color correcting blumenthal silk

well I spent a whole lot of time messing with the curves in Photoshop, trying to get the color right on the blumenthal silk. I have gone full circle and i'm really scratching my head on this. basically one way to fix a picture is to take a curve on an adjustment layer (if you have elements use selective color i suppose -but the curve is so neat to look at!) and make the screen look like the print out and then make a new adjustment layer curve with the opposite info! but the bottom line is that something that seemed to have stopped working (switch input/output numbers) is working again.

an interesting thing is that curves is represented as a line indicating from 0 (darkest) to 255 (white) on a pure diagonal. if you pull the line up from the mid point, you make the middle pixels lighter and if you pull them down they get darker.

So you'd think the "opposite" of one curve would look like it's mirror. but some how it doesn't. instead it seems that it's upside down and backward! so i'm shaking my head and got my son in to help me think it through.

Anyway. the main adjustments i'm making are tonal just the blacks and whites and grays. i'm learning that the color adjustment can be much less if you fix the tonality first. this is easier for me to do now that i work with this nifty test strip (little squares of white to black in 21 gradations) with a color gradient rainbow thing. I add a swath from the picture i want to print.

i can say for sure that i have to reduce the ink 33% --that really helps (BTW since writing this i have found that silk that i cut and put in a plastic bag and got back to a couple of weeks later did not need the ink reduction.)

well the fix just came out of the printer. it looks ok but i have to wait to see it in the daylight (or should i say fog light!) to be sure. the light in this room is bad. I can see that, from reducing the ink, the dark colors look better and the light colors got too light.

to do the fix in levels slide the mid point slider to the left to lighten the midtones and then on the output at the bottom move the darks slider to the right to lighten the blacks. you could do it in selective color too where you'd lighten the blacks and grays.