Color editing in images often consists of two main tasks: changing hue and saturation, and editing lightness or tone curves. State-of-the-art palette- based recoloring approaches entangle these two tasks. A user’s only lightness control is changing the lightness of individual palette colors. This is inferior to state-of-the-art commercial software, where lightness editing is based on flexible tone curves that remap lightness. However, tone curves are only provided globally or per color channel (e.g., RGB). They are unrelated to the image content. Neither tone curves nor palette-based approaches support direct image-space edits—changing a specific pixel to a desired hue, saturation, and lightness. ColorfulCurves solves both of these problems by uniting palette-based and tone curve editing. In ColorfulCurves, users directly edit palette colors’ hue and saturation, per-palette tone curves, or image pixels (hue, saturation, and lightness). ColorfulCurves solves an 𝐿2,1 optimization problem in real-time to find a sparse edit that satisfies all user constraints. Our expert study found overwhelming support for ColorfulCurves over experts’ preferred tools.
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