[Bob Currier]

Which version of Color Finesse are you running? There was a bug fixed in version 3.0.5 on Windows which could account for this. The current version for download is 3.0.8. Adobe CC 12.2 includes Color Finesse 3.0.10. My tests with the color bars you provided display everything as expected on both Windows and Mac.

(Before you upgrade, copy down your Color Finesse serial number from the dialog you get clicking CF’s “About” button. You will need the serial number to install the upgrade.)

To address some of the other issues raied in this thread:

SMPTE bars were developed for an analog NTSC world, where color is encoded as YCbCr color difference signals. That’s why they have a tough time making the transition to the digital, RGB, world.

The bars you posted are set up as 75% saturation, encoded into RGB in the range 16-235 (thinking of them as 8-bit). Because they are RGB, they can’t encode the I and Q patches (the purplish/bluish patches in the lower left).

You can tell that they are at 75% saturation because the color bars do not ever reach 255 in any color channel. They should max out at 180 for 75% encoded 16-235. You can tell that they are 16-235 because the black bars are at a value of 16 (not 0).

If they were encoded 0-255, the color bars would have the color channels maxing out at 191 and the black bars would be at 0. But then you’d lose the “blacker-than-black” portion of the PLUGE.

Don’t assume that bars you get from a (consumer/prosumer) camera are correct; there have been several cameras where the designed got confused.

For use in AE you usually want bars that are 0-255, since that is the natural range that AE works in, and you want your bars to match the rest of the footage.

In 98.3% of the cases, you want to leave the Color Finesse preference set to 0-255, and the “Blacks are at 7.5%” preference unchecked, and use 0-255 bars. The preferences are there for the other 1.7% of cases, which is compatibility with editing systems that are mostly long dead.

Bob Currier
Synthetic Aperture

[Bob Currier]

After Effects CS4 came with Color Finesse 2 LE, not Color Finesse 3.

Do you have a CF3 serial number or a CF2 serial number? A CF2 serial number will start with “CFLEP20” while a CF3 serial will start with “CFLEP30”.

The Color Finesse 2 installer is still available on our website if you need to reinstall that using the serial that was included with CS4.

Bob Currier
Synthetic Aperture

[Bob Currier]

Color Finesse isn’t an additional purchase, it’s installed automatically into After Effects by the Adobe CS4 and CS5 installers. In CS3 it was a separate installer on the Adobe DVD, but there was still a serial number for it included with AE. Look in the Effects menu under “Synthetic Aperture” and you should find Color Finesse.

Adobe does license it only for use in After Effects. If you want to also use it with Premiere Pro then you’d need to upgrade it through our web site to the “PI” version. Perhaps that’s what you were thinking of. (If you think Adobe should also license it for Premiere Pro, let them know by filing a feature request.)

But for After Effects, Adobe has already paid for it for you, so please take advantage of that and get color correcting!

Bob Currier
Synthetic Aperture

[Bob Currier]

Jon Bagge is correct, it’s an operation ordering issue.

The HSL controls (which is where the saturation control is) is processed prior to the RGB controls. So you end up colorizing your desaturated image.

But there is a useful workaround for this situation using the Secondary color corrector to perform the desaturation:

Adjust your RGB controls as you like, and when you want to desaturate the image, select one of the Secondary color correction tabs. By default, nothing is selected. Check the “Invert Selection” which will cause everything to be selected. Now use the Saturation control in the Secondary tab to do your desaturation and I think you’ll get the results you’re expecting. Since there are six Secondary color correction tabs, you can use this workaround even when using (up to 5) secondaries; just use the last one for desaturation.

The order of processing operations is covered at the end of Chapter 3 in the Color Finesse Users Guide.

For Color Finesse specific issues you’ll probably get a quicker response over in the Synthetic Aperture forum. I caught this question by chance because Google Alerts happened to flag it.

Bob Currier
Synthetic Aperture

[Bob Currier]

I took a quick crack at this to see what I could do.

I’ve found that curves are particularly useful for this kind of faded-photo situation, since the underlying problem is that you’ve lost most of the cyan dye from the print.

