Professional colorist Gerry Holtz emphasizes the value of a light touch: “One of the biggest mistakes a lot of people make is color correcting too much and having to correct their own problems. There’s also a hue saturation curve control, so you can boost or cut specific hues, and color wheels that allow you to adjust highlights, shadows, and midtones separately.Īfter you’ve achieved a color balance that looks right, you can begin replicating that in other sequences. Use the Curves controls to make precise adjustments to luminance and individual color channels. In the Lumetri Color panel, you can find a variety of color correction tools. Use the Lumetri Color waveform scope and histograms to ensure that the values of your tones aren’t clipped or crushed.
Once skin and other midtones look natural, check to make sure your highlights and shadow details aren’t lost. This line marks the hue of blood under the skin, so whatever the subject’s ethnicity, their skin tone should sit close to that line. Draw a box around the face of your subject, and then check the vectorscope to see how closely the skin tone falls to the line separating magenta from yellow. To isolate the skin tone, go to Effect Controls and add a mask. One helpful way to gauge skin tone is to look at the Lumetri YUV vectorscope, which measures brightness (the Y value) against color (U and V values). Skin tone can be the most difficult shade to get right and the easiest to notice when it’s wrong, so pay close attention to the skin tones of your subjects. Under the Tone heading, you can use sliders to adjust Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, Blacks, and Saturation. Move the Tint slider left to shift the whites toward green and right to shift them toward magenta. Move the Temperature slider left to add blue to your whites and right to add orange. “If you want to color balance the image, you can use the Eyedropper to click the white card, and that will tell the computer, ‘This is white.’ The white balance will adjust, and that’s a good place to start.”Īnother way to adjust the white balance is to use the Temperature and Tint sliders and gauge the effect on the video clip. Because white is a component in all your other colors, this will help your whole picture look more realistic.ĭirector and editor Jonathon Pawlowski suggests holding a white card or paper in front of the camera before every shot. If your whites appear tinted blue or yellow, you can adjust them. White balance describes the temperature of the whites in your video.