Hullfish S., Fowler J. Color Correction for Video. Using Desktop Tools to Perfect Your Image

Издательство Focal Press, 2009, -295 pp.Any good communicator will tell you that knowing and understanding your audience are the most important things in communication. The original audience for this book, originally written in 2002, was very easy to define: nearly everyone. That’s because very few people had been exposed to the small array of tools that allowed real color correction power at the desktop level. Avid and Final Cut Pro released their first versions of applications with color correction tools within months after Jaime Fowler and I first signed the deal to write this book. At the time, Avid Symphony was probably the only piece of gear under $250,000 with much color correction power.
Since then, numerous companies have started delivering color correction systems, hardware, software, plug-ins, and workflows. The list of players at this point is extensive. However, in the spirit of the original publication, this book is aimed at an audience who wants to understand how to do good color correction on the desktop. With that said, if you are a beginning colorist or student who aspires to play with the big iron systems, this is also a good starting place for you because the basic concepts are identical. Beginning colorist is a term that can easily be applied to plenty of veteran editors and effects artists. Even if you know how to use the interface of your color application but you don’t always get the results you want as quickly as you would like, this is the book for you.
The difficulty in understanding the audience for this revised edition is that the audience has matured a bit and has been exposed to more options in the last few years. However, it’s difficult to assess every individual reader’s body of knowledge. Even skilled and seasoned professionals probably have something to learn. After the first edition came out, I received plenty of emails from veteran colleagues who learned things about video levels, setting up monitors, and using waveform and vectorscopes that they were amazed that they didn’t know. The book also found a wide following among After Effects users, which was a completely unintended audience.
So to answer the question of the book’s intended audience, let me tell my personal story of learning color correction. I was one of the original beta testers for Avid’s Symphony. In an early release, Symphony included a powerful color correction mode. When I first saw it, it looked intimidating. There were lots of controls that could deliver a huge amount of power, but I had no idea where to start. The instruction manual covered all the basics of what the knobs and buttons did, but I didn’t know what I was looking for in the image itself or how to use the power that had been delivered to me. If that describes you, you should read this book.
If you have ever wondered how you can make your productions look network ready, this book is for you, too. As I learned color correction at the feet of some very talented senior colorists, notably Bob Sliga, the one big take away that I got from my training was that understanding what all the knobs and buttons do is not nearly as important as training your eye to see the deficiencies and strengths of each image and understanding where the image wants you to take it or how far you can push it from its intended direction. This is the origin of the impression that color correction is some unlearnable black art. The breakthrough that this book delivers is that there are several tricks to learning exactly what to look for.
This book is also designed to be product and platform agnostic. In other words, we don’t care what color correction application or NLE you use or on which computer operating system you are running it. The book is based on principles that should be applicable to any gear that can do color correction. Because of the general nature of the book, it is not a substitute for reading the color correction section of your user’s manual for your application. However, one of the criticisms of the original edition that we seek to repair with this edition is the complaint that specific step-by-step instruction was lacking. Therefore, throughout the book we show step-by-step tutorials for a number of applications. I’ll try to hit several of them, but we’ll stick to the ones with the most widespread acceptance and distribution. That includes Final Cut Pro, Apple’s Color, Avid, and Color Finesse (which often ships as an included plug-in with Adobe’s After Effects and Premiere). If you are using an application other than one of those, you should see that the interface that your application uses is probably very similar to these.Getting Started with Color Correction
Analyze This—Your Monitor
Using Scopes as Creative Tools
Other Methods to Analyze Footage
Colorists’ Tools—Primary Color Correction
Secondary Color Correction
Tutorials
Advanced Color Correction Tutorials
The History and Role of the Colorist
Vision and Color Theory
Built-in Software and Plug-in Capabilities