Primary Color Correction: Tonal Range Primer - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 9

Fig. 1.7 The GUI for DaVinci Resolve is dark and essentially colorless.

vectorscope. Most colorists try to grade using waveform or vectorscopes
that have a neutral trace and graticule color instead of the traditional
green.
This obsession with surrounding environment used to include the
option to turn off the bright white Mac menu bar at the top of the mon-
itor when using Color (then FinalTouch). Color and some other color
correction software applications, such as Avid Symphony, go so far as
to allow the user to customize the application's graphical user interface
(GUI) colors to be darker and less saturated. A look at the GUI for DaVinci
Resolve makes this clear ( Figure 1.7 ) .

D e f i n i t i o n
GUI: Graphical user inter-
face. Basically, the screen
that you see when working
in an application that
allows you to interact with
the program and execute
commands ( Figure 1.7 ).

Surround Environment

Interview with Randy Starnes
To relate how important the surround is, when I first started, we worked in a room that
was designed to resemble the living room, and the thought was, “You're going to watch
television in an environment similar to this, so let's color grade in this environment. The
monitor was set in a bookcase. It was a warmly lit room with a desk lamp, overhead
tungsten lights. A beautiful room, very comfortable—it was like a den, a gentlemen's
smoking room. And I think in those days, we even smoked in the rooms. The longer you
would color correct something, the more red you would put into the pictures because