secondary color correction in ae

[Curious Turtle]

It depends what you mean by “secondary cc”. I’m not in front of my Final Cut system, but I don’t recall any sort of “Limit Effect” in the 3-way colour corrector.

If you mean the ability to correct shadows, mids and highlights separately then practice with the Levels and Curves effects. This is still classed as primary colour correction as you’re affecting the image globally.

Alternatively, you could use the Color Finesse plug-in that came bundled with After Effects. That offers the 3-way corrector that you’re familiar with, plus proper secondary correction that lets you apply corrections to certain areas and ranges of colours.

Or, if you want it really simple I’m going to shamelessly plug Film Wash Color Effects for After Effects. A series of filter presets that will give you a completely different feel to your footage.

All the best,
Ben

Curious Turtle Professional Video
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http://www.curiousturtle.com

[Grant Swanson]

For secondary color correction you might create an adjustment layer and apply your effects to it, masking it off to the areas of the shot you need, and feather it out, of course. Almost all your color correction can be achieved using Levels, and for just about anything else you need, you can add Hue & Saturation to that.

While those two effects work great, they can be a little awkward to work with, so for a good 3-way color corrector for After Effects, I would check out Colorista, by Magic Bullet.

Hope that helped!

-Grant Swanson

[Jiri Fiala]

Hello Tommasso,

you can do Secondary CC via Hue/Saturation effect for example. You can select only colors you want to work with. For example, if you want to keep just the reds, select all greens and blues and desaturate them. You can save all your settings to a preset for using later. Most of AE’s color effect allow you to select just the colors (or ranges) you want.

[Tommaso Cicognani]

thanks guys for the help, I think I’ll go for Colorista, it seems the better choice for me as it is very similar to fcp 3-way.

[Darby Edelen]

[Ben Heusner] “I’m not in front of my Final Cut system, but I don’t recall any sort of “Limit Effect” in the 3-way colour corrector.”

You can definitely limit the effect of the 3-way color corrector in FCP to specific hue/saturation/lightness ranges.

You could also use one of the Matte effects to limit the area affected.

Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA