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Contrast / Colors Within the Image Adjust Center you can easily adjust and optimize the whole image or a selection. As you can see in the image below you can use the sliders to optimize the red, green and blue tones in your image according to your needs. The changes are displayed in real-time so that you can always evaluate the result. When you applied an effect to a picture, you can directly compare the original picture with the edited one. For further information go here. Furthermore, you can adjust the color temperature, saturation, hue, brightness, contrast and gamma value.
Working with gradation curves
By using gradation curves it is possible to perform individuell and very precise tonal value correction of an image. You can find those settings to the right of the sliders (see above). If you hover over those curves with your mouse you can start working with them instantly. A great advantage compared with other methods which can be adjusted with the help of slider, such as increase contrast, is that you can really emphasize only certain areas of an image. The fist curve on the left represents the light, the brightness of the image. The left bottom line represents black and the top right corner represents white (see image below).
In the example below the lowest point which was associated with the darkest color (black) was slightly moved up. The black tone in the picture is now a dark grey. This means that the black areas were lightened up by moving up the value in the curve (into a brighter area). This way black turned into grey. If you would like to edit a point in the curve, just click on the appropriate point within the curve, keep the mouse button pressed and drag the point up (to brighten up) or down (to darken).
Of course there is lot more you can do with that function than what was described in the example above. If you turn the curve into an s-bend (see example below), the contrast is optimized in the best possible way. In order to find the perfect settings to adjust your images, you might have to try out a few curve adjustments and settings. But it is definitely worth it! Especially, if you got a digital camera with its own peculiarities, such es slightly faulty white balance, great improvements can be achieved.
Overexposed images can be improved by adjust the curve similar to the one in the image below. There certain bright areas were dragged down.
Color channels
Similar to the brightness / light also single colors (red, green, blue) or all colors can be adjusted. Just click on the arrow next to the list below the gradation curve and select the appropriate channel (see image below).
Here the same principle which was explained above holds true. In bottom left represents the dark color range and top right represents the bright color range. In the curves for colors the points can also be dragged up or down according to your wishes until you achieve the desired result for your image.
In the example below all dark red color tones were dragged upward. In the original image on the left there are still color shades visible, while in the edited image those are missing completely. Tinged images (e.g. scans of analog photos or images from digital camera of the first generation) can be easily improved with these methods.
To apply your changes, just click Yes. If you want to discard the changes that you made in Contrast/Colors, you only have to click No (see image below).
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