The original image is acceptable, and in fact I have made prints of the image in this condition.

But watch these meerkats jump out of the picture after a few standard moves for shadow, highlight, neutral, and saturation!

Move the cursor over each of the jade tokens to see the results from curving in each color mode.

Which version do you like the best, and, more importantly, how can you do as well or better for your own images?

See the original image.

The original RGB image is a digital camera capture. It has a good distribution of brightness values from pure black to white, and the colors are reasonable. Move the cursor over one of the oval tokens and see a sample of how the image may be improved in each of the color spaces supported by Curvemeister.

The original image has no punch. Each of the corrected ones does, in its own way. Here's how it was done.

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As always, start with the shadow and highlight. Plunk down a shadow point and drag it toward the largest black area that contains important detail. In this case, the black point will be the tail of the lower meerkat.

Setting the shadow

Drag the shadow point icon around until the special preview shows you speckles of black, but not pure black. We are able to pick up about 20 points of pixel value at the shadow.

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Drag the shadow point until the black area is broken into small speckles.
Curvemeister grays out the rest of the image during the drag, the
better to see the overall image is grayed out.

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The highlight is easy, as soon as you realize that there is no white point. How do we know there's no white point? Just try to create one. The white point will white out the highlights on the animals fur, and the result is a pure white animal instead of a buff color. These rather dusty looking animals might be white as harp seals after a good lather, rinse, repeat or two, but until then, an off-brown color is more like it.

The world's cleanest meerkat!
Too clean by half.

So, press the delete key if necessary to delete the highlight, turn on the Master Curve option, if necessary, and crowd in the highlight a bit by dragging toward the center of the curve. Back off a point or two when you see white dandruff-like speckles on the back of the leftmost meerkat's head. This ensures that your change will create little or no areas of pure white.

Dragging the white threshold. Score 11 points for the home team.

Can you see the flecks of white on top of the animals head? When dragging the threshold, this is when to quit. Do not allow the white areas to become any larger than this..

As you can see in the illustration above, we gained 11 points. Add this to the highlight and we have opened up 30 points of brightness range for our image. That's like saving 30 dollars when you have a total of 255, and the image shows it. Let's take a look.

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Before and after. Meerkats are starting to pop out of the screen.

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What's next? Neutrals. Did you know that the camera made these animals green? Check it out by creating an eyedropper sample point on the upper chest of the animal in the middle.

You can barely see the green cast, but a look at the numbers shows that there is a hefty 6 or 7 points of it.

Gray can be green! Are your view options set to show the Hue Clock? This makes the the green color is even more obvious than eyeballing the numbers.

Red, brown, yellow, gray, and white are colors that most of us will accept in an animal. If the Hue Clock is anywhere from 10 o'clock to 2 o'clock, you have a believable animal color. Green will raise a skeptical eyebrow, unless it's a tree dwelling sloth, algae laden polar bear, or a green monkey. For these desert animals, though, green is not acceptable. Think of it this way: if you had 255 dollars in your budget, would you leave 7 green dollars lying on the sidewalk? No way.

Fixing neutrals in Curvemeister is easy - just click on the tiny menu button ( ), and select the Pin Mode>Neutral command. Boom, instant neutral! And no more sloth-like green meerkats.

Click on the tiny menu arrow and pin the eyedropper sample to neutral.

It doesn't get any grayer than this!!

Worth noting, too, that subtracting the green from the meerkats added a bit of magenta to the rest of the picture, perking it up a bit and making it look better all around. Another sign that getting the green out was the right thing to do.

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With the exception of using the threshold control to set the upper brightness range, we have not really strayed from what the Color Wizard would have told you to do. That's about to change. We are going to adjust the master curve to allocate more of our 255 dollar budget to the animal's fur, hopefully taking some of that budget away from the background. Also, we want to darken the image just a bit.

Click on the RGB tab if necessary to make the curve larger.

Now run the cursor across various areas of the animal fur, particularly the darker areas, and watch the indicator dot zip up and down the master curve. The important areas are in about the middle of the curve. This is the area you want to make steeper.

Since the image needs to be darker overall, dragging a single off center point (down in this case, since that is how the curve is configured) toward the black will do the job. Here is what the curve I chose looks like.

A simple one-point curve gets the job done.

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Let's switch now to the Lab color space, As you will see, the work will be much faster in this color space, and we can get one powerful effect that simply isn't available in RGB. Click on the Lab radio button in the Curve Window.

