- [Ashley] With auto color correction,

there are two basic ways that adjustments are made:

One is based on contrast,

which means that black and white levels are set

based on what the software deems to be

the darkest and lightest parts of the image.

And the other is based on color balance,

where it measures the levels of red, green, and blue,

in the image,

and then tries to remove those obvious color casts.

Automatic methods are often great ways

to get a good head start on the color correction process.

But many times,

you'll need to manually tweak things a little further.

Let's talk about why this is.

First, I want to look at contrast.

Here's the luma waveform scope.

When the software auto corrects,

it typically measures the luma of the image,

and it generally sets the lightest part of the image,

at, or approaching video white.

And it sets the darkest part of the image

at, or approaching video black.

And sometimes this works great.

But other times,

you can probably imagine that you can run into some issues,

mainly if your image

doesn't have true white or black values.

An automatic correction

can produce some unrealistic or overly dramatic results.

In other words,

automatic corrections aren't usually a great solution

when there aren't clear contrast markers in the image.

Now let's talk

about how auto correction approaches color balance.

If we look at our RGB parade,

we know that it measures

the red, green, and blue color channels.

When the software auto corrects the color,

it tries to align the channels across the board.

Again, sometimes this works out great.

But you can probably see the issues

with this method as well.

If the image has an overall natural or intended color cast,

automatic corrections can neutralize desired colors,

and incorrectly add in complimentary colors.

Bottom line:

neutralizing a color cast is not always desired.

But if you use automatic controls

to assist you in the process,

and you know when to move to manual methods

to take over, the automatic controls can be a great help.

All right,

let's try out some automatic color correction methods.

I have all three of my scopes up,

so make sure those are all checked.

And I want to start by showing you

a legacy auto color correction effect

that was pretty aggressive,

and usually pretty accurate.

Legacy means that it's on its way out,

so don't get attached to it.

But I'm going to come to my effects.

And then I'm just going to type in auto,

and you can see under obsolete,

we've got auto color, auto contrast, auto levels.

I'm going to just drag auto contrast onto this first clip,

and watch what happens to my luma wave form.

You should see the darkest values go to zero,

and the lightest values go to a hundred.

All right.

And that's exactly what happened.

And you see that it's looking a lot better.

And now if I drop on auto color,

take a look at the RGB parade.

You should see those channels align pretty well.

So a great starting place.

It did not affect saturation.

So I would always need to come in,

and then just bump up my saturation,

and maybe make a few more tweaks.

But as you can see, not too bad.

However, those are on the way out, as I said,

so I'm going to delete those.

And then I'm going to come over to my Lumatri Color tool set,

and let's explore some of the auto correction tools

within here.

There are basically two that I'm going to call out,

within the basic correction category.

We have the white balance selector,

and we have this auto button.

The white balance selector is going to remove color casts,

and the auto button

is going to perform an auto contrast adjustment.

Let me go to my Lumatri scopes.

And the order of operations here,

normally I correct contrast,

and then remove color casts.

But the way this works in Lumatri color tool set

is top down.

So it processes my chroma adjustments first,

and then my tonal adjustments.

So for an auto correction,

I am going to choose the white balance selector first.

So I'm just going to click on this eyedropper.

And then this is where you tell the software

what is white,

so it can adjust everything else accordingly.

And there isn't too much, that's, you know,

pure white in this image.

So I'm going to select her teeth.

And when I do this,

go ahead and look at the RGB parade as the channels align.

All right, so a very modest adjustment there,

and you could see that the temperature and tint

were changed accordingly.

Now I'm going to come down to my auto button,

and I'll click that.

And you can see

that this was not an aggressive change at all.

Basically just a little bit in the shadows and the blacks.

But we still have, I would say, a very flat image.

Here's the before, and after, on this auto correction.

So I still very much need to come in and tweak this.

We need to, you know, bring our blacks down,

and and our whites up,

and adjust our highlights and our shadows.

And basically we're performing the correction from scratch.

So I don't really like this auto button

on super flat images.

Another thing these auto controls don't do

is adjust the saturation.

You'll see the image is still, you know,

quite desaturated, as we see in the vector scope as well.

So I would also need to climb in, and adjust that too.

Okay.

So these particular auto correction tools,

on this particular image, not the best help.

But let's come to this next image,

and let's go through the same workflow.

I'm going to just select my white balance selector

and then I'll select something white, about right here.

All right.

And a fairly dramatic adjustment,

and things appear much more in line.

So that did help quite a lot.

You can see

that there was a large adjustment on temperature and tint.

and then I'm going to come down to auto and I'll select that.

And this was a lot more aggressive.

You can see that a lot of adjustments were made

within my tonal controls.

It's not perfect yet.

I still do need to finesse this,

in terms of my whites and blacks,

and highlights and shadows.

Also, it did not touch my saturation.

So if I wanted to make a saturation adjustment,

I would have to do that separately.

But I'm sure you agree that this is a much better

before and after,

in terms of establishing a starting place,

than this image was.

And then I'll come to this image here,

and we'll do the same thing.

Let's go ahead and find where he smiles,

so I can white balance on his teeth.

And I'll click on auto.

And this adjustment is okay.

Still a little flat.

So we need to, you know,

broaden out our to range manually, like so, okay?

And I think I would like to have a little bit more alignment

within my color channels.

And then again,

we need to always affect saturation separately as well.

Okay? So it gave us an no okay starting place,

but we still definitely needed

to implement a lot of those manual controls.

It really depends on the image, how well this works.

But go ahead and try it and see if you can get a head start.

If not, and you already know how to use the manual controls,

so you'll be all set.

(bright music)