Color Correction Handbook, Second Edition

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COLORCORRECTIONH A N D B O O Ksecond editionProfessional Techniquesfor Video and CinemaAlexis Van Hurkman

COLORCORRECTIONH A N D B O O KProfessional Techniquesfor Video and Cinema,2nd EditionAlexis Van Hurkman

COLOR CORRECTION HANDBOOK:Professional Techniques for Video and Cinema, Second EditionAlexis Van HurkmanPeachpit Presswww.peachpit.comTo report errors, please send a note to errata@peachpit.comPeachpit Press is a division of Pearson EducationCopyright 2014 by Alexis Van HurkmanSenior Editor: Karyn JohnsonDevelopment Editor: Stephen Nathans-KellyProduction Editor: David Van NessCopyeditor: Kim WimpsettCompositor: WolfsonDesignProofreader: Liz WelchIndexer: Valerie Haynes PerryInterior Design: Kathleen CunninghamCover Design: Aren Howell StraigerCover photo: Kaylynn RaschkeCover models: Gal FridayNotice of RightsAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any formby any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, withoutthe prior written permission of the publisher. For information on getting permission forreprints and excerpts, contact permissions@peachpit.com.Notice of LiabilityThe information in this book is distributed on an “As Is” basis without warranty. Whileevery precaution has been taken in the preparation of the book, neither the author norPeachpit shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damagecaused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in thisbook or by the computer software and hardware products described in it.TrademarksMany of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their productsare claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and Peachpitwas aware of a trademark claim, the designations appear as requested by the owner ofthe trademark. All other product names and services identified throughout this book areused in editorial fashion only and for the benefit of such companies with no intention ofinfringement of the trademark. No such use, or the use of any trade name, is intended toconvey endorsement or other affiliation with this book.ISBN-13: 978-0-321-92966-2ISBN-10: 978-0-321-92966-7987654321Printed and bound in the United States of America

DEDICATIONTo my wife and companion, Kaylynn.I merely create the appearance of beauty.You make the world beautiful wherever you go

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vTABLE OF CONTENTSFOREWORDxiINTRODUCTIONxv1 COLOR CORRECTION WORKFLOWS1Are You Grading for Cinema, Broadcast, or the Web?1Where Colorists Fit In2Before the Shoot: Choosing a Recording Format4Digital Dailies: The Start of Postproduction12Round-Trip Workflows182 SETTING UP A COLOR CORRECTIONENVIRONMENT25Understanding Display-Referred Color Management25Choosing a Display29Display Calibration50Setting Up a Color Correction Suite60Configuring a Grading Theater68Other Hardware for Color Correction763 PRIMARY CONTRAST ADJUSTMENTS83How We See Color83Luminance and Luma84Evaluating Contrast Using Video Scopes92Controls to Adjust Contrast97Expanding Contrast110Compressing Contrast113

viTABLE OF CONTENTSY'CBCR Luma Adjustments vs. RGB Luma Adjustments114Redistributing Midtone Contrast117Adjusting Log-Encoded Contrast122Setting Appropriate Highlights and Shadows131Working with High Dynamic Range (HDR) Media141Contrast and Perception146Contrast During Exhibition151Dealing with Underexposure152Dealing with Overexposure1604 PRIMARY COLOR ADJUSTMENTS175Color Temperature177What Is Chroma?181Analyzing Color Balance192Using Color Balance Controls202Using Log Color Controls229Color Temperature Controls237Using Color Curves238Saturation Adjustments249Understanding and Controlling Color Contrast2625 HSL QUALIFICATION AND HUE CURVES273HSL Qualification in Theory274Individual Qualifier Controls277A Basic HSL Qualification Workflow289Tips for Using and Optimizing HSL Qualifications297Different Ways of Using HSL Qualifiers304

