Color Correction 201 (page 2)

Style

You can use the Secondary Color Corrector for purposes other than correction. You can isolate colors and enhance them to form effects such as those seen in films like Sin City (2005) and Pleasantville (1998). Though Francis Ford Coppola probably spent tens of thousands of dollars - and that's at early 1980s dollars - to make those Siamese fighting fish the only colored objects in his stylized black-and-white film, Rumble Fish (1983), you can accomplish this with sub-$1,000 software on a sub-$3,000 computer.

In our sky example earlier, where we enriched a dull sky by isolating it and boosting the blues, we could just as easily have transformed it into an orange sky for a surreal dream sequence as in What Dreams May Come (1998) or for an effect like the virtual Mars vacation scenes in Total Recall (1990). By isolating individual hues, we can change them into just about anything we want, right in our own little ol' computers.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, unlike in our Color Correction 101 article, we cannot explain a step-by-step procedure for Secondary Color Correction.

Unlike their similar procedures for the Color Corrector 3-Way tool or filter, each editing platform (Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas, Avid Xpress, etc.) has a very different way to handle Secondary Color Correction. Your user manual most probably has a cryptic explanation on this procedure, or you can search online to find free articles, blog entries and video tutorials for your specific program. Don't be intimidated. It may seem alien at first, maybe even counterintuitive, but once you learn and get used to using the Color Corrector, you may wonder how you ever edited without it.

Contributing editor Morgan Paar is a nomadic producer, shooter and editor, who is currently teaching high school video production.