Hooray! Curvemeister has carried over the the black and neutral point, and changed the curves appropriately. Since we did not use a highlight point, you will still need to manually drag the white end of the L channel toward the middle.

As before, click on the right edge of the graph.

As before in RGB mode, Curvemeister will provide a contrast enhanced version of the preview, with pure black and white used to indicate any potential loss of detail in pure white or black areas. The key is to keep the dots as tiny as possible - ideally no more than one pixel.

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The kicker for Lab, though is going to involve it's super ability to manipulate color information separately, in a way that is impossible in RGB space. Ready? Here goes.

You can increase the saturation of the colors simply by making the a and b curves steeper. Using Curvemeister's curve scaling feature to rotate the Lab curve. To do this, first click on the a tab to make the curve bigger.

Now the fun part. We are going to steepen both the a and b channels and jazz up the colors.

First move the cursor over the upper or lower margin of the a curve. Drag the cursor horizontally. This will steepen the curve and instantly boost color saturation for the a channel.

This steepening operation must be done for both the a and b channels.

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As simple as Lab was, HSB is an even easier color space for this image. This is because it manipulates saturation with a single curve.

After again setting that white threshold, drag the high end of the saturation curve toward the center of the image, as indicated by the curve in the reference image.

HSB has one problem - it's no good for neutrals. So Curvemeister does not apply neutral sample points to the HSB color space. In this case, it means we get to keep our green animals - see if you can pick this out in the image above. This would normally be dealt with in a separate curve operation either before or after the HSB curves.

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Now for Curvemeister's flagship color space, wg-CMYK.

This color space is very similar to RGB, with one important difference. You may separate shadow information into a separate channel, using the black separation control. This gives us unique leverage over both color and shadows.

Set the control to Heavy Black, for reasons that will be explained later.

Since colors are relatively subtle in this image, I chose
heavy black to leverage two important characteristics
of the CMYK color space.

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Set the brightness threshold control as before. Now we are in a position to do two interesting things that we could not really do in the other three color spaces.

The first is to increase the amount of color information specifically dedicated to the animal's fur. This is accomplished using the following three curves:

Note the three tick-marked gray points. These are the carryover neutral points from the RGB correction we did earlier. Sometimes they will interfere with other control points, causing kinks in the curve. If this
happens, drag them off the curve manually.

The Cyan curve has two additional points whose purpose is to steepen the curve area occupied by the darker brown animal fur. The same logic applies to the yellow curve, except that the neutral point, located near the 25% grid line, served to anchor the lighter range of the animal fur. Adding a control point near the neutral might cause an undesirable "kink" in the yellow curve.

After these curves are applied, the image increases dramatically in saturation, only the meerkats stand out from their background just a bit more than with the Lab and HSB versions of this image. This is because the curve enhancement is more intimately tied to the colors of the animals, rather than global saturation.

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We now cash in on one more benefit of the wg-CMYK color space, namely the separation of the black (K) channel from the color (CMY) channels.

CMYK, is the only color space that, for this image, allows us to have our proverbial cake and eat it too. Specifically, we create a curve that increases the detail in the lighter areas of the animal fur (the middle part of the curve) while moving the black endpoint toward the middle simultaneously increases the contrast around the very dark regions around the eyes.

The curve is steepest where it coincides with
detail in the animal fur. The control points in the bottom left corner are anchor
points, designed to keep the lightest areas of black from changing.

Final Notes

How to determine the black generation setting? Usually light, medium or heavy is appropriate. If shadow control is desired, click on the Black tab and set black generation so that you have enough detail to control your shadows, and no more.

You may use the black channel tab to visually judge the amount of black
generation that you will need.

Remember that larger black generation means that you are giving up color "head room". For this particular image, with medium or light black separation, the range of color occupied by the animal fur would have been larger, and it would have been difficult or impossible to increase the color saturation without also affecting overall image brightness.

The most extreme case of this, wg-CMYK with no black generation has no shadow control at all It is mathematical equivalent to RGB space.

In addition to the reduction of control over color, shadow control would have been reduced with a lighter black generation. This is because the black areas in the image would not have been under the control of the K channel. Instead the shadows would be dominated by the CMY channels.

Increasing black separation to maximum would have made it more difficult to improve the shadows without cutting into the tonal range of colored areas.