TABLE OF CONTENTSHue Curve Adjustments315Other Types of HSL Adjustments323Advanced Keyers3256 SHAPES331Shape UI and Controls332Highlighting Subjects338Creating Depth343Shapes HSL Qualifiers349Aggressive Digital Relighting350Shapes and Motion3557 ANIMATING GRADES365Grade Animation Controls Compared365Correcting Changes in Exposure373Correcting Hue Shifts375Grade Transitions Using Through Edits and Dissolves383Artificial Lighting Changes385Creative Grade Animation3898 MEMORY COLORS: SKIN TONE,SKIES, AND FOLIAGE393What Are Memory Colors?394Ideals for Skin Tone407Techniques for Adjusting Complexion Using Secondaries452Ideals for Skies468Techniques for Adjusting Skies477Ideals for Foliage496vii

viiiTABLE OF CONTENTS9 SHOT MATCHING ANDSCENE BALANCING511Color Timing512Strategies for Working with Clients515How to Begin Balancing a Scene517How to Match One Shot to Another520Recycling Grades535Scene Matching in Action54210 QUALITY CONTROL ANDBROADCAST SAFE549Grading for Film Output551Video Signal Standards and Limits552Quality Control Issues That Affect Colorists560Six Structured Steps to Legalizing Your Picture561Monitoring and Legalizing Saturation in Detail562RGB Color Space Legality and the RGB Parade Scope575Soft Clipping for Luma and RGB578Other Video Scope Options for Broadcast Gamut Monitoring579Creating Graphics and Animation with Legal Values584Broadcast-Safe Settings in Grading Applications586Broadcast-Safe Settings in Editing Applications587Avid Media Composer and Symphony Broadcast-Safe Settings588Adobe Premiere Pro Broadcast-Safe Settings591Final Cut Pro X Broadcast-Safe Settings592Final Cut Pro 7 Broadcast-Safe Settings592

TABLE OF CONTENTSPREVIEW: COLOR CORRECTIONLOOK BOOK599Tints and Color Washes600Undertones610Vibrance and Targeted Saturation618INDEX621ix

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xiFOREWORDThis is the book I’ve been waiting for: the definitive book on grading for coloristsand aspiring colorists alike.I’ve been involved in postproduction since 1983. Over the years I have color correctedmore than 3,000 music videos, countless commercials, and numerous televisionshows and features. I’ve worked with some of the most talented directors, actors,and singers in the world. I can’t imagine any other job where I could have had suchan impact on pop culture. I love what I do, and I’m so happy that this book willlead more people to a fulfilling career in grading.I started my color correction career in Toronto, Canada, at a post house called TheMagnetic North Corporation. Color correction was still relatively new. We had aRank Cintel flying spot scanner and an Amigo Color Corrector with primary colorcontrol, no secondaries, and not much else. How times have changed! Today’s colorists have a massive amount of control over the look of the image and can choosefrom a variety of color correctors to help them achieve their goals.Back in the 1980s, the only way you could become a colorist was to work at a posthouse, or possibly a television station. You started as a tape assistant and learned allthe basics of video, such as lining up a tape for the online editor and understandingwhat acceptable video levels were for broadcast. It often took years before you gotthe opportunity to sit in “the chair.”Back in those days, we mostly color corrected film, and clients were still nervousabout letting us put their precious negative on a machine that could possiblyscratch it or worse. Because of our limited color control of the images, we coloristswere considered a necessary evil (at best) in the film-to-tape process.Luckily for us, in 1984, the DaVinci color correction system came out and gave usmuch more latitude in how we manipulated the images. Suddenly, talented telecinecolorists became a more important part of the post process, much sought after, andconstantly booked. Most of our work came from doing commercials, music videos,and television shows; films were still color corrected only photochemically.During the 1980s, many people who worked at post houses had come from a television background, so when we colorists starting experimenting with crushingblacks and manipulating color, there were many technicians staring at their scopesand scratching their heads worrying that the networks might reject these looks.Looking back, it’s funny to think about how many times I was told I had crushedthe blacks and lost all the detail. What was I thinking?

