Correcting Shots - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 309

At this point, Sliga leaves Color's Secondary room for a foray into the
Color FX room. “Let's do a highlight blur. So we're going to need an alpha
blend, we're going to need a blur, and we'll need a key. So I generally drag
black and white into scale and just adjust the scale creating a highlight
key.” Sliga drags a Blur to the output of the scale node and blurs it, adjusts
the blur, then connects that to the key channel of the alpha blend node.
“Now we have another blur here, and we'll take this blur up big time.
If I drag the blurry image into the light section of the alpha blend, which
is source 2, then press alpha blend, it's going to blur the highlights . But if
we drag it to the other input of the alpha blend node, it'll blur the shadows ”
( Figure 7.74 ).
Fig. 7.74 Apple Color's
ColorFX Room node tree.
Grading with Curves in Primary
As I mentioned earlier in the topic, Terry Curren was one of the few
proponents of using curves, which are now available in Color's Primary
In room. But when I was interviewing colorists for the topic, I was using
Color's predecessor, FinalTouch, which did not have Primary curves.
For this correction, Curren worked out of his suite at Burbank-based
Alpha Dogs on an Avid Symphony Nitris, but you can follow along with
his work method in any application that has curves.
Curren begins by explaining his working setup. “I generally work with
two scopes up. I use a vectorscope laid over a luminance waveform and
then I also have the RGB parade waveform. I go for the black and white