Setup
Primary Correction provides a quick and easy way to fix the color balance in your video. It can also adjust the color saturation, brightness, and add lighting depth of film. Adjustments made to the Primary Correction will affect your entire video; later sections will describe how to localize your changes to just a certain part of light range of your video.
Unbalanced colors are caused by lighting conditions at the time you shoot the video. For example, a shot might have been illuminated by indoor incandescent lighting - which is "warmer" (more reds and oranges) than outdoor light - or by outdoor light (more blues), or a combination of indoor and outdoor lighting. The result is unbalanced color in your video.
The Primary Correction solves this by letting you point out something in the picture that should be white (or even gray) and it then uses that as a reference point to bring the colors back into proper balance.
Use the color dropper to select a spot in the image that is intended to be white (a piece of paper, a wall, etc.) and turn up the color correction so it does indeed balance out to white, fixing the rest of the picture at the same time. Then, further adjust the image to get the look you want by setting the saturation, brightness and film gamma.
- Use the Pick White color dropper to select an object in the clip that you know is normally gray or white, such as a piece of paper or a white shirt. Try to use an object close to the main subject of the clip. This tells ColorFast what should be white.
- Correction sets the strength of the color correction. 100 sets full correction (enough to make the sampled color genuinely a balanced shade of gray.) 0 sets no correction at all.
- Saturation adjusts the color strength. At 0, the colors remain unchanged. Turn down Saturation to remove color; turn it up to enhance the colors.
- Brightness controls the higher end of the luminance curve without affecting black levels.
- Exposure raises or lowers the overall image luminance.
- Film Gamma recreates the brightness behavior of film. Film tends to have a linear region in the middle, but the highs (brights) and lows (darks) are compressed. The Film Gamma control recreates this by compressing the lights and darks while expanding the mid tones. So, brights are brighter and darks are darker!
Luminance Range allows you to adjust the set points for the Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights of your video.
Adjust the Shadow Threshold control to set which parts of the image are in the low range, then adjust the Highlight Threshold control to set which parts of the image are in the high range. Next, adjust the Blend control to set the Midtones for the image. If desired, adjust the Spread control to blur the Luminance masks.
Skin Preservation allows you to select a skin tone and eliminate it from being affected by the Secondary Correction.
Check the "Enable" box in the Skin Preservation section, use the color picker to select the color of the skin, and select "Skin Mask" from the "Show Mask" dropdown so you can easily see the affect area. Now adjust the Sensitivity and Soften controls to fine-tune the selected area. Then set "Show Mask" to None.
- Color sets the color that is to be ignored during secondary processing.
- Sensitivity sets the sensitivity of the mask. Adjust this to find the best threshold to separate the skin areas from the rest of the image. You might enable the Show Mask option so you can more easily see the affected area.
- Soften softens the edges of the Skin Mask, allowing you to control how smoothly the colors are blended in with the rest of the image.
- Enable sets whether the Skin Mask is enabled.
- Enabling Invert changes the behavior so that only the color selected is affected by the Secondary Processor.
- Set Show Mask to Skin Mask to see the image as a negative mask. This makes it much easier to calibrate the affected area.
Secondary Correction allows you to change the coloring and light behavior of the three light ranges in the image independently.
Choose an image range to work on (Highlights, Midtones, or Shadows). Next, choose a color to tint that image range with using the Pick Tint control. Dial up the Tint to increase the influence of that color. Further adjust the image by setting the Saturation and Level controls.
- The Pick Tint control sets the desired color for tinting, either by choosing from a palette of colors or using the color dropper to pick a color from the video image.
- Tint sets the influence of the color. Tint can be turned up above 0 to increase the color or turned down below 0 to subtract it out.
- Saturation adjusts the color strength. At 0, the colors remain unchanged. Turn down Saturation to remove color; turn it up to enhance the colors.
- Level adjusts the brightness for that image range.
- Enable turns the effect on and off for the selected image range.
Shape Mask creates a user defined region in the picture that will be affected by the Secondary Processor controls.
Turn on the Shape Mask by checking the Enable button. Adjust the position controls to set your shape. Use the Curve control to round the corners, and the Feather control to set the blending between the regions inside and outside the shape.
- The Shape group lets you adjust the four corners of the image.
- Curve sets the roundness of your Shape. With Curve set to 100, your shape will be an oval. With Curve set to 0, your shape will be a rectangle.
- Feather sets the amount of blending between the inner region and the outer region. Turn Feather up to create a soft blend between the two regions. Turn it down for a sharp delineation between regions.
- Setting Show Mask to Shape Mask displays the area outside your region as a negative image. This makes it much easier to define a region using the Shape controls.
- Enabling Invert changes the behavior so that the region outside the shape is affected by the Secondary Processor.
- Enabling Limit Color Mask effectively makes the Shape Mask a "garbage matte" for the Skin Preservation mask. When used this way, anything outside the area defined by the Shape Mask will be ignored when the Skin Preservation color is processed.