How White Is Your Dog?-Dickens is a Westie and He is White.

This is Dickens, a West Highland White Terrior (Westie) and he is white. “Well, ya! So What?”, you say. One of the more frustrating things about being in the “color” business is that most people, except for pro and semi-pro photographers, tend to be insensitive (how is that for being polically correct?) to color. They either don’t recognize that the color of their digital pictures is wrong or they just assume that the photos from their digital camera just aren’t as good as Kodak or Fuji film. In a way, that assumtion is correct, however, the color information is really there (unless the photo is over or under exposed) and it can be fixed. Here is a comparison of the original photo and the cropped and color corrected shot of Dickens.

The original photo has a color cast and is dull and lifeless. While this condition is most evident in pictures with a lot of white or grey areas it is generally the case with almost all of the pictures you take. This problem can be helped significantly if you calibrate or “adjust the white point”, but who among us knows how to do that or even what it means. So, if you make the whites to be white and the greys to be grey (we call those neutral colors-no, neutrals are not beige or brown.) the rest of the colors in the photo are going to be pretty close to what they should be. How does one do that?

Color Lesson #1-Get rid of the color cast.
There are certainly a number of ways to get rid of the color cast, most of which I don’t know how to do or even care to learn. Why? Because I don’t have to. (Caution: Commercial coming.) My company, PictoColor (www.pictocolor.com), specializes in color correction technology that makes it real simple to Make the Color Right. Our OneClick Color technology, which was used on Dickens, removes the color cast, adjusts brightness, contrast, and saturation by clicking on an area in the photo that is white, black, or grey. It is available in CorrectPhoto (www.correctphoto.com), the digital photo editor I used to crop and color correct the photo of Dickens, or for PhotoShop or Elements users there is a plug-in called iCorrect OneClick (www.pictocolor.com/oneclick.htm)

Using CorrectPhoto I cropped the photo using the 4×6 cropping format and then clicked on a couple of white areas on Dickens and the white in the Santa outfit. You can find more detailed information on the OneClick color by going to http://www.correctphoto.com/Color_Correction.htm.

The point of this post is really twofold. First, the color of your digital picture is really not right even though you may think it is. Secondly, it is easy to Make the Color Right if you have the right tool to do it. Don’t accept a mediocre photo when you can easily create a memory.

Wayne http://www.correctphoto.com

PS. I almost forgot to mention how I added the “Santa Dickens” text to the photo. Go to http://www.correctphoto.com/ImageTitler.htm for information on a really simple ImageTitler.