Color Correction in Avid Media Composer
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction to Color Correction
Color Correction is one of the final essential stages in the post-production process and should be performed after you've finished editing your program and have reached picture lock. There are three basic stages within the color correction workflow. First, you make changes to the contrast and color of the shots in your program, so that you can fix problematic footage that may be too dark, too bright, or that might have an improper color cast. And you can also make sure your skin tones have the proper hue and saturation. Next, you spend time ensuring that each shot appropriately matches the other shots within the same scene and has proper visual continuity.
This is often called shot-to-shot correction. Finally, it's where you make creative changes, giving your scene a specific look or treatment. Finally, if you're sending your show to broadcast, it's also where you bring your footage within legal broadcast standards once you've performed the previous three stages. We'll take a step-by-step look at each stage in the color correction process in just a bit. But first I want to discuss how you go about color correcting your shots. Let's head into Media Composer. All right, we're in the software, and we're in Color Correction mode.
We'll take a look at exactly how we get here in a future movie. But right now I just want to make a few references. When performing color correction you need to rely on both your eyes, as well as video scopes. You use your eyes to tell yourself what part of the image is what, as well as the general idea of how you go about correcting it. But you also must use various video scopes to measure the appropriate values as you're correcting. For example, let's take a look at this image here. Now by looking at this image we can tell that it's overall just too blue.
It's also pretty muddy, which means there's not enough contrast. So already we know that we probably need to remove some blue, as well as make the highlights lighter and the shadows darker. That will increase the contrast and make the image pop more. Now, the flesh tones also look really dark and dingy. So we'll need to warm those up quite a bit. So we'll be adding some red and yellow back into the midtones. So here we've used our eyes to give us some clues about what needs to be done and how we're going to do it.
Now while we go about all these steps, we also use video scopes to measure the values. So we're not just eyeballing it. Believe me, our eyes can deceive us. So we'll need some precise tools to help us out. For example, we'll need to actually map the blackest part in our image at or near video black, which has a value. If we look over here on the Y Waveform-- which again, we will go into in great detail in a future movie--we need to map the darkest part of our values to 16 on the 8-bit digital scale, or 0%, and we need to map the whitest part of our image at or near video white, which is equal to 235 on the 8-bit digital scale, or 100%.
If we exceed these values, we produce illegal values for broadcast, and the show will get rejected. Now even if we're not going to broadcast, it's still a good idea to adhere to these standards. Don't worry, we'll go over all of these specific values later. Just realize that measuring your adjustments is important, but so is using your eyes. You can't just rely on the scopes to make your adjustments because the software doesn't know what part of the image is supposed to be what. We know this is a face, but Media Composer doesn't. That's why you need both.
Now after we're done color correcting the shot, we need to make sure the shot matches all the other shots from the same scene. So as you can see here, we have a lot of different lighting schemes within the scene, and we need to make sure that everything matches and has visual continuity. Finally, we might want to add a creative look or feel to stylize the footage. There's a lot to consider, and we'll get to everything in this course. So as you can see, you have a lot of things to do during color correction, and it's important to use both your eyes and the video scopes to achieve your goals.
Now that we've gone over the very basics, let's take a look at how we can apply it in practice.
So we've explored why in theory we perform color correction on our footage. In this movie, I thought we'd take a look at some actual before and after treatments so that we can get an idea of where we are going. Our client doesn't quite know what they want, so we'll present them with several exciting options. Now, if you've watched the first movie, you're already familiar with some of the problems we have with this footage. I'm going to play through the short sequence, which doesn't have any color correction, so that you can see some of the issues.
(video playing) As you can see, we definitely have quite a few issues in terms of color balance and contrast and in regards to our shots matching one another.
Now I'm going to scrub through the same sequence, this time once it's been color corrected. Go ahead and load it up and just briefly scrub through. And we've got some nice contrast and nice saturation. Everything matches each other very well. This is a nicely color corrected sequence, and we haven't applied any other treatments to it yet, but we've just done the baseline grade. We've corrected for contrast, we've removed color cast, and it's ready to go if we do want to apply some treatments.
Okay, let's take a look at some additional treatments that we might want to present. This one here. Go ahead and scrub through it. This has a very graphic gritty quality, very high contrast, very high saturation, and it definitely is very stylized. So, this might be something that our client is interested in. And we'll go ahead and load this one up. And this here is a Bleach Bypass emulation. This actually emulates what you can do in film development when you either partially or completely skip the bleaching function during the processing of color film.
Now, when you do this, you keep this silver lining in the film emulsion, along with the color dyes, and this results in like a black and white image over a color image, and it usually results in reduced saturation and increased contrast and graininess as well as--as you can see-- a tendency towards being blue or green. So that can look very cool. And let's take a look at one more. Got a Sepia treatment. And as you can see here, this is emulating old, faded photograph or film.
We've also added some film grain to it to add to that antiquated quality. So, you've seen this a lot before, and we will definitely take a look at that later as well. So, as you can see, color correction can deeply affect the way we emotionally feel about a scene. And throughout this course we'll learn not only how to correct our image so that it looks good and falls within legal broadcast levels, but we will also learn how to apply different treatments, some of which we've explored in the sneak preview.
We've already looked at some main reasons that color correction is important, and we've even seen it in action. In this movie we're going to take a look at the specific workflow that will allow us to achieve the best results. Now the color correction process can be broken into three basic stages, which we've already mentioned. Stage 1 is correcting your luma and chroma values in individual shots, Stage 2 is achieving shot-to-shot consistency, and Stage 3 is applying a specific look or style to your entire show. Again, you use both your eyes and the video scopes to do this.
Let's burrow in a little deeper. As we said, Stage 1 is where you correct your individual shots. This is where you adjust your luma, your light and dark values, and your chroma color values, which are made up of two parts: hue and saturation. So, let's break this down. The first step involves adjusting your luma values. First, you set the black part of your image to video black, and you set the white part of your image to video white. This opens up your contrast range, which is not only correct, but is generally much more pleasing to the eye.
Opening your tonal range makes dull and flat footage crisp and bold, and also it makes all other light and color values in your image more accurate. After performing luma adjustments, you should typically clip the luma values, which means that any stray shadows or highlights that register outside legal levels are automatically clamped to be within legal broadcast levels.
The second step involves removing color cast and neutralizing your image. This means that you measure the colors that are supposed to be neutral in your image--black and white--and makes sure that they are in fact neutral, which means that they are free from a color cast.
If you find your blacks are too cool or your whites are too warm, then you go about removing the color cast by subtracting the offending color, so that you can achieve true black and white values. Doing this will improve color accuracy in your entire image. Keep in mind though: sometimes footage is purposefully shot with a particular color cast in mind, like with gels or filters. If this is the case, you won't want to remove the artistic vision of those that shot the footage. So make sure you communicate with the director or director of photography about their intentions during shooting.
The third step is adjusting hue and saturation. Once your black and white values are registering correctly in terms of luma and chroma, then it's time for you to make any needed adjustments to your hue and saturation values, especially in terms of flesh tones. Often you'll need to warm up your flesh tones if they are too pale, or you may need to cool them down if they are overall too red. You also have the opportunity to either increase or decrease your saturation.
After you've corrected the luma and chroma of each shot, you'll need to work on getting shot-to-shot consistency. This means that you'll often need to apply your corrections, making sure that each shot works well with the adjacent shots. Often, for example, a master shot might be slightly darker or lighter than the close-ups of the same scene because it was shot at a different time of day. Therefore, you'll often need to just make some fine adjustments to bring everything into the same spectrum.
Finally, once you've made the appropriate corrections and made sure everything is worked well together, you can add a stylistic look or treatment to your scene like we saw in the last movie.
It's important that you've done all of the work ahead of time to make everything look good before you apply your treatment. As you can see, there's a distinct workflow that you're going to need to take when color correcting your shots. We'll go over each of these shots in detail, but first we're going to take just a little bit of time to talk about some other things you should consider when performing color corrections.
We've already mentioned that you need to see with your eyes and measure with the scopes when evaluating your shots for color correction. Well, in order to give your eyes the best chance possible, there are several things you should try to do when setting up your color correction environment. These include getting a properly calibrated monitor, using good lighting, working in a neutrally colored space-- preferably neutral gray--and if possible using external scopes. Let's take a look at each of these.
Your eyes are powerful tools in the color correction process, but what if the monitor you're using is emitting a blue cast that isn't really there. That means that for each of your shots you'll be incorrectly removing blue from your image. Then when you bring the footage to another monitor, everything will look too yellow. To prevent this from happening, you need to spend the time making sure your monitor is the correct color temperature, 6500 Kelvin--also called D65, which is the color of daylight--and that the hue and chroma are properly set and balanced. The actual process of properly calibrating your monitor is beyond the scope of this course, but definitely take the time to research that because it's very important.
The lighting in your color correction environment is also very important. You want to help you perceive your footage as it truly is. Ideally, you want to work with lights that are set at 6500 Kelvin, and you want to make sure the light isn't too bright or shining on your monitor. Sometimes your eyes will improperly compensate for color on the walls or anywhere else in the color correction environment. Therefore, you want to remove any chance that this will happen by working in a room with a totally neutral wall. Light is okay, but neutral gray is best.
There are internal video scopes within Media Composer that you can use when color correcting your footage. If possible, though, it's a great idea to use external scopes, so that you can get an accurate read on this signal once it leaves Media Composer. Also, external scopes give you very sensitive real-time response and often provide a display with higher resolution and more control over measurement units. Also, they often have some filtering and magnification capabilities, so that you can isolate certain parts of the video signal. Again, if you don't have hardware scopes, that's okay. Just use the internal ones in Media Composer.
Finally, if you can, working on an external control surface is a great idea. This gives you tactile control over your corrections and allows you to make multiple adjustments at once. Here, I'm on Avid's web site, and we're looking at the Avid Artist Color. So, it's a control surface made by Avid. You can, of course, use any control surface, but this is one that Avid makes and fits right within the Media Composer Color Correction interface. And as you can see, it has lots of buttons and dials and it has three trackballs and it really allows you to have tactile control over your corrections.
And once you use it, you probably won't want to go back to software corrections, but in this course we're going to take a look at software corrections, and then you will be able to easily incorporate the tactile control later on if you choose to. The tips in this movie are absolute musts if you're a professional colorist and slightly less essential if you're an editor who just does a little color correction. But if you can, try to set up your color correction environment with as many of these things as possible. It will make your experience truer and allow you to achieve more accurate results.
Okay, so you should have a pretty good idea of why we need to perform color correction, as well as the proper workflow and considerations for successful color correction. Now let's take a tour of the Media Composer Color Correction interface before we actually get our feet wet. Now there are several ways that you can actually launch the Color Correction tool. You can come down here into this Modes panel and choose the Color Correction tool right here, or you can come up to Windows and Workspaces and Color Correction. And when you open it up, if you need to reposition any windows, you can. Right now I'm in pretty good shape. But usually you will need to kind of prevent them from overlapping a little bit. And then you can just come back up to Windows > Workspaces and Save Current once you have made those adjustments.
All right, so we have 3 basic levels here. We are already familiar with the timeline. If you need to review anything about editing in the timeline, please feel free to look at the Media Composer 6 Essential Training course. So that leaves two new tools that we need to look at.
We will go ahead and start with the Color Correction tool here. Now when the Color Correction tool opens, you are going to see these three wheels. These are called chroma Wheels, and it's in something called the HSL group. Now HSL stands for Hue, Saturation, and Luma. And just so you know, the HSL group works in the YUV color space, which means that luma and chroma can be adjusted separately. Now this allows you to change one part of the signal without significantly affecting the other.
So let's go ahead and just park on an image here. Again, this needs a lot of color correction. We won't actually perform any significant color correction now, but just to make a couple of adjustments here. WE WANT TO START OVER HERE TO THE RIGHT, AND THIS IS THE GAIN, GAMMA, AND SETUP CONTROLS. This allows you to control your luma, so your light and dark values. So I can increase my whites or decrease, then you can kind of see the changes applied here. Once I have made a correction, you can see in the timeline that a color correction affect was applied.
So this happens just the very moment that I make my first correction. Okay, so we'll talk a lot about how to adjust our highlights, midtones and shadows in the future movie, but that's where those are. And then you also have your chroma wheels. Now this allows you to add specific color values in your shadows, your midtones, and your highlights. So as you can see here, if I drive my highlights up really red, you see that everything that is white in the image is now this reddish pink color.
All right, and you can kind of see that that is across the board. And same thing with my shadows. You would really never ever go out to the edge here. These are usually very subtle adjustments, but just so you can see the changes. That is what the chroma wheels do. Down here (below Gain, Gamma and Setup) we have some automatic color correction tools, and we have some automatic color correction tools here as well (eyedroppers under color wheels). And then over here on the right side, we have some color match swatches, which allows us to very easily measure and match our shots with one another.
