Color Timing Effects

Color Timing Effects

Digital tools can of course go far beyond what is possible
with lens fi lters. The industry standard tools rely on a
three-way color corrector, which allows you to tint the image
in three basic luminance ranges—highlights, midtones,
and shadows—adjusting each separately via wheels which
control hue and brightness.
Colorista from Red Giant is a three-way color corrector
that opens the door to coloring footage the way it would
be done with a feature fi lm D.I. grade. Third-party plug-ins
are generally considered beyond the scope of this book,
and colorist work based on three-way color correction has
merited whole books and courses of its own, but this plugin
opens the door to grading primary and secondary colors
like a pro.
A primary grade might involve injecting unexpected hues
into each range: blue shadows, pink highlights, green

midtones. The secondary grade then isolates an area of the
scene—often faces or other dramatically key elements—
and determines how their color and contrast complements
the scene as a whole.
The grade is then applied across several shots in what is
traditionally called the color timing process—literally, making
color consistent across time, which typically involves
much more than simply applying the same adjustment to
every shot. You can use the techniques described here and
in Section II to fi rst balance a shot, then add its color look,
fi nally bringing out any key exceptional details; then voila,
you are a colorist.