Automate your color correction with a Perl script

Card Trick

© articular, Fotolia

© articular, Fotolia

Article from Issue 95/2008
Author(s):

If you have grown tired of manually correcting color-casted images (as described in last month's Perl column), you might appreciate a script that automates this procedure.

Last month, I wrote about using reference cards to correct the white balance in digital photos by taking a test snapshot (see Figure 1) [2]. The black, white, and gray plastic cards, which are available from any good photography equipment dealer, should not generate any color values in a digital image. This provides three calibration points for low, medium, and high light intensity, which the GIMP photo editing tool can then reference to correct your snapshots.

Figure 1: Discovering the color values for the three cards in the picture – the script reads the RGB values along the horizontal line at the center to obtain the graph in
Figure 2: The values in the unfiltered image fluctuate too strongly to identify the cards reliably.

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