So this is going to be very key in our scene-to-scene correction. Below that we have some color correction buckets, which allow us to save some templates out when I'm working in a color correction session. And then if I come over to my two tabs here (far left, Controls & Hue Offsets), I will notice that this is all within the Hue Offsets tab. I have some additional controls in the Controls tab, and these are some very basic adjustments in terms of hue and brightness and contrast. I can really basically achieve a lot of the things that I can do within Hue and Brightness and Contrast in Hue Offsets. And this actually gets me more control in more detail, so I don't use these very often. But what I do use often is saturation. So, my saturation is something that is unique to the Controls tab and is very important. So I can either decrease or increase my saturation. And this is another very important part, the Clip Low and Clip High. This allows me to basically clamp my luma values at 16 and 235, my video black and video white. Again, we talked about this before. These are very important values to keep our luma signal within, and we will explore that in much greater detail in later movies. Again, we have our Color Match swatches over here on the right and our color correction buckets as well. So that's kind of a brief tour of the HSL group. Again, it's the YUV color space allowing us to basically manipulate our luma and our chroma values separately.
Now let's move on into Curves. CURVES WORK IN THE RGB COLOR SPACE, WHICH MEANS THAT LUMA AND CHROMA ARE COMBINED. THEREFORE, ANY CHANGES WE MAKE WILL AFFECT BOTH PARTS OF THE SIGNAL, LUMA AND CHROMA TOGETHER.
Now, if you've worked in Photoshop or other applications that use curves, this basically works in the same way. We have a red, green, and blue curve, and we have a master curve, or luma curve, which is red plus green plus blue. Now we already have control points in the black and white regions of each of our curves. And you can see that we have them likewise in each of our color channels. And we can either manipulate these control points. You can kind of see that as I drag this around, the image changes. And you can also add control points and make it brighter and darker.
And the same thing, you know, over here in the other curves. If I add a control point and move towards blue, you can obviously see what happens. But the cool part about this is that I'm adding it in the middle. And we will definitely go into all the specifics about adding control points and where to add them and how to manipulate in a future movie.
To the right of my curves I have a Master Saturation and then Master Gain, Gamma, and Setup controls as well. Now these are pretty much identical to the controls within the HSL. In fact, you can see that the values that I have over here in HSL are likewise applied in curves. So this basically allows me to use these controls without needing to go back to the HSL. So this is kind of a duplicate version of those. And then we also have our Color Match controls over here, which again allows us to make some very nice shot-to-shot corrections and our color correction buckets. And we have some automatic color correction tools down here as well, and we will explore all of those in future movies.
We also have these buttons next to every single adjustment. These are enable buttons, so let me just make kind of a drastic change here. And if I deselect it, you can see that the change is no longer applied. We still have the adjustment made; we are just not viewing it. If I want to reset it altogether, I Option+Click on Enable button, or Alt+Click on a PC, and then any adjustment is removed. So same thing here, if I wanted to make an adjustment, I can disable that and it goes away, or I can Option+Click on this and it resets.
So that's just a very brief tour of our Color Correction tool. Again, WE HAVE TWO GROUPS, HSL, JUST THE YUV COLOR SPACE FOR EVERYTHING IS SEPARATE AS FAR AS LUMA AND CHROMA. AND OUR CURVES IN THE RGB COLOR SPACE, WHERE EVERYTHING IS PRETTY INTERTWINED.
Now let's come up to our three windows here. By default, it will probably say Previous, Current, and Next. And this is basically the shot that I'm correcting. Is Current, and you will pretty much never change that. And this is the shot right before. And this is the shot right after.
Now these can be populated with what ever you want. If I click on this menu here, you can see that I can have various choices with the shots. I can leave it empty, I can put the entire sequence in. I can have the second previous, the second next, and I can also show you the reference shot. If I want to basically establish a shot as a reference shot, I can load it up here, and then it will stay as I'm correcting other shots. So let's say, for example, that I want this shot here (hover over a shot in the timeline) to be my reference. I am going to go ahead and reference it. It's now placed in the reference shot. And as I come back here, I can now reference that shot here. And then maybe over here I want to put a video scope, because these are other options that you have available to you to correct your shot. You know that you not only need your eyes, but you need the scopes to show you information about your video signal. So we have lots of video scopes to work with. We will go into many of these throughout this course.
Now you do have some buttons below your monitor. It allows you to see things like before and after. And it also allows you to go to various shots as well as remove your correction. So as you can see, the color correction workspace has a lot of features. When you're ready to go back to regular Source/Record mode after being in Color Correction mode, you can simply come up to Windows > Workspaces and then back to Source/Record Editing. And then also keep in mind you have your different mode buttons down here. You can operate it there as well. As you can see, the color correction workspace has a lot of features. We will be going over each of these in detail, but this movie should give you a basic overview of the main functions.
Now let's get started!
In a previous movie we went through the various stages of the color correction process. As a reminder, stage 1 is where we get individual shots looking good as far as luma and chroma levels are concerned. And the very first part of this process is setting accurate black and white values. We will take a look at how to do that in this movie. All right, so we have already kind of evaluated the shot, we know that the whites are too dim and the blacks are too milky, and it does have an overall general blue color cast.
We are not going to worry about that color cast about anything related to chroma in this movie though. Right now we're just concerned with getting those accurate whites and blacks. So let's get into Color Correction mode. I am going to go ahead and choose Workspaces and Color Correction. And if you look down here on the timeline, we have V2 monitored and that's so we can see our secondary video track as we come over our picture-in-picture here. We don't want to actually apply the correction to V2, however. We want to make sure to apply it to V1, so we can keep our monitor here. But we just want to deselect V2, and right now we have the current shot right here in the middle.
And now we have the previous and next shots here on V1. Again, if I had V2 selected we wouldn't have a previous shot, and we would have the next shot which is way down here that's not what we want, we want to make sure to just correct V1. All right, so we are set up there, and we actually want to choose a different option to go in our left monitor here. So we don't want to worry about previous right now. Let's go ahead and load the Y Waveform. Now the Y Waveform shows us our luma value.
That shows us our light and dark values of our current shot, and it doesn't take into consideration chroma or color. So if this was a totally black and white image--which I can make it black and white by taking down its saturation--notice that my Y Waveform is pretty much the same. So this is basically just like we are correcting the black and white image. I am going to go ahead and reset this value by Option clicking, or Alt-click on a PC, and we are going to go ahead and head back to Hue Offsets.
Let's talk about a couple more things with the Y Waveform monitor here. At the bottom we have black, and at the top we have white, and it's very hard to see these numbers at the current video quality setting that we are at. I am going to just temporarily move this to yellow, so this best performance. And you can see that when I do that, you can actually see these numbers a lot better. So at 16 we have got video black. So we want the darkest part of our image to rest right along that line.
If I don't have any black values in my image, then it's not going to rest on that line. So polar bear in a snowstorm. We are not going to have anything down here next 16. But we do have some nice true black images that should be down there. So we will want to lower this to that value. Here, and you can't really see the two here, but this is 235 on the digital bit scale, and that's representing video white. So if we look at our image, and we do have white values--which we do--then we want to those to rest right up here along this line.
So 16 is equal to 0%, and 235 is equal to 100%. Notice that you can go above these. We can go all the way up to 255, and we can go all the way down to 0, but that's getting into these super black and super white areas. So we want to avoid that if we can. Now this graph goes from left to right exactly representing the image here in the current monitor. So as we proceed here, here is the guy, and here is the background.
So this clump here in the trace, so we kind of have a clump here and a clump here, those are just like values of luma, all right? So, we have kind of a darker clump here. It's probably like the shadow of his face here, maybe some hair, maybe some of his clothes, kind of a lot of really like luma values all right here. And then here we have a large clump, and that's pretty much the sea. So the blue right here is all about 50% luma.
So the trace, whether it's fine or whether it's clumped together, that tells you a little bit about how the values are distributed across the image. All right, so with that, we have black- to-white and we have left-to-right represented of this image. We are going to go ahead and ask ourselves where in the image is it's supposed to be black, and we've got several black areas right here which are about right here in the trace. We want to lower that, and we are going to do that with this Setup control.
So I am just going to click on the Setup control, and if I drag to the left, you can see the image updating in the current monitor. And as soon as I release, you can see the trace in the Y Waveform update as well. Now if I go too far, you can see that it's getting into that super black region. That's not what we want. We wanted it to rest right along 16 or 0%. So I am going to go ahead and raise that a little bit, and if I want to make fine adjustments I hold down Shift and then drag to the left. And you can see that I'm making very fine adjustments.
And if I'm a little bit below, it's okay. We can clip those values later, but I'm going to go ahead and just raise that a little bit, so it's resting right along that line. And then we are going to come in and try to get our white or lightest values up to video white. So I am going to go ahead and drag this to the right. And again, we want to make sure that we don't go too far above 235. Again, we can clip that if we need to. But here we go.
So we have broadened our contrast range. You can see that when we actually drag that up to 235 it sort of took it away from my video black region, and that happened it is kind of a dance if you drag too far in one region, if you drag too far on one control, it can affect other controls. They have it rather overlapping nature. So I am just going to go back down a little bit on my setup, and then I am going to Shift+Drag this to make a very fine adjustment up to 235. All right, so I like where my blacks are. I like where my whites are.
My gamma is my midtones, so if you generally want something brighter or generally darker, you can control that with gamma. This is a bright sunny day, so I'm going to go ahead and brighten this up a little bit, like so. And this is looking pretty good. I am going to go a little bit down with my setup, because I did affect that. And all right, I am kind of liking how this looks. Now one thing you want to do throughout the process is to always look at where you came from. So I've got my Dual Split button right here.
If I click on Dual Split, this is the before, and by default it splits it into two. What I like to do is actually just drag this over to the right and then treat it as a toggle. So if I click on--here is kind of the after and before. And I am actually going to make sure that I have my video quality all the way up to full greens so that we see this at full resolution here. And just be aware that we aren't able to really see these numbers very well, depending on what your resolution is.
We are at a lower resolution, or recording right now so it is impacted. But again, we still have a color cast here, and we need to warm up his flesh tones. That fine. That's part of the next few stages. But for right now we have accurate blacks and accurate whites as far as our luma signal was concerned. We just want to do one last thing. You noticed that we do have a couple of pixels right below video black and maybe a couple of pixels right above video white. Let's go ahead and just clamp those. Go over to controls and click on Clip Low and Clip High. And you'll notice that they got brought right into the legal levels, and we're going to talk a lot more about getting things legal for broadcast. But this is just one thing that you can do to clip low and clip high, and we don't have to worry about it going forward.
All right, so we are all set up. We've got our blacks and whites, and in the next movie we will take a look at how to remove our color cast.
Now that we've set accurate blacks and whites, it's time to see if the image has any unwanted color casts. Now the key here is unwanted, as sometimes footage is intentionally shot with gels and filters to give it a color cast. So make sure to check that you're not removing something that should be there. But assuming that's not the case like in this image here, let's go over the process for measuring, and then neutralizing our image appropriately. Now the process of neutralizing an image involves removing color casts from the neutral colors in the image.
There are three neutral colors: black, white, and neutral gray. Because not many images have a perfect neutral gray, we're really only looking to neutralize the black and white values. Now we've already done all of the work in setting our blacks and whites, which is why it's important to do that first. So we're good to go. Let's switch our Y Waveform video scope to another one that will help us add a little bit better for color casts, the RGB Parade. And as you see here we have the same image three times in each of the three color channels.
So here's the red, green, and blue. And going from left to right across the image, you can see that here is our guy. And here he is again, and these are relatively equal, we're little bit higher in the greens. You can see everything falls apart in the blues. Everything is stretched out because we have a lot of color cast in our midtones for blues as well as our highlights. So when we're looking to neutralize our blacks and whites, we can expect to have a color cast in the highlights and shadows, which we already knew.
Let's take a quick moment to look at how to remove color cast before actually doing it. We have here a color wheel that we have in Media Composer. And if we start at 0 degrees, we have our red value--moving clockwise to magenta and then blue. And then 180 degrees is cyan--directly opposite of red--so it's its opposite. And then moving to green and then yellow. So if you look at colors that are opposite of one another on the color wheel that gives a clue about how we neutralize color casts.
So take a look at blue. So to neutralize an image that has a color cast of blue, you're going to add what's opposite. So we're going to add yellow. Let's go ahead and go back into Media Composer. And we're going to first attack the white, so we're going to deal with our highlight chroma wheel. We have our blue here, and we want to drag in the opposite direction of yellow. Before we do that, we're going to just take a measurement. We do so over here with the color match swatches, which we know from the tour in chapter 1, allows us to match color from shot to shot. It also allows us to measure our colors in the red, green, and blue channels.
I'm going to click and hold, and then without releasing the mouse I'm going to come up here into the image. You can see that it's updating in real time, telling me information about the red, green, and blue channels. And I can come up here and sample some whites up here in the ocean, or maybe over here on his shirt. And I'm going to go ahead and release. I've got a red value of 212, green of 224, blue of 255, and that is fairly indicative of what we have here in the RGB Parade.
