Color correction and adjustment

When you assemble a composition, you often need to adjust or correct the colors of one or more of the layers. Such adjustments can be for any of several reasons. Some examples:

You need to make it seem as if multiple footage items were shot under the same conditions so that they can be composited or edited together.
You need to adjust the colors of a shot so that it seems to have been shot at dusk instead of noon.
You need to adjust the exposure of an image to recover detail from the over-exposed highlights.
You need to enhance one color in a shot because you will be compositing a graphic element over it with that color.
You need to restrict colors to a particular range, such as the broadcast-safe range.

After Effects includes many built-in effects for color correction, including the Curves effect, the Levels effect, and other effects in the Color Correction effects category.

John Dickinson provides visual aids on his website that illustrate how to use the Curves and Levels effects for color adjustments: www.adobe.com/go/learn_ae_jdcurves and www.adobe.com/go/learn_ae_jdlevels.

The Color Finesse plug-in included with After Effects includes excellent color-correction tools. For more information, see the Color Finesse documentation in the folder that contains the plug-in. (See Plug-ins.)

The Camera Raw plug-in can be used to correct and adjust still images in JPEG, TIFF, and various camera raw formats.

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 blog: www.adobe.com/go/learn_ae_sturebelcc.

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

Histogram showing highlight clipping

Histogram showing shadow clipping