The sweetness that is i2e
When you think industrial-strength color correction, you think…Photoshop.
Trouble is: time. It takes for-EVAH to get decent color correction with Photoshop. That’s okay for landscape photographers, but what event photographers have the time to Photoshop 500 photos?
And face it: Photoshop’s autocolor is a joke.
Enter i2e, the program I use for 90% of my color correction. When you order a print from smugmug and choose autocolor, it’s going through i2e. And 90% of the time, its autocorrect is better than most people can do manually in Photoshop.
I use the image editor standard edition ($325) from Colour-Science in Switzerland. I don’t need the color management stuff in the pro edition. They have a home edition for $64 — good if you don’t process too many images.
What makes the program so sweet?
1. Rare is the image that fully automatic i2e corrections don’t improve. Photoshop’s autocorrect screws up 50% of images.
2. It does a great job of sensing memory color areas of the photo — sky, grass, and skin — and moving them toward believable values.
3. Manually tweaking is incredibly easy and fast compared to Photoshop curves. You can process hundreds of photos an hour.
What you still need Photoshop for: creative things like the bandaid tool to fix blemishes.
What I wish it had: a hover tool + info pallette like Photoshop has so you can see color values at any spot on the photo.
They’ve got a month’s free trial. You gotta try it.
Disclaimer: I’ve never even met them and don’t get anything for saying nice things about the program.
December 25th, 2005 at 6:52 am
My supplier for Mitsubishi printers recommended the software but Color Science just sold the software to a US company and is not currently available for purchase OR trial. Can someone please forward me a copy of the i2e PS plug-in for me to try????
imagemaster@dsp.com.pt
January 28th, 2006 at 9:05 pm
Just click on the link in the post to go to colour-science. They say that new products are being developed and will be beta tested in Feb. You can sign up to be a beta tester.
August 24th, 2006 at 8:15 pm
SmugMug has posted great things about the I2e software (dated), but I find it strange that there are no posts in dgrin or other areas of smugmug. I would like to decipher the information on the “colour-science.com” website. Can anyone provide “current” info?
January 8th, 2007 at 11:38 am
I2E is a three-character acronymn – too short for the discussion forums to think it is a word you should be searching for. You can either try searching “Image Editor” (use quotes), as this is the product name, or perhaps the good folks at Dgrin could rig their boards so that ‘I2E’ is a searchable term???
March 19th, 2008 at 6:13 am
I don’t see a Mac version of i2e.
March 19th, 2008 at 6:14 am
I don’t see a Mac version of i2e. Is it recommended to get PhotoShop and the i2e Plug-In (when Mac available), or just i2e standard package?
March 23rd, 2008 at 9:06 am
The one main issue I have with i2e is that it tends to remove details in the highlights – much better to use curves in Photoshop if you need to preserve the detail.
November 9th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
I just purchased a MAC after reading your info I now have concern that I may have made a mistake. I bought it specificly for my photography hobby.