xiiFOREWORDIn the 1990s we transitioned from analog into digital. In the analog world therewere all kinds of issues that could make a colorist prematurely gray. The telecineitself often had some color drift; to get around that, after we colored a take, wewould immediately record it to tape. Even when the telecine itself was stable, thestill store’s color could drift, throwing off all of your color matching. I still get aknot in my stomach just thinking about it. With the arrival of the digital era, manyof these issues went away, and we could usually count on a more stable color correction environment.At that time, the best colorists became the rock stars of postproduction. Directorsand DPs had to have their favorite colorists working on their projects. We had morecolor control than ever, and when music videos directed by David Fincher, MarkRomanek, and Michael Bay debuted on MTV, the world took notice. What’s more,when the commercial world saw how much attention music videos were attractingfor their “look,” advertising agencies demanded the top coloring talent as well.But the coloring world remained mostly closed off to anyone who thought theymight want to do color grading as a career. You still had to come up through thepost house system, and you had to be talented, lucky, and patient enough to slowlybuild a clientele.There were no books to help you learn your craft back then. Learning color gradingwas trial and error and a good deal of frustration. Back then, a grading suite couldcost more than a million dollars and needed a lot of tech support. Today, as weknow, it’s a much different story. It still takes technical knowledge and artistic skillto build a client following, but the opportunities to do so are much more accessiblethan before.As the millennium came upon us, digital colorists began to realize the possibilityof grading feature films, but barriers persisted. Among other things, the amount ofstorage needed seemed almost inconceivable. Finally, in 2004, Company 3 built afeature-film DI suite, and I got to grade my first feature; it was Constantine, starringKeanu Reeves and directed by Francis Lawrence, for whom I had graded more than50 music videos. I can’t say how thrilling it was after all those years to color for thebig screen.Over the past seven years, much of the film and broadcast world has been transitioning away from film cameras to digital. Digital cinematography has affected theway we as colorists do things as well. Now that we have the capability to color correct raw footage in cut order, we can be much more accurate and detailed in howwe grade a project. We can take advantage of all the improvements in color correction systems such as advanced secondary control, windowing, LUTs, and more.It’s an exciting time in our profession. Things are changing quickly, and color correction is finally getting the notice and respect it deserves after all these years. I canthink of no more opportune time for the arrival of this new edition of Alexis VanHurkman’s Color Correction Handbook.

FOREWORDI’m a huge fan of Alexis’s book. This is a great tool for anyone who has ever wondered, “How did they get it to look like that?” Whether you’re an aspiring coloristor a seasoned pro, you’ll find it an amazing learning tool or a great book of reference. For the novice, it’s organized in a way to make even fairly advanced ideaseasy to understand and to emulate. For an experienced professional like me, someof the techniques discussed here inspired me to try things in a different way thanI might have. I can’t think of any major color correction issue that this book doesnot cover.And it’s all presented in a concise, easy-to-understand format. Reading this book islike taking a master class in color correction. Years of experience fill its pages, andit’s there for your reference whenever you need it.—David Hussey, colorist and cofounder, C03 LAxiii

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xvINTRODUCTIONColor is life, for a world without colors appears to us as dead. Colors areprimordial ideas, children of the aboriginal colorless light and its counterpart,colorless darkness. As flame begets light, so light engenders colors. Colors arethe children of light, and light is their mother. Light, that first phenomenon ofthe world, reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors.—Johannes Itten (1888–1967)This book is intended for developing colorists who aspire to master the art andengineering of serious color grading. It incorporates information and techniquesthat I’ve found useful during my career as a colorist of narrative and documentaryprojects. It has also provided me with an excellent excuse to delve more deeply intonot just how to create the adjustments we make in the most efficient way possiblebut why we make them in the first place and how they interact with the viewer’svisual perceptions so that we can exert more direct and informed control overthe process.Although this book generally assumes you’re a paid professional who’s working inclient-driven situations, the information is accessible to anyone with an interest ingiving their programs a creative polish, from the do-it-yourself (DIY) filmmaker tothe creative editor who’s looking to enhance her skill set.It used to be that the ranks of color timers, telecine operators, and colorists forbroadcast were an exclusive and high-priced club. Because professional color gradingrequired half-million-dollar suites filled with dedicated hardware, there were fewsuch suites. Learning to operate such systems typically involved an apprenticeship(starting out as a tape operator) where you had the opportunity to learn at theelbow of the senior colorist before eventually graduating to junior colorist, gradingdailies and doing night-shift work, and eventually proving your mettle and gettinginvolved with more serious sessions.This is changing. With the proliferation of high-quality, dedicated color gradingsystems on desktop hardware, the half-million-dollar investment has dropped precipitously, opening up the field to an ever-increasing number of boutique post housesthat can offer truly professional services, not to mention individual filmmakers andproduction facilities that are daring to go “in-house” with their color grading.As a result, editors and compositing artists alike are gravitating toward adding colorcorrection to their already wide skill set. This is natural, and one of many reasonsI think this book is an important offering to the postproduction community. Thereare no longer as many opportunities for apprenticeship with a seasoned professional,

