Secondaries with the Pros - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 248

Secondaries Use Is Changing
When I first started learning about color correction, the prevailing wisdom was that you
“saved” your secondaries. In other words, you wanted to just use a secondary color cor-
rection for something that really needed it. However, that was the wisdom when additional
secondaries were either nonexistent or came as options at a very high premium. Bob Sliga
and I discussed how this wisdom is changing with products like Apple's Color, which allows
what would have been considered as 16 or more secondaries in a color corrector from the
1990s. According to Sliga, “The secondary in Color is not the same as traditional secondary
in film to tape transfer. You can go back to the days when we didn't really have secondary
color correction, when we could only grab the six vectors and change saturation and hue
and maybe luminance a little bit. That was the typical secondary color correction where
you could isolate a color until DaVinci changed the game in secondary color correction by
isolating a color by using a luminance key or an HSL key or by putting a window around
something—which wasn't traditionally called a secondary, but they called that Power Tiers.
“In Color, the secondary room is not just picking colors. We can use it as eight sepa-
rate levels of full color correction. We're creating a color as opposed to just enhancing it,
and that is how the game has changed. Having eight secondaries—I think I've filled them
up once, where I've run out of room. If you're that far down, either (a) the shot was totally
mis-shot, or (b) the effect you're trying to create was 'you better be paying big money per
hour,' because if you're using all eight windows and secondaries per scene on a feature or
on a commercial, that's a long time for color correction. Does every job need all the com-
plexity? No. But it's good to have the headroom if you need to be able to take something
or push something a different way or a different color. I think the colorist that learns these
tools and is more flexible and thinks outside the box' will be effective longer.”
So, in addition to using the Secondary room as a true secondary, it's also possible to
use the secondaries as “layers” of primary correction, where you don't even bother mak-
ing a qualification before doing adjustments. This allows you to easily enable or disable
the various “layers” as you perfect your grade.
Using a Luma Key to Build Contrast
Bob Sliga shows how to use secondaries to create a unique high-contrast
look using the “football center” scene ( Figure 6.69 ) from Artbeats' Sports
Collection.
In addition to the traditional method of stretching out the tonal range
in primary color correction, it's possible to create even greater contrast by
grading inside and outside of a luminance key.
First Sliga takes us through the traditional method, starting with some
primary-type corrections that Sliga decides to do in a secondary. Sliga
exams the source footage and begins, “If you go to our original picture,
it's balanced out pretty decent. So the primary room would be the basic,