Now before we resample, I am going to show you one thing to do in order to make this as accurate as possible. If I come over to Settings and then Correction, I'm going to turn on something called 3x3 Averaging, that's simply going to average a 3x3 or a 9-pixel square right around where I release my mouse. That prevents me from sampling any stray pixels that might have a different value than the ones around them. So I didn't do that the first time, but from now on we'll do that, say OK.
And then I'm going to make my adjustment. I'm going to take my highlight chroma wheel, and then I'm going to drag away from blue toward yellow and release. You can see that my RGB Parade updated. I now have a little bit of trace in the blue, but the clump got moved down, right in line with the red and green. Let's go ahead and resample and see where we're at. Well, we did bring down the blues, but we also brought down the reds. Everything is becoming a little bit more in line here.
We can keep tweaking. It is a meticulous process. It definitely gives you appreciation for the power of automatic color correction. But auto color correction does not always work, especially in extreme color balance or contrast problems. So you will need to do this meticulously every now and then. So we can keep going and keep tweaking. But for the purposes of this demonstration, we're going to move on to our shadows and get those more in line as well. So, we keep going, but for right now I am going to go ahead and take my shadow chroma wheel. And we'll first sample our black and see where that's at.
We're at 11, 16, and 34. Ideally you want these units to be around 10 units apart. Right now we're a little bit too far. We've got too much blue in our shadows. So we're going to take our shadow chroma wheel and again drag away from blue towards yellow. And not quite as much this time, because it's not quite as blue, but maybe just a little bit here. And we'll go ahead--you saw the RGB Parade update, and we'll go ahead and resample.
Again, I'm just clicking and holding. And then I'm going to release over the black here. And we're better, we're at Red 16, Green 20, Blue 23. That's pretty good. I mean, again, you want those probably within about 10 units of one another, and we are. And so, again, you can keep tweaking if you want to. Try to get them all as close to 16 as possible. But that's fairly good. So, let's go ahead and take a look at the before and after. It's a subtle difference, but if I click on this Enable button here on the highlights and this Enable button here on the shadows. This basically shows us where we were at before we did any of the color neutralization.
Again, look in the RGB Parade and also in the current monitor as I enable those again. So some subtle differences. But now we've neutralized our blacks and whites, and we're poised to do the next big phase, which is to adjust our hue and saturation. Again, we're going to be focusing primarily on the skin tones, so we're going to warm those up significantly, which we'll look at in the next movie.
Once you've set accurate black and white values for your image, you're ready to make adjustments to the hue and saturation. Now because our image is of a person, we'll be focusing primarily on the flesh tones. The human eye is very sensitive to accurate flesh tones, so make sure to spend some time with this to get it just right. All right, so we've got our RGB Parade. I did a tiny bit more tweaking since the last movie to get these a little bit more accurate. So we've got our blacks and whites where they should be as far as luma is concerned. We've also neutralized them and we're going to move from the RGB Parade to the Vectorscope.
Now the Vectorscope measures chroma only, so it measures no luma at all. And it measures it in the same way that we measure our chroma wheel color. So if we start here, this is red, magenta, blue, cyan, green, and yellow. And again if we're at full quality, those are hard to read, so I'll temporarily move to Best Performance so that we can actually read those. So the angle around the Vectorscope indicates hue, or our color, and measuring out from the center indicates our saturation values.
So a completely desaturated image would have no values on the Vectorscope. The trace would be absent. It'd be a little green dot in the middle. And right now we have the saturation extending to about a third of the way out from the center, so we definitely have some saturation. But where it really counts, in our flesh tones, it's really pretty dingy. So we're going to make some improvements there. One thing you should be aware of is that there is an imaginary line that extends right here in between yellow and red, and it's called the Flesh Tone Line.
And regardless of race, it's where the values of chroma should align for basically any human face. So we want to make sure that the hues align right along this imaginary line right here. So we're going to be focusing primarily in the midtones, because our flesh tones are in the midtones. And first of all, we want to increase the red and yellow here. We want to warm it up, so it's really dark and dingy. We're going to go ahead and just drag up and to the left. And watch how this affects it right in the image as well as in our Vectorscope.
And you don't want to go too much because take a look at how that affects the rest of the background. So in the water, it's a little bit too red. But you want to kind of just ride that flesh tone line up to make it just a little warmer. And this is where you can also head back and add some more luma adjustments as well. If I wanted to just brighten the gamma up just a tiny bit, I can come in and add just a little bit of brightness there.
And I'm going to actually move back to my highest quality. We lose our definition as far as where we're able to see our hues. But we know right here that we're really interested between red and yellow, and I'm going to continue to just warm that up just slightly. And then I'm going to ahead over to Controls, because I want to also increase the saturation. So again, our saturation control. It's only available over here. We really don't have much in the way of controlling saturation on the Hue Offsets tab, except if I was to drag it way out, this would of course saturate it quite a bit--but only in that color channel. It's really not a good tool to use for general saturation across the image.
Okay, so I'm going to head back over to controls and then bump my saturation up a little bit here. You can see the values increase in the Vectorscope as well. If I want to make fine adjustments, I hold down Shift and I can make very fine adjustments, like so. Let's go ahead and take a look at the before and after here. If I wanted to see the entire before and after, I again can click on my Dual Split. That's where we came from and that's what we've got right now.
It's looking pretty good. I think we might be a little too saturated still, so go back a little bit to the left. And we're looking pretty good as far as our flesh tones are concerned. I think what I would do next is actually increase the contrast just a little bit to make it pop just a little bit more. This is where the color correction process becomes organic. Once you complete all three stages, you can head back to previous steps to continue to improve the image.
So in the next movie we'll go through all three stages on one shot to do this in practice.
In this movie I'd like to go through all three stages of the color correction process from start to finish so that you can see how it all fits together in correcting one shot. Okay, so we start by setting our blacks and whites. I'm going to bring up the Y Waveform. And you can see here that we have some overblown whites and our blacks are way too high. So let's start off by setting our blacks. We'll go ahead and make sure that the darkest values rest near 0% or 16. I'll go ahead and Shift+Drag to make fine adjustment here, and rest right along here.
And the reason we're doing this is because we do have black values here, and we want to make sure that they are represented correctly here on the Y Waveform. We're going to go ahead and bring up our gain as well. It was too high. Now it got brought down. Again, like I said, this is kind of a dance. You're going to go back and forth until you have stretched the video signal and you have achieved a good tonal range and good contrast.
The next thing we want to go ahead and make some decisions about our gamma. And we can either brighten the image up-- this is more of a subjective choice--or darken it. Again, this is a bright sunny day, so we'll probably want to brighten that up just a bit here. And again, I'm going to go ahead and just drive these down just a little bit below 16, because we can always clip those. So that makes it pop just a little bit more if you crunch your blacks and whites ever so slightly. So we're going to head on over under Controls and set our clip values at 16 and 235.
You can see that everything was clamped. And just a little bit more. All right, so that looks good. We have a good tonal range. Let's take a look at our before and after. This is before, and this is after. And if we want to actually see the difference in the video signal, we're going to have to disable. That's where we came from, and here is where we have arrived. All right, looks good. Now let's head on over into our RGB Parade and take a look at our color cast. We do not have our channels aligned. Again, we have a blue color cast, so we're going to have to measure that and fix that.
Let's go ahead and measure our whites first. So go ahead and click and drag and release. And we're not too bad, 223, 208, 229. Let's go ahead and sample our blacks to see where they're at. So we definitely have some inconsistencies in the blacks. Let's go ahead and drag toward red. So we need to add some red into that.
Okay you saw this shift. This now is right in line there. I think this is going to be pretty good. Go ahead and resample. Do a side-by-side comparison here. 25, 14, 13. Again, ideally we want it at 16, 16, 16. This is fairly good. Again, you want it within about 10, and we're just about there. So I'm going to call that good for neutralizing or neutral colors, our blacks and whites. Let's go ahead and move to the Vectorscope. And you can see that we have values in between yellow and red and also in between blue and cyan. That makes sense because those are basically the colors that we see here.
We do have people in the shots, so we do have some flesh tones that we want to make sure that we get accurate. So we're going to warm this up just slightly. Let's go ahead and take our midtone chroma wheel, and I'm going to just drag it around and see what it does, like drag of course near green everything kind of gets a little bit too green. So I'm going to pop right in there. I think that's looking really nice. So I think as far as my chroma is concerned. This looks really good.
I'm going to pop back over to Controls and then just bump up the saturation just a bit here. And you can see that reflected in the Vectorscope. Let's go ahead and look at a before and after. Here is before. Here's after. I'm going to head back in and just crunch my blacks and whites just a little bit to make it pop just a little bit more. And ideally I would be looking at the Y Waveform when I did that. Looking good! All right, so that's basically taking the entire process from start to finish by setting our white and blacks, by neutralizing our whites and blacks, and then by taking a look at our hue and saturation values.
And by and large we just warmed those up and then increased our saturation just a little bit. And I think this is looking really nice.
In the last chapter we went through all of the ways to correct the luma and chroma of individual shots using the tools in the HSL group. In this chapter we are going to take a look at how to use the controls within the Curves group to help you achieve similar results. Now as you remember, HSL controls let you work in the YUV color space where luma and chroma are affected separately. In Curves, you work in the RGB color space, where luma and chroma are affected together. So any changes you make in your image's brightness can also affect your chroma and vice-versa.
I'm going to head on into Curves. I am going to go ahead and click on the Curves tab. And as you see here there are four main controls: a Red curve, Green, Blue, and a Master curve, which is basically our luma curve. And before we get started, I want to talk a little bit about how the various colors make up the luma signal. The green channel makes up about 59% of luma, the red channel makes up about 30%, and the blue channel makes up about 11%. Now this means that if you make adjustments within the green curve, it's going to affect the luma or brightness of your clip a lot more than if you adjust the blue curve, so keep that in mind.
Okay, so what's the Curves group all about? Well, when you use Curves to perform color correction, you can often apply pretty complex adjustments using just a few control points on the Curve controls. This is nice, especially after we learned all of the various controls, sliders, wheels, and switches in the HSL group. It also offers you greater control and flexibility. Some people make broad adjustments in HSL and then make finer adjustment in curves. Others prefer to work in only one group or another.
Let's take a look at some basic mechanics of curves. In each of the curves we have two control points at the very bottom and very top. And it's a linear curve, which means that it's going from the blackest values to the lightest values in a linear fashion. Which means it goes from the blackest values to the lightest values representing the entire tonal range. You add control points by simply clicking on the curve, and if you drag up and to the left, you're going to brighten the image.
If you drag down and to the right, you're darkening the image. To delete a control point, you just select it and press Delete. In addition to adding control points and manipulating them manually, you can also input values down here in the boxes below the curve. So, for example, I'm going to go ahead and delete this one, but I am going to select this control point down here. And you'll notice that I am at 0. Well, we know that 0 is in the super black region, so I'm going to actually just change this to 16.
And you can see that I now have a black point at 16, which means that I can't go below video black. I can do the same up here. Right here it's at 255 in the super white region. I am just going to move that to 235, and you can see here that we've clipped our values at video black and video white. So we not only have the ability to manipulate, but we also can input values in a very specific manner. If we want to measure RGB information, we can use the eyedropper just like we did before.
But when we do it this time, again I'm going to Click and Hold and measure my white. But notice what happens in the curves. We have crosshairs at the values where this is sampled. So I have red 180, green 187, and blue 207. And they're represented right here. And we will use that to our advantage a little bit later in the course. If I'd like to disable the adjustments I've made in a curve, I can go ahead and click on the Enable button.
And if I'd like to reset the curve entirely, I Option+Click, or Alt+Click on a PC, and the curve is reset. Let's go over some basic adjustments that we'll make on a frequent basis. If I want to reduce my Gain, I drag my white point down. You can see that it's being affected here in the Current monitor. Let's display the Y Waveform so you can see this in action on the video scope as well. If I want to increase my Gain, I drag to the left.
This has the potential of overdriving the whites, as you can see, so if I'm going to brighten up an image, it's often nice to just go ahead and type in 235 here, so that everything rests along the upper limits appropriately. If I want to increase my setup, I drag my black point up. If I want to decrease my setup, I drag it to the right. Again, I have the ability to go below video black, so I can always clip that off, like so.
If I want to increase my contrast, I just drag my white and my black point near one another. If I want to decrease contrast, I do the opposite. If I want to adjust only my shadows, my highlights or my midtones, I am just going to add control points around the area that I want to adjust. And if you remember in HSL, I really only had gain, gamma, and setup. This is from above 0 to 25%, this is from about 25 to 75, and this is from about 75 to 100.
