6.0

Guiding Principles for Color Correction
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Adapting the Original Look
An adaptive adjustment deliberately departs from the original look of the scene in some way. For
example, you might lighten one shot to make it match another. In this case, you are departing
from the original look in order to achieve shot-to-shot consistency in your sequence. A more
dramatic adaptive adjustment might be to apply a gold tint to an entire sequence for an
advertising spot or to apply extreme adjustments such as posterization or chroma inversion for a
music video.
It is good practice to make restorative adjustments before you begin adaptive adjustments. You
can then build on an image that has good color characteristics. Most viewers can probably
perceive the difference between a restored, well-balanced image with a strong blue tint applied
and an unrestored, poorly lit image with a strong blue tint applied (and prefer the former).
Stages of Color Correction
A typical color correction for a shot might include the following main stages of adjustment:
• Correcting the tonal range (or contrast ratio).
• Neutralizing color casts.
• Achieving consistency between the shots in a sequence.
• Achieving a final look.
Different kinds of projects lead to different emphases among these stages and might even make
some unnecessary. Different working habits also affect how you handle these stages. A more
experienced colorist might work in a manner that blurs the distinctions between them. A
beginner might prefer to keep them distinct and achieve an acceptable result for each one before
moving on to the next.
Correcting Tonal Range
Correcting the tonal range usually requires two steps. First, you reset the white and black points
to make the range of values between the lightest part of the image and the darkest part of the
image as large as possible. Second, you adjust the gray point to control how much of the total
tonal range falls above and how much below the middle value.
Setting White and Black Points
Setting the white point and the black point is simple when a shot includes an area that should
obviously be very light and another area that should be very dark. You look for what should be
the lightest area of the image and adjust controls until it becomes as light as possible, and then do
the same for the area that needs to be black. You can dramatically improve the quality of shots
taken using insufficient or excessive light just by making white and black point adjustments.