Primary Color Correction: Color Manipulation Tools - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 129

the clipped blues and the midtones are more blue than they should be.
The only way to fix this problem would be to try to lose the blue cast in
the upper midtones by making the whites too warm, then using a second-
ary color correction to either pull all of the saturation out of the clipped
area, or try to balance just the highest whites.
One of the ways we can check to see what the clipping in the blue
channel looks like is to look at another color correction tool in Avid Sym-
phony called Channels, which is similar to After Effects' ability to dis-
play the individual color channels using the controls at the bottom of the
Composition window ( Figure 4.30 ).
After Effects can show you what the individual color channels look
like using the Show Channel and Color Management Settings under the
Main Comp window.
Looking at the individual color channels as black and white images
gives you a good idea of what kind of damage has been done to specific
channels. It is also a good way to see which channel has the worst noise
problems. Often, noise needs to be corrected only in specific channels.
Figures 4.31 , 4.32 , and 4.33 are the red, green, and blue channels,
respectively, of the “chromadumonde_cool” image. You can see that the
green channel is very nicely exposed across all tonal ranges. The red chan-
nel is also fairly evenly exposed—though darker and less contrasty. And
the blue channel is overexposed throughout, with the highlights com-
pletely clipped. On a properly exposed chart, all of these color channels
should look identical because the amount of red, green, and blue in each
of the black, gray, or white chips should be identical. Obviously, the color
chips around the edge of the chart will have different exposures due to
the different amounts of each channel in each chip.
Fig. 4.30 After Effects Show Channel Control.