12. FINAL CUT PRO: ADVANCED color correction [8:54 min]
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What You'll Need: Final Cut Pro
TRANSCRIPT
Hi I’m Kiarra Drew with We Make Movies.
In the previous color correction lesson, you learned how to use the video scopes and get an overview of color correction using the color board. In this lesson, we’ll give you an overview of some of the more advanced tools in FCPX and how you can apply them to your clips. This lesson will assume you have watched the previous lesson and have a basic understanding of everything that was covered.
Let's begin by changing the default setting for a color correction type in Final Cut Pro X. Select the Final Cut Pro dropdown menu and then select “preferences”. In the general menu change the color correction field from color board to color wheels. This will change the default color correction type that you use when you begin making a new grade on a clip as you will see in a second. Now, close out of the menu and return to the timeline.
Make sure you are in the color and effects window layout by going to Window, then workspaces and selecting color and effects, and then select a clip you would like to grade and press cmd-6 to open the color pane in the inspector. You’ll notice that instead of the color board with the 4 pucks on it, you now have 4 color wheels instead. Now, you may want a little extra real estate in your inspector as you go, so go ahead and double click on the clip name at the top of the inspector and you’ll see the inspector now extend the full length of the screen. Now, let's focus on the color wheels themselves and how to use them.
The color wheels are essentially a combination of all 3 color board views in a single window. Like the color board, there is a circle that represents the Master, Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights of the image, except now you can control the color, exposure and saturation all from the same dial. From the master wheel, drag the center circle around the color spectrum and notice how the color of the image changes the same way it did when you dragged the master puck upwards in the in the color board’s color tab in the previous lesson. Now, drag the slider on the left up and down and notice how the saturation changes in the same way that it did in the saturation pane of the color board. Finally drag the slider on the right, and you’ll see how the exposure changes like it did in the exposure tab of the color board. Now play with the shadows, midtones, and highlights circles and see how those correspond as well to the comparable pucks on the color board. Essentially, the color wheels are just a more simplified way of allowing you to view and adjust your grade from a single menu. Go ahead and grade your clip now in the color menu until you are happy with it.
Once you’ve finished grading your clip, it’s time to add another correction on top of it. Final Cut Pro X allows you to layer filters in a similar way to how you layer effects, and you can flip between or add new ones in an easy to use menu. Where it says Color Wheels 1 at the top of the inspector, click the downward carrot. A menu pops up with a check mark next to Color Wheels 1 to let you know it is the active correction, and then below that you see “add correction” with 4 options, two of which we have already discussed. Select “Color Curves” to add the new correction, and you’ll now see what we call Color Curves. The top Luma Curve corresponds to the contrast of your image, with the bottom being zero and the top being 100 like you would see on your waveform. The Red, Green, and Blue curves correspond to the Red, Green, and Blue color channels.
Let's start by adding a point to the red curve by clicking anywhere on the curve with the mouse. Now, move the point up and down and around and notice what happens to red channel in the RGB parade scope on the bottom left of your scope view. If you see an issue in one of your color channels adding points around the problem area and adjusting can be a great way to clean up the issue in that particular color channel. When you’re done playing with the color curves, you can reset all of them by clicking the counter clockwise circular arrow next to the eyedropper icon above each curve. You can also delete points by selecting a point you have added and pressing the delete key.
Another time to use color curves is to add a more refined contrast to an image than you normally could with the color wheels or color board. This works particularly well with interview or talking head footage so grab one of those clips if you can and follow along. In the luma curve add a point in center of the curve. Now add another point about halfway up between the two points and drag that point subtly up, down and around to massage the contrast of the curve of the image. Next, grab that center point and start to move that around in a similar fashion and notice how the overall contrast of the image can be affected in a more precise way than you were able to do with the color wheels. You can add additional points as you see fit, but be careful not to add too many as it will gradually start to make your image look unnatural.
When you’re done with that, lets go ahead and add another correction from the same dropdown menu as before, except this time, select the Hue/Saturation curve option. For this exercise, try and select a clip to work with that has a large color patch in it that you’d like to affect, like a blue sky, patch of green grass, or single colored wall or table that stands out. Select the eyedropper at the top of the hue vs. Hue curve, and then go into the viewer and click in an area of the image you would like to affect and drag outward being careful not to touch any part of the image you don’t want to affect. After you let go, you’ll notice that 3 points have been added to the Hue vs. hue curve. Drag the point in the middle up and down and you’ll see the colors in the image in your selection adjust accordingly. Play with this for a bit, then take a similar approach to some of the other curves and see how each curve does a different thing when you make a selection on it or add points and adjust.
Now, what do you do if you only want to have a color change affect only part of the image? You can do this easily with a shape mask. Lets add a new color wheels correction to our image and adjust the exposure of the midtones of our image upwards a bit. Now drag your mouse up to the bar where it says color wheels and when you do, you will see an icon with a circle in a square appear. Select that icon and select add shape mask, and you’ll see a shape mask appear. Go and drag the center of the mask until it’s around a person’s face in your image. Next, adjust the inner circle until it basically surrounds the person’s face. Next drag the white point in or out to change the circle into a square and back again. Now, adjust the midtones exposure up and down and see how the contrast inside your circle is affected. Next, drag the outer circle of the mask outward, and this will affect the feathering of the image. Adjust your contrast and feathering so that the effect is barely noticeable. Now, towards the bottom of the inspector notice where it says inside and outside. Select where it says outside. You’ll notice that the adjustments you made to the inside of the panel are gone now because you are now only affecting the outside of the mask. Go ahead and drag the exposure on the shadows wheel now and notice how by dragging down the shadows on the outside of the mask you have found a great way to highlight a person in the shot without affecting the image too much. This is a really useful trick.
Now, go ahead an add one more color wheels filter to your shot, and we’ll show you one final thing. Select the shape mask icon, except this time select a color mask instead of shape mask when the option appears. Now, make sure the eyedropper is selected, it should be highlighted blue, and go and click and drag across a section of an image like a wall or the sky. You’ll see a region of the image be selected by going black or white. Once you’ve selected a decent sized portion of the image you would like to affect, let go of the mask. Go ahead now and move the highlights and midtones pucks around your image now and you’ll see how that affects your color selection. This is commonly called a secondary correction in the color correction world, and is a great way to target a specific part of the image to grade. Now, you can move back and forth between your different color correction layers to refine or add new layers as you need to by going back to the corrections menu and selecting the one you want to affect. Layers are listed from the first correction you used at the top, to the last one at the bottom. You can choose the previous correction we were working on with the mask effect by selecting the color filter directly above the one with the check box next to it.
This should give you a really strong overview of all the color features in Final Cut Pro X and should set you well on your way to grading professional looking movies that you will be proud of.