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Curves Editor like Photoshop
Is there a work around way to be able to have the eye dropper capabilities of Photoshop’s Curves editor in After Effects? Sometimes I would like to just be able to eye dropper pick my black and white in my footage. There has to be a way. Thanks for any help.
–Jonathan Alexander
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5 Replies
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No. Technically it wouldn’t even be correct and thus pretty useless many times. Since AE is aimed at creating video content, you usually don’t want your colors to be “pure” because when movin on to editing, your setup levels and white points will be adjusted anyways.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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I see what you are saying, but there are times when it still might be useful, no?
If I wanted to sylize some footage and fool around with that is white and what is black or mids, it would come in handy. Plus it would be a really qucik and easy way to do that.
I don’t see they can’t just have it as an option. Is there a way to maybe do this in a workaround way?
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[Jonathan Alexander] “I see what you are saying, but there are times when it still might be useful, no?”
Personally I don’t think so. you see, why implement a feature that only gets used by maybe 20% of users once a week. I certainly wouldn’t use it – it seems illogical to me to enforce things such as “Superblack” and “Superwhite” on footage that is going to end up on a DVD anyway. Even many computer CoDecs such as DivX do not keep this high color dynamic range in favor of better compression. But if you think it would be useful, go ahead and file a FR at the Adobe site.
[Jonathan Alexander] “Is there a way to maybe do this in a workaround way?”
No, not with the curves effect. Since it is basically just one large custom effects control, you have no access to its internal workings using expressions. You can get something like that using the Levels effect, but it still requires a third-party color sampler plugin such as the one contained in Digital Anarchy’s Anarchy Toolbox set.
Other than that look into Photoshop automation. If you want to stylize your stuff, you can use Batch actions very effectively in the manner you need.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Cool, thanks for the tips.
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Hi there,
did you ever find an answer to this? Despite what the other dude thinks, being able to sample a color with a levels or curves effect is one of the most valuable tools a compositor can have.
I’ve come from a Nuke background where sampling black and white points on a grade node is pretty much the basis of accurate color matching. Real shame there’s no equivalent in AE.
Will continue looking and post again if anything turns up.
Cheers.
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