Many people are content to use only the pins provided with Curvemeister. There is nothing wrong with this, since most pinning is probably done to improve flesh tones, and several of those are provided already.

So why create your own pins? You may have a portrait of someone that has a great flesh tone that you want to "borrow" for other images of the same person, or you may have some other reason to want to match colors between two or more photographs, for example flower colors, commercial images, or other photographs containing objects for which no pin is provided. You may simply want to install pins that you downloaded from the Curvemeister site, and someday, I hope, you may want to share some of your more interesting colors with others.

For this, Curvemeister supports several ways to create and modify pins. If the color you want to pin is already in an existing image, you may create a sample in Curvemeister, and save that sample as a pin. If you know the numeric value of the color, as would be the case, for example, when designing custom black and white points, you may create a pin directly using the pin palette's right-click menu to either duplicate an existing pin or create a new one. Both of these methods are discussed here.

1. To create a pin from scratch, by supplying numbers or using the color picker, use the New Pin ... command in the right click menu for the Pin Palette. Skip to step 4.

2. To modify an existing pin, right click the pin in the pin palette, and select the Edit Pin command.

The Duplicate Pin command creates a new pin, and initializes it with the currently highlighted pin.

3. To create a pin based on a color from an an image, first create a sample point by alt-clicking on the desired point in the image. Use the sample pane's Save Sample as Pin command, as shown in figure 1.

4. This dialog will appear after any of the previous operations. This is where you can modify any and all of the characteristics of a pin..

In general it's best to click the ->Lab button. This converts your color values to Lab, to make it easier for others to use your pins accurately. An exception would be certain CMYK pins, such as shadow and highlight pins, which should probably not be converted to Lab.

Notes may contain any information you consider useful. It will be saved with the pin, and displayed in a tooltip window when you hold the mouse cursor over the pin.

The Include Statistics checkbox will be enabled if Curvemeister's Sample Display options specify standard deviation or deltaE. If checked, Curvemeister includes statistics from the original sample in the notes.

Pin Type operates as follows:

• Normal specifies that the pin will operate by adding interior points to the curves. This option will be used for the vast majority of your pins.
• Shadow and Highlight specify a pin that will manipulate the appropriate endpoints of the curve for each channel.
• Neutral will calculate a gray value that retains the brightness of the original color. This pin type ignores the destination pin color when making its neutral calculation.

The Pin Mode check boxes may be selected in any combination:

• Hue creates a pin that will modify the color of an object.
• Saturation specifies that the pin will change the intensity of the color.
• Brightness specifies that the pin will change the lightness of the pinned image color to match the pin color.

Here are the most common pin mode combinations and their meaning:

Hue and Saturation - matches the pin color but not the brightness. This is the most generally useful setting, because it preserves the shading of an object.

Hue, Saturation, and Brightness - changes the image's color to an exact match to the pin color. Logos should be pinned in this mode if they are the most important object in the image.

None - specifies a pin that measures a color for comparison purposes only. This option is used in combination with the deltaE statistic to compare the pin color with a color from the image.

Hue - this relatively unusual combination may provide superior results when the color of an object must be changed, but the feeling of the object's shape, which is dependent on brightness and saturation, is important. For example, round objects will appear rounder if the saturation falls off at the edges.

Click on the ... button to access Photoshop's color picker, which is a good way to fine tune a color without having to rely on your typing skills. You may also use the picker to to invoke a spot color from Photoshop's built-in database. Spot colors generally correspond to logo colors.

Note: You may also edit your pins directly using a text editor, and there are instructions for this in the comments for the pins.txt file under the curvemeister.com folder. Since pins are stored as text files, you may email them to other people, and use a text editor to add and change pin values. This also allows you to combine pins from multiple sources into a single pin file, and to use colors from measuring instruments such as a colorimeter or spectrometer.