To use a pin, drag it onto an object in the image that you want to have match the pin color.

Pins may be thought of as colored neutrals, In certain situations, you may decide to use them to fix a color cast by pinning an object with a known color to the specified pin color.

Pins are also used when the most important color, generally a flesh tone, needs to look good, even at the expense - within reason - of other colors in the image.

Most of us have encountered, in our color correction adventures, a skin tone that is just "off" in some way that we can't quite describe. How about a sky that looks too blue, pink, or purple - we're not sure which, if any of those colors are the culprit? Or grass that either lacks color, and looks dead, or is so loaded with green that it looks like Astroturf? Do you have a portrait with great colors, and would you like some way to "carry" those colors over to another image?

Pins are designed to help you with some of these problems and, can become a regular part of your color correction procedure.

Of interest to CMYK practitioners whose work is destined for press, pins may be used to define arbitrary target values for highlight and neutral values, rich blacks, consistent logo colors, and more.

Because pins are stored in a text file format, they are easy to share. Check out the files area of the Curvemeister group for discussions, more pins from Curvemeister and your fellow customers in the near future.

Color pinning makes it easy to perform lightning fast, accurate, and consistent color corrections based on a previously saved value for a particular color, and an object in your image that you know should match that color. All you need to do is drag the desired pin onto the object whose color you want to change.

For example, if you are a wedding photographer, you may want all the flesh tones in a series of images of the bride to match one another. If you are setting up a catalog of product shots, to avoid refunds, you may want to match a set of catalog shots to standard colors. Both of these would normally be considered difficult and time consuming tasks, but they are easy and accurate with pins.

The most commonly used pin is a flesh tone. You may also pin sky, foliage, wood, a color from Photoshop's color library, or any other relatively standard color of your own choosing.

Pins are also a convenient way to set up a custom shadow or highlight. You may also create a hue/sat pin to enforce a warmer neutral than usual.

Once created, you may use a pin on as many images as you wish. Since pins live in text files, you may easily edit them with a word processor, email them to others, or share them with other people the Curvemeister group.

Pin files may also be managed using standard windows file copy and move operations, and organized in folders.

After you drag a pin onto your image, a pin becomes a pinned sample. The pinned sample in turn causes Curvemeister to add curve control points that reflect combination of hue, saturation, or brightness values associated with the pin.

Philosophy

I am often asked whether it is justifiable to pin a color to a predefined value, when there is no real proof that that value is accurate.

This is a question that deserves an answer, obviously. Pragmatically speaking, our goal in improving an image is not to make it more accurate - though we hope to do that to some extent - but to make it better. This means more color and contrast, and no colors that tell the viewer that something is wrong.

If you can improve an incorrect tone, such as a flesh tone, in the image, other colors are bound to benefit, and the result will be an overall improvement in the appearance of the image.

For example, if a flesh tone starts out too purple, and you pin it to one of the flesh tones provided with Curvemeister (or one of your own), you will probably see not only the flesh tone improve, but the other objects will improve as well.

Another example would be using one of the wood colors - unfinished pine, for example, to pin a light colored table whose exact composition is unknown. Again, if the table is made of another wood, such as poplar, and pinning changes it from purple to pine color, we've accomplished our goal: improvement of the image. I've even used one of the wood colors on a dead leaf, and improved the image.

Prioritize your pins, and pin only important colors. Many people start with the idea that if one color is set accurately, however unmportant it may be to the rest of the images, it will provide a reference point and all the other colors will fall in line. Alas, for a variety of reasons, this simply does not work. It's possible to pin one color very accurately, and have other colors become worse. For this reason, and others, pins should be used sparingly. It's usually best to restrict the number of pins you use to one or two.

If possible, a neutral is usually better than a pin for removing an overall color cast. Once the cast is gone, it's not unusual to then use a flesh tone pin to improve skin tones, or when there is no neutral, other colors such as flesh tones may be used as a reference instead of a neutral. This may require a second pass of Curvemeister, since using more than one pin in Lab mode ,or a pin and a neutral, often fails miserably.