The Color Wheels Mystery … An obviously wrong answer

[Simon Ubsdell]

Apologies to all. Senility appears to be setting in.

I wrongly claimed in the above post that we implemented SMH in Hawaiki AutoGrade, when in fact we only implemented it for the RGB and not the Y.

It still makes for a very interesting and useful set of controls.

But SMH can only ever sensibly be thought of as an addition to Lift/Gamma/Gain, never a complete replacement for it.

Targeted corrections are great, but they are inherently problematic.

Lift/Gamma/Gain gives you the smoothest possible transition between adjacent pixel values and that is fundamentally a very good thing. But when you start to target more defined ranges then it becomes a lot easier to mangle your image quite badly.

For this reason, SMH needs to be handled with care – think of it as local surgery, not as a universal panacea.

And one of the reasons I bring this up in this context is to do with the new curves features in 10.4.

They’re absolutely great and it’s really nice to see this functionality in an NLE and not just in the big grading systems. But at the same time, inexperienced colorists risk their images falling apart in all sorts of ways that they might not be alert to.

It’s important to think of these tools as problem solvers, not primary grading functions. Otherwise problems potentially lie ahead.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Bill Davis]

Simons above post seems to me very useful advice.

Many like me will be exploring this new implementation of well understood colorists tools and anything that helps people learn to “go slowly” and use restraint with a tool that can get you into trouble – is probably very good advice.

My 2 cents.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.