User Manual

Secondary Color Correction
If you want to adjust a specific part of your image then you need to use secondary corrections.
The adjustments you have been doing up until now using the color wheels and lift, gamma
andgain adjustments affect the whole image at the same time and so they are called primary
color corrections.
However if you need to adjust specific parts of your image, say for example you wanted to
improve the color in the grass in a scene, or you wanted to deepen the blue in a sky, then you
can use secondary corrections. Secondary color corrections are where you select a part of the
image and then adjust just that part. With nodes, you can stack multiple secondary corrections
so you can keep working parts of your image until everything is just right! You can even use
windows and tracking to allow the selections to follow movement in your images.
Qualifying a Color
Often you’ll find a specific color in your clip can be enhanced, for example grass by the side
ofa road, or the blue in a sky, or you may need to adjust color on a specific object to focus the
audience’s attention on it. You can easily do this by using the HSL qualifier tool.
Using the HSL qualifier to select colors in your image
is helpful when you want to make areas ofyour
image ‘pop’, to add contrast, or to help draw the
audience’s attention to certain areas of your shot
To qualify a color:
1 Add a new serial node.
2 Open the ‘qualifier’ palette and make sure the ‘color range’ sample eyedropper tool
is selected.
3 Click on the color in your clip you want to affect.
4 Usually you’ll need to make some adjustments to soften the edges of your selection
and limit the region to only the desired color. Click on the ‘highlight’ button to see
yourselection.
5 Adjust the ‘width’ control in the ‘hue’ window to broaden or narrow your selection.
Experiment with the high, low and softness controls to see how to refine your selection.
Nowyou can make corrections to your selected color using the color wheels or custom curves.
Sometimes your selection can spill into areas of the shot you don’t want to affect. You can easily
mask out the unwanted areas using a power window. Simply create a new window and shape it
to select only the area of color you want. If your selected color moves in the shot, you can use
the tracking feature to track your power window.
49Using DaVinci Resolve