Those are fixed values, but in Curves I can set that however I want. So if I would like to generally brighten an image, but then decrease the values in the shadows, I can do that really intricately, and I can keep going and really get it exactly how I want it. Now this is not really what I'm going for. I am just demoing this, so I am just going to go ahead and delete those two points. But as you can see, you have tremendous control because you can set up to 16 control points in one graph.
Now the cool thing is this that you can do the same exact things in each of these graphs. So if I wanted to reduce my blue gain, I can do that so it's basically taking the blues down in the highlights. If I wanted to decrease my blue in the gamma, you can do it like so. And you can obviously really go, you know, pretty significant. You can produce really extreme adjustments, but most of the time you are just tweaking it. And same thing here, if I wanted to reduce my green gain. This is just bringing down the greens in my highlights. If I wanted to raise the green in the shadows. And you can see what happens here in the midtones and you can really control it by adding more control points.
So we haven't really corrected this image yet, we're just kind of going through the mechanics of adding control points and adjusting these curves. In the next movie we will go through a typical curves workflow to correct the luma and chroma of our image.
Now that we've been introduced to the tools and the Curves group, let's put it to use. We'll follow the same basic workflow that we followed before. First we'll adjust the luma, and then we'll adjust the chroma, by fixing any color cast in the image. Throughout the process, we'll be monitoring and measuring our adjustments with several of the video scopes. I have the Y Waveform video scope loaded now, and we have no adjustments made so far. So what am I going to do is map my blacks to video black and my whites to video whites, which we'll do here in the Master curve.
So I'm going to go ahead and just click on my black point here, and just move it over to the right until everything rests along about 16. And we're a little bit far. We are a little bit under. That's fine because of what I'm going to do next. I'm going to go ahead and just click in here and type in 16, and now everything is legal. Let's do the same thing for our whites. I'm going to go ahead and just increase those until they're slightly above and let's bring them into legal limits by just typing in 235. Okay, looks good.
Now, let's go ahead and take a look at our gamma. We can choose any part of the curve that we want to adjust our gamma. If we wanted to adjust upper gamma, we can do so by just clicking up here. Middle gamma, lower, and what I'd actually like to do is place it about right there. We can of course come back. This is a very organic process, and we can come back if we need to, to fix that. And I like that so far for my contrast range.
Now let's move to the RGB Parade. And we have our blues that are slightly higher in the highlights. So I'm just going to drag my gain of my blues down. And you can see the adjustment made both in the image as well as in the RGB Parade. And let's move our Reds up. So to do that, I drag to the left. And it's looking pretty good. He's looking much less blue, and let's go ahead and measure.
So let's go ahead and measure our whites. 232, 224, 217, that's really good for just eyeballing it. And let's measure our blacks to make sure they're okay. 36, 32, 31, they're all still just a little high, but they are very close to one another. There's no color cast. So what this is telling me is that my blacks are free from a color cast. They are a little light. I want to bring them a little bit closer to 16. So I'll come back later and add a little bit more contrast.
All right, let's move over to the Vectorscope, and we're pretty good on our flesh tones here. If I wanted to warm them up slightly, I could come in and just drag red up just a tiny bit and maybe blue down just a tiny bit, because when you're warming up flesh tones you want to add red and you want to add yellow. Let's do it before and after, just for the heck of it. Let's go ahead and do Dual Split.
That's before and after, looking pretty good. Let's add some saturation. Again, we have the Saturation slider right here. It's the same saturation slider that we had over here, but we don't have to do those two steps. We can stay right in the curves and just add some saturation right on in. You can see it reflected both in the image and in the Vectorscope. And I said before I'd like to add just a little more contrast to my image. So I'm going to take my black point and drag it over just a little bit further to the right, like so. And I need to make sure that we are right at 16.
There we are. 18, 16, 16, just about perfect. So that was a good move, and I'm just going to go through and look at all three of them again. That looks good, that looks good, and that looks good. I think the image looks great, especially from where we came from. We did lose detail in the highlights because it was shot with too much gain. You can't get that back really. But that considered, everything else looks really good. As you can see, making adjustments in Curves is pretty fast and pretty powerful, once you get the hang of working with your control points.
Remember, you can have up to 16 control points in each graph. So you can really perform some intricate corrections, fine tuning until you get the image exactly how you want it.
We've just gone through all the manual ways of color correcting your footage in both HSL and Curves. Well, as with most things, it's best to teach you the hard way before teaching you the easy way. Not only so you can appreciate the process, but also so you can learn. By watching how Media Composer corrects footage automatically, you can get a good idea of how to do the same things manually. Also, you should be aware that Auto Correction doesn't always work. It really only works when your correction needs are not too substantial. So it probably wouldn't work, for example, if you have significant color balance problems or extreme light conditions.
And at the very least, if it does work, you'll most likely need to perform manual tweaks to get it just right. In this movie we'll explore the HSL automatic controls, and in the next movie we'll take a look at the Curves automatic controls. If you've watched the previous movies on performing manual corrections in HSL, you know that we set the blacks and whites first, and then we eliminated the color cast. Now you follow the same workflow in auto correcting. Let's take a look. Okay, so we're familiar with this shot by now. And what we're going to do is just populate the left monitor with the Y Waveform and the right monitor with the RGB Parade, because we're going to look at both luma corrections as well as Color Balance corrections.
All right, so we're going to come down to this row of buttons right here. And if you look at this one, this is Auto-Contrast. It's going to set the white and black values simultaneously. To the left is Auto Black, and to the right is Auto White. Now you don't use those too often on their own because this one does both in one. So I'm going to go ahead and just press Auto Contrast. Make sure to take a look in the Current monitor as well as in the Y Waveform. And you can see that our tonal range opens significantly.
We could still stand to probably tweak the blacks just a little bit more. But when the trace is kind of clumped in the middle of there, Media Composer doesn't always map the whites and blacks to video white and video black. Okay, so that's our Auto Contrast. If we come over to RGB Parade, we know that we still have a color balance issue. That's when we come down to this button right here, which is Auto Balance. When I click on the Auto Balance button, Media Composer is going to analyze the shot and balance the footage.
Go ahead and click. Make sure to look in the Current monitor as well of the RGB Parade. And you can see that evened out fairly well, and it looks a lot better. Let's take a look at the before and after. That's before and that's after. Looks a lot better. But it still needs some adjustments. As we've mentioned before, we're probably going to need to tweak the blacks and introduce a little bit more contrast. And notice how it didn't change the gamma whatsoever. It changed my gain, and it changed my setup, but my midtones are unaffected.
So, anytime I perform an automatic correction, I'm going to need to attack my midtones manually. Let see how the HSL automatic corrections work on a different shot. I'm going to press this button here to go to my next uncorrected shot. And we're familiar with this one as well. Notice again that we have been traced clumped in the middle. So it might not correct for full auto black and auto white. But let's take a look and see how it does. Go ahead and press Auto Contrast. And it brought my blacks down significantly, but really didn't do much to my whites.
Let's see how it does with Auto Balance. Again, take a look in the RGB Parade, where we have lots of color cast--especially in highlights. And press Auto Balance. And again, that looks a lot better. But I'm going to need to do some tweaking. Again, to open up the contrast, we're going our whites up. And again, we'll probably need to tweak our gamma. I'm not going to perform those manual corrections right now because I want to show you one more thing. Let's head back to this image here. And I'm going to just split this in half and I am going to deselect my audio tracks and just split my video track in half.
When I leave this correction here, I'm going to remove it from the last part. So I'm going to do some comparing. All right, so this is the Auto Contrast, Auto Balance application. Let's move over to this uncorrected half, and we're going to perform the Auto Contrast again just in the same way. But this time instead of letting Media Composer choose where to perform the auto balance, I'm going to tell it where to. And the way I do that is through these eyedropper buttons right here underneath my chroma wheels.
As you can see, these are Remove Color Cast buttons from the shadows, midtones, and highlights. We're primarily going to be working in highlights and shadows so that we can neutralize our whites and our blacks. Let's go ahead and take the blacks first. I'm going to go ahead and click on this, and this becomes a button. I'm not depressing the eyedropper this time. I am just going to click exactly where I would like to remove the color cast. So this is what I would like to be purely black.
I'm going to go ahead and click right here. Watch in the RGB Parade as well as in the Current monitor. You can see that our blacks were neutralized. And let's do the same thing in the highlights. Go ahead and grab his shorts right here. All right, and let's go ahead and compare that method to the previous one. So this is kind of the assisted automatic where we told it where to neutralize, and this is the purely automatic where it analyzed it. So there is a difference.
This one's a little warmer. This one's a little cooler. But regardless, either method is going to need further tweaks. We're going to need to open up the contrast range just a little bit more. We might want to change some values in our chroma wheels so that our balance works a little bit better, and we're also going to need to change our gamma. So just to show you there, we'll go ahead and manually tweak just a little bit to get this looking just right. And the sunny day so we will kind of up the gamma a little bit.
And I'd like to warm it up just a little bit more. So as you can see, the shot looks really nice. We have adjusted the midtones to warm those up and we've also introduced some gamma adjustments and we've opened up our contrast. Now if you remember, when I perform to be Remove Color Cast on this shot, I was able to remove the color cast from the highlights and from the shadows, but there were no Midtone adjustments. That's why this ended up being bluer. And when Media Composer did it, it actually did adjust for midtones.
But the truth of the matter is, is that if you're going to adjust for midtones, you're going to need to find an area in the frame that should be color neutral. So that is neutral gray. We could probably sample these rocks or the shadow, but by and large you'll just want to remove the color cast from your highlights and shadows and then tweak your midtones manually. So if I came back and did some manual tweaks here, just warm that up a bit. And again, perform some manual tweaks to get this looking just right.
And I can come in and clip my low and high. And here's a manually tweaked automatic correction. These are pretty close. Not exactly the same, but you get different results with different ways of performing automatic corrections. Automatic Color Correction can give you a really nice head start for correcting your footage. But as you can see, in almost all cases you'll need to implement manual correction strategies to tweak it further, and in some cases automatic correction doesn't work well at all. So be smart about when you use these tools and how to combine them with Manual Correction tools.
We've already seen all the Automatic Color Correction tools that are available in the HSL group. There are quite a few available in the Curves group as well. Go ahead and switch over to Curves. The main difference about using the Curves automatic controls is that you should generally perform them in the opposite order as HSL. That is instead of performing the Auto Contrast and then the Auto Balance, you just do it in the opposite order, first applying Auto Balance and then Auto Contrast. This is because the order of processing in Curves is reversed.
It processes the Red, Green, and Blue channels before it processes the Master curve. Let's take a look. All right! We have this shot loaded again, and we are looking at the Y Waveform and the RGB Parade. If yours doesn't show this, just make sure to load it from the list. And we're going to come down here to these controls right at the bottom right of the window. This is my Auto Contrast, and this is my Auto Balance. So, first I'm going to click on the Auto Balance controls and make sure to look in the RGB Parade.
Everything was balanced appropriately across the red, green, and blue channels. You'll notice here in the red, green, and blue channels that control points were placed appropriately. And now we're going to go ahead and perform our Auto Contrast and make sure to look in the Master curve here, as well as in the Y Waveform in the current monitor when I do this. Okay, so this adjustment has adjusted my contrast. We've brought our blacks down and our whites up. And things are looking pretty good. Let's go ahead and take a look at the before and after.
Here's before and after. Again, notice that it's made no gamma adjustments across the board. We're only affecting high and low. But if I wanted to tweak gamma, I'd have to come in, apply a control point, and then manually tweak it or input values down here. I'm just going to delete this control point because I do want to make a comparison. So this is the automatic color correction for curves using the Auto Balance. Now, remember the eyedropper from HSL? There is also an eyedropper, which is our Remove Color Cast button for Curves.
So, I'm going to, again, split this in half, and we'll do a comparison here. Let's go ahead and make an Add Edit, and then we'll come over here and remove the effect, and we'll do it all over again. So, this time I am going to perform the Auto Contrast first because we need to set our whites and blacks appropriately. So we'll just do the Auto Contrast. And now I'm going to come in with my Remove Color Cast button and click all of the places in the image where I would like to remove the color cast.
So, this is the one instance in which I perform it in the reverse order that I would normally. So, I'm going to Auto Contrast and then I'm going to balance my shot by removing the color cast. Again, this is an assisted automatic as I'm telling Media Composer where to look. So, again we'll come in, and I'm going to click on his black pants. Take a look as the adjustments are made. Okay, so we're now in line along the shadows. We have a control point added along the R, G, and B curves. Let's do it again. There's no need to pick different eyedropper, you just pick the same eyedropper every time. And now I'm going to come in and get his pants.
Again, take a look at where the control points are added on the red, green, and blue curves. And you can actually keep going and the curves will continue to form. So, if I wanted to get his hat here-- and you can see that points continue to be added--and it's really, really neutralizing my image beautifully. And we'll pick just one more area of white. And you can see that once the curves just stop really forming, you're probably done.
