SelfToner 0.1

A PhotoShop plugin, developed using FilterMeister, that applies tones to images. Tones you like can be easily stored and applied to other images. Like SelfTanner, it may leave your image looking like a carrot, but it's not limited to sepia - it can do warm, cool, green, purple etc., limited only by the palette of the input image.

Up to Other Plugins

Background

The idea for this tool popped into my head after reading a tutorial at Luminous Landscape on copying tones (i.e. duotones, tritones, quadtones) from other images. I originally envisioned it for that use - copying tones from images that are already more or less monochromatic. It turns out to have a much cooler use - toning images from a subdued version of their own color palette.

Installation

Unzip the archive below. Drop the filter (download below), which is an .8bf file, into your PhotoShop filters directory, usually something like c:\program files\Adobe\Photoshop\PlugIns\Filters. Then launch PhotoShop - it will appear in a "FiddaFilters" group on the Filter menu. You can put the accompanying library of tones (.ton files) anywhere you want, but I find it convenient to keep them all in one place (in my case in the plugin\filters directory).

I've tested this with Photoshop 5.0LE and CS, and PS Elements 2.0. It's not demanding and should work with other versions as well. If you're using other software that accepts PhotoShop compatible plugins installation should be similar, but I don't have any examples to try. It might also run standalone with PluginCommander but I haven't tried that either.

Controls

SelfToner opens to a control dialog with a preview at left. You can drag on the preview to move around your image or selection. You can zoom using the +/- buttons below the image.

This filter is fairly fast - running the filter on a 2mpix image takes a few seconds on an old 450MHz P3.

The filter operates in two modes - "from image" which tones an image from its own color palette (which you can store for use on other images), and "from memory" which applies a stored tone palette (.ton file) to the current image.

From Image Mode

Toning: Balances original color image with toned version. Generally you're better off creating a 100% tone in a layer and controlling the blend by opacity of the layer, but this is here for convenience.
Tone Saturation: Controls saturation of the color palette applied to the image. Some source images and stored .ton files are pretty intense, so you may want to make their effect subtle by reducing the saturation.
Luminance Weight - (R/G/B): Controls the luminance model used to extract the tone curve. The default is the "standard" 20/70/10 weighting to R/G/B. Normally changing this will have only minor effects, but it may allow you to get rid of color artifacts. For example, you may have blue sky and green grass that are similar in luminance with the default weights, resulting in bits of green in the sky. Changing the luminance model to raise the importance of blue may lead to better color separation.
Tone Rank - (R/G/B): Controls the shape of the tone curve extracted from the image. Normally, the tone curve extracted is the median of the RGB values at each luminance level. Adjusting the ranks can bias this toward warmer or cooler colors if desired.
Smoothness: Controls smoothing of the tone curve to eliminate spikes in images that have abrupt color transitions or gaps in their histograms.
Memorize: Saves a tone palette as a .ton file for later use with other images.
Show Curve: Shows the tone curve to be applied to the image (may be helpful for visualizing results of Tone Rank control).

From Memory Mode

Controls are generally the same as above, except that parameters controlling the shape of the tone curve extracted from the source are unavailable. The "Recall" button opens existing .ton files (which are just lists of RGB values; conceivably you could create them in a spreadsheet if you wanted to).

The luminance controls are normally not needed in this mode - in fact you may find it easier to first create an attractive grayscale image, then convert it to RGB (with equal channels) before applying a stored .ton file.

Examples

The following examples illustrate the use of SelfToner. Your mileage may vary.

Source image, in color: Toned "from image", using defaults: Toned "from memory", using "mocha.ton", included in the distribution .zip:

Original image, color: Toned "from image" - note that the good separation of luminance/color in the original allows the separation of warm reds and cool grays to be preserved in the final image. To get rid of some red artifacts in the sky, I changed the luminance weights to 40/10/50 in this version.

Pine needles & cool blue cones, in color: Toned "from image"

Color palette from needles applied to the previous image, using "from memory" with "needles.ton" (OK, might have been good to reduce the saturation here a bit):

License

Reluminate includes absolutely no warranty express or implied - use at your own risk. Don't oversave your originals (duh).

Download

Sorry, there's only a Windows version: SelfToner 0.1

Feedback

I'm continuing to work on this out of my own curiousity. Rather than emailing me, please contribute to the Sony forum discussion at DPreview - otherwise I'll get too distracted from real work.

Source image, in color:	Toned "from image", using defaults:	Toned "from memory", using "mocha.ton", included in the distribution .zip:

Original image, color:	Toned "from image" - note that the good separation of luminance/color in the original allows the separation of warm reds and cool grays to be preserved in the final image. To get rid of some red artifacts in the sky, I changed the luminance weights to 40/10/50 in this version.

Pine needles & cool blue cones, in color:	Toned "from image"

Color palette from needles applied to the previous image, using "from memory" with "needles.ton" (OK, might have been good to reduce the saturation here a bit):