Primary Color Correction: Tonal Range Primer - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 27

or not unless you adjust the focus ring a little bit in each direction, then
settle in on the proper focus. Doing color correction is similar. You need
to see how far you can push an image and when you haven't pushed it
far enough.
The black levels can actually come down a little lower in the red and
green channels, but we'll get to those kinds of adjustments in another tuto-
rial. I chose to stop when the blue channel reached the bottom because
I didn't want to clip or crush the blue shadows. Also, I was watching the
detail area in the dark portions of the eyes, and that's as far as I could go
before I started to lose details in the eyes.
Setting Highlights
With the black levels set, turn your attention to the highlights or gain con-
trols. You can see from the waveform that the sky, especially on the right
side, is clipped ( Figure 1.25 ) . This clipping is evident from the sharp white
line at the top of the right side of the waveform display. It's never a good
thing to see this kind of clipping, but it is very common in this kind of
scenario of an interview shot outside with the sky in the shot. Trying to
“unclip” this is not worth our time at the moment, so all we really want to
do is set our gain control to get that clipped part of the sky to be the maxi-
mum legal level. We also want to use our “focusing” analogy to see if we can
pull the highlights down to possibly eliminate the clipping. The clipping may
be something that is fixable. You don't know until you try to get rid of it. If
Fig. 1.25 The thin, hard white line at the top of the waveform display—indicated by the black arrow on
the left side of the figure—shows where clipping of the highlights has occurred.