Advantages of the Warping Wheels as compared to the traditional color wheels

In contrast to traditional color wheels, the Picture Instruments Warping Wheels Plugin provides extra functions for restoring and subsequently adjusting skin tones. Thus in most cases, the time-consuming work with masks is overdue.

With the “Protect Skin Tones” control, the skin tones are protected from the tint of the Warping Wheels. The Boost control saturates or desaturates the skin tones independently of the color wheels. If necessary, the Skin Tone Hue control can also be used to adjust the skin color.

With the range controls on the left side of the three color wheel for shadows, mids and highlights you can now set separately adjust whether the color tint should affect the darker-, the mid- or bright part of the respective range.

With the smoothness control of each Warping Wheel, it is possible to set the width of the respective range (shadows, mids, highlights – sometimes known as lift, gamma, gain). A high value widens the range. As a consequence, the crossover to the adjacent brightness range gets smoother. A small value reduces the width of the respective range.

Just like with the classic color wheels there is a Master Wheel which lets you tint, saturate and desaturate the entire image or change its brightness. In addition, you can tint the various brightness ranges of an image by using the controls in the middle of the individual wheels for shadows, mid-tones, and highlights. There is also a brightness control for each of the three ranges.

Color Warp Technology

The name Warping Wheels refers to the Color Warp technology invented by Picture Instruments. With the Color Warp technology, colors can be bent very smoothly in the color space. This greatly reduces compression artifacts such as block formation or banding. Since the increased use of smartphone pics and videos as well as mini-gimbals and drones lead to more and more heavily compressed footage we think it’s a very important step to create our algorithms in such a way that they amplify the sometimes inevitable compression artifacts during post-processing as little as possible.