Primary Color Correction: Tonal Correction Tools - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 35

CHAPTER 2
Primary Color Correction: Tonal
Correction Tools
This chapter describes the tonal correction tools available in several of the
applications and plug-ins for doing color correction. It also describes their
respective strengths and weaknesses.
Main Tools for Tonal Corrections
Across the range of products, there are lots of tools. Some of them help to
alter tonal range; some are more commonly used to control the “color”
of the image, generically meaning that they'd be used to control hue
and saturation, though they'd also have some effect on the tonal range
as well.
For tonal corrections, almost every application that has color
correction abilities has some slider or numerical controls to adjust
brightness, contrast, black level (sometimes also called lift, shadows,
pedestal, blacks, or setup, as mentioned in Chapter 1 ) , and gamma.
Some applications may also include numerous sliders and numeri-
cal entry windows for various tweaks to the gamma, including knee,
shoulder, softness, and the width or specific range of each of these
gamma adjustments.
In addition to the typical sliders controls—which are sometimes
controllable by knobs or dials on an external manual interface like
those made by Tangent Devices ( Figure 2.1 ), JLCooper, and Avid—
some applications also give you tonal control via the manipulation of
histograms, which some applications call Levels. Most of these Level
controls allow you to adjust the output level, which is a fairly intuitive
thing to do, but some also include the ability to adjust the actual input
Levels using a histogram, which will work the reverse of the way you
would think.
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