Log Wheels

Visually, this tool resembles Color Wheels. There are three colour wheels — Shadows, Midtones and Highlights. Under each of these is a brightness slider. The fourth wheel, offset, affects the entire range of highlights. As with the Color Wheels tool, when you drag the point towards a certain colour, the shadows, midtones, highlights, or the entire brightness range moves toward that colour. But, as the name implies, Log Wheels is designed to work with log footage.

For best results the Log Wheels layer is placed at the bottom of the layer stack before applying any layer that converts the log footage to a video space such as rec. 709.

When using Log Wheels, it is important to leave the colour profile of the footage unchanged in the colour management section of the inspector panel, and to instead leave all the adjustments to the layers.

Now, after applying the LUT and with the help of Log Wheels, we have a lot of flexibility for adjustments. Notice the smooth effect of the tool on the image brightness over the entire extended range of the log image. At the bottom, you can set the inflection point between shadows and midtones, and between midtones and highlights.

This Log Wheels workflow is sometimes indispensable at the stage of creating a primary colour correction.