Graduated Color

A Photoshop plugin to apply graduated colors in

retouching
Power Retouche Graduated Color plugin is an advanced digital equivalent of traditional graduated color filters. It
lets you have one or two colors and quickly set one color to the complementary of the other. Rotate any direction
you want. Change the contrast and even the midpoint of the graduation.
Power Retouche Photoshop plug-ins are also for Paint Shop Pro, Corel Draw, Illustrator, Fireworks and other
graphic software or photo software (Mac & Windows) see list

Graduated Color plugin

Benefits
of the plugin

Graduated
Color controls

Apply one or two graduated colors in either uniform or photographic mode

Set the direction of the graduation to any angle of 360 degrees
Control the contrast and midpoint of the graduation
Target retouching to lights, midtones or darks independently

Tutorial
Tutorial as pdf
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The Graduated Color plugin works with these image modes (Windows and Mac)...
8 & 16 bit / channel: RGB, CMYK, Multichannel.

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Products overview

This is the Graduated Color plugins controlpanel.

Click on the image to enlarge.

Download Win plug-ins

Download Mac plug-ins

It has four groups of controls:

Download tutorials
1. Direction, contrast, midpoint
2. Color one
3. Color two
4. Retouch levels: target lights, midtones or darks

Examples graduated
colors for
correction or
for effect

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FREE PLUGIN
IN THE DOWNLOAD

The Graduated Color plugin

is an advanced digital
version of traditional
graduated color filters. The
left most image is the
original.

Graduated Color

The Controls
Light

Direction

Contrast

Midpoint

Direction will rotate the direction of the graduation within a full

circle. The slider ranges from -180 to 180 degrees. 0 is top
vertical. +/-180 bottom vertical. -90 is left horizontal and 90 is
right horizontal.
Checking Show Direction will draw a line from the center of the
preview in the direction of color one. This will only appear on the
preview.
Contrast will determine the fade-out of the one or two colors and
how hard they approach the midpoint. In the following example we only used color one.

Please note that the

subtle graduations get
lost when reducing the
image size and
compressing to JPEG
for webpages.

Contrast 0

Contrast 50

Contrast 100

Midpoint will determine the ratio between color one and color two. If you only have one color, it will spread the color more
or less over the image depending on contrast. In the following examples contrast was set high, to 50 in all cases, for the
sake of clarity. Again please remember the subtle graduations get lost when compressing the images for the web.

Midpoint -100
Only color one

Color One &

Color Two

Use Color picker

Yellow - Violet

Midpoint -50

Midpoint 0

Midpoint 50

Midpoint 100
Only color two

The plugin allows you to have one or two colors opposite each
other. By checking "Color One" or "Color Two" you turn either
color on.The long colored rectangle shows the filter color. You
can change the filter color in four ways:
1. Use Color picker. When checked, this will add the color of the
small rectangle to the filter color. If you activate a color picker,
you can click in the rectangle to get a standard color picker dialog
from which to choose a color.

Blue green Pink

2. Yellow - Violet slider. This will change the filter color with
either of the complementary colors yellow or violet.

Comp.

3. Blue green - Pink slider. This will change the filter color with
either of the complementary colors blue green or pink.
4. Complementary button (Comp.). Clicking this button will set the color to the complementary of the other filter color. If
you click "Comp." in the area of Color Two, then color picker two will be set to the complementary of color picker one, and
the two sliders will be set to the complementary of the sliders for Color One.
The filter color will be the sum of the two sliders and of the color picker, if "Use Color picker" is checked. This last detail
means you can switch between two variations by adding, or not adding, the color from the color picker.

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Graduated Color

Retouch Levels

Retouch Levels is common to many Powerretouche plugins. It

will change the amount the filtering is applied to lights, midtones
and darks respectively.

Example - Changing the Illumination

In this image we used Illumination

Editor to place the light on the top
right corner and reduce the light on
the hand (See tutorial on Illumination
Editor).
Next we use Graduated Color to
warm up the color of the light, since it
in this image has a undesirable cold
cast...

First we only used Color One, at 30

degrees to target the upper right
corner. We set the filter color with the
color picker by selecting a fleshysandy color. Since we are primarily
interested in the midtones and don't
want to flatten the lights more than
they are, we turned "Lights" down to
25 in "Retouch Levels". Now you
might complain there is a warm cast,
so let's fix that in an interesting way...

Here we added Color Two and used

the Comp. button to set the color to
the complementary of Color One.
This heightened the mystery of the
cool pensive fingers against the warm
flesh of the face and the red lips. A
subtle use of complementary colors
will greatly enhance the drama or
mystery of an image and counter
balance any tendency to color cast.

Example - Correcting graduated colorcast

This photo of a glacier has a nasty graduated cyan-green cast concentrated in the sky and fading out downwards. Also the
water in the foreground does not stand out from the cliff; especially we want more contrast between the water and the
shadow under the overhanging snow on the cliff.

Before

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After

Graduated Color

Here are the settings we used. Note that we used Color One at
the top and Color Two at the bottom (angle = 0).

Applying a slight red-violet filter to a cyan-green color will turn cyan-green into clear blue.
Please see below for how to further improve this poor picture...

Advanced Editing with other Power Retouche plug-ins

Now what this photo needs is graduated contrast enhancement to bring the foreground towards the spectator and also
create the depth those blue shadows invite to.
To do this we need to use the PR Illumination Editor plugin and the PR Contrast plugin...

Contrast correction layer

First duplicate the image to a new layer (menu Layer > Duplicate Layer...).
Then invoke PR Contrast and create an overall amount of contrast that
you think will be right for the foreground (In this case General Contrast =
30, to enhance both BW contrast and color contrast and saturation all at
once). On the whole it will be ugly and overdone. This will be our Contrast
Correction layer. Something like this...

Graduated correction layer

Then invoke PR Illumination Editor. Turn on "Use Transparency", set
Raise Exposure and Reduce Exposure to 0. Now make the top of the
image progressively more transparent. Something like this...
We used Transparency = 95. Shade - Light = 70.

Power Retouche
After you apply, you should get this result...
Merge the correction layer with the background by choosing "Flatten
Image" from the menu "Layer".
Compare it to the original reproduced below and see how much space
and depth we got into the picture.

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Graduated Color

Original
Here's the flat original once more...

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