Primary Color Correction: Color Manipulation Tools - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 116

dial in the level of the midtones watching our hero—facing us in the booth—
so that we have detail in his clothing, but keeping skin tones natural. Also,
keep an eye on the other elements of the image so that things like the guy at
the counter or the bread in the foreground don't get too much visual atten-
tion by lifting the gamma too much. My main concern in determining that
level is watching the hero's skin tones and shadow detail ( Figure 4.6 ).
Angle of Attack
Terry Curren from Alpha Dogs in Burbank, California, has a rule of thumb for balancing images on the RGB Parade
waveform: “Even though the whites and the blacks end up even, the mids have this little angle to them with slightly
higher reds, mid greens, and lower blues.” Terry demonstrated this by holding a pen up to his RGB Parade scope, show-
ing about a 15-degree angle from the midtone blue cell to the midtone red cell, with the green midtone perfectly in
between. The angle of the pen was similar to the red line showing the same angle in the gammas on this RGB Wave-
form display ( Figure 4.8 ) . Obviously, there are times when the midtones have one of the other channels that is more
dominant than in this example, but as we went through correction after correction, this angle on the midtones with
reds above greens above blues seemed to be the most common by far.
This angle makes sense when you think about how much skin tone there is in the midrange of most of our
images. Skin tones are reddish-yellow. Yellow is higher red and green than blue. And a warmer, redder yellow tone
would be slightly more red than that.
Fig. 4.8