© 2003-2006 Mike Russell, All Rights Reserved

Neutral Points

Most images have an object in them that you know has, or should have, no color at all. Once you have identified such an object in your image, and placed a neutral on it, Curvemeister will remove the color from the neutral, and in so doing lift a veil from the colors in the rest of the image. Keep in mind that you are not looking around for gray values in your image. Instead you are relying on your own knowledge about the world to pick a specific object that should have no color. This is why neutrals are so important and useful for getting rid of that enemy of all color correction, color casts.

This section covers some of the technical nitty gritty behind neutrals. Please also check out the examples that discuss neutrals for a good background on how and why neutrals are used for color correction.

You may create a neutral by right-clicking on a part of the image that you know has no color, such as this sign on white cardboard, and selecting the Set Neutral item from the image preview window.

This image appears a bit on the blue side, and using curves to remove all color from the neutral will make the image look a lot better.

Figure 1. Setting a neutral with the preview window right click menu.

Another way to set a neutral is to drag the predefined neutral pin from the pin palette.

A neutral is a neutral is a neutral. Unlike shadow and highlight, where the pin color is relevant to the final color value, for a neutral there is no advantage or disadvantage to using a pin instead of right-clicking.


Figure 3. The curves created by the two neutrals at the
center left and center bottom edges of the image.

Figure 3 shows the curves for the image after pinning in two places, as is often required in RGB mode.

As mentioned earlier, Neutrals are a special type of pin point that looks at its sample color, and creates curve points to make that sample color gray.

Curvemeister treats neutrals specially, in several ways. Only one neutral is honored in Lab mode, and neutrals have no effect at all in HSB mode. Although these limitations are there for good reason, you may experiment with getting around this limitation by creating your own version of a neutral pin with a target of HSB(0,0,0) that pins saturation only.

Table of Contents