Secondary Color Correction Primer - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 195

I sat in with Pankaj Bajpai at Encore in Los Angeles. Pankaj drives a Lustre, and one of his favorite tools in its
arsenal is Lustre's ease of creating masks and windows. He explains, “I do a lot of masks and a lot of Power Window
type work because so often it is very important to bring that three-dimensionality, because when your pictures feel
three-dimensional, then you almost automatically start to feel like it's real.”
Figure 5.45 gives you an idea of the complexity of the shapes that Bajpai is drawing to get these organic looks.
Fig. 5.45
Another adamant user of these custom shapes for secondary color cor-
rection is veteran Chicago colorist Pete Jannotta, who says, “I always pre-
fer to draw (custom shapes) because even in Da Vinci I don't use a fixed
circle ever anymore. What I like to do is draw the shape and then move it
around so I can see how the light is working. I don't care what the shape
is, but if it's an oval, then it's fixed and I can't control it.”
But the flip side of this control is the cost in time. If you've got time on
your side, then custom shapes are great.
Using Spot Color Correction to Relight
One of the subsets of reasons to use a spot color correction is in the ability
to effectively relight the image in post. This is not to cast aspersions on
the director of photography in any way. They are under the same time
constraints for lighting the scene that we are for grading it in post, so
sometimes what the DP wants to do just doesn't happen on the set.