Secondary Color Correction Primer - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 191

Fig. 5.40
This image is very washed out, but it also looks like the top of the
image needs to be treated in a much different way than the bottom of
the picture, below the horizon. Normally, you would try to balance the
picture and expand the contrast first in a primary color correction, but I'm
going to take this right to a secondary color correction to make my point.
The first thing to do is to select the grass area with a window of some
sort. I will do this correction in Color, so go into secondaries, enable a sec-
ondary, and enable Vignette. Then choose a square shape and drag it out
and position it so that the top of the resulting rectangle is roughly placed
on the horizon which is slightly off-angle. Color has an angle control that
can be used to precisely align the top of the rectangle with the horizon.
You can also add a slight softness to the rectangle.
For the purpose of this tutorial, we'll address a single frame of the
shot, but the camera does actually tilt up over the course of the shot, so in
a real-life situation, you would need to track the rectangle to follow the
tilt (Color is capable of doing this) or add keyframes in a program that was
not able to track so that the shot's horizon would stay lined up with your
spot correction's “horizon.”
With the grass defined as the inside of the correction ( Figure 5.41 ), you
can adjust the contrast and colors of the grass alone, just as you would
in a normal primary color correction. Originally, I started by trying to use
the hue offset wheels to pull the grass towards green, but when I added a
pretty heavy correction in the master lift, the saturation of my green color
looked really bad. I reset my hue offset wheels and worked on contrast
first. I chose to lower the master lift and slightly lower gamma and barely
raise gain. With the contrast and tone set, I pulled the midtones away
from blue just a little to improve the color of the grass. I also did similar,
very minor corrections to highlights and shadows in the same direction.