Need colour correction advice for stitching images

[zxiong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Peter,

I'm not sure about Corel but I've done simalar work for the Sydney New Years Eve 
fireworks using Photoshop which has been proven to be successful. It took me a
couple of weeks of intensive work to finish it. In short, you would need to
select and adjust individual joint areas. If you use stitching software such 
as the Panorama Factory, exposures would be automatically adjusted.  When you
stitch or paste scenes from other originals/scans, colours can be matched
perfectly if you work on individual channels of selected areas while monitoring
either on screen or by measuring their exact RGB values. Soft selections such
as feather, gradients, or layers are crucial. I believe curve adjustments of 
individual channels are preferable to colour saturations. Original colours of
your slides are irrelevent in digital manipulations.

Zonghou Xiong

>I have scanned some photos and wanted to stitch them together. It
>worked ok, but looked bad because a couple of them need colour
>correction.
>
>They are long exposure night shots of New Years Eve fireworks. I took
>one series of shots with 10 second exposure, then another with 20. One
>set of shots is more purple than the other set because of the longer
>exposure. Naturally, the best fireworks bursts were on different sets.
>So now I need to correct one set so I can choose images from either
>set.
>
>I'm not experienced at colour correction, but found a function in my
>software (Corel Photopaint 8.0) that looks like it should do it. This
>option allows you to adjust hue, saturation or brightness of all
>colours at once, or of red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, or magenta
>individually.
>
>When I increased the saturation of red by 50 (percent?) and decreased
>magenta by 80, it seemed to have corrected it. But I can't get it
>right enough that you can't see the variation when stitched. I find it
>difficult to judge when it's right without going throught the whole
>stitching process.
>
>Can anyone give me any tips that will make it easier? Am I on the
>right track?
>
>Peter Shute


Peter Shute