Add Tools for Analysis of Color in an Image

These suggestions are for using Photoshop in the realm of color theory (Albers). They won’t change an image but they will help you understand an image so that you can develop a strategy for changing the image. When you quantify color theory numerically you make it more precise and open up new avenues for exploration.
Photoshop should be used in every Color foundation course in art schools. This will lead many painters to use Photoshop, opening up a wider market.

Histogram
In the Histogram palette you can find out what percentage of the image is above or below a certain value. Allow users to refine the range of tones identified (for instance the percentage of tones between 0 and 40 or 240 and 255). Add a few standard ranges tied to zone system terminology (I-X) but with automatic conversion to standard Info readouts (in Grayscale readouts zone I is 0-10, zone V is 45-55, zone X is 90-100, etc).
Second allow the user to find out what percentage of the image is a certain color (like Hue/Saturation allows you to define and adjust a specific range of color). Give the same kind of information found in the Histogram for tone, but for hue and for saturation.
Allow for several ranges of a color to be tracked at once. Make the window customizable, like the File Browser, so that users can track only a few or many colors at once.

Color Picker
Add a 3D option for the color picker and make it a palette, perhaps as an expansion of the Histogram palette or as nested folder with it.
Think Chromix’s Color Think. With it (or Gretag’s ProfileMaker) you can graph an ICC profile and an image in 3D. Add to this numbers for Dmax and ISO brightness extracted from the profile chosen. Add to this functionality the ability to graph gamut compression. Choose a rendering intent and see the image before and after compression (simultaneously). Get the interface to allow you to compare two methods of gamut compression. This will graphically display the effect of a given profile, conversion method, rendering intent. People will understand it better and make better choices. It will also give people a quick way of comparing Dmax values between different substrates, inks, and RIPs.
Then add the ability to click on an area of an image and have that light up an area of the 3D graph. Or to click on the 3D graph and have that hue (and surrounding values, range customizable) light up in the image.
Then add the ability to plot in 3D or identify areas in the image that have specific color relationships to the ones identified – in the same family (30 degree similarity), analogous colors (60 degree similarity), complements (+/-180 degrees), and split complements. You could include nearest in-gamut color given a choice off profile/rendering intent. This will allow people to make more informed and more precise color choices when altering an image.
If the window could be dynamically updated as the image is corrected this would add a tremendous wow! factor to the tool. People would love just watching what happens to an image, much like watching LED’s for stereo systems while music is playing – only much more interesting.
The Histogram is just a graph, but it’s tremendously useful. It helps guide people to making more precise corrections. So would these tools. They’d change the way people see and think about images and change the way they correct images.