Color Wheels

ColorWheels

From left to right, the first correction tool on the top header is Color Wheels (also known to some as telecine controls). The controls appear when you select and apply the tool to a layer. Controls are divided according to Lift (shadows), Gamma (midrange), and Gain (highlights). These regions can be adjusted using either hue offset wheels (“color wheels”) or RGB sliders. Each has a Master slider to raise or lower the brightness level of that region and a Sat slider to increase or decrease the chroma saturation for that region. The far right slider is an overall Sat control for chroma saturation.

Whether you work with the lift/gamma/gain wheels or sliders, the function is the same. Correction is an offset. If you push the wheel to increase towards the red or you increase the red slider, then it will reduce the complementary colors (the opposite hues). This is visible on a vectorscope.

The lift, gamma, and gain regions are curves that overlap each other with a crossover point between lift (shadows) and gamma (mids), and between gamma (mids) and gain (highlights). At the bottom right corner you will find Saturation Range controls for Shadows and Highlights. Internally these values define the shadow and highlight regions. This in turn controls how much of the image is affected when you adjust one of the individual Sat sliders. A user will rarely, if ever, need to change these.

The last item is a contextual menu with two options: Import CDL and Export CDL. A CDL (color decision list) is a text document containing color values expressed as RGB values for Slope (gain), Offset (lift), Power (gamma), and Saturation. A CDL can be used to exchange primary color data (such as from the Color Wheels layer) between Color Finale 2 and other grading systems that support CDLs. At this point in time, only separate CDLs can be generated from each clip to which Color Finale 2 has been applied. You cannot generate one complete CDL that covers all of the clips in a timeline.


Last modified July 14, 2021