So, it added a control point, but there really wasn't much that was done on that last adjustment. So, this is about as far as I'm going to get. Let's go ahead and take a look at the total automatic, which is the first one here. And then this is the assisted automatic where we told Media Composer where to look. So, you can see there is a difference. And I'm not saying one is right and one is wrong, but there're different approaches. Either way, you probably will need to go in and just adjust your contrast and your gamma a little bit more.
So, if I were to take this from start to finish, this was a wonderful start, but I'm going to need to adjust my contrast just a little bit more. So, I'm just going to drag this over to the right just a little bit. And I want to make sure that I'm clipping right at 16, and we'll go ahead and just brighten this up just a little bit. So I'll place a control point on my Master curve and get my gamma up just a little bit. So I think this is looking really nice. Again, here's the before and after. Really nice. As you can see, you can achieve similar results with the Curves automatic color correction controls, but it's not identical.
So be sure to experiment with each set of controls to see how Now, you may grow to prefer one group or another, or you may like to use them in various situations with different footage. In the next movie we'll put it all together by learning how to configure the each works in different situations. color correction effect, where we can perform all of the steps and combine it into one single effect.
As we've learned in the last couple of movies, we know that with HSL Automatic corrections we should apply Auto Contrast and then Auto Balance, and with Curves automatic corrections we should apply Auto Balance and then Auto Contrast. Well, rather than needing to remember this--and in order to make the process easier--Media Composer offers the ability to combine these steps into one. As you can see here, I'm back in Source Record mode, and I'm going to go to my Effects tab, and in the Image category you'll see an effect called Color Correction.
Well, if I head on over to this shots and drag it over to apply, you'll notice that it doesn't do a thing. Well, that's because you need to configure it first. Let's go ahead and remove this, and let's take the steps to configure the Color Correction effect, so that this will work. If I come into Settings and go to Correction and double-click on it to open it, there's an AutoCorrect tab. And I'm going to press that. And here we have an announcement, "When applying Color Correction from the Effect palette, perform the following operations:" and right now it says Nothing.
Well, that's why you didn't see anything happen. But if I pull down this list, take a look at all of the choices that I get. I can have various options in HSL as well as Curves. So, what's first in HSL? Auto Contrast and then Auto Balance. We're not going to worry with Auto Black or Auto White because Auto Contrast does that in one. Okay, so you want to stick with one group. Don't want to cross over to the next. So, we're good to go here, HSL Auto Contrast then HSL Auto Balance.
I'm going to say OK. Then I'm going to come back to the Image category > Color Correction effect and apply it, and there you go. We had an Auto Contrast and Auto Balance applied, and we're not even in Color Correction mode. We can, of course, come back into Color Correction mode and tweak this further, because you can see in HSL that both luma adjustments as well as my chroma wheel adjustments were made, and I can go in and tweak it further if I want, like so.
Up the saturation. Whatever I want to do. So, it's just a starting place, but I was able to do it very, very quickly without even entering Color Correction mode. All right! Let's go ahead and remove that and head back into Source Record mode. And this time I want to configure the correction for curves. So, I'm going to change this to Curves Auto Balance and then Curves Auto Contrast. Okay, and we'll go ahead into the Color Correction effect, apply it.
And here is the Curves adjustment. So, if I head into Color Correction mode and I click on the Curves tab, you'll see that it added the control points where necessary, and I can come and tweak it further, however I like. Okay? All right! So, I'm going to go ahead and remove that because we want to talk about how to do this very, very quickly. I'm going to go back into Source Record mode, and let's pick one. I kind of liked the way that curves looked better than HSL, so I'm going to leave it on Curves, and I want to basically apply the correction to every shot in the sequence at once.
Well, there's a couple of ways that I can do this. I can drag a big lasso around all of my video clips, so that they're all selected, and then I can come over to my Color Correction effect and then just double-click. And it takes just a little bit, but now we have all of the corrections applied onto every shot, and the show already looks a lot better. It definitely does still have some issues. But not too bad. We can go in and tweak those as necessary.
Another way to do that--let me just undo. Command+Z. Be aware that if you park your playhead on the timeline and then use your Select Right or Select Left buttons, you're able to select the clip that you're on as well at all clips to the right or to the left of that. So, I can just click on Select Right. I have everything selected. And one thing that it did before was it applied a correction where I didn't want it. So, I'm just going to deselect that. I'm going to head on over into Segment mode here and select everything here.
I am going to Shift+Click this off, and this one as well, so that I just have my clip selected and not the filler space above it. So, that's going to help us out a lot. I'm going to double-click on Color Correction. It takes just a little bit, and again, everything was applied. So, again, it does have some issues. I'm looking primarily at this. We'll need to definitely fix that, and you know here. But otherwise it's a really good starting place to go back and tweak it manually to perfection.
Just one thing to keep in mind though, it's the middle frame that's analyzed during automatic correction. So, keep that in mind if a shot changes significantly from start to finish. Otherwise, if it doesn't, you're good to go, and you can continue to manually tweak the shots.
Okay. We've now spent a fair amount of time making sure you have the tools to correct the luma and chroma in your individual shots. You have a lot of resources--both manual and automatic--to get your shots looking their best. Now it's time to make sure the shots work well together. That is, we're establishing shot-to-shot consistency. Let's go ahead and take a look through our sequence and see what's working and what still needs to be adjusted so that everything matches appropriately. Now we've corrected just a couple of shots, and all the rest need to be corrected.
So here is our corrected shot here, and this one here. They're looking good, and I think they look good next to one another. I'm going to just go ahead and scrub through this, and then I'm going to pull up the first frame of every shot in the sequence, so that we can take a look at all of the different lighting schemes and colors to see all of the best ways to match them together. All right! So these look good, but as I start from the beginning, we've corrected this one, this looks nice, and this one still looks flat. And keep going. We've got a lot of different types of lighting, have definitely some color saturation, contrast issues. And these really don't look like they were even taken on the same day or same time of day, for the most part. All right! Let's take a look at everything all together.
I'm going to open up my Source Media bin and open up Biking selects. I'm going to open up in the same tab as this. Just release. And let's go ahead and expand this. I'm going to Frame view, and I'm going to increase the size of my thumbnails by pressing Command+L repeatedly, and let's go ahead and fill the window here. Okay, and now we're kind of able to look at everything together.
So you can see that we have some very blue shots and some very desaturated pale shots, and we also have basic contrast problems across the board. All right! But there are shots that look like one another. We have these that's basically in the same family, we have these that are basically in the same family, these have similar lighting conditions, and all the shots of the bikers kind of look alike.
So we have some places to start, but we're going to need to make those adjustments across the board. And now we know basically what we need to do, let's go ahead and use some of the tools in Color Correction workspace both manual and automatic to make it happen.
In this movie we're going to take a look at all of the various ways that Media Composer allows you to save your color correction templates to apply to other shots in the timeline. One of the most important things you can do to achieve shot-to-shot correction is to save your color correction templates and then apply them to other shots. Then you can tweak the corrections from there, but at least you start with a baseline grade that can be useful for matching shots with similar lighting conditions. All right, so this is a shot that I like, and I would like to save this out as a template.
I'm going to first create a new bin, and I'm just going to call it CC Templates. And I'll go ahead and just drag right into this bin right here, so we have both of them open. And the way that you save a color correction template is you just come over to this icon right here, and then drag, and it's automatically going to name it the name of the shot. So I'm just going to rename this Bikers resting, because there are several shots in the master footage of this basic scene, and I think they could all use the same basic color correction adjustments.
So we've got that one saved out. In this sequence, however, there is really not too many more that would benefit from that. So I'm going to come right down to this shot right here, and this does have a Color Correction effect applied to it. I'm going to save this one out because there are several surrounding it that might benefit from the adjustments made in this shot. So again, I'm going to click and drag. I'm just going to click inside the name, and say Bikers riding. And here, I've saved it permanently.
But what I'm also going to do is save it temporarily in one of my buckets. So this is a permanent template, and then the buckets last as long as this editing session is open. So I'm just going to Option+Click or Alt+Click on a PC, on C1 here, and now this becomes a button. So if I come over to here, I have two options: I can either click and drag this effect on top of here, or I can just click on this button, and the adjustments were applied.
Now, like I said, we're going to need to tweak this further. As you can see, we need to open up the Contrast range just a little bit more. But I think that the basic color balance is looking good, and I can do may be something similar here. This is a little bluer, so it might not turn out quite as well. Go ahead and just click on this. And you can see that all of the basic adjustments were applied, and I can come in and tweak it further if necessary. So you have those two basic options: you can click and drag, or you can use your buckets, or you can actually use some organizational tools to help you out a little bit further.
I'm going to come to my Source Media folder, and click and drag my Biking selects. Open. And let's go ahead and take a look at these again. Now here are all of the shots, and as we can see, some of them have similar lighting conditions. I'm going to go back to Text View here, and let's say I have similar lighting conditions among multiple shots. For example, these three, Bikers ride toward 1, 2, and 3 all might need the same adjustment. Instead of going to look and see which one is named what, I have some tools that I can use by applying colors here in this bin, and then applying the same colors in the timeline.
It can really help you out. So I'm just going to click on Bikers ride toward 1 and Shift+Click to select all three, and then right now I have a Color column available. If you don't, you can just simply go to the Fast menu, and then choose Columns, and make sure that Color is selected. In fact, just to simplify this, I'm going to go ahead and just select Color. And then also, I'll select Frame so that I can see each of these shots, and what they look like. Okay.
So I have these three very similar shots. I'm going to assign them a color. I'll go ahead and give them pink, okay? And you see that nothing really happened in the timeline yet. But if I come down to the Timeline Fast menu, and I choose Clip Color and I choose Source, it's going to highlight all of the clips that match my source clips in the same color. So right now I only have one, but if I have a few others that match those lighting conditions, I can do that, and you can see that it's applied there.
And let's see if I have anything similar. I have these two. We'll go ahead and give them a different color. I have these two of the reflection. I'll go ahead and give those a third color. So, if it's too hard to see what's what in the timeline because you can barely read it--especially when you have a longer sequence--feel free to use the tool of color to be able to come in. And I'm going to go ahead and go back into Source/Record mode real quick, so that we can apply these.
I'm going to just make sure I'm in Segment mode here, and I can click, and then I can Shift+Click multiple segments. And if I've saved those out right here, I can just double-click on Bikers riding, and they're both applied. So I'm going to continue going through the sequence, applying the templates to similar shots. And in this way we can perform a few representative corrections and then use those to quickly apply them to many shots at once.
Then you can just tweak each shot, so that you only have to apply small adjustments rather than starting over at the drawing board each time.
All editors should strive to use the keyboard shortcuts as much as possible to achieve fast and efficient workflows. The same goes for Color Correction shortcuts, especially when dealing with shot-to-shot correction. However, none of them are mapped to the keyboard by default; you have to do that. Let's take a look at how. All right! I am going to take my Project window and widen it out a little bit, because I am going to open up my Settings tab. I am just going to click on any setting and press K to jump to the keyboard. And I am going to rename this edit because this is my edit keyboard, the one I use during all of my primary editing.
I am going to duplicate this by pressing Command+D, or Ctrl+D on a PC. I am going to go ahead and just rename this Color Correction. You can create a different keyboard for all phases of editing. And then to just move from one to another, you just click the check mark up here. And we are going to use our Color Correction keyboard. I am just going to reset my workspace like so. And I am going to go ahead and open that keyboard, double-click. And from the tools menu, I want to choose Command palette or press Command+3, or Ctrl+3 on a PC.
All right. We are looking for the Color Correction tab, and you can see that there's a whole lot of controls that we can map to our keyboard. We are mostly interested in Save Correction here, which allows us to save a correction to a bin. I am going to go ahead and just move this to the S key, S for save. And while we are at it, I am going to go ahead and just map Auto Contrast and Auto Balance to the keyboard as well. Auto Contrast I will put on C, and Auto Balance I will put on B.
Then if you look over here, this represents the 8 Color Correction buckets that are available during every Color Correction session. So I am just going to map C1, 2, and 3 to 1, 2, and 3. When you are mapping buttons, you always want to make sure that 'Button to Button' reassignment is on. All right. So I am going to close my Command palette and close my Keyboard, move to the Color Correction workspace, and let's head over to this shot right here. All right! So I am going to just very quickly perform a basic adjustment.
To save my template, I am going to create a bin, New Bin, and call it CC Templates. I am going to go ahead and just grab the tab of the bin, drop it in here. So it's ready for me to save. And I'm simply going to press C for contrast, press B for balance. And this is an interesting correction. Let's take a look at a before and after. Looks like it definitely corrected for the blue, but perhaps a little bit too much. So let's just do just a little bit of tweaking. And I am going to go ahead and increase my contrast just a bit and then bump up my gamma.
