Photoshop Elements 2.0 - Colour correction.

[Denis_Mortell]

I use Kodak Color Correction strips when shooting artwork for reproduction. All photographs are taken on a Canon 20D in RAW mode.

What I would like to be able to do is to correct the mid-gray on the strip giving red, green and blue all the same value of 127.

I am assuming that this would eliminate any cast. I could then simply adjust the brightness/contrast accordingly.

I have found using the eyedropper tool via Enhance/Colour/Colour Cast to be unsatisfactory. Whether I try a white, grey or black point, I never seem to get the neutral look I am seeking. This can be confirmed by checking the mid-gray levels afterwareds in Info.

Can I manually set the mid-gray levels using Elements 2.0?

Or is there another way of achieving what I want, namely, a clean image?

Thanks.

Denis

[Christoph_Jung]

Denis,
as you're shooting RAW, I'd say the best way to remove color casts is doing so in the process of RAW conversion. Whatever you do afterwards will always result in a loss of information, and as PSE2 takes 8 bit photos only, this will most likely be visible.
Perhaps it's time to switch to PSE3, where you can directly convert RAW pictures?
Christoph

[Denis_Mortell]

[ QUOTE ]
Denis,
as you're shooting RAW, I'd say the best way to remove color casts is doing so in the process of RAW conversion. Whatever you do afterwards will always result in a loss of information, and as PSE2 takes 8 bit photos only, this will most likely be visible.
Perhaps it's time to switch to PSE3, where you can directly convert RAW pictures?
Christoph

[/ QUOTE ]

Christoph,

Thanks for that. I hadn't realized that this was a feature in PSE3.

I use DPP for RAW conversion. To date I have only been using the brightness/contrast features in it. Will look into correcting colour a bit more closely.

I still would like a way of being able to select the mid-grey in the Kodak strip and 'forcing it' to 127 for red, green and blue. I wonder if I could do this with PSCS? Might tempt me to buy it! ;-)

D.

[Christoph_Jung]

Denis,
I own PSCS and PSE3 (the latter used as my main image catalogue only), so I think I can comment on both. I select a (RAW-format) picture in PSE3, press Ctrl-H which brings me into PSCS, but you could as well switch to PSE3's editing program.
Here, you can press "I" which means selecting the eyedropper, and click into some grey area - whitebalance set! As I'm more after pleasing results than absolute color fidelity (sometimes adding a little more sunshine to an outdoor portrait helps a lot :-), I try multiple grey spots in the picture or use the sliders after the eyedropper. In your case, having a grey card in the picture, it should be a matter of half a second. If you hit grey, but not 127,127,127 but say 100,100,100, you could use exposure correction (next slider on same panel).
If you got the time to read, buy Bruce Fraser's book "Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS". Using his tips has led me to better pictures from the start, needing less correction with curves or levels.
Christoph