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Hello,
I am looking for a really good book of Color Correction… Does anyone know which is the better?
mario
Hello Mario:
The concept of color correction is a broad one: To become a “professional colorist” requires patience, a good eye, a feel, understanding, talent, stamina amd practice! Coloring is like art: there is “good” art and “bad” art….
To get yourself started, you should try to understand the theory and concept of basic color correction: One you understand the general theory, you can apply it to most any color correcting toolset.
Simply put: Color correction is such a vast field and the techniques used will often depend on the desired look, whether it be a hyper-saturated music video, a simple change of color to someoneÂ’s shirt, to make a daytime scene look like night, or to tint a sunny day to a sunset.
To learn specifically about Combustion’s color corrector, check out the included Tutorial (Lesson 8 that comes with Combustion.) If you buy the Discreet Cv2 Courseware, see Lesson 31.
Additionally, I remember some very useful tips that were posted over at the http://www.creativecow.net forum. These excellent ideas were posted by Maurice Patel almost a year ago and are memorable:
Maurice’s pointers:
“Good colour correction (CC) is not just knowing the CC operator but also understanding the power of using masks – these will help you better isolate regions and control lighting, as well as the strengths of each mode within the Discreet CC operator.
For example, subtle CCs can be created using a matte – to experiment load a background plate and generate a luma key and select Output “MatteÂâ€, or select an area (such as the sky) and apply a gradient to the selection – you can even add paint. Make sure your result is grayscale (luminance) image. Reload (copy) the footage to create a new layer, and apply the “compound channel selection†operator. In the “Layer†field select the “Discreet Keyer†or “Paint†operator and in the channel field choose “Red†(you can choose any component (green or blue) as the luminance values are equal for each component) – Apply the Discreet colour corrector operator on top. You will see that white areas get more CC than black areas and you can create subtle transitions in CC using the gradient.
Need more control? Try this: load some footage and create a Luma matte as described above. Load the footage again (or copy and paste) to create a second layer and rotoscope an object – set the object to white, insert a black rectangle underneath to hide the original footage. Copy and paste the footage again to create a 3rd layer apply two colour corrections using two “compound channel selections†each pointing to a different luma image. The fits colour corrector will only affect the rotoscoped image, the second will selectively colour correct the brighter parts of the image.
In this way you can create multiple luminance masks to control what gets colour corrected and how, each one controlling different colour corrector operators with different settings. This technique can be used for very subtle selective colour correction with almost infinite precision
As for the colour correction tools themselves – the curves can give you a very high level of customisability as you can dictate what happens to very narrow ranges of colour.
have fun – Maurice”
Best of Luck:
Jack
I have recently got a copy of “Digital Compositing for Film and Video” by Steve Wright from Focal Press. It has examples of real world applications and explains the techniques in detail. But as Jack said the final image is “what looks right”.
You may also want to check out Ron Brinkman’s “Art and Science of Digital Compositing”
Hope this helps
Sinan Vural
Greetings…
There is a new book on “Color Correction” on the market…
Entitled ” Color Correction for Digital Video ” and written by Steve Hullfish and Jaime Fowler — it is published by CMP Books. Publication Date: December 2002 – US$49.95, 4-Color, Trade Paper with CD-ROM, Category: Computers/Multimedia/Digital Video – 7-3/8″ x 9-1/4″, 202 pp. Product Code: 1578202019 – ISBN: 1-57820-201-9
CMP Books webiste / store is here: >>
There is a review of the book at the CreativeCow.net site here: >>
http://creativecow.net/articles/onneweer_barend/color_corr/index.html
regards,
JACK
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