Adjust color and tone

CorelDRAW lets you adjust the color and tone of bitmaps. For example, you can replace colors and adjust the brightness, lightness, and intensity of colors.

By adjusting tone and color, you can restore detail lost in shadows or highlights, remove color casts, correct underexposure or overexposure, and generally improve the quality of the bitmaps. You can also correct color and tone quickly by using the Image Adjustment Lab. For more information, see Image Adjustment Lab.

You can adjust the color and tone of bitmaps automatically by using the Auto Adjust command or by using the following filters.

Effect	Description
Brightness/contrast/intensity	Lets you adjust the brightness of all colors and the difference between light and dark areas
Channel mixer	Lets you mix color channels to balance the colors of a bitmap. For example, if a bitmap has too much red, you can adjust the red channel in an RGB bitmap to improve image quality.
Color balance	Lets you add cyan or red, magenta or green, and yellow or blue to selected tones in a bitmap. For example, if you want to tone down the blue color in a photo, you can shift the color values from blue to yellow.
Contrast enhancement	Lets you adjust the tone, color, and contrast of a bitmap while preserving shadow and highlight detail. An interactive histogram lets you shift or compress brightness values to printable limits. The histogram can also be adjusted by sampling values from the bitmap.
Desaturate	Lets you reduce the saturation of each color in a bitmap to zero, remove the hue component, and convert each color to its grayscale equivalent. This creates a grayscale black-and-white photo effect without changing the color model.
Gamma	Gamma is a method of tonal correction that takes the human eye's perception of neighboring pixels into account. For example, if you were to place a 10 percent gray circle on a black background and an identical gray circle on a white background, the circle surrounded by black appears lighter to the human eye than the circle surrounded by white even though the brightness values are identical. The Gamma effect lets you pick up detail in a low contrast image without significantly affecting the shadows or highlights. It affects the values in the image but it is curve-based so that the changes are weighted toward the midtones.
Hue/saturation/lightness	Lets you adjust the color channels in a bitmap and change the position of colors in the spectrum. This effect allows you to change colors and their richness, as well as the percentage of white in an image. Hue represents the dominant color (red, green, blue, yellow, and so on), saturation is the amount or richness of this color, and lightness represents the overall percentage of white in an image.
Local equalization	Lets you enhance contrast near edges to reveal detail in both light and dark regions. This process can produce artificial contrast variations in the center of relatively uniform regions. You can correct this by expanding the region so that it is larger than any uniform area in the image. You can set the height and width of the region around the pixels to accentuate contrast. To maintain equal proportions, enable the Lock button .
Replace colors	The Replace colors filter lets you replace one or more colors in an image, selection, or object. A color mask is created to define the colors to be replaced. The application shows the color mask in the preview window so you can see the selected colors. The protected areas are black, and areas with colors that will be replaced are white. You can add colors to and subtract colors from the color mask to refine your selection. Depending on the range you set, you can replace one color or shift an entire image from one color range to another. The range sets the tolerance of the color mask. Color tolerance is based on color similarity and defines the percentage of color variation from the seed colors that is allowed in the mask. A greater tolerance value adds more colors to the color mask. You can set the hue, saturation, and lightness for the new color. Depending on the options you choose, you can replace one or more colors with a single color or with multiple colors.
Sample/Target balance	Lets you adjust color values in a bitmap with sample colors taken from the image. You can choose sample colors from the dark, midtone, and light ranges of an image and apply target colors to each of the sample colors. For example, you can increase the contrast in a bitmap by choosing the darkest and lightest tones in a bitmap and mapping them to black and white respectively. After you choose sample colors from the dark, midtone, and light ranges of the image and assign a target color to each sample color, the pixels with the same color as the sample colors adjust to display the corresponding target color.
Selective color	Lets you change color by changing the percentage of spectrum CMYK process colors from the red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and magenta color spectrum in a bitmap. This filter also lets you add process color to the grayscale tonal component of an image. Selective color modifications increase and decrease the percentage of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black pixels that make up each primary color in the color spectrum. For example, decreasing the percentage of magenta in the reds spectrum results in a color shift toward yellow. Conversely, increasing the percentage of magenta in the reds spectrum causes a color shift toward magenta and an overall increase in red. The extent of color modification depends on the adjustment percentage method you choose.
Tone curve	Lets you perform color corrections precisely, by controlling individual pixel values. By changing pixel brightness values, you can make changes to shadows, midtones, and highlights. For more information, see Tone Curve filter.

