Learn How To See color
Color correction is more than just fixing exposure and lighting problems created on the shoot. To become successful you need to learn how to "see" the video image with all it's subtle nuances. Whether you're after a cool "bluish" look for your video or enhancing the warm skin tones of a bride's face, color correction is fundamentally about shaping your audience's perception.
Get Good "Grades"
Color Correction, also called grading, can be broken down into two stages: primary and secondary. Primary color correction involves enhancing contrast and color balance to achieve an overall look or mood. In other cases, if the look is unintended, color correction can be used to rebalance an image to bring it back to a neutral color balance.
Add a Touch of Magic Hour
Color correction can also be used to alter the mood of a shot. Here is a beach scene that was shot at midday then graded to look as if it was shot at twilight.
Learn From Our Mistakes
Like photography or painting, color correction is an art form that is best learned by doing. That's why we provide all the necessary media files (in both SD and HD formats) for you to follow along with in Final Cut Pro. However, we've gone one step further; the clips you will be working with were actually shot with deliberate errors in exposure, lighting and color balance. In short, the footage you'll be correcting will be similar to the footage you will encounter in the real world.
Our approach
One final point. We created this tutorial because we strongly believe that color correction cannot be effectively learned from a book. You may learn the theory and the tool sets but you won't necessarily learn the approach. That said, we strived to present color correction as primarily a creative process and less as a technical one.
But most of all, color correction is just plain fun allowing you to affect your audience in ways that you may not have known were possible.
About the Instuctor
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Andrew Balis is a cinematographer, editor, post production consultant and Apple certified instructor teaching classes in Final Cut Pro to industry professionals at Moviola Education and UCLA. He is co-author and producer of the Final Cut Pro Advanced Techniques DVD-ROM. |
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Table of Contents
Evaluation
- Using an NTSC monitor for accuracy
- Setting video out
- Setting up a video monitor
- Using a standard TV for color correction
- Creating the right environment
- Final Cut Pro's video scopes
- Display options
- The Waveform monitor
- Broadcast safe levels
- A deeper look at black levels
- Reading contrast
- The Vectorscope
- Broadcast safe limits for color
- Real-Time video scopes
- Analog video scopes
Contrast and Color Balancing Basics
- Setting up for RT playback
- Color correction interfaces
- Using the 3-way color corrector
- Adjusting contrast
- Blacks, mids, and whites
- Contrast control tips
- Updating external video
- Color balancing basics
Contrast Control
- Fixing overexposed images
- Vision, photography and color
- More on overexposure
- Fixing underexposed images
- Color Balancing in the Blacks
- Color Balancing in the Mids
- Color Balancing in the Whites
- Working with the flesh tone line
- Rendering skin tones naturally
- Using the Auto-Balance eye-dropper
- Working with a gray card/chip chart
- Color temperature corrections
Creating Stylized Looks
- Creating high contrast looks
- Leveraging the broadcast safe filter
- High contrast on high contrast
- Black and white
- Perceiving color
- Subtle color tints
- Stylized color tints
- Using desaturate highs/lows filter
- Using multiclips in your workflow
- Before and after
- Setting up your workflow
- Understanding the Frame Viewer
- Multiple edit layouts
- Working with Playhead Sync
- Copy filter controls
- Working with multiple filters
- Pasting and removing attributes
- Using FCP's Find command
- Creating browser favorites
- Color correction button bars
- Matching Hue
- The Color Corrector filter
- Contrast controls
- Using the Balance Wheel
- Using the Hue Wheel
- Copy filter controls
- Additional evaluation controls
- The Histogram
- The RGB Parade
- Using Range Check
- Animating color correction
- Using Keyframes
- Using Transitions
Secondary Color Correction
- Enhancing the image
- Creating extreme color changes
- Working with edge controls
- Resetting secondary controls
- Creating one-color looks
- Applying mattes
Grad Filter Effects
- Replacing a sky
- Fixing a problem
- Highlight grad
- Vignettes
Quality Control
- Luma/Chroma video systems
- Quality overview
- Analog/Composite video
- NTSC
- Analog/Y/C video
- Analog/Component video
- CAV interconnect standards
- Digital Component video
- Subsampling
- 8 bit and 10 bit video
- Color spaces
- ITU-R 601
- Mixing Analog and Digital video
System Requirements