After some playing around I decided (with no real knowledge) that the guy on the left was wearing bluejeans, and the guy on the right was wearing gray slacks of some sort. So I started in the Color Finesse Full UI and selected the Curves tab. I clicked the gray point (middle) eyedropper in the lower left of the controls, then I clicked on a “middle gray” portion of the right-hand guy’s pants. I chose his right (your left) leg.

The results were a definite improvement, but looked a small bit too green for my taste. So I grabbed the point in the green curve that Color Finesse inserted and dragged it slightly to the right to reduce the green in the shadows.

It looked better, but a bit too contrasty, so I clicked the Master curve and dragged a point slightly to the left to lighten the shadows and reduce the contrast.

This took a lot less time to do than to read. The results, along with my curve settings are in this screenshot:

https://www.synthetic-ap.com/images/ex_difficult_color_rbc.jpg

There are a lot of other ways to attack this problem, and this isn’t perfect. But the skin tones are reasonable which is the most important thing.

As for your original questions:

1) The WFM is there as a reference to let you know when things are starting to clip in the highlights and shadows and to see when there is an imbalance between the channels. My advice is to start off color correcting by eye, but making note of what the WFM looks like. Eventually you’ll learn the relationships enough that you can do the inverse: correct by WFM and like the resulting image. Don’t obsess about the WFM.

2) The VS is, again, just a reference tool. If you like the results visually, it doesn’t matter what the VS looks like. But if the results look “off” and you can’t figure out why, the VS can often show the direction you need to correct in. If the VS leans towards cyan and you don’t like the cyan cast, then you can, for example, use the Hue Offset wheels in the HSL tab to drag the colors away from cyan to correct. You’ll immediately see the VS display move in the same direction.

3) It depends. If the image is almost right, then the common advice is to set the levels first, then tweak the color to get the look you want. But when faced with an image like your photo, it’s often best to try to cancel the color distortion first, and then tweak the levels once it’s “close” to correct.

Hope that helps. A lot of learning color correction is just playing around to understand how the controls interact. It can be frustrating at first, but you’ll soon learn to evaluate an image and know how to attack the problem.

Bob Currier
Synthetic Aperture

[Bob Currier]

Be sure to install the latest version of Color Finesse, 2.1.11, as there was an alpha bug we fixed that could cause black edges.

You can download the current installer from our website and use your existing Color Finesse 2 serial number to install. If you’re using the version of Color Finesse which came with After Effects, be sure to download the “LE” version of the installer as that’s the one that will accept your serial number.

In other situations pre-comping may still needed with CF because of the way that AE passes pixels to us. We receive just the pixels from the layer CF is applied to, not the composited/effected pixels from all previous layers which is often (but not always!) what you want. Not so much a bug as a feature of the way AE functions.

Bob Currier
Synthetic Aperture

[Bob Currier]

Are you referring to the Color Finesse preview on your computer monitor, or on an external video monitor?

If the computer monitor, try changing the “Use Old Style Gamma” checkbox in the Color Finesse preferences General tab.

Also note that Color Finesse does not use AE’s color management, so if that is turned on you in AE you will see a display mismatch.

[Obligatory plug: For a histogram (and much more) when using any plug-in/effect, check out our Test Gear product.]

Bob Currier
Synthetic Aperture

[Bob Currier]

Got it! Thanks.

I suspected a color management issue, but you have that turned off in AE. Since you see no difference between the screen shots, but do see a difference when viewing it live, I wonder if it’s a video board-caused difference.

Any chance you have any color management being done by your video card driver? The NVIDIA cards allow some to be done on a per-application difference, so it might be treating AE and CF differently. And doing a screen capture bypasses this processing.

Just an idea that kind of fits the symptoms.

Bob Currier
Synthetic Aperture

[Bob Currier]

If you’re seeing a difference like that, we’d love to get screen shots to compare. Send them to support “at” synthetic-ap “dot” com.

Please also include your color management settings in AE. Screen shots of the Project Settings and Footage Interpretation dialogs are the easiest way to capture this info.

Bob Currier
Synthetic Aperture