Secondary Color Correction Primer - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 194

On one hand, these custom shapes are very valuable for at least two
reasons. The first is that using squares and circles is obviously fairly lim-
iting when you are trying to isolate a specific portion of the screen. The
other great reason for using custom shapes is that they are much less likely
to be noticed as spot corrections. Obviously you don't want any spot color
correction to be noticed. That is a sure sign that it hasn't been done prop-
erly. But even watching the best of TV spots with a trained eye, you can
see vignetting that has been done by a skilled colorist, if you know what
to look for. But with a custom shape, it is very hard to see even a fairly
extreme spot correction, because the shape is not uniform. This is the same
concept as camouflage in military and hunting use. A camouflaged person
or truck is just as visible as any other person or truck, but the camouflage
pattern works by breaking up the easily defined shapes that humans and
animals are used to identifying as another human being or truck.
Pankaj Bajpai
Pankaj Bajpai is Senior Colorist at Encore in Hollywood. He was instrumental in establishing their file-based workflows
and DI-style approach to grading TV episodes. He has also provided his expertise to AMPAS's ACES/IIF color workflow.
In 15 years as a colorist, Bajpai has graded multiple seasons and various episodes of hit TV series, including
Lie to Me, Carnivale, Sex and the City, Hung, The Beast, In Treatment, Justified, Rome, and The Wire.
Before becoming a colorist, Bajpai worked as a DP on documentary films around the world.
Fig. 5.44 Encore's Pankaj Bajpai at the controls of his Lustre.