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Adobe Premiere: What the Fast Color Corrector Tools Do
You're now in the "wiggle the controls until it looks right" phase of the adjustment; here's your toolset.
Featured Author:
Jan Ozer
Jan has worked in digital video since 1990, joining PC Magazine as a contributing editor in 1996, and EventDV (then CD-ROM Professional) in 1994. Since then, Jan has written 12 books on digital video, translated into 7 languages, including the PC Magazine Guide to Digital Video (John Wiley, 2003), and the upcoming Adobe Digital Video How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques with Adobe Production Studio for Adobe Press (2006). In addition to frequently teaching short courses at seminars and expositions, Jan has instructed two- and three-day video production seminars since 1992, most recently for the University of Wisconsin.
Compression technologies have always been a particular focus for Jan, who got his first taste as VP of Marketing for Iterated Systems, the developer of the Fractal video and still image compression licensed by Microsoft for the original CD-ROM version of Encarta. In 1994, Jan’s company, Doceo Publishing, released the Video Compression Sampler, the first comparison of CD-ROM compression technologies like Cinepak, Indeo and Video 1. Since then, Jan has written many authoritative articles on DVD and streaming technologies for organizations like StreamingMedia.com and Extremetech. In January 2006, Jan released two white papers through StreamingMedia.com that rigorously compared the quality and usability of the Windows Media, Real, Apple’s H.264 and Flash codecs (Proprietary Codecs, 2006: Choosing and Using the Optimal Video Codec) and solely Flash codecs (Flash Codecs, 2006: Choosing and Using the Optimal Flash Codec).
Jan Ozer
There are several tools within the Fast Color Corrector to help you fine-tune your video. Top to bottom, here’s what they do:
Hue Angle
Controls the outer ring of the color wheel; rotating left shifts the colors toward green; rotating right shifts them toward red.
Balance Magnitude
Controls correction intensity. This corresponds to the ball on the end of the Color Correction widget, with more intense adjustments produced further from the center.
Balance Gain
According to the user manual, Balance Gain controls the “coarseness or fineness of the Balance Magnitude and Balance Angle Adjustments,” and corresponds to the crossbar in the middle of the Color Correction widget. I use it to fine-tune these adjustments, and find it easier to adjust by dragging over the numerical values than dragging the crossbar directly.
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Balance Angle
Controls which colors are adjusted. Generally, when fixing a colorcast, you’re moving away from a color, as shown in image above, which is pointed away from blue to cure a bluish colorcast.
Saturation
Controls color saturation, or the intensity of the color. When adjusting Balance Magnitude or Balance Angle, you’re changing the actual colors in the frame, while saturation makes these colors more or less vivid.
Adjusting White Balance with the Fast Color Corrector
