Adobe After Effects CS4 - Manual (Page 286)

280 USING AFTER EFFECTS CS4
Color
Last updated 12/21/2009
Additional resources for color correction and adjustment
John Dickinson provides visual aids on his Motionworks website that illustrate how to use the Curves and Levels
effects for color adjustments:
• Curves effect diagram on Motionworks website
• Levels effect diagram on Motionworks website
The Rebel CC animation preset is a simple, telecine-style color-correction tool for coloring or grading a movie. This
animation preset uses expressions to control the Levels (Individual Controls) effect. To learn more and download the
animation preset, see
Stu Maschwitz's ProLost blog .
Stu Maschwitz provides a post on his ProLost blog that discusses color correcting for skin tones, with links to some
resources about test setups that show various skin tones on a vectorscope.
Mark Christiansen provides tips and detailed techniques for color correction, color adjustment, and color matching
in the “Color Correction in Adobe After Effects” chapter of
After Effects Studio Techniques on the Peachpit Press
website.
Using histograms to adjust color
A histogram is a representation of the number of pixels at each luminance value in an image. A histogram that has
nonzero values for each luminance value indicates an image that takes advantage of the full tonal range. A histogram
that doesn’t use the full tonal range corresponds to a dull image that lacks contrast.
A common color-correction task is adjusting an image to spread out the pixel values more evenly from left to right on
the histogram, instead of having them bunched up at one end or the other. Applying the Levels effect and adjusting its
Input White and Input Black properties in the histogram is an easy and effective way to accomplish this task for many
images.
Histogram for image that does not use full tonal range
Input sliders moved so that output uses full tonal range