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Color Washer

My personal pros and cons list


Color Washer  is a plugin.  A kind of sub program that can be used in any photo editor that accepts photoshop plugins.  (e.g. Paint Shop Pro, Photo-Brush, Ultimate Paint, etc... and of course Photoshop and Photoshop Elements).

Its purpose is to correct color cast, exposure and contrast in a very convenient and automatic way with manual retouch possibility.  In my opinion it is better and faster than any built-in function from any photo editor software.  The algorithms hidden inside seem to be very sophisticated.

Below the screen shots, I will tell you what I found to be convenient and what I was missing.

Screen shot
color washer plugin screen shot
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The pros:
  bullet  Color Washer tells you the zoom factor of what you see on the screen.
Remember? this is one of my fads!

bullet  Color Washer offers 5 different auto modes to correct color casts.  Just choose the one that gives the best results.

bullet  Alternatively you can select an area on the photo and Color Washer will adapt the correction to the characteristics of this area.

bullet  Moreover, you can slightly modify the values selected by the automatic mode manually.  Nevertheless this is rarely necessary.

bullet  Color Washer offers an automatic exposure correction mode and several semi-automatic modes,  if the automatic mode does not behave like expected.

bullet  Color Washer offers 5 semi-automatic presets for the contrast correction.  Additional manual refining is possible if needed.

bullet  Color Washer displays an histogram of the photo you are working on.

bullet  Color Washer shows you if the correction could produce an overexposed area by means of a hatching of the endangered area.  This allows you to step back and select one contrast correction preset below.  A very usefull feature.

bullet  Color Washer allows you to enhance your digital photos in seconds instead of minutes.  Mostly 20 or 30 seconds should be enough.  As a comparison, with traditional tools implicating guesswork,  it could take you 10 to 30 minutes because you would need to use many successive functions instead of doing all in the same walk.

This is by far not an exhaustive list of Color Washer's features, but rather a quick summary of functions I found most useful.


The cons:
  bullet  When you select the autodetect mode for the exposure correction, Color Washer chooses among 3 sub modes.  It can happen that none of them fits.  But you can still select among 5 older sub modes that are still implemented.  Should I put this one in the pros list ?.

bullet  Radio buttons would be more convenient than combo-boxes to make your choices.


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