Feature: The most perplexing tasks is to control color Contrast, Mr. Contrast helps
Motivation: Flaming Pears plugin sets a standard for Color Contrast control

Way back in the dawning days of digital darkrooms - it just about 20 years ago - one of the features yearned for by this refuge from wet, dark, and dankrooms was something better than the two valued Brightness and Contrast supplied by Picture Publisher and Photoshop 3. Well Corel hit the mark with PhotoPaint's Brightness-Contrast-Intensity controls. In Photoshop CS2, Adobe pays homage to this triumvirate of color contrast controls with its Image | Adjustment | Exposure command and its 3 control factors - Exposure, Offset and Gamma and ups the ante by making it work with 8/16/32 bit color images.

But meanwhile my desire to control contrast has also moved slightly upscale - I would like to have more control over colorizing and moving from color to black and white. True the Channel Mixer gives a user broad control over the relative hue changes - but I would like to control contrast at the same time. Finally I would like to retain hints of the original colors in the move to B+W. And of course to add color glow around dark hue regions ... well that is just wishful thinking.

Well maybe not. Flaming Pear's Mr. Contrast appears to supply pretty darn close to my hearts desire 20 years later. Lets look at how this compares with doing the same sort of tasks in Adobe Photoshop's CS. First start with the original image:

The colors and textures are a little flamboyant, so lets try moving the images to grayscale with in order to use the gray and black mix to tone down the strong colors and textures. Of course in Photoshop our preferred way to get to B+W is with the Image | Adjustment | Channel Mixer command. Checking the Monochrome option in the lower right makes for a very powerful color to B+W conversion. It is very useful to have not just individual R G and B control but also Contrast
as well.

The results are pretty satisfying with 2-3 exceptions. First, I would like the background not to move to a uniform light gray tone; but rather a glow of gray around the darker areas. Second, I would like to bring out the light and dark areas of the dresses more strongly - but if I move the contrast control I lose the gray toning. The green color control brings it out but only where green is in the original image. So lets try Mr. Contrast:

With Mr. Contras I am able to add a tinge of gray glow around the darker areas of the image while uniformly bring out the dress textures with the Detail size and Dry Mix controls. But I decide to colorize using a dark blue almost pewter shade. Again, Photoshop is equal to the task with its Image | Adjustments | Hue Saturation command:

Again the results are on and off just as in the B+W case. Nice contrast in the gowns, just what I want except for one thing - I would like a suggestion of the original colors. Also the white background has moved too uniformly dark blue in hue. Lets see what Mr. Contrast can do:

Right on the mark! The blue tone glow is back while the suggestion of original colors is allows for a much wider range of tones than the Colorize option in Photoshop. However, we are still not satisfied and so we do a two step with Mr. Contrast. We use the original settings for a the right 3/4 of the image (using a rectangular mask with a feather of 50px. Then we invert the mask and just add back a lot more of the original co lour for the first 1/4 of the image. Here is is our final result:

Closer to what we want - and of course that is is the aim of photofinishing. With the Photopack of Aetherize, Melancholytron and Flood plugins, Mr.Contrast is $50 - alone it sells for $20. And as this reviewer see it - worth every penny. In fact, "thank you, thank you, thank you" is more than deserved for this plugin.