Adding Photographic Touches in Post-production - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 338

Final color corrections
It's time now to move on to our final color correction tweaks. Essentially, all we need
to do now is add a little more life to the image by boosting the contrast range a little as
well as perhaps adding a bit more life to the colors. To do that, we are going to use a
very powerful color-grading plugin that ships as part of After Effects, mainly because
the options we will use here have very obvious equivalents available in Photoshop
also.
To apply the effect we want here, the first thing we will do is add a new adjustment
layer to our composition by performing the following steps:
1. Come up to the Layers menu at the top of the After Effects UI and choose
Adjustment Layer under New , moving it to the top of the layer stack (if it
isn't already there).
2. To keep things neat, let's right-click on the layer and descriptively rename it
Color Finesse .
3. Over in the Effects & Presets panel, type the words color fin , which will
bring up the Synthetic Apertures SA Color Finesse 3 plugin.
4. Apply this effect to the Adjustment Layer we have just created by dragging it
onto it.
5. In the Effect Controls panel, twirl open the Simplified Interface rollout, and
then close all other rollouts except for HSL and Master .
Now, while we could tweak away to our heart's content with the Highlights , Midtone ,
and Shadow controls, all we will do here is make some slight but nevertheless very
effective alterations to the Master controls. In that rollout then, let's perform the fol-
lowing step:
1. Set Vibrance to a value of 10 ; set Contrast to 20 ; and set the overall RGB
Gain to 1.1 .