Darken should use selectable colors

[greenmorpher]

No, it always turns white into gray, no matter what colors are around

That's as it should be, IMO. The Brighten and Darken tools are generalized exposure correction tools, directly comparable to increasing or decreasing the exposure when printing a photo in a darkroom, which is why other image editors refer to the tools as Burn and Dodge.

But that is no reason to cripple the capability of a digital tool, Ken. Back in the old days (and I was there in my bathroom with a blanket over the window) we burned and dodged because that was all we could do -- and we were working in B&W.

But how about burning and dodging in color printing in the day? Burning added color -- not just gray!

Why not allow digital burn/darken to do the same thing?

As you say, there are ways to handle such a situation, but I am talking simple, single step.

Cheers, Geoff

[photoken]

But that is no reason to cripple the capability of a digital tool

You're missing the point. The Darken and Lighten (Burn and Dodge) tools provide perfectly valid and useful functionality. There's no reason to needlessly complicate them to try to add features that are better achieved with PL's other tools.

(Burning and dodging a colour image in the darkroom might have added some kind of colour, but it was a very strange colour, indeed....)

It all comes back to the information contained in the original image. Your photo of the toast was so overexposed that all the colour information was lost, blown away. In that case, the only way to compensate is by colorizing, not darkening. If your original image had retained some colour information in the toast, then the Darken tool would have created a noticeable colour, instead of gray.

[greenmorpher]

Ken, even Darkening light but not blown out areas can lead to trouble with the gray Darkening having an obvious presence.

I think you are not understanding my position; I am looking for a tool I can use quickly and easily in a hurry -- I don’t produce great art, I produce stuff for websites, mainly, against the clock. You are promoting something more complex.

I am puzzled by the basis for your thinking -- and that of the producers of other image editing programs. Burning in gray is a hangover from B&W film photography. The world left that behind a long, long time ago.

If you can add gray with the burn tool, there is no logical reason why you cannot add a color. Adding a color or colors just as valid -- in fact, more so. It mimics and real world and it mimics the way we digitally represent the real world.

Cheers, Geoff

[bkh]

If you can add gray with the burn tool, there is no logical reason why you cannot add a color. Adding a color or colors just as valid -- in fact, more so. It mimics and real world and it mimics the way we digitally represent the real world.

Maybe you should try the darken tool with the "shadows" setting – it works like "Colour Burn" (with a greyscale layer). The reason seems to be that "Lights", "Midtones" and "Shadows" in the Darken tool refer to each channel separately in RGB mode, so "Shadow" increases saturation without turning white into grey. I guess that the names of the ranges are a bit misleading here . This is about as far as one can get recovering natural colours from the image.

Imo, the darken tool shouldn't add artificial colours – that's a task for the brush tool. (Besides, it's difficult to define a good behaviour – e.g., what if the chosen colour is actually lighter than the one which you want to darken? What if one channel is lighter and the others darker?)

Cheers

Burkhard.

P.S. Seems that HIS and Lab modes don't work as expected – HIS doesn't seem to have any effect at all, and Lab changes a and b channels even if they are turned off. At least, for HIS and Lab, "Lights", "Midtones" and "Shadows" make sense.

[Martin Huber]

P.S. Seems that HIS and Lab modes don't work as expected – HIS doesn't seem to have any effect at all, and Lab changes a and b channels even if they are turned off. At least, for HIS and Lab, "Lights", "Midtones" and "Shadows" make sense.

I will fix that.

Martin