Adjusting the hues of the video clip by warming the midtones and cooling the shadows. Dragging the shadows control up into the blues will give dark areas of the grapes a rich, vibrant shade. Dragging the midtones control up into the reds will warm up the green leaves, creating a feeling of a warm October afternoon. The idea here is to adjust the hue of the shot by dragging the controls up into the color you want to add. The example image is pretty evenly balanced, but in this case let’s see if we can make a more dramatic shot. This scope displays the red, green, and blue components of the image separately so that you can see how much of each is contained in the shadows, midtones, and highlights as you move across the graph. Now, use the Settings menu to select the Histogram, and set it to the RGB Parade. The large control on the left is the global control and the other three once again allow you to manipulate the shadows, midtones, and highlights individually. Select this pane, and you’ll see that it contains four controls over a rainbow of colors. You adjust the hues in the Color pane of the Color Board. The hues are the actual color values, as in red or yellow or blue. The last step is to adjust the hues in the clip. By the way, to make an image black and white, simply drag the global slider all the way down to remove all saturation, and therefore all color, from the image. In the example here, I’ve bumped up the saturation to make the grapes and leaves more colorful, being careful to keep the bright dots in the Vectorscope from touching the boxes around the perimeter. The Vectorscope below the Viewer shows saturation levels, which you can change in the Color Board’s Saturation pane.Īlthough you can adjust saturation in the shadows, midtones, and highlights separately, I often find that the global slider is all that I need to use. The setup for evaluating and adjusting saturation. The farther out from the center, the more saturated the pixels are. In the Video Scopes window, use the Settings menu to select the Vectorscope, which displays saturation information as dots for each image pixel inside a circular graph. Select the Saturation pane in the Color Board. Once you are happy with the exposure, a good next step is to evaluate the saturation, which refers to how rich the colors are. The highlights are already as bright as possible. Note that I’ve also raised the midtones slightly to brighten the shot. Creating darker shadows by dragging down the Shadows control.
Simply drag the controls up and down, using the Waveform as a guide, to create more contrast for the shot. The Color Board has a master slider on the left that lets you adjust the overall (global) exposure, and it also has three controls for adjusting the shadows (black circle), midtones (grey circle) and highlights (white circle) independently. As you can see by examining the Waveform and by looking at the image itself, our example shot doesn’t have many dark areas. The Waveform is the scope that tells you how bright and dark the pixels are as you move across the image from left to right, with 0 being darkest and 100 being brightest. In Final Cut Pro X, you adjust brightness values in the Exposure pane of the Color Board. However, the basic idea is that a good starting point is to work on the overall brightness or luminance of a shot first, and then adjust its color components, which consist of hue and saturation. To really understand color correction, you need some knowledge of color theory, which is beyond the scope of this article. The Waveform illustrates the brightness values of the image from left to right.
Setting up the Waveform scope to appear beneath the image.