Correcting Shots - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 314

“So this is why I'm in curves so much. For me, I want to bring out the
gamma in this to get more life in the picture—make it pop more. Now,
there is a lot of blue in this. Of course, it's a blue sky, but there's also a
lot of blue in the blacks, too,” he demonstrates, pointing to the bottom
of the RGB parade. “The red black is down there, the green is a little
higher, and the blue is up here. Generally, I see the gammas weighted the
opposite way,” he says, demonstrating the angle again. “But right now it's
weighted this way,” he comments, showing that the angle is the opposite
of the way he wants it.
“You can tell by looking at it that it's a very blue picture. So basically,
what I've done is this: I've brought up the gamma, I pulled some blue
out, and I've added a little red,” moving the high/mid blues down on the
curve and the high/mid reds up barely. “Then, if this was a commercial,
they'd probably want the sky to pop more, so this is where the secondar-
ies would come in for me, in the skies, to bring them out more. Just drive
the sky more blue while holding blue out of the clouds. That's where I
really find myself using the secondaries the most—on skies. Sky looks
great like this as a dark blue, but usually it's much brighter. So if you can
grab it and bring the luminance down on it without affecting the rest of
the picture, that's really nice” ( Figures 7.81 and 7.82 ).
Curren does another correction of some Randy Riesen footage with
curves in Symphony ( Figures 7.83 and 7.84 ) .
“Again, I'm going in to pull up gamma,” he says as he uses the mas-
ter curve about one-third up from the bottom. “I'm going to bring the
highs down lower because they're clipped anyway. I find when they're
already clipped, I like to get them down below 100IRE. It seems to not
be as offensive. Obviously, the picture is blue, but I can see, looking at
the bottom of the RGB Parade, that both the green and blue are much
higher. So in the reds I can bring up the gamma and I can bring both
the blue and the green down in the blacks. Basically, I've pulled all
the blue cast out of it. But you might not want that, because this is a
downtown city, which is always kind of blue in the middle of the day,
because you never see the sun until it's directly overhead. Again, this
all depends on what was wrapped around it. Left to my own devices,
this is where I would go, because it's the closest to normal,” Curren
concludes ( Figures 7.85 and 7.86 ) .