Commercial Color Correction Plug-ins?

[Tom Ma]

Synthetica Aperture Color Finesse. Comes with AE CS5. Can do all this and more, and is intuitive.

[Michael Szalapski]

You can do this sort of color correction with Color Finesse, as mentioned. You can also do it using many other color correction controls. Here’s a great technique using Levels and some math to get it exactly right.

However, all this aside, if you would white balance your camera, you won’t have to worry about it in the first place. This sort of thing is why they invented white balance in the first place.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Jason Messer]

Thanks for the quick response guys. This was sort of a preemptive strike thread for when I actually do get the real deal.

I’ll be testing this tonight, at which time I will white balance the camera and see the result I get.

However, I was worried that white balancing under the halogen lights would throw the rest of my colors off (IE: compensating for the yellow hue would throw my greens and blues of my clothes, etc off).

Any thoughts?

[Michael Szalapski]

Unless you’ve got brand-specific colors your wardrobe cannot be “off”. The human eye looks for skin tones first. Skin tones must look good and everything else will look fine. However, if there’s a yellow cast on the skin, there’s going to be a yellow cast on the clothes too. White balancing will make everything be correct.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Walter Soyka]

[Jason Messer] “I was worried that white balancing under the halogen lights would throw the rest of my colors off”

Like the other posters said, white balancing is how you ensure your colors appear correctly. If you don’t white balance, you may give image a strong color cast. If the color cast is too strong, you will not be able to correct it cleanly.

Here’s why: color video is made by combining red, green, and blue color channels (see the RGB histograms in Color Finesse). If you had a yellow cast in your image, your red channel and green channel would be much brighter than your blue channel. To remove the cast, you have to lower red and green levels and raise blue levels. Any missing blue information and any blown-out red or green highlights are unrecoverable, so you’d be limited in how much you could correct the image back to normal tones before noticing artifacts. White balancing the camera first will keep the recorded R, G, and B values for neutral tones very close, giving you a lot more latitude for further adjustment. Good exposure will also help tremendously.

Color Finesse will handle your shot very well. Personally, I like Magic Bullet Colorista II for quick color adjustments within After Effects, and I prefer a dedicated app (first Apple Color, now DaVinci Resolve) for larger projects. All these plugins and apps deliver comparable quality. The differences are workflow, interface, and speed.

Regardless of which system you use, you’ll want a capture card and a broadcast monitor for critical color evaluation.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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