AE Toolbox 1: Color Correction tutorials

Hi there. Whether you've gotten here through a generic site search or through this thread, welcome.

In this thread, you'll find some of the color (or, if you prefer, colour) correction tutorials I've stumbled across  on various sites that I have found to be, or hope to find to be, most useful. I hope they help you too!

To kick things off, here is a tutorial by Hollywood professional Stu Maschwitz.

It's one of the cooler tutorials out there about color correction, in this case recreating the looks of Transformers, Terminator: Salvation, Where the Wild Things Are, and the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123. It uses Red Giant Software's Magic Bullet Looks, since it's by the guy who essentially created it, but it's also got some very good rules of thumb that may come in handy for creating your own looks, whether or not you have Magic Bullet:

Creating a Summer Blockbuster Film Look

Screencaps:

Here's a two-part tutorial by danonabouncycastle on advanced color correction techniques using built-in After Effects plugins.

It's a very useful tutorial for many different purposes, since it goes over masking, blurs, and lens flares, among other techniques to help create and sell the shot.

It's also been very influential in my own color correction work because of its use (especially in Part 2) of hue/saturation and photo filters.

I especially recommend photo filters for anyone trying to recreate an old-school film look; they've been invaluable in my attempts to recreate/emulate Douglas Slocombe's work on the original Indy movies. A (real) photo filter is essentially a piece of colored material (usually glass) that comes between what's being filmed and the camera lens. Different filters provide different effects. When I'm trying to turn Janusz Kaminski's palette into a Slocombe palette, the first thing I do is add a photo filter; sometimes, I stack two or three different ones.


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here are some further tuts. all of the footage we deal with has already been color corrected so this won't pertain most of you.
But if you want to dabble here are some tips when Cc:
1) look away often from your screen and look at other items in your room because YOUR EYES WILL ADJUST!
2) no sunlight in the room. and no changing lights sources.

The following tuts are by Andrew Devies and these are proper introduction level Cc tuts using a single color corrector effect applied to the entire image.
There are tools to help Cc and one of the most important ones is
THE VECTORSCOPE.

We all have different editing systems so take what you can from the next tuts which relate to premier pro.
Color Correction 1: Brightness & Contrast
Color Correction 2: Primary Colour Correction
Color Correction 3: Vignette Techniques
Color Correction 4: Secondary Colour Correction
and here are some for AE.
Primary Color Correction in After Effects

Secondary Color Correction in After Effects

Thanks, Jorge! Was just about to post the vectorscope one, but you beat me to it.

Would you mind providing a little more detail about your links, such as who they are by and why you find them useful? I'd like to keep the links we post as informative and easily searchable as possible. Cheers!


ETA: Thanks for the edits!

A tutorial I would like to see, which will surely help faneditors on this site, is matching the color of one clip with another. I'm working on inserting deleted scenes into a movie, and the deleted scenes have not been color corrected at all, which means I have to manually match the extended clips against the finished film. I find that somewhat challenging, and I wish there was something like Photoshop's "match color" function...

That's a very good idea, Cactus. It's something I think a lot of people could benefit from. I'm not sure I've found a really good one for that yet, but I'll dig through my archives and see what I can come up with.

Cactus said:

A tutorial I would like to see, which will surely help faneditors on this site, is matching the color of one clip with another. I'm working on inserting deleted scenes into a movie, and the deleted scenes have not been color corrected at all, which means I have to manually match the extended clips against the finished film. I find that somewhat challenging, and I wish there was something like Photoshop's "match color" function...

Click to expand...

watch THE VECTORSCOPE tut. its all about identifying color and its representation on the scope. once you know what your looking for in one clip you just apply it to the new clip. using the tools makes it easier to match. that tut has it.
So the process starts with the footage. try to find scenes that are similar. if you are matching a WS then find a similar WS in the original scene. then the next step is one of jumping from original clip to new clip and checking the values on the scope and modifying the new clip to match the original clip.
When i do Cc I start by matching the white levels and the black levels. then the chroma and last the hue.
There is a tool like the vectorscope for the white and black levels. Its called THE YC WAVEFORM and Andrew Devies has an excellent tut on it for Premier pro.
And here's one for After Effects WAVEFORM MONITORS

And this other tut breaks the process down nicely. Once again it's using AE but the process is what to learn from.
Color Correction in Adobe After Effects by Mark Christiansen.

This one is a great tutorial: combining PHOTOSHOP and AFTER EFFECTS on video clips.
http://library.creativecow.net/articles/harrington_richard/Film-Look-PS/video-tutorial by Richard Harrington.

Nice! Thanks for this one, Jorge. Rich Harrington almost always has great tutorials, but this one had eluded me. If anyone is interested in doing more with video in Photoshop, I highly recommend checking out his other tutorials on Creative Cow and/or his Photoshop for Video blog.

Are there any tutorials people would recommend to do this in Vegas ?

The Magic Bullet suite is also available for Sony Vegas. So the tutorials for After Effects that are geared at Magic Bullet, are also applicable to Vegas.

Right you are, throw.

And on the subject of both color correction and Magic Bullet, AETuts+ is doing a theme week on color correction , also known as color grading. If you're interested in potentially winning a license to Magic Bullet's very cool Colorista II, be sure to click on the above link and enter the contest. The tutorials look like they're going to be pretty cool, too, starting with one on Color Finesse, which ships with AE CS4 and above.