Achieving Perfect Color and Skin Tones in FCP X, Part II
In the second part of this tutorial, we color correct a shot taken with a daylight balanced LED light. The image is already looking pretty good straight out of the camera, and the differences might be too subtle to see given that the images uploaded to WordPress are small and much darker than the originals. For that reason, I’ve added a short clip at the end of this post.
2. SOOC with waveform.3. Corrected Exposure.4. After dropping the Draw Mask effect on the clip, isolating the chart and examining the RGB parade, we see that highlights, midtones and shadows line up and there is a dot in the middle of the vectorscope, indicating good white balance.5. Having reset the mask, we draw a rectangle around the color squares of the Colorchecker, and boost saturation. Looking at the vectorscope, we see there is a color shift.6. Let’s open the color tab and select hue/saturation curves. We then click on the yellow, red, green, magenta, blue, and cyan color chips on the chart.7. Holding down on the Shift key, we drag each of the hues up and down until all six colors are lined up on the vectorscope.8. After unselecting the mask and removing added saturation.9. Lastly, because the face looks a tad red, we go back and, using the hue/saturation curves, reduce the red channel a touch. That was easy!
