Secondaries with the Pros - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 205

CHAPTER 6

Secondaries with the Pros

In the earlier chapters, we broke up color correction into various compo-
nents or tasks, which makes sense when you are trying to learn some-
thing. In reality, these tasks are not performed in isolation, but in a more
all-encompassing, holistic approach that includes revising work that was
already done and fixing issues that actually developed throughout the color
correction process.
Because of that, the following chapters, which are led mostly by our
expert panel of colorists, will have a primary focus—such as secondary
correction, or look creation—but will also include other elements—such as
primary correction—or may jump into other elements of the correction,
because that's how the colorists actually worked on the images and to
break the tasks up like in the previous chapters would be to take their
entire thought process out of context.
I organized this chapter into two basic secondary concepts that we
outlined in the previous chapter:

1. Vignettes (or spot corrections or windows)

N o t e
Something to keep in mind
as you see where each col-
orist took an image is that
they were asked to be fairly
self-directed in what they
thought the image should
look like. This instruction
is fairly unusual for a
colorist, as a director of
photography or director or
producer is usually guiding
the session and providing
the colorist with context
for the shot or a vision that
had been developed prior
to the shoot.

2. Vector and luma qualifications (based on HSL values)

Both of these methods actually create mattes, inside of which the sec-
ondary correction is done.

Almost every colorist in this topic used vignettes in their work, but
many of them seemed almost a little embarrassed that they used them.

Vignettes

One of the methods of secondary color correction is vignetting or spot
color correction. In a DaVinci suite, it is called Power Windows. Whatever

205