Colorista - fantastic colour-correction package

Hugh "Nomad" Hancock — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:44:54 +0100

When we finished off the feature-length cut of BloodSpell, one of the single biggest and most impressive changes we made was going over the entire project with colour-correction tools. The results were astounding - the colours were brighter, deeper, more vibrant, and the entire project benefitted as a result. Since then, I’ve been recommending that anyone who makes digital video has to get into colour-correction.

I’ve just been using Colorista, a colour-correction package that a pro editor friend of mine pointed me at, and it’s sufficiently impressive that I had to mention it here.

I’ve always found sophisticated colour-correction a bit of a pain - Final Cut Pro’s colour correction tends to produce rather erratic results compared to what you’d expect, and it’s hard to tweak the 3-way colour corrector to do what you want rather than introducing strange colour casts to the image.

Colorista, however, works exactly as you’d expect it to - when you adjust the high tones, it pulls all the bright parts of the image up, naturally adjusting the image so that it looks like that’s how it was originally shot. When you change the dark tones, it doesn’t affect the rest of the image either. And so on.

It’s only available for higher-end video editors (After Effects, Final Cut, Premiere and Avid), and it costs $199, but the results are astounding. Check out their tutorial videos, and you’ll see what I mean.

Definitely one to consider if you’re hard-core about your editing.

Machinima for Dummies: Colorista - fantastic colour-correction package

Colorista - fantastic colour-correction package