14 Chapter 1 Color Correction Basics
The Fundamentals
Every program requires you to take, at the very least, the following steps. With practice,
most of these can be accomplished using the primary color correction tools (for more
information, see Chapter 9, “Primary In,” on page 163).
 Making sure that key elements in your program look the way they should: Every scene of
your program has key elements that are the main focus of the viewer. In a narrative
or documentary video, the focus is probably on the individuals within each shot. In a
commercial, the key element is undoubtedly the product (for example the label of a
bottle or the color of a car). Regardless of what these key elements are, chances are
you or your audience will have certain expectations of what they should look like,
and it’s your job to make the colors in the program match what was originally shot.
When working with shots of people, one of the guiding principles of color correction
is to make sure that their skin tones in the program look the same as (or better than)
in real life. Regardless of ethnicity or complexion, the hues of human skin tones,
when measured objectively on a Vectorscope, fall along a fairly narrow range
(although the saturation and brightness vary). Color gives you the tools to make
whatever adjustments are necessary to ensure that the skin tones of people in your
final edited piece look the way they should.
 Correcting errors in color balance and exposure: Frequently, images that are acquired
digitally (whether shot on analog or digital video, or transferred from film) don’t have
optimal exposure or color balance to begin with. For example, many camcorders and
digital cinema cameras deliberately record blacks that aren’t quite at 0 percent in
order to avoid the inadvertent crushing of data unnecessarily.
Furthermore, accidents can happen in any shoot. For example, the crew may not
have had the correctly balanced film stock for the conditions in which they were
shooting, or someone may have forgotten to white balance the video camera before
shooting an interview in an office lit with fluorescent lights, resulting in footage with
a greenish tinge. Color makes it easy to fix these kinds of mistakes.
 Balancing all the shots in a scene to match: Most edited programs incorporate footage
from a variety of sources, shot in multiple locations over the course of many days,
weeks, or months of production. Even with the most skilled lighting and camera
crews, differences in color and exposure are bound to occur, sometimes within shots
meant to be combined into a single scene.
When edited together, these changes in color and lighting can make individual shots
stand out, making the editing appear uneven. With careful color correction, all the
different shots that make up a scene can be balanced to match one another so that
they all look as if they’re happening at the same time and in the same place, with the
same lighting. This is commonly referred to as scene-to-scene color correction.