Color Correction
No skill is as essential for a compositor as the ability to
authoritatively and conclusively take control of color, such
that foreground and background elements seem to inhabit
the same world, shots from a sequence are consistent with
one another, and their overall look matches the artistic
direction of the project.
The compositor, after all, is typically the last one to touch
a shot before it goes into the edit. Inspired, artistic color
work injects life, clarity, and drama into standard (or even
substandard) 3D output, adequately (or even poorly) shot
footage, and fl at, monochromatic stills. It draws the audience’s
attention where it belongs, never causing them to
think about the compositing at all.
Good compositors are credited with possessing a “good
eye,” but color matching is a skill that you can practice
and refi ne even if you have no feel for adjusting images—
indeed, even if you consider yourself color blind.
And despite the new color tools that appear each year to
refi ne your ability to dial in color, for color matching in
After Effects, three color correction tools allow you to do
most of the heavy lifting: Levels, Curves, and Hue/Saturation
(and because Levels and Curves overlap in their
functionality, in many cases you’re just choosing one or
two of the three). These endure (from the earliest days of
Photoshop) because they are stable and fast, and they will
get the job done every time—just learn how to use them,
and keep practicing.A skeptic might ask
. Why these old tools with so many cool newer ones?
. Why not use Brightness & Contrast to adjust, you know,
brightness and contrast, or Shadow and Highlight if
that’s what needs adjustment?
. What do you mean I can adjust Levels even if I’m color
blind?
This chapter holds the answers to these questions and
many more. First, we’ll look at optimizing a given image
using these tools, and then we’ll move into matching a
foreground layer to the optimized background, balancing
the colors. The goal is to eliminate the need to hack
at color work and to build skills that eliminate a lot of the
guesswork.
This chapter introduces topics that resound throughout
the rest of the book. Chapter 11 deals specifi cally with
HDR color, and then Chapter 12 focuses on specifi c light
and color scenarios, while the rest of Section III describes
how to create specifi c types of effects shots.
