1.5

Each room gathers all the controls pertaining to that particular step of the color correction
process onto a single screen. These rooms are organized from left to right in the order
colorists will typically use them, so that after adjusting your project’s preferences in the
Setup room, you can work your way across from the Primary controls, to the Secondary
controls, Color FX, Primary Out, and finally Geometry as you adjust each shot in your
project.
• Setup: All projects begin in the Setup room. This is where you import and manage the
shots in your program. The grade bin, project settings, and application preferences are
also found within the Setup room. For video colorists, the project settings area of the
Setup room is where you find the Broadcast Safe controls, which allow you to apply
gamut restrictions to the entire program.
• Primary In: Primary color corrections affect the entire image, so this room is where you
make overall adjustments to the color and contrast of each shot. Color balance and
curve controls let you adjust colors in the shadows, midtones, and highlights of the
image. The lift, gamma, and gain controls let you make detailed contrast adjustments,
which affect the brightness of different areas of the picture. There are also controls for
overall, highlight, and shadow saturation, and printer point (or printer light) controls
for colorists used to color timing for film.
• Secondaries: Secondary color corrections are targeted adjustments made to specific
areas of the image. This room provides numerous methods for isolating, or qualifying,
the parts of the image you want to correct. Controls are provided with which to isolate
a region using shape masks. Additional controls let you isolate areas of the picture
using a chroma-keyed matte with individual qualifications for hue, saturation, and
luminance. Each shot can have up to eight secondary operations. Furthermore,
special-purpose secondary curves let you make adjustments to hue, saturation, and
luma within specific portions of the spectrum.
• Color FX: The Color FX room lets you create your own custom effects via a node-based
interface more commonly found in high-end compositing applications, similar to Shake.
These individual effects nodes can be linked together in thousands of combinations,
providing a fast way to create many different types of color effects. Your custom effects
can be saved in the Color FX bin for future use, letting you apply your look to future
projects.
• Primary Out: The Primary Out room is identical to the Primary In room except that its
color corrections are applied to shots after they have been processed by all the other
color grading rooms. This provides a way to post-process your images after all other
operations have been performed.
36 Chapter 2 Color Correction Workflows