Depth of Options
Despite the streamlined look of Colorista, the amount of options is extremely deep.
To begin with, the main controls of the program are three color wheels: Lift, Gamma, and Gain. Lift controls the shadow areas, the Gamma controls the midtone areas, and the Gain controls the highlight areas. Each wheel has an outer ring which can be rotated to adjust the overall Luma for that area. After that comes the white balance eye dropper, which is meant to give you a general color correction starting place and is designed to be utilized before fine-tuning of the color wheels. After this is the saturation slider, which allows you to determine how much color is actually present in your overall color mix. (This is a much higher quality control than that which is found in most video and image programs, allowing you to go all the way to extreme levels without having the picture posterize on you!) After that comes the Exposure tool, which allows you to adjust the apparent F/stop the footage was shot in. This allows a more natural, more film-like way to brighten or darken the overall footage. The final option is a Power mask tool, which allows you to create squares or circles which can highlight or subdue specific parts of your footage. Both the circle and square tools can be feathered to prevent contrasting with the background and can be very valuable for highlighting a person’s face, but not the background.
Now, most editors and color correctors immediately notice that there’s no secondary color correction options in this list. Surprising though this may seem, this was an intentional choice on the part of Red Giant. Since secondary color correction can added unneeded confusion and can sometimes muddy other color choices, they instead made the plug-in a 32-bit, non-destructive addition. What this means is that, rather than having to have one plug-in that’s geared to do every type of color correction in a single pass, you can simply stack instances of Colorista for each change you want, without screwing up your footage and without your footage getting muddied. This is because of the amount of information that the 32-bit processing of Colorista can contain, in comparison to the 8-bit processing of the 3-way color correction tools in Premiere Pro 2 or FCP 5. This fact is what truly gives Colorista its virtually limitless options.
Now, despite all the great options in Colorista, there are a few that are missing that I would like to see in future releases. For instance, the Saturation and Exposure segments give you the option to type in the saturation or exposure amount you want, if you don’t want to drag a slider to the spot you want. However, the Lift/Gamma/Gain palettes do not allow you to type in values, which is a bit annoying, especially since rotating the Luma rings precisely is a bit tricky to do in a repeatable fashion. Additionally, I would like to have a custom size option for the power masks. While a huge amount can be done with circle and square masks, as DaVinci users are well aware, it would be nice to be able to precisely control the exact size and shape of the power masks, without having to create an extra layer of color-graded footage in AE and garbage-matting the excess.
Performance
The actual controls for adjusting your three main categories (Lift, Gamma, and Gain) are very precise, which is really nice. Once you’ve done an initial white balance, it is very easy to grab the central selector of your gain circle and drag it around, while watching your RGB Parade, until you get pretty close to true white. (This is especially a beautiful experience if you happen to utilize a trackball.) If you try to do the same procedure in FCP’s or Premiere Pro 2’s included 3-Way Color Corrector, the levels skew so radically with the slightest adjustments that you invariably throw your hands up in despair. Additionally, Colorista’s final results looks much more professional and natural, doing an admirable job of imitating a film-based process than the much more digital results from the 3 way color correctors packaged with editing programs.