And as soon as I am happy with that, I am going to go ahead and just save that to my Bin. Okay, that's good. Press S to save it to my bin, and I am going to go ahead and just click inside here and call this Bikers sunny. Okay. So very quickly we were able to adjust the contrast and then the balance and then save our template out after making just a few tweaks. All right. All of that is great for keyboard adjustments.
I can then apply this template right onto a similar clip, and we will probably need to do again a few tweaks here. A little bit red and the mid tones, there we go! Now I am going to go ahead and do a Bucket Adjustment. Again, a Bucket Adjustment is only available during this editing session. So I'm going to come back to this shot here that we just corrected, and if I Option+Click, or Alt+Click on a PC, on C1, I am going to apply it to my Color Correction Bucket.
Now I have also mapped C1 to the 1 key on my keyboard. So if I come to another shot and then press 1, all the adjustments that I made on this shot are applied. I know it's not that hard to come over here and just click on this Bucket button. However, when you combine all of the keyboard shortcuts together, it really, really becomes very efficient. And then this is applied and I can tweak it as I need to for this shot.
So if you are organized and you save all of your color correction templates-- either in bins or in buckets--you have the ability to very quickly save templates via the keyboard and also use the templates in your buckets via keyboard shortcuts as well.
If you need to match colors between shots, there are several tools available to you. One is called Color Match, which replaces one color with another, and the other is called Natural Match, which does something similar but it replaces the hue without affecting the saturation or luma. Let's take a look at both of these. Let's first take a look at Color Match. When performing a Color Match, one color is replaced with another and all other color values adjust proportionally. And all tools in the Color Correction workspace are likewise adjusted to reflect the change.
Now there are two Color Match controls, one within the Curves group, and another within HSL. Now, in HSL you are slightly limited. In the Controls group you can really only match across Hue, Saturation, or Luminance. And in Hue Offsets group, you can match between highlights, midtones, and shadows. You have a lot more control in Curves, and so that's what we are going to work with in this movie. But if you're not getting the results that you want, you might want to head on over to the HSL group and try those Color Match controls. Okay.
So we have an image that we like, and we would like to match another image to it. We have several shots in a row that have the same basic lighting scheme, so let's use this as our model. I want to set this as the reference frame. So I'm going to come over to this pulldown menu and choose Reference. And now whatever shot I correct in my middle monitor, I am reflecting against this reference frame. All right! Let's choose this one first. So, you can see here that we have our blue color cast again, and the sky doesn't really match and we really don't believe that these two shots belong together.
So the first thing that we want to do is actually adjust the luma value, so we want to set our black and white points before we try to match color. I am going to come to this pulldown menu and choose Y Waveform, so that we can monitor this. Let's just give it an Auto Contrast and brighten it up slightly here. And we still don't really match as far as color is concerned but our lighting looks a little bit more believable. So this is where Color Match comes into play. I am going to come over to this Color Match swatch, and we used this before when we wanted to measure our color values in our image.
Well, we are going to do the same thing here. I am going to press and hold and then release over the area that I'd like to sample. So I have the blue sky in the middle monitor. I want to do the same thing here, press and hold and release in our reference monitor. And we are saying, can you please match this color to this color? And we want it to happen across the Red, Green, and Blue curves. Notice that you can also do it in the master curve, but for our purposes here, we are going to stick in the Red, Green, and Blue curves, and I'm going to choose Match Color.
And as you can see, my sky matches really, really well right now. Now again, this matched this color and adjusted all other colors proportionally. So I am going to need to do a little bit of tweaking, but at least I know that the control points here, here, and here reflect this change, so I don't really want to mess with those. But I am going to warm up my midtones a little bit here. And again, here And I am just doing just a tiny bit of tweaking across the board to try to bring these more in line. All right.
Now I'm starting to really believe that these two shots come after one another now. I am just going to show you the before again. Here is before, not at all, and here is after, and we have got matching sky. We have got matching high bright sun. I think we are in good shape. All right. So Color Match worked really well here. I want to go over to another sequence where I want to talk a little bit about Natural Match. So I am going to load up the Natural Match sequence here, and we actually have two of the same guy.
Now this has been corrected, we've seen this many times throughout the course. And this is still uncorrected. So let's go ahead and load the Color Correction toolset. And if this is not already your reference frame, you just want to park on it, and then choose Reference from this pulldown menu, and this is now going to be your reference frame for your Color Correction. Then I come over here, and I'm ready to match it up. Okay. So when we talk about flesh tones, we want to probably use Natural Match instead of just a straight color match, because we want the hue to change but not the saturation or luminance.
Now first, you want to map your blacks and whites, because you need accurate black and white values for your color values to work. So we are going to do an Auto Contrast, and we're going to brighten it up a little bit because, again, the Auto Contrast does not affect gamma. Okay. We are still really blue, so let's try a little bit of matching here. I am going to switch from RGB to RGB Natural Match. You can see here that I have check marks next to both of those.
So I'm going to want to sample kind of the skin right here, to the skin right here, so high sunlight skin to high sunlight skin. I am going to go ahead and sample, like so. And here as well. Let's go ahead and match our color. So the flesh tone looks a lot better, it's warmed up, and it looks a lot like this one. Again, I am going to need to do a little bit of tweaking to make sure everything else looks good and it looks like I need to just open up my contrast just a bit.
And that looks good, brightening up my midtones a little bit, and I'm just going to brighten up the blues in my highlights just a bit. We are looking good there too. So again, here's the before, and here's the after. And most important, our flesh tone matches really well, and I think we are good to go. Now, if I want to save this flesh tone out and use it again--so if this guy was appearing several times in my show--I might want to just save this, because I don't know if I'd be able to sample it this perfectly again.
I'm simply going to Option+Click, or Alt+Click on a PC, in this swatch and drag it to my bin. Now, you'll notice that it automatically named it RosyBrown with the values here. And I am just going to rename this Flesh Tone Man 1. So instead of a Sequence icon, I have a little Swatch icon. And then if I have my Color column displayed, it shows the actual color of that swatch.
So if I ever wanted to repopulate that-- let me go ahead and just take these away by double-clicking. And I will go ahead and just bring this down to black. I'm just going to populate this by clicking and dragging, and I've repopulated it inside of my Color Swatch box. So that's how you can save out skin tones, and you can use it again to do another color match on a different shot on a different day.
So this worked really well, I think. And then in our other sequence, we had a really successful result between these two shots. Now, that's not always the case. Let's take a look down here, and let's try to match this shot to this shot, okay? So we want to kind of make sure that this doesn't look as duskish. I want to match it more towards the daylight scene here.
I am going to go ahead and enter Color Correction mode. Let's go ahead and correct the shot that we want to be the model. So we will go ahead and Auto Balance, Auto Contrast, a couple of more changes here. Okay. All right! So let's make this the reference--go ahead and reference that. Head back to here. And let me just say that one of the biggest rules of color matching is that they look like they could be from the same scene.
So we already have a hint that this might not work too well. But we are going to go ahead and try it anyway, just so I can show you what the results would be on a situation where it's just not going to work. So I'm going to sample my sky here, and then sample my sky here. Let's first try it without natural match, and then we'll try it with. Let's try to get that looking like it could be from the same place. So we will go ahead and match. So we now have the sky that matches really well.
Everything else in the scene just has this really awful color cast. Let's see if we can warm it up a little bit, remove some blue from the highlights. Again, as long as we leave these control points alone, we should maintain the integrity of the sky, which still is matching. But let's see, we will go ahead and try to brighten it up. As you can see, we are really not achieving continuity here.
This is just not going to match to this shot. I am going to just undo the last few moves right before we performed the match. And let's try it again with Natural Match. Sometimes this works a little bit better, because you're just replacing hue, and not the entire saturation and luminance scales. So go ahead, Sample and Sample and Match. Okay, and so it didn't give us that drastic of a blue color cast, but again, the lighting schemes are probably going to be just a little too far apart to really work.
So probably no matter what I do, we are probably still not going to be able to make these look like they are coming from the same place. So, I certainly challenge you to try Color Matching and Natural Matching between shots yourself. We have a lot of shots to choose from. As you can see, we also do have a lot of different lighting schemes. So there are some challenges, some of them work really well here, and then some of them don't work quite as well. But give it a try. It's going to take some practice.
You won't get it perfect the first time, but it's definitely fun to play with.
Sometimes you want to apply a color correction to just a portion of your image rather than the entire frame. Fortunately, the Paint Effect has a wide array of tools you can use to do just that. Okay, so here I have a shot that really doesn't work well at all. I mean, I've tried very hard to get rid of that yellow but I cannot do it. I can add as much blue to the highlights as possible, and it's just not going to get rid of that yellow. This was the original shot.
So you can see that the yellow existed automatically in the highlights. And I like the water. I just need to isolate that yellow and get it out of there. So, what I'm going to do is use the Paint Effect to draw a shape around this area, and it does kind of span the entire middle part of it as we pan, and we want to just get rid of that yellow right there. So, I'm going to go to the Effect palette, Image > Paint Effect, and I already have an effect on there, so I need to auto-nest the effect.
I'm going to Option+Drag, or Alt+Drag on a PC, the Paint Effect on top of my color correction. And nothing happens right away because we need to open the Effect Editor and we need to draw a shape. Now it needs to basically encompass this entire region right here. I could do a Freeform or a Polygon, but I'm just going to draw a Rectangle to keep it simple. Okay. Well, that doesn't look very good. So we will change what's inside of this square.
Right now it is set to Solid. We want to change what's in the mode. As you see here, if we kind of look through this list, most of the options within the mode are color correction options. So, if you start here, we have Colorize, Hue, Saturation, Luminance, and we have Darken and Lighten options, and then going down here we have lots of options available all dealing with color correction. So, what I'm going to do first is just try colorizing it. And by default, the color is red. That's not what we want.
We want to make sure to choose the color that would match the water, and I can come in here and try to choose it from the color wheel. And you can see that it colorizes that box blue. But a better option is for me to open this up and then click on my magnifying glass and get the color of the water and match it perfectly, like so. Let's go ahead and just expand this a little bit. Okay.
And it sort of has a harsh edge right now. If I click outside of here, you can kind of still see the rectangle shape. So, I am going to come back into my Effect Editor and I'm going to select the shape and we're going to introduce some feathering. Feathering is going to blend the shape into the background. So, I'm going to just grab my Horizontal and Vertical sliders here, and then the Bias is going to determine whether or not the feathering is going to apply from the outside of the shape or towards the inside of the shape.
So, I need it to basically feather to the outside of the shape so that it blends in with the background. And let's just scrub through here and see how it's working, it still have just a tiny bit of yellow down here. I think I might extend it down just slightly. If you ever run out of room, you can press the Reduce button right here and just make your shape a little bit bigger than the frame. And I'll zoom back in and we'll see how this is working. Okay, not bad.
So, here I've applied a shape mask in order to camouflage the problematic area that I had right here. I could then apply other Color Correction effects on top of both of these and it would affect both the raw video and the paint shape. But this is a really nice way to really isolate your corrections. Now keep in mind, we affected everything inside of our shape uniformly. So everything inside of here got the same colorized treatment. There may be other things you want to try.
In the mode menu, there are lots and lots of color correction options, including Color Match--which we have talked about earlier in this course--and we also have things where we can adjust the brightness, contrast, hue, and saturation of everything inside of our shape. So, definitely experiment with all of the choices within mode. In the next movie we'll take a look at how to not only affect what's inside of your shape but also isolate colors via secondary color correction with the Magic Mask.
In the last movie we learned color correcting with the Paint Effect, which is great. But if you want to isolate a specific color within your Paint Effect and change it, you'll need to use the Magic Mask option. Let's take a look. All right! So we have our problematic yellow foamy waves here, and we want to change that. And in the last movie we actually just applied a shape over the whole thing and made it the color of the rest of the ocean. And this time we want to leave everything as it is but just change the yellow to white.
So let's go ahead and get our Paint Effect. And I'm going to Option+Drag, or Alt+Drag on a PC, the Paint Effect on top of the Color Correction effect. All right. And then I'm going to go ahead and open up my Effect Editor. And we want to draw the shape over the area that is affected. So I'm just going to zoom out just a little bit so I can get the entire space. And again, I could choose any of these paint drawing shapes that I want, but again, the Rectangle tool is basic and easy, so I'll just draw that one. And it draws the big red solid shape, and that's not what we want.
We want to change Solid to Outline. And what this is going to do is it's going to show through to the raw video, which is going to allow me to select that yellow that I want to cover up. So down here under Magic Mask, I want to sample that yellow color by clicking my cursor right inside this box, which is now there's dark red. And then I'm going to drag over here. And watch these sliders underneath the Magic Mask update as I go through this.
So I'm going to release over the yellow, and you can see that now the yellow is the color that's affected. All right! So now we're going to come over to Color, and we're going to tell it what color we want it to be. So let's go ahead and just open this up. And I just want it to be a nice foamy white, and not super white. We don't want it to be illegal. So I'm just going to drag it down slightly to about right here and say OK. And nothing happens yet because I'm still on Outline mode. All right! I can really choose any of the color correction options, but for our purposes I'm just going to try Solid. So I'm just going to change this to Solid.
