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Selective Color Comparisons

This page shows you the result of replacing an image area with another color by using LightMachine and similar tools without using a selection. It is meant to give you the chance to compare LightMachine with other tools. We tried to do the color replacements in the other tools as accurately as possible and didn't try to cheat by using them wrongly. We probably even used them more accurately than most users do. The names of the other tools aren't mentioned (only those of Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro), but they are sorted according to their price.

The Original Photo

Wouldn't it be nice to see if another skirt color than royal-blue would fit better to this lady? To narrow it down to only a few colors, we will do only the most difficult selective color corrections:

Dark Blue to White: because it is very difficult to do.

Blue to Yellow: because it is the complimentary color of blue.
Blue to Red: because it is another difficult adjustment.
Dark Blue to Light Blue: because it needs a selective brightness correction.

The color replacements below were done without creating a selection, which would have needed a lot of work in this case. So the tools internally used a mask for these selective color adjustments.

	Blue to White	Blue to Yellow	Blue to Red	Dark Blue to Light Blue	Comment

LightMachine ($70 / $40)					LightMachine was the only tool in this test that got the blue skirt white without producing artifcats. It needed some slider tweaking, but it worked out nicely. Same is true for the yellow example. LightMachine's Colors Pro mode easily achieved a fresh red color and a nice light blue skirt. It would have been possible to produce darker colors, but for demonstration purposes we used relative bright colors in all three cases.
Photoshop's Color Replace Filter ($650+)					The Color Replace tool is quite effective, but has some problems. In the white example it created quite some artifacts where the dot patterns are. The other examples turned out fine, but they look flatter than LightMachine results, because there is no contrast slider available.
Photoshop's Hue/Saturation Filter ($650+)					This tool easily adds artifacts when using it for selective color adjustments. The artifacts become quite visible in the yellow example and also if you have a closer look at the red example.The blue example turned out quite nicely, but you can't get it any brighter, otherwise artifacts show up again. Achieving a white color wasn't possible, you can only get it in grey.
Photoshop's Selective Color Filter ($650+)	Not Possible				Photoshop's Selective Color filter managed to change the color of the skirt, but its results are not really satisfying, even a lot tedious of slider tweaking. White didn't work at all, the yellow is more olive green, the red turned out more bordeaux and the light blue drifted into cyan.
$150 Tool					After small fight with the inconvenient control of this tool and some discolored results, we managed to achieve these results. Achieving a white and yellow color is not really possible. The red and blue examples on the other hand turned out fine. However, it wasn't possible to brighten the blue color any further.
Paint Shop Pro's Hue Map Filter ($120 / $70)	Not Possible				Apart from the artifacts that PSP's Hue Map filter produces in some images, it managed to get the skirt red. A white and yellow color correction didn't work. The only way to achieve a light blue correction was to use the Lightness Shift slider, but that caused the whole image to brighten up in an unnatural way.
$40 Tool					This tools only managed to get a gray, but not white result. The red correction is fine, but what was supposed to be yellow turned out brownish. The only way to brighten up the dark blue was to decrease the Saturation slider, but that produced a more cyan color instead of light blue. So it doesn't really let you brighten up the colors.