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9 Primary In
The Primary In room provides your main interface for color
correcting each shot. For every shot, this is where you begin,
and in many cases this may be all you need.
Simply speaking, primary corrections are color corrections that affect the entire image at
once. The Primary In room provides a variety of controls that will be familiar to anyone
who’s worked with other image editing and color correction plug-ins and applications.
Each of these controls manipulates the contrast and color in the image in a different
way.
Note: Many of the controls in the Primary In room also appear in the Secondaries and
Primary Out rooms, in which they have identical functionality.
This chapter covers the following:
 What Is the Primary In Room Used For? (p. 163)
 Using the Primary Contrast Controls (p. 166)
 Adjusting Contrast in the Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights (p. 168)
 Using Color Balance Controls (p. 179)
 Understanding Shadow, Midtone, and Highlight Adjustments (p. 183)
 Curves Controls (p. 189)
 Basic Tab (p. 201)
 Advanced Tab (p. 204)
 Auto Balance (p. 206)
What Is the Primary In Room Used For?
Typically, you’ll use the Primary In room to do tasks such as the following:
 To adjust image contrast, so that the shadows are deep enough, the highlights are
bright enough, and the overall lightness of the image is appropriate to the scene.