"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote


| So the "hue" control is mainly for newbies (-:?

It's different functions. You can adjust "gamma",
or color intensity, per channel or linked. Hue adjusts
just that -- hue. For instance, if you take a B/W
and want to make it look old-fashioned, you could
do a colorfill of amber at 10% opacity. What if you
don't like the *hue*? You can then adjust that to be
more yellow, red, etc. It can be useful to fix a
situation like a sunset photo that looks bluish. Or
you could make the photo look more bluish to accent
the sunset feeling. Or you could use it to correct a
photo of a person's face that came out too red.
And it's often useful with graphic arts.
People often use "shade" to mean hue, which
confuses things. Hue just does what it says --
changing the overall color of an image. you'd
rarely want much of that, but sometimes a tiny
bit is nice. Another example: An African "safari"
landscape with lots of tans and yellows, that looks
slightly greenish, could be tipped slightly toward
orange to make it look richer.

With your photos you're talking about RGB being
out of balance, but there could be cases where
hue adjustment would also help.

No tool is for beginners, unless you count all the
gimmicky filters that do things like make a photo
look like a watercolor or a craypas drawing. And
all tools can be used "like a beginner". It's common
for people to oversaturate because they think it
makes an image look richer. Sometimes a tiny bit
of that will help. Usually it's overdone.

But it quickly becomes a philosophical issue
because with digital it's hard to say what the
"real" picture is. Where does touch-up stop
and creation start? You want to restore your
photos to what you think they should look like,
but you might also crop, remove objects, add
rosy cheeks... and if you want to spend more
money you can get "fashion model" filters to give
people better bone structure, give women better
curves, etc. (Look at any women's magazine
cover these days. The photos are only vague,
airbrush-style facsimiles of the models. They not
only hide skin pores these days. They can also
contort facial features.)
I got one of those programs with PSP16. I never
tried it. As I recall it required me to "register" and
I didn't really have any curiosity about it, anyway.
It's called FaceFilter. From the blurb:
""Use the muscle-based facial morphing system
to create a desired expression....comprehensive
multi-layer makeup system..."

So who's to say that hueing your photo to
red is not high art? If you can sucker the art
fashionistas at New York's MoMA to put it up
on the wall then it is. Officially. (And what other
standard is there with modern art, after all?