By default, the application shows a live preview of the image in the document window as you change the settings in the filter dialog box. However, if you zoom in on the image in the document window to get a closer look at a specific area, but you still want to be able to evaluate the changes in the entire image, you can preview the image in the dialog box. For more information about previewing images in the dialog boxes of bitmap effects, see To apply a bitmap effect to an image area.

To adjust color and tone automatically

2 .	Click Effects Adjust Auto adjust.

To adjust the brightness, contrast, and intensity

2 .	Click Effects Adjust Brightness/contrast/intensity (or press Ctrl + B).

Adjusting the brightness, contrast, and intensity lets you improve the clarity and quality of the image.

Brightness shifts all pixel values up or down the tonal range, lightening or darkening all colors equally.

Contrast adjusts the difference between light and dark colors.

Intensity brightens the light areas of the drawing or darkens the dark areas.

Contrast and intensity usually go hand-in-hand because an increase in contrast sometimes washes out detail in shadows and highlights, and an increase in intensity can bring it back.

To adjust the color balance

2 .	Click Effects Adjust Color balance (or press Ctrl + Shift + B).

The Color balance effect has been used to shift the colors in the image from blue to yellow.

To apply the Gamma effect

2 .	Click Effects Adjust Gamma.

Adjusting the midtones lets you increase the detail in a low-contrast image without affecting the shadows or highlights.

To adjust hue, saturation, and lightness

2 .	Click Effects Adjust Hue/saturation/lightness (or press Ctrl + Shift + U).

Use the Hue/saturation/lightness effect to change the colors in an image.

To replace colors

2 .	Click Effects Adjust Replace Colors.

3 .	Click the Sample single color eyedropper tool , and click in the image to select a seed color.

You can also
Add colors to the color mask	Click the Add colors to mask eyedropper tool and drag in the image to select the colors you want.
Subtract colors from the color mask	Click the Subtract colors from mask eyedropper tool and drag in the image to select the colors you want.
Set the percentage of color variation from the seed colors that is allowed in the mask	Move the Range slider. At lower range settings, only pixels with very similar colors are replaced; at higher settings, more pixels are replaced. For example, a range of 1 affects only a single color; a range of 100 shifts most of the colors in the direction of the new color.
Ignore grayscale pixels when replacing colors	Enable the Ignore grayscale check box. Disabling the Ignore grayscale check box replaces gray pixels based on saturation and lightness values alone.
Replace one or more colors with a single output color	Enable the Single output color check box.
Set the hue, saturation, and lightness of the output color	Move the Hue, Saturation, and Lightness sliders, respectively.

The Replace colors effect has been applied to replace all instances of the color red with purple.

To preview the image in the dialog box, click the Preview button . For more information about previewing images while adjusting settings, see To apply a bitmap effect to an object.

To apply the Replace colors filter non-destructively, use a lens. For information about using lenses, see Lenses.

When you copy the color mask from one bitmap object to another, all mask settings are preserved.

To apply the Sample/target balance effect

2 .	Click Effects Adjust Sample/target balance.

4 .	Click the Low-point , Mid-point , and High-point Eyedropper tool, and click in the image to choose a dark area, midtone area, and light area, respectively.

The shadows, midtones, and highlights in the image have been adjusted by mapping a sample color in the bitmap to a target color.

Enable the Clip automatically check box to set the range of the histogram display and ensure that all spikes fit on the chart. When the Clip automatically check box is disabled, use the Clipping box to set the percentage of brightness values that are ignored when identifying the light and dark colors in the histogram.

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