Secondary Color Correction Primer - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 162

Fig. 5.6 Avid Symphony's Secondary color correction tab.

Fig. 5.7 IRIDAS's SpeedGrade DI Secondary correction mode. IRIDAS has been purchased by Adobe. Plans for integration into Adobe
products or as a standalone Adobe color corrector were not known at time of publication.

I briefly touched on this issue at the end of the previous chapter, but
it could easily be argued that this new effects capability belongs in a dis-
cussion of secondary correction instead of primaries. Where it belongs
depends on whether you feel that “primary color correction” is a work-
flow term. If “primary” and “secondary” simply define logical steps in a
workflow, then effects work is decidedly in the secondary category. On the
other hand, if you regard primary color correction as global corrections to
the image and secondary corrections as qualified or targeted corrections
to a portion of the image, then effects is probably a primary correction, as
many of these filters and effects are applied to the entire image. To many
colorists, it is not a distinction that even needs to be made. Everything is
simply a tool and categorization is not necessary.

D e f i n i t i o n
secondaries: Short-
hand for secondary color
corrections. The plural is
often used because most
applications allow you to
have multiple second-
ary color corrections—
secondaries—on a single
image.

The Purpose of Secondary Correction

In nearly every demo of a color correction application or NLE with color
correction capabilities, there is a point in which they turn a car or a shirt
or a product package a different color using secondaries.
When I first started color correcting, I rarely used secondaries
because I didn't find myself correcting car commercials in which they
filmed a car with the wrong color. I soon learned that serious colorists