Primary Color Correction: Tonal Range Primer - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 10

your eyes became desensitized. At the start of the day, skin tones would look normal,
but after six or eight hours, you were correcting skin tones oversaturated, like basket-
balls, because your perception has changed. The reason you have the neutral back-
ground is that you keep the same perception all along. You refer to something that is
neutral. Otherwise, if you bathe the area in blue, you're going to compensate for that.
You're going to lose your sensitivity to blue, or red, or warm. And then you become
desensitized to that. If you sit in a yellow room, your pictures are going to end up yel-
low. Or you're going to be constantly fighting what you perceive. So the easiest way to
avoid that is to surround the monitor with something that is neutral and daylight. You
can also take your monitor to black and white to refresh your perspective. Sometimes
I'll use the switcher to put a gray border or a white border around my image to judge
what pure white should look like or pure gray. Sometimes that helps the colorist and
sometimes that helps the client, whose perception is just as important to the process.
If you have an environment that is not neutral, the hardest thing to get right are going
to be the white scenes.
Randy Starnes has been the colorist on Desperate Housewives, Extreme Makeover:
Home Edition, Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman, Touched by an Angel, and others.

Waveform and Vectorscope Displays

Most of the waveform and vectorscope displays that are built in to the
software of desktop applications are barely sufficient for color correction
purposes. These scopes have two things going for them: they're free and
they're convenient. Other than that, there's not much to recommend
them. There are a number of reasons that they do not stand up to a pro-
fessional's needs.
Depending on the specific application, many of the built-in scopes
are not showing you full resolution. Some are designed to only show
every other line or every fourth line of your video image! They also
don't have the full complement of features that are available on an
outboard scope, such as ability to zoom or position the trace to better
evaluate the image. There can also be a problem with lag time between
a correction and that correction being sensed by the scope, because the
amount of computational horsepower that is required to display the
scope is pretty intensive. The main problem with these built-in scopes
for broadcast work is that they have no real relation to the signal that
comes out of the computer, because they're not downstream of the
video output. In the initial release of Color, the scopes inside Color
didn't match the scopes for the exact same footage inside Final Cut
Pro, though this was more of a Quicktime issue. Another serious issue
for efficient color correction is the ease with which you can jump from

D e f i n i t i o n
waveform monitor: A
waveform monitor displays
the amplitude level—
brightness and darkness—
along the vertical axis with
the dark parts of the image
near the bottom and the
brighter parts of the signal
near the top. Technically,
the horizontal axis of the
waveform displays “time,”
but practically speaking,
the horizontal axis of the
waveform corresponds to
the horizontal placement
of picture elements across
the image with no regard
to the vertical placement of
elements in the image.