Apple Final Cut Pro 6 - Manual (Page 1376)

Chapter 27 Color Correction 591
III
14 Drag the Saturation slider to increase or decrease the saturation.
Be careful when you do this. A common mistake beginners make is to oversaturate
shots to make them look “better.” Although a highly saturated look is sometimes
appropriate, less saturation may actually improve the look of your footage. This is
especially true if you have a camcorder with artificially vivid color.
In this example, the corrections applied so far have caused the image to be slightly
oversaturated. This is especially apparent in the red third of the RGB Parade scope, in
the Video Scopes tab.
Note: As always, be careful to make adjustments to saturation only while looking at a
properly calibrated broadcast monitor. It can be very tempting to mistakenly
oversaturate the colors of your clip based on the way video looks on a computer
display. It’s a good idea to enable the Excess Chroma option (in the Range Check
submenu of the View menu) to keep yourself from inadvertently setting illegal chroma
levels by boosting the saturation too high.
Before adjusting
the saturation
After adjusting the
saturation, red levels
are slightly reduced.