You can see right away that any color that was yellow is now white. So I'm going to drag this down just a little bit here, and we have some parameters that we need to change. I'm going to twirl open both mode and Feathering, because we want to drag our Horizontal and Vertical sliders under Feathering, which is going to allow us to blend into the background. And then I'm going to drag my Bias later to left, and this is going to allow me to blend into the background quite nicely.
Notice that everything else was left alone. So I still have my shadow underneath my wave. My birds are still this darker color rather than turning blue, like it did before in the last movie, but now I'm only affecting that yellow area. I think I'm going to just drop the Opacity just a little bit so that it's a little bit more natural. And let's go ahead and just scroll through and see how we like it. All right, I think it looks really nice. We've maintained all of the nice detail and texture around these waves.
We didn't override them with one big solid colorized shape, but we've maintained it because we've isolated the color. We performed secondary color correction. So anytime you want to perform secondary color correction in Media Composer, you have to apply the Paint Effect, draw a shape over the area that you would like to affect, and then choose the appropriate mode option. Which again, if you wanted to do any other type of color correction option in here, you certainly could, and then it's just going to affect the color that you chose.
Now if you're looking for extremely powerful secondary color correction, you might want to checkout Media Composer's big brother Avid Symphony.
Occasionally you might need to animate color correction effects over time, especially if a shot changes lighting conditions midway through. Or you may just want to change the correction stylistically over time. Fortunately you can keyframe your color correction effects to do this. All right! So we have applied our shot-to-shot correction, everything is looking really nice, and there is no real changes in lighting conditions midway through the shots. But what I would like to do is just shift from a black and white image to a color image as I am fading up on this bike wheel as the rack focus is happening.
So there's no keyframing within the Color Correction tool, but this is an effect. So if I just click on the Effect mode button, I can open up the Color Correction Effect. And as you see here, I have HSL and Curves. Now this is an HSL adjustment, so I'm just going to twirl down HSL, and here's my Controls tab and my Hue Offsets tab. So I know that Saturation is contained within Controls, but I really have access to all of these sliders, and I can keyframe any of them.
I'm going to enable my Keyframe Graphs by clicking on this button in the lower-right. And I already have my Saturation Graph open. It's probably going to appear closed to you when you open it. So I'm just going to twirl down the Saturation Graph, and I have here the entire duration of this clip. And right now I have 100% saturation across the entire thing. So I'm going to need to add some keyframes. At the very beginning I want to add a keyframe. You can do so by right-clicking and choosing Add Keyframe.
You can also press the Apostrophe key on the keyboard, or you have an Add Keyframe button down here. And I'd like it to basically be full- color as soon as the Rack Focus is over, so I'm going to add another keyframe. Okay, and right here I'm going to just drag this down, and so now I'm starting off black and whites and gradually fading up. Right now this is a linear interpolation. If I want this to animate in a different way, I can right-click and I have some available options here: Shelf, Linear, Spline, and Bezier.
Spline is going to give me a very nice gradual ease-in, ease-out. Bezier is going to give me these direction handles that I can drag to define the exact curve. So if I want it to be black and white for a little bit longer and then swoop up to color, I can do that. Go ahead and play through. (video playing) So I think I like that pretty well. We're staying on black and white and then we're just very quickly saturating the image. I think that looks nice.
And if you ever want to change anything else, all you're going to do is make sure that you have the correct tab open, Controls > Hue Offsets, and then you just make sure to twirl down the graph and display the appropriate parameter. So if I wanted this to go from one color to another, this is an entire spectrum of hues, so as I do this it's going through the entire spectrum. Not exactly what I want, but just to demonstrate that you have a lot of control over every single parameter.
You see that these are slightly offset, so your keyframes do not have to be in line with one another. Every single parameter can get its own set of keyframes. I'm going to go ahead and undo that because that's something that's really not desirable for me, but I do like how it fades up and gradually saturates. So that's all there is to it. Animating parameters in Color Correction Effects works the same exact way that you animate parameters in other effects as well.
Now that we've got each shot corrected and all of the shots looking good next to one another, we have the option of giving the entire show a specific look and feel. Now let's just take a look at this sequence and make sure that we like all of the corrections--and that everything looks like it's coming from the same world. And I definitely think that it does. I think we're ready to apply the style if we need to. And I'm going to go ahead and load the sequence called All, and I've basically just edited our three treatments one after another.
So here's our graphic, gritty, supersaturated, high contrast sequence. And then after that I've got our Bleach Bypass and then our Sepia with film grain. And so you can see all of the various treatments that we are going to explore in this chapter. Now, the way I've done this is to add a video track above all of the rest of the video tracks. So I've added a third V3, and then you just apply the correction on that track and it's applied to all of the clips underneath them.
Occasionally you may need to keyframe your stylized Color Correction effect, or you can do Add Edits. So for example, right here I needed to kind of tone down the graphic quality while this guy was on screen, so I just added edits around him. So, by and large, just adding one track above will do the trick, but sometimes you are going to need to fine-tune it just a little bit. So if we go back to the Style sequence, I'm going to add a video track. You can do so by right-clicking and choosing New Video Track, or you can just press Command+Y, or Ctrl+Y on a PC, and I'm going to select V3. And I also wanted to monitor V3, so that we can see our adjustment.
I'm going to open up the Color Correction Workspace, and I'm just going to apply a basic adjustment across the board so that you can see that everything underneath is effected. And we'll just take down the saturation. And as you can see, the entire sequence is now in black and white. So as you can see, it's fairly easy to apply one correction across the board to give your show a whole new look. Just remember, you may need to do some tweaking with Add Edits or keyframing to make sure the adjustments affect each shot accurately.
All right, now let's get started.
Before applying our treatments, we'll explore a very important effect that can often help you at this stage called the Color Effect. The Color Effect gives you some similar controls in terms of basic hue, saturation, and luma adjustments, but not as much control in terms of isolating just the shadows, midtones, or highlights of your image. It does offer additional controls for adjusting things like posterization, solarization, and other stylistic considerations. Let's take a look. Okay, so in the Effect palette, in the Image category, is your Color Effect.
You can just drag it on to V3 or whatever the top video track is in your sequence. And then you just open up the Effect Editor. This is not performed in the color correction tool set. I'll go ahead and just zoom back in so we can see it at full frame. And as you see here, the parameters are really, really similar to those in color correction. So you have a Brightness control and you have Contrast. This is exactly like in color correction.
You have the ability to Invert your luma so it basically looks like a film negative. Your luma range, you can set your white and black point, so if you change this you could really kind of crunch your blacks and whites and get a very high contrast image. Your gamma allows you to, of course, just affect the midtones, which you can't see as well right now because I have my crunched blacks and whites. But we are just basically looking at some midtone adjustments here. And Luma Clip. This is where you should pretty much leave this. 235 and 16 will clip at video, black and video white.
You can of course adjust this, and it's going to basically do the exact opposite and make a very low contrast image, because all of the pixels below black and above white are going to be clipped at white and black accordingly. I am going to actually just going to type in 235 to reset this. So all of that should be pretty familiar. Coming down here, you have the ability to change the hue. So it's basically a spectrum going all the way around. You can kind of add a cast to your image if you would like to.
Here is your saturation, desaturation, or supersaturate it. This is where you get into some controls that are beyond the scope of the Color Correction tool. Posterization is going to clump together like colors to produce that graphic look, so we'll definitely be using that when we create our gritty graphic treatment. Solarization, on the other hand, is basically going to produce that film negative look. So if you go all the way to the right on solarization, it's just like clicking on Invert, but you can do any value in between as well.
For Color Gain, this is often used for just giving something a tint. Because all of the parameters are processed from top-down, once I, for example, desaturate my image, I can then introduce, for example, a tint by just writing my Color Gain. You can kind of see my cyan and my red, my magenta and my green, and my yellow and my blue.
So this is, you know, a nice way to produce an effect across the board. This looks like it's going to be way too contrasty, but this shot pretty cool. But this is just another option that you might, perhaps, want to use. The Color Effect can give you a lot of the same controls and also some additional ones as well.
There are dozens of different treatments you can apply to your sequence, and you should definitely experiment with as many as possible. In the next three movies we'll explore some of these in detail, starting with a gritty, high contrast, high saturation graphic look and feel. So we've added a video track above all the rest of our video tracks, and for this graphic look and feel we're going to use the color effect which we learned about in the last movie. So I'm going to go to the Effect palette's Image category, Color Effect, then drop it on. And I'm going to go ahead and we park on this shot of the three guys and open up to the Effect Editor.
All right. So, we have all of these parameters available to us. First thing, let's go ahead and attack the contrast. We could increase the Contrast here, but I like to increase the Black Point and decrease the White Point, and I think it looks a little bit better and you have a little bit more control. And then let's go ahead and increase our saturation. And I'm going to just go across and see what it's looking like so far. Okay. All right. So just check in there and keep going.
This is where we're going to get our graphic quality. I'm going to increase the posterization quite a lot, and you can see those colors clumped together. Anything that is alike is just going to clump together, so you can get these bands of color going across. And this is where things should start looking a lot more graphic, and they definitely are. I think what I'd like to do is also just warm it up a little bit. So we're going to check out the Color Gain and increase the Red and decrease the Blue, going more towards the yellow. And it's looking good.
I think it might be a little too saturated, so I'm going to back-off on that a little bit. Okay. And the one shot I really don't like at all is this one right here of the guy. So I'll probably need to offset that, either keyframe it or put Add Edits around it, so that we can see a little bit more of his flesh tones there.
But otherwise, it's looking pretty much how I expected. Let's go ahead and add those edits and make sure that he looks as good as possible. All right, so I'm going to Command+Click, or Ctrl+Click on a PC, right here, near this edit point. It's going to snap to this edit point. And because I just have V3 selected, I'm just going to add an edit onto V3. And now I'm going to Command+Option+Click, or Ctrl+Alt+Click on a PC, to snap to the tail of this edit.
So again, we have V3 selected here. We're going to add our edit. And so now we have one effect applied over here. That looks fine. That looks good. We need to correct that. Let's see if we need to offset any others. Okay, like all of that just fine. And I think I'll keep everything else the same. So we'll go ahead and just affect this one by itself. And I think part of the problem is the saturation, so I'll bring that down. And I also want to adjust my black and white point slightly to open that up, just brightening him up a little bit, and then I'm going to back off on the posterization here as well.
Okay, let's see what that looks like. All right, that looks a lot better to me--a lot less severe. And then if we just go through--I'm just scrubbing through--we shouldn't really be able to tell much difference. I think it looks pretty good. All right! So, we have a treatment ready to show our client. If they like that graphic gritty kind of severe quality, I think we've got something for them.
In this movie we are going to re- create a Bleach Bypass treatment, which produces an interesting, cool, pale look by mimicking the procedure in a film processing where you either partially or completely skip the bleaching step. If you're having trouble thinking of where you've seen this before, think "Saving Private Ryan." All right, so we've added a video track. And let's go into our Color Correction Workspace and we are going to do this in Curves. So if I go ahead and click on the Timeline to make sure that we don't have any corrections--which we don't--I'm going to go ahead and perform an Auto Balance and then an Auto Contrast. And the reason I am doing this is so that it will automatically give me the 16 and 235 clipping, which I need to do anyway.
So I can do that, but I'm probably not going to leave these positions where they are. I will go ahead and move them back over and then make sure that this is at 235. So we have the clipping at the top and the bottom of the Red, Green, and Blue curves, as well as the Master curve, so we should be ready to go as far as correcting this image. I'm going to, again, pause on this shot here. And the first thing I am going to do is just bring down my saturation.
I am going to use my Master Saturation, I am going to bring it down to somewhere around 30%. All right. And then I'm going to add a control point on my upper gamma and then just kind of bow this curve out just a little bit, and then I am going to bow it in near my shadows. Okay so, it's kind of like an S shape but very slight. All right, let's just take a look at how we are looking. So we definitely desaturated and we have little bit more contrast here.
I am going to now add blue and green into the upper gamma and lower gamma. Okay, so I'm going to just add a control point and bow it out just slightly, and then I am going to add this one in the middle and bow this out slightly here, because a bleach bypass treatment usually does have a weight toward green and blue. And let's just give it a quick test.
Okay, we are getting there. Let's go ahead and take down my reds. Again, when I go away from red, I am going towards cyan. All right. And then just a little bit more, I am going to go ahead and just take my general Gain down a tad. And I am just making very slight tweaks.
All right, we are definitely very, very close. I think we might still be a little bit too bright. I am going to leave my Master Curve alone and just take my Master Gain down. I think that will help out a lot. Bleach Bypass is often a little bit on the dimmer side. It's a dreary kind of look. So, kind of bring that down to around 80%. And I think we've just about got it. I am going to add slightly less blue and slightly more green in the upper gamma.
