Page 410 - Xara Designer Pro X17

410 The Photo Tools

• Click and drag one of the icons from the levels dialog over your photo. As you do this
you will see the photo change. Release the mouse buttons when you're happy with the
change.

So to set the black point automatically you'd drag the black eye-dropper over the blackest
part of your photo. Similarly, you'd drag the white eye-dropper over the whitest part of
your image.

Note: These are buttons which can be dragged - they do not work by selecting the button
and then clicking again on the photo. Instead you must drag them over the photo. These
are interactive, so as you drag the picture is changed.

Color cast - fixing the white balance
The middle of the three eye-droppers sets the gray point and this is mostly useful for
altering the white balance of your photos. You drag it from the LEVELS Dialog, like the
others, but drag it over any point in the picture that is meant to be gray. In doing this the
balance of colors is altered to try and make the item under the mouse pointer a pure
shade of gray, and thus alters the color balance of the whole picture.

If you have a photo taken with the wrong light setting, they will come out orange or blue.
This control can help fix this, although in bad cases it will never be possible to make
them perfect.

Tip: If there are no gray objects in the picture, find anything that is meant to be white and
look for an area that's in shade or less than bright white.

Tip: If you have multiple pictures taken with the same color cast, you can copy the
correction from one to another using the Copy / Paste Attributes feature.

Here is an example, a snow scene, that is badly under-exposed, and with a strong blue
cast. Its histogram on the right shows the white levels are poor.