Three Way Color Corrector in After Effects

After Effects has been dinged over the years for lacking a classic “three-way” color correction tool, like the one found in Discreet products and just about every Non Linear Editor out there. But could it be that AE has actually had one for years, sans the sexy color-wheel UI?

In the Adjust category, there’s an oft-neglected effect called Color Balance. You’ve probably neglected it because its UI is just an unfriendly pile of sliders.

But if you tie those sliders to some Color Control effects using expressions, you can create a visual way to drive Color Balance’s quite decent color correction engine.

Download 3WayCB_01.ffx (4kb .zip file, requires After Effects 6.5)

You create your correction by dialing colors into the Master, Shadow, Midtone and Highlight swatches. If you select the “B” (of HSB) mode in the Adobe Color Picker, you are presented with a sort of “unwrapped” color wheel. If you’re on a Mac, you can elect to use the Apple color picker, which actually sports a color wheel. Either way, you can ignore the brightness of your color selection. The strength of your tinting will come from the saturation of the color.

If you want a solution that doesn't involve a modal dialog, use PowerPicker instead of the Color Control effects. Then you can pick colors right in the Effects Control Window, and get realtime feedback as you scrub your selection.

It ain’t the Discreet Color Corrector, but it ain’t half bad either. Give it a whirl and let us know what you think!

Comparotron2000™:

Before
After

much better

Amazon fixed their description of Mark’s book.

And there was much rejoicing.

Preorder, like, only the best book on compositing ever

Adobe After Effects 6.5 Studio Techniques by Mark Christiansen

Mark has created a truly practical guide to film effects compsiting in the least-expensive and arguably most feature-packed compositing application available. Yours Truly contributed a chapter on training your eye.

There are books that will learn you After Effects, and there are books that claim to learn you film compositing. If you put them all in a blender and let the juices ferment under the heat of a thousand suns, you would have a snifter full of Adobe After Effects 6.5 Studio Techniques.

Preorder now before rabid fans tear my chapter out of all existing copies like the Britney Spears photo spread in Rolling Stone that one time.

Why the hell would you use a visual effects compositing plug-in set to color grade your HD short?

In part so you can make this:

Look like this:

Eric's an old hand at shooting for HD post, and knew well to keep his highlights in control. The raw image from the Varicam practically looks like a scanned film neg.



He then pushed the contrast in eLin, freely clipping highlights — or so it appears. In truth, those pegged values in Renée's arm and the back wall are actually only clipped in the video preview. Eric's Cineon log output preserved the entire dynamic range of the original footage, and his 35mm film print has the nice, smooth rolloff into the extreme highlights that was once thought to be the sole privilidge of film.



Plus, Eric had a great DP and is a hell of a colorist!



The LA Day demo movie covers the process in some detail. Questions? Post them on the eLin forum.



Mad stilz from One Weekend a Month coutesy of Eric Escobar