Seeing as I'm going to serve as the role of editor during level 6 I thought it would be important to start to better understand color correction. Before moving onto anything more complex such as color grading, here is a step by step guide to correcting skin tones, an element of a scene I would consider to be most important.
Seeing as Final Cut Pro has an adequent color correction tool built in, its this that I'm going to be using. To find it you must go into effects, video filters, color correction and then colour corrector 3-way.
Next, look for a black and a white point in the shot if possible and using the eye dropper tool click on the appropriate points in the frame. Clicking on something that should be white will adjust the coloring of the whole shot so that the whites are nearer pure white. Clicking on something black will do the same but for the blacks.
Following this, going on personal preference and depending on the quality of the light, it might be necessary to slide the mids a little bit towards the red. This will naturally increase the subjects skin tone, preventing it from looking washed out.
Again, depending on the lighting used in the scene, its time to adjust the brightness of the blacks, mids and whites. Like the increasing of reds in the mids, this is subjective to your intented 'look' for the scene. This is what my colour 3-way looks like at this point. As you can see the adjustments are very slight.
Now you want to crop the image to that only skin tones are visible. To do this cycle through ther wireframe modes (W) so that the corners of a frame can be seen. Next, press 'C' to select the crop tool and drag the corners of the frame to crop around some skin tone.
Once the image is cropped go to tools and bring up the color scopes. These scopes are graphical representations of the colour in any given shot and can be very useful once you know how to read them. There are four types of graphs; waveform monitor, vectorsope, histogram and RGB parade. For this task you want to select the vectorscope. Looking at the vectorscope a small cluster of color will be visible, there will also be a straight line, in this case this line is the skin tone line and represents the ideal colour for that particular scene. To move the cluster of color closer to the line and therefore closer to the ideal color, tweak the mids towards the required color until the cluster sits on top of the line.
Once your happy, go to the motion tab and click the reset button for crop to remove the crop you just applied. The skin tone should now be properly colour corrected and you can move on to the next scene.
Below is a before and after of the same clip. Obviously this isn't the finished image, once every shot has been corrected you can then begin grading it to give it a specific 'look'.
The good thing about this correction is that so long as the lighting doesn't change, regardless of who comes in and out of the scene their skin tones will be perfect. To copy the attributes you applied to one clip to another clip simply go into the colour 3-way tab and drag it (using the hand icon) onto the desired clip. Just to be sure that the tones are correct on the new clip, crop into the skin, look at the vectorscop and check that the cluster is on the the line. If yes, the tone is fine, if not, once again adjust the mids until it is.
Seeing as Final Cut Pro has an adequent color correction tool built in, its this that I'm going to be using. To find it you must go into effects, video filters, color correction and then colour corrector 3-way.
Following this, going on personal preference and depending on the quality of the light, it might be necessary to slide the mids a little bit towards the red. This will naturally increase the subjects skin tone, preventing it from looking washed out.
Again, depending on the lighting used in the scene, its time to adjust the brightness of the blacks, mids and whites. Like the increasing of reds in the mids, this is subjective to your intented 'look' for the scene. This is what my colour 3-way looks like at this point. As you can see the adjustments are very slight.
Now you want to crop the image to that only skin tones are visible. To do this cycle through ther wireframe modes (W) so that the corners of a frame can be seen. Next, press 'C' to select the crop tool and drag the corners of the frame to crop around some skin tone.
Once the image is cropped go to tools and bring up the color scopes. These scopes are graphical representations of the colour in any given shot and can be very useful once you know how to read them. There are four types of graphs; waveform monitor, vectorsope, histogram and RGB parade. For this task you want to select the vectorscope. Looking at the vectorscope a small cluster of color will be visible, there will also be a straight line, in this case this line is the skin tone line and represents the ideal colour for that particular scene. To move the cluster of color closer to the line and therefore closer to the ideal color, tweak the mids towards the required color until the cluster sits on top of the line.
Once your happy, go to the motion tab and click the reset button for crop to remove the crop you just applied. The skin tone should now be properly colour corrected and you can move on to the next scene.
Below is a before and after of the same clip. Obviously this isn't the finished image, once every shot has been corrected you can then begin grading it to give it a specific 'look'.
 |
| Before |
 |
| After |
The good thing about this correction is that so long as the lighting doesn't change, regardless of who comes in and out of the scene their skin tones will be perfect. To copy the attributes you applied to one clip to another clip simply go into the colour 3-way tab and drag it (using the hand icon) onto the desired clip. Just to be sure that the tones are correct on the new clip, crop into the skin, look at the vectorscop and check that the cluster is on the the line. If yes, the tone is fine, if not, once again adjust the mids until it is.
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