I would normally post a screenshot of PSPs great histogram adjustment tool, but that would require that I install it, a chore which in turn I strive to avoid.
(because I'm looking for something better, if that exists)
Fortunately, I've actually found some screenshots of this dialog online. Here they are, it's always the same dialog:
(source:
http://www.owwm.com/Scanning/Scanning.asp)
(source:
http://www.imaging-resource.com/SOFT/PSP/PSP.HTM)
(source:
http://www.n8xe.com/astronomy/articles/processing.htm)
Now compare that to the much simpler dialog of Gimp:
(source:
http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/index.html?node60.html)
In comparison, PSP has some very nice features:
- Real-time overlay (preview) of the new histogram after modification (red (new) over grey (old) in the 2nd image above)
- Direct display of the graph of the mathematical function that is applied to the pixels with the given settings. This is the mostly diagonal line over the histogram in the above images. If you modify any control in the dialog, both the line as well as the red histogram overlay are immediately updated.
- The output levels can be set in PSP in a much more natural manner than in Gimp (see how they are arranged in correspondence with the graph in the PSP dialog!). That is, if you for example drag up the black dot of the "output min." in the PSP dialog, the curve starts at that height, not at the bottom any more.
- There is a real-time preview of the actual image, too.
Overall, PSPs histogram tool has a
very intuitive dialog (many of its features are hard to explain in words) that I've seen nowhere else so far, and what I'm looking for is a tool with similar functionality. The tool can be a lot "smaller" than PSP or any other program, because this histogram stuff is the only feature of PSP that I'm really missing from TheGimp.
