Primary Stage
The Colorista II tools are organized into three stages of color correction. This page covers Primary, the first stage. Primary is the first stop to getting white balance, saturation and exposure correct, and includes a powerful HSL correction. The second stage is Secondary and the final stage is Master.
Keyboard shortcut: Press Cmd+1 on Mac [Ctl+1 on Win] to twirl open the Primary group, and twirl closed Secondary and Master.
Primary Exposure
Exposure stretches or compresses the Red, Green and Blue channels. Exposure is good for setting the overall brightness of the image. You can use the 3-Way Highlight control to similar effect, but you may already have used it to adjust white balance. Use Exposure when you want to add brightness compensation after adjusting the other correction controls. Read more here.
Keyboard shortcuts for Primary Exposure:
Primary Density
Density shifts up or down the value ranges for the Red, Green and Blue channels. This tool allows you to reset the color range that you are using. Primary Density is more for larger shifts while Secondary and Master Density are best used to fine tune areas. Read more here.
Used together, Primary Density and Primary Exposure are a good way to prepare your image for further correction with Primary 3-Way, Secondary stage, or Master Curves.
Highlight Recovery
The Highlight Recovery option intelligently rebuilds missing details in blown-out highlights. For example, fix the blown-out areas in a sky or an actor's face; or recover the highlights in flattened bright or highly saturated images. Highlight Recovery is an incredibly powerful feature that you will love once you discover its potential.
Value range is 0 to 100%. Default value is 0%, or fully turned off. Increasing the value brings back more detail.
The parameter works by reconstructing blown-out highlight detail based on surrounding areas. This feature is especially great for corporate and wedding videographers, who often don't have control of their lighting environment. No technology will bring back lost detail completely but with Highlight Recovery, you can often hide problems and save shots.
Primary 3-Way
The three color wheels adjust the Shadows, Midtones and Highlights in your image. These wheels are traditionally called Lift, Gamma and Gain. The 3-Way wheels operate in HSL space (Hue, Saturation, Luminance). Read more here.
In the Primary stage, this is generally your first stop in doing color correction, along with Exposure, Density and Auto Balance.
Auto Balance
Auto Balance is a color picker that allows you to remove a highlight color cast by clicking on a close-to-white area in your Preview Window. The parameter will then set a color that balances out the Red, Green and Blue components to make that white area neutral. If you choose to use this control, it should be the first one you set, even before adjusting the 3-Way settings. Auto Balance is a terrific first step to fixing a color issue in your footage.
Our Auto Balance works differently than other balance controls that you have used before. You don't click a button to let the software figure out the white color. Instead, you use an eyedropper tool to explicitly define what you think the white point should be in the image. The Auto Balance control then tries to correctly set the shadows and the highlights. The Auto Balance color chip reflects what it feels is the middle tone between the shadows and the highlights.
Another unique aspect of our Auto Balance is that it corrects for both the white point and the black point. Typically, a balance parameter only corrects for the white point.
Auto Balance only affects the shadows and highlights of your source footage. It does not adjust for the midtones. If you look at the changes that occur in the Primary stage's 3-Way wheels, only the Shadow and Highlight wheels will show a correction. The white point in the Highlight wheel and black point in the Shadow wheel move correspondingly. The Midtone wheel does not change.
Typically you will use the Auto Balance eyedropper tool to sample the white point. However, an alternate use is to click the color chip and choose your own color. This method sets that color to explicitly tint the image. Generally if you use this method, you are doing so to compensate for the perceived color tone. If the color is too hot and you want to cool it down, choose a blue color chip to turn the image more orange (its opposite on the color wheel).
Workflow Tip: Typically, the most accurate way to sample a white point is to click in the sclera, the white area of someone's eye. Teeth are always too yellowish to use as a good sample. If the sclera is too much in shadows, as in our example below, then sample from the whitest possible point of your image.
Colorista 1 Note: This control was previously named White Balance and corrected only for the white point.
Left to right, the original image and image after Auto Balance. Red X marks the sample area. You can see changes in the Auto Balance color chip, Shadow wheel and Highlight wheel.
Primary Saturation
The Saturation slider raises or lowers the colorfulness or intensity of color of your footage. Value range is –100 to +100%.
The default value of 0% does not affect the saturation of your image. Lower values drain color from the image, making it closer to grayscale. Higher values add color intensity and causes your image’s color to become more bold. Be careful when using this parameter as a high Saturation can make colors look too pure and artificial-looking.
Primary HSL
The HSL tool lets you grab the color you want to adjust, and move it toward the color you want it to become. HSL is spilt into two color wheels that together define Hue, Saturation and Lightness. Each wheel has eight different color channels, along with numeric entry option, that provide a very refined HSL adjustment. Read more here.
Primary Mix
The Mix slider is a refinement control that sets the interaction between the original image and the Primary correction stage. Value range is 0 to 100%. Default setting is 100%, which means the Primary correction is fully applied. Lower values make the Primary correction less visible. At 0%, the Primary correction is effectively turned off.
Mix gives you very fine control over how much a stage contributes to the overall correction. Let's say that you have added a lot of contrast with your Primary correction. Instead of having to turn down each of the controls in that stage, you can lower all of the controls at once by lowering the Mix.
There is a Mix control in each stage of correction. By controlling the transparency or strength of each stage, the user can back off the effect to provide for more subtle color correction. This provides for greater flexibility in combining and adjusting the three stages.
Primary Bypass checkbox
The Bypass switch similarly turns off all the controls in the Primary stage. Turned off by default (unchecked). By activating Primary Bypass, you are passing over the color correction of the Primary stage. This makes it easier to evaluate the Colorista results as you work.
Bypass also lets you solo a correction stage. For instance, if you bypass the Primary and Master stages, then you have effectively solo'ed the Secondary stage, meaning you are only viewing and using Secondary. Like the Mix control, the Bypass switch provides for greater flexibility in combining and adjusting the three stages.
Keyboard shortcut: Press Cmd+Option+3 on Mac [Ctl+Alt+3 on Win] to toggle on/off Primary Bypass.