Digital Filmmaking Part 2 - Color Correction

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You can use other After Effects tools to manipulate color. Even the ones that are not so readily clear. Levels is a good example. While at first glance it may seem like a tool to adjust global image characteristics such as gamma, by changing the channel box from RGB to any other color channel you can perform very fine adjustments.

Composite Suite's Selective Color lets you tweak a single color without affecting the rest of the image. Here the green paint on William's face was changed to purple.
For some pretty bizarre effects you can go to Effect > Channel > Set Channel. With this tool you can replace any color channel with another from the same layer or a different one. If you wish you can use this for not-so-bizarre effects, too, such as transferring the color channels from one shot to the other. To do this, place the donor shot in the layer underneath the one you want to tweak so that it doesn’t show up and select that layer as the source for each channel.

Another advantage of compositing applications is that you can use your program’s keyframing capabilities to make fine adjustments to any portion of the scene. This really comes in handy if, for any reason, color changes occur during a shot. Such would be the case if you shot very late in the afternoon, right before sunset, when the color temperature changes with each passing minute.
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If your work is going to be broadcast it is a good idea to use the Effect > Video > Broadcast Colors tool after your color correction just to play it safe and make sure that levels are legal. And to make sure that your color correction efforts will look just right, there’s nothing better than seeing your changes on a video monitor as you make them. After Effects 5.0 lets you output your work to certain video devices by selecting Edit > Preferences > Video Preview. I use the Matrox RTMac with my G4, so all I had to do was set the Output Device to Matrox RTMac Video Out Component and the Output Mode to Matrox RTMac. I left the Update Desktop During Video Playback and Show Output During RAM Preview boxes unchecked to increase performance and I checked the others so that every change that I make shows up immediately on the video monitor.


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