Primary Color Correction: Tonal Range Primer - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 24

that there is probably some clipping of the highlights in the sky area, but
there should be plenty of detail available in the rest of the image. The
blacks are certainly not crushed because very little of the waveform trace
is below 20IRE.
The standard composite waveform monitor (top right quadrant)
An experienced colorist would actually tackle this color cast in the
blacks at the same time, but we're going to break this task down into
its components.
shows that there is a small area in the middle of the image that appears
to be almost on the 0IRE line where black should be, but most of the
rest of the image doesn't reach all the way down to black (0IRE); see
Figure 1.22 .
Looking at the YRGB Parade waveform (top left quadrant) shows that
really nothing is hitting black except a small portion in the middle of the
blue cell. This indicates that there really isn't a nice rich black anywhere in
the picture and that the black balance has a heavy blue cast to it. We'll deal
with the blue cast in the next chapter. For now our goal is to spread the tonal
range, focusing on bringing the black level down to the proper level first.
An experienced colorist would actually tackle this color cast in the blacks
at the same time, but we're going to break this task down into its compo-
nents. Generally speaking, though, we wouldn't want to pull the overall
blacks down on this image very much because we'll end up crushing the
blacks in the blue channel while trying to bring down the overall level. That
will mean we'll lose some detail there and cause some color problems.
So far we've used three methods to look at the black level in this
image: we viewed the actual image on a broadcast monitor, we viewed a
composite waveform display, and we viewed a YRGB waveform display.
You'll learn more ways to analyze the image later in the topic. Some of
these methods have the widespread support of professional colorists; oth-
ers are still gaining acceptance as the tools evolve.
Now that we have analyzed the image, it is time to actually do some-
thing to it. To affect the black levels, we are going to look at a few tools
common to many of these applications. I will not show all of the tools
from all of the applications, but I'll show you a broad array of tools that
are available across the spectrum of applications. Your application may
not have all of these tools. But you should be able to find one or two of
them that look familiar, even if the specific tool is from a different applica-
tion. That's all you'll need.
Often, when I'm teaching color correction, I tell the story of my martial
arts training. I never got very far in the art that I studied—Hapkido—but
I learned a lot of great lessons. One of the things that we did in Hapkido