xviINTRODUCTIONand the need for talent in this arena is growing as more and more producersthat once would never have considered putting their programs through a colorcorrection pass are coming to the realization that if the program isn’t graded, it’snot finished.However, even though color correction is becoming increasingly absorbed into thepostproduction process, I make a passionate argument for the role of the dedicatedcolorist working within a specifically configured suite or grading theater. I don’thave a problem with color correction being done in a home-office environment,but no matter where you park your gear, it’s essential (as I discuss in Chapter 2) tomonitor your image in a proper environment on an appropriate display if you wantprofessional results. I liken grading rooms to audio mixing stages: For both audioand video, the best decisions are made by an experienced artist working in a carefully focused environment that allows a fine degree of control over the process.Although it’s arguable that colorists are perhaps the smallest subcommunity inpostproduction, a lot of applications are currently available that are dedicatedto the task of grading. At the time of this writing, some of the more notable ofthese include DaVinci Resolve, FilmLight Baselight, Assimilate Scratch, AdobeSpeedGrade, SGO Mistika, Digital Vision Film Master, Autodesk Lustre, andMarquise Technologies RAIN.Each of these applications differs widely in their real-time capabilities and theiroverall approach to the grading user interface (UI), yet they all share a largely common toolset so that once you learn the basics of three-way color balancing, curves,lift/gamma/gain contrast adjustment, HSL Qualification, and the use of shapes,video scopes, and grade management, you’ll have a very good idea of how to goabout getting the job done in any one of these applications.Furthermore, I’ve deliberately chosen to focus on applications that are compatiblewith dedicated control surfaces, on the premise that serious-minded practitionerswill come to appreciate the comfort and efficiency that these surfaces offer duringlong grading sessions.In terms of the specific applications that I mention in this book, it’s impossible todo a comprehensive survey of functionality for every single application. Instead,I’ve tried to include information that’s applicable to the most widely used of thecolor grading applications with which I’m familiar and to call out notable functionswithin specific applications where appropriate. For obvious reasons, I created mostof the examples using one of four applications that I personally have had installedduring the development of this book: DaVinci Resolve, FilmLight Baselight Editions,Assimilate Scratch, and Adobe SpeedGrade. But I’ve worked hard to make sure thatthe majority of the examples apply equally well to other grading applications.

INTRODUCTIONThis is not to say that the techniques explored within this book are useful only tooperators of dedicated grading applications. As the postproduction software industry has matured, advanced color correction tools have snuck into a wide variety ofapplications, ranging from ambitious combination editorial/compositing/finishing apps such as Autodesk Smoke and Avid Symphony, to more focused nonlineareditors (NLEs) including Avid Media Composer, Apple Final Cut Pro X, AdobePremiere Pro, and Sony Vegas Pro. Furthermore, if an NLE’s built-in tools don’tfloat your boat, additional third-party color correction plug-ins such as Red Giant’sColorista II, Magic Bullet Looks, and Synthetic Aperture’s Color Finesse let you significantly extend your editing software’s capabilities.Last, but certainly not least, compositing applications such as Adobe After Effectsand The Foundry’s Nuke have color correction capabilities built in, primarily for platematching and effects work, but there are hardy souls who use these applications forfull-bore grading work. If you’re among that group, I salute you for your moxie.For all of these applications, if you have access to the basic tools I mentioned earlier, then you’ll be able to adapt the techniques found here. I’ve found that it’salmost more important to see the idea behind general approaches to solving a particular problem or creating a unique grade than it is to get a specific step-by-steplist of instructions. Once you’ve got an idea of what would be interesting to do,figuring out how to do it in your particular application is simply a detail. For thatreason, I’ve deliberately chosen to put creativity first and to generalize applicationfunctionality as much as possible so that the techniques are applicable on the widest possible array of applications.COLOR CORRECTION VS. GRADINGAt one time (not so very long ago) color correction was the description given to colorwork on video, while grading was the term applied to the process of color timingmotion-picture film.As the tools for both film and vid

Other Video Scope Options for Broadcast Gamut Monitoring 579 Creating Graphics and Animation with Legal Values 584 Broadcast-Safe Settings in Grading Applications 586 Broadcast-Safe Settings in Editing Applications 587 Avid Media Composer and Symphony Broadcast-Safe Settings 588 Adobe Premiere Pro Broadcast-Safe Settings 591

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