All right, I think we are going to call that done. So it's not quite Saving Private Ryan, but it looks pretty good and we have another treatment to show our client.
Sepia is a look you've seen many times before. It adds a certain antiquated quality to your footage, as it emulates the quality of faded old photographs or film. So for our Sepia treatment, let's make sure to make it looks a little faded, and we will add in some film grain to round out the look and feel. Okay, so let's go ahead and park on one of our images here. Enter the Color Correction workspace. And I'm going to just click on V3 so that it resets everything.
We haven't added an adjustment yet, and we're going to go ahead and do an Auto Balance and Auto Contrast, again, just so we have the upper and lower limits available to us, so we don't overdrive anything. So the first thing we're going to do for Sepia is to take down our saturation. The cool thing about Curves is that saturation is processed before our Curves, so we can add color back into our image. Before we do that, let's go ahead and soften out the contrast a little bit.
Before, we were creating more contrast by making S-Curves that were shaped like this, and now we'll just do the opposite. We'll drag up on the blacks and down on the whites, and this is just basically giving us less contrast-- so a more faded look. And everything is still just totally black and white, which is fine. And now we're going to go ahead and add some control points in the Blue curve and in the Red curve, because Sepia is going to be kind of a rusty red-yellow color.
So those are where we're going to focus our adjustments. I'm going to go ahead and just add midpoints right in the middle of the gamma on both Red and Yellow, and then we're just going to just make some slight tweaks as far as the upper and lower gamma are concerned. It's looking pretty good. Do the same thing for Red. I'm going to just ride back and forth on the Green curve to see if we can tweak this just a little bit.
I'm going to just have it just slightly towards green. Okay. I think we are close. I might just give it just a tiny bit more contrast actually, and a lot more. So I think this is a pretty good Sepia tone. And now all we want to do is add some film grain to add to that old-fashioned feel. So we're going to go back to Source/Record and my Effect palette, and it's in the Illusion FX > Film Grain.
Because we already have an effect, we're going to have to Option+Drag or Alt+Drag on a PC, our Film Grain onto our color correction. I'm going to open up my Effect Editor, and there are two parameters in here that we want to adjust: Level and Size. Let me just drag my Size up to about 3, my Level in the mid 30s, and let's just see what this looks like. I'm going to go ahead and just play. (video playing) All right! I think that works pretty well.
We have a really nice sepia tone, it's faded, we have the Film Grain, and it looks nice and old-fashioned. They're not really wearing old- fashioned outfits, but sometimes you've gotta mix content and style. Now we have another treatment that we can present to our client.
We've talked about legal luma and chroma values throughout the course, but now we're really going to hammer down on it. Because if your show is going to broadcast, you absolutely must pay attention to keeping everything within legal limits, or it will simply be rejected. Fortunately, there are some very nice tools within Media Composer's Color Correction tool that will help you monitor and fix illegal values. In this movie we're going to take a look at the Safe Color Warnings. The Safe Color Warning feature allows you to monitor your show and display warnings on screen whenever your composite, luma, or RGB signals are out of range.
Let's go ahead and go into Color Correction. And if you look up here, we have the Safe Colors Settings. If I click on this, we can see that we have High and Low limits for our Composite signal, Luminance, and RGB Gamut. Our composite signal is luma plus chroma, and the standard Low is -20 and the standard High is 110 and the unit is IRE. We want it to warn us if we exceed these limits.
For luma, we have 7.5 and 100. This is equal to 16 and 235. But we're now in the IRE units. And again, we want it to warn us if we exceed those limits. The RGB Gamut, we can go from 0 to 255 in the 8 Bit digital scale. We can also display IRE. You can see the equivalent values here. I am going to just keep it in 8 Bit. Everything here is standard. So we're going to warn here as well.
If anything exceeds any of these values, Media Composer will tell us. I'll say OK. Notice that our Safe Color Warning button turns orange. Okay, so let's head on into the first shot here. And as you see, we have an indicator in the upper-left corner that's going to tell us if anything is out of limits. The first bar refers to our composite signal, or luma plus chroma. On the first panel, you'll see that there is a yellow bar in the upper portion. This means that we're exceeding our composite signal on the upper limits.
The second panel indicates our luma signal. And we have a white bar on the lower portion, which means we are exceeding in the lower limits or close to black. If you take a look at the third, fourth, and fifth panels, we're right in the middle, which indicates that we're just fine on our RGB Gamut. So what this is telling me is that I have some colors that are too hot in the upper portion, and I have my luma values that are too dark in the lower portion.
If I switch to the Y Waveform, you'll see that I have some white pixels at the very, very bottom of my Y Waveform. So I'm going to need to take care of those. And then if I switch to the YC Waveform which we haven't actually looked at yet, this indicates the luma plus chroma, which is equal to the composite signal. So I have a couple of values right here and right here that exceed the upper limits of that composite signal.
So you have a little bit more leeway as far as your composite signal is concerned. But we are still exceeding it on the upper end. So we'll need to fix that as well. Let's just go ahead to the next shot and see what else we've got. So we're fine on the composite signal on this one as indicated by the YC Waveform. We've got nothing that goes above or below our upper and lower limits. But on the Y Waveform you can see that we are exceeding at the very top and at the very bottom. We've just got just a couple of pixels.
We've got just a couple of stray pixels that we'll need to take care of, and so on and so forth. I'm simply going to scrub through so you can see how each of the shots are registering. It looks like we have illegal values on all of them so far. Oh, except for this one. This one is fine, and this one is fine. Everything else looks like--this one is okay. And you can see that about half the shots have some issues. All right! So our Safe Color Warnings just basically let us know that the issues are there, but it doesn't do anything.
These are only warnings. They don't actually fix the problem. We'll take a look at how to fix the problem in the rest of this chapter.
When you've got illegal luma or chroma values, you'll need to correct them, either manually, by adjusting some controls within one of the color correction groups, or automatically, by applying the Safe Color Limiter Effect. Let's first take a look at all of the ways we can manually correct our luma and chroma. Okay, so we have been introduced to the Safe Color warnings indicator, which turn on right here. And in the upper left corner of our image, we have a five panel display showing us if our composite signal--which is our luma plus chroma-- our luma signal--which is the dark and light values of our image--and also the red, green, and blue gamut.
So we can see if we have any values out of limits on either the low or the high end. Anything in the middle is fine. You can see in this image that we have some problems in both the low and the high end of our luma signal. So when we are dealing with luma, we want to look at the Y Waveform, because this is our luma signal. You can kind of guess where that might be. We're peaking a little bit in the upper and lower regions right here. And we already know a couple of ways in order to get it in between 16 and 235.
For example, we have the Gain slider and the Setup slider that controls our light and dark values. We also have our Clip Low and Clip High. This is meant to keep all of our luma values in between 16 and 235, which is the upper and lower limits. However, notice that we have two groups. And if you have adjustment in both the HSL and Curves group, just realize that everything in HSL is processed first and then everything in Curves is processed.
So occasionally you might have limited your signal in HSL, but you might be overdriving in Curves. So my recommendation is for you to perform most of your limiting effects in Curves. So because we have a luma problem, let's go to our Master Curve. I want to go ahead and click on my black point, and we want to make sure that this is at 16. And let's go ahead and click on our white points. And I'll just make sure this is at 235.
You saw that my low end indicator went away. We still have a little bit of a problem on the high end. You occasionally might need to go just a tiny bit below 235. I am just going to tap the down arrow, and you can see that just one tap did it. We are now at 234, and we don't have any problems at this shot anymore. Our safe warning indicator went away. If we wanted to perform those adjustments across the board, you can do so by enabling a top video track and applying that same effect to V3 here.
So if I wanted to limit across the board, I am just going to, again, type in 16 on my black point and 235 on my white point. So let's just look through here. It looks like we are fairly free from any luma problems. Again, we do have a couple. It looks like on the low end, which means that we have some level of illegal black left.
I am going to go ahead and just park on that one frame where we have a little bit of problem. And I am going to go ahead and just raise this just a little bit 'til that goes away--and usually, it just takes one. And let's just make sure that we don't have any more luma problems throughout. Okay, I think we are good. It doesn't look like we have any more problems with our luma signal. And we had a bunch before, so that did it. So our luma is good.
We still have a couple of problems in our composite signal. For example, this shot here. You can see that everything is good, except we are high on our composite signal. We can enable the YC waveform. It's luma plus chroma, and this is basically the luma signal in green with the chroma signal overlaid on top of it. So you can do a little bit of diagnostics here to see where spatially we are peaking high and low. You can kind of see that we have a few areas here.
And we have some pretty bold yellows and reds. So what I am going to actually look at instead is the Vectorscope, and see if we have any trace on the outer edge of our circle. And it doesn't really look like we do, but it only takes one or two pixels. So what I am going to do, because we have most of the trace in the red and yellow area, is I'm going to just take my red upper limits here and then just start dragging it down and see if this goes away. And you see that it did.
We brought it down to 236 here, and I think we might be good. We have a couple of more spots where we have some issues, so I might just drag it down just a little bit more. You can also just click in this box and then tap the down arrow, and this value will go down. And I think we are pretty good right there. We have some other values here. Again, we're going to look at the Vectorscope. Looks like we have some really outlying green area, and that's probably his glasses. So let's do the same thing here.
This time I am just going to type in 235, and you can see that that Safe Color warning went away. Let's just do the same thing for blue, just for good measure. All right, and let's see if we have any other warnings across the board. Okay. Right here, it looks like a very strong yellow. Again, I could come in and keep going as far as diagnosing where my issues are. And just so you know, I am doing it on one effect above all of my clips. I could also be doing it clip by clip.
It really depends on how you'd like to work. However, something that's a lot easier than manually diagnosing--going through all of the various scopes and figuring out where we can manually bring down these values--is using an automatic effect called the Safe Color Limiter. And we are going to examine that in the next movie.
It's good to know how to manually correct your luma and chroma values, in case you have a stray problem here or there. But when you've got many problems-- especially those that are difficult to diagnose--I definitely recommend that you use the Safe Color Limiter effect. Now the Safe Color Limiter effect is an effect that can limit the high and low values of the luma signal, the total composite signal, as well as the RGB color gamut. Now by default, the Safe Color Limiter effect uses the settings in the Safe Color settings. Now we saw those in the Color Correction tool, but you can also access them in the Settings tab and Safe Colors, and it should look familiar.
We have the composite signal low and high end, the luma signal, and the RGB Gamut. Now these might not look as familiar, because we haven't really been dealing with IRE, but they do have equivalent values in 8 bit. And that should definitely look familiar, 16 and 235. All right, so I'm going to just go into the Effect palette. And in the Image category, we have Safe Color Limiter. I am just going to apply that to V3. And the best part about that is we are completely done. It's gone through and it's limited all illegal values in my composite signal, my luma signal, and in my Red, Green, and Blue Gamut.
All right, so as we are going through here, everything looks good. Well, this doesn't look quite as good because it's not rendered. You can see that the Paint effect that we applied in a previous movie--which took care of those yellow waves--looks just fine when we are parked on it, but as we are skimming through, it's not quite there. Don't worry. We'll render it at the very end. But Safe Color Limiter effect doesn't need to be rendered, it's good to go. And let's just take a look at a couple of additional values inside of here that are pretty interesting. I am going to go ahead and open up the Effect Editor.
The really interesting part is up here, Source Monitor Analysis. And right now it's set to Highlight Out of Range Colors. Now I am going to play through this, and I want you to look for some really bright pixels. Yellow pixels indicates that the composite signal was out of limits. White pixels indicates that the luma signal was out of limits. And the red, green, and blue pixels indicates if the Red, Green, and Blue Color gamut was out of limits. I am just going to go ahead and play this, and you can take a look at what I mean.
Definitely got some composite out of limits right here. Definitely have some Red, Green, and Blue out of limits there and here and there. Just pixels that we wouldn't necessarily have known we had a problem with were, in fact, illegal. You know, if I looked at this, I have lots and lots of problems with my blues. Okay, this is blue. And if I go ahead and look inside my Color Correction Workspace, I have the YC Waveform populated.
If you don't, you can just pull it down from this menu here. We have the chroma overlaid on top of our luma signal. And it's definitely very, very high here, which indicates that we had some problems. And the Safe Color Limiter effect solves those problems immediately. I am going to head back to Source/Record and back into Effect mode, so we can continue to kind of analyze all of the problems that I've fixed. Again, we have some composite problems there. So we definitely had a lot of things that it went through and fixed for us.
And as you can see, it's very, very easy to apply, and it's very, very powerful, because you are able to now send this show to air without any issue. As you can see, adjusting your video signal to legal levels is an absolute must if your show is going to be broadcast. Now fortunately, Media Composer's Color Correction tool gives you both manual and automatic controls to quickly and efficiently bring everything within legal limits.