Digital ROC

Digital ROC, also comes in Pro or Standard versions. It's intended to automatically correct and balance colour in images. Most digital camera tend to get the colour right when set on Auto white balance, most of the time, but there are exceptions. Artificial lighting using tungsten filament (ordinary light bulbs) and fluorescent lighting, for example, are notoriously difficult to get right. With this in mind I tested the plug-in on a night shot. I’ve always struggled in Photoshop to correct this sort of shot from a jpeg, its one of the reasons I always use Raw.



The default adjustment seemed better, though rather yellow. In the example screen above, the orange original is in the top right The control available consists of colour sliders, much like in Photoshop, plus some brightness and contrast adjustment. The Standard version does not have any controls for brightness or for the black and white clip which control contrast. The only other difference, again following the other Pro versions, is that there is the option to specify if the source image is from a Film or a Digital camera.

It seems to me that these plug-ins are intended more for photographers who don’t use Raw mode. The Raw converter in Photoshop, for example, offers much more control over colour balance. In my example I tried to correct the image in Adobe Camera Raw as well as the Digital ROC plug-in with some further adjustment using the controls available. As you will see below from the comparison the Raw adjusted version seems more naturally colour correct. I was unable to get near as good as result with the plug-on compared to the Raw adjusted version, and I struggled with the highlights too.



Having said all that, this was possibly an extreme example and with this in mind I had another go with a different photo. However this time I used both the SHO and the ROC filters, both on default one after the other and got a much better result first time. With a little adjustment to levels I was pleased with the result this time (below).