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Welcome to this chapter on the Color Correction Effects and After Effects.
There are more Color Correction Effects than any other single type of effects in all of
After Effects. So it's fair to assume that you're going to
see some pretty amazing stuff as we go throughout this chapter.
Now, before we start, I want to give you a taste of what you will see, some highlights,
and I also want to, right off the bat here, give you some things that you might want to
avoid. Things like the Brightness Contrast Effect,
really not a great thing to use unless you know what you're doing.
It's really going to damage your image. You definitely don't want to lighten up an
image or a piece of footage with Brightness Contrast, not a good idea.
There are many other choices such as curves or levels to do the same thing.
Also, there are many effects that have been replaced and upgraded, and are only left in
for just the sake of completeness and compatibility with all their After Effects
Projects. Specifically, the Change Color Effect, also
Color Balance (HLS). Now, not Color Balance, Color Balance is amazing,
one of my all time favorite affects, Color Balance (HLS), practically worthless.
Same thing with Gamma/Pedestal/Gain, not really super helpful, and also PSArbitraryMap, a
completely worthless effect. Okay. So let me give you a heads-up of what's
going on here, what we're going to see throughout this chapter.
By far and away, the most powerful effect probably in this entire chapter is Colorama.
We could probably build an entire lynda.com training series around this one effect only.
So this is the project that we're going to look at with Colorama.
I have taken some green screen video of Paavo here, and I have used COLORAMA, to not only
knockout the green screen, but to combine this footage with some footage
of Mount Rainier. Now, this looks kind of like fake, cartoony
video, like it's a combination of illustrated files or whatever, but it's not,
this is a regular full color here, with blues and everything like that, video of Mount Rainier
over Seattle. But using Colorama we have managed to kind
of posterize this so this looks kind of edgy and stuff like that at the bottom.
Then we just kind of have like this slight edge here with Mount Rainier and this cool
gradient background. All stuff that we did with COLORAMA, and this
is all happening on one layer. So just a quick preview at the project that
we were going to make in the Colorama. Pretty cool.
Another one of the cool effects I think that a lot of people don't know about here is the
Leave Color Effect. We have like this really cool fitness clip,
and what we're going to do is I'm going to show you this Leave Color Effect,
which will allow you to pick a color, in our case this blue here, and make everything else
gray. So right now the background doesn't pop anymore
than anything else, this girls shirt in the back,
its kind of like this cool pale green, her shirt up in the front is like this nice red
color, there are lots of just cool colors all over
the place. But as we turn on Leave Color basically everything
is gray except for the blue. Now, first it doesn't seem so cool, but watch
how cool this looks when it's previewed, see how cool that looks, everything is gray,
tons of movement, and the blue is left behind. If you didn't know about the Leave Color Effect
that might be a difficult effect to achieve, but with the Leave Color Effect, pretty awesome.
Then we could go through like we do in the Leave Color movie, we'll add more effects
to this to bring out those colors or even change that
color. Finally, we're going to look at this Shape
Layer Project that I made. Basically this is a just a circle and a star
with Shape Layer, I still can't get over that. But we're going to go and look at this project
as we talk about the Exposure Effect, and in the process of talking
about the Exposure Effect, we're also going to look at High Dynamic Range Color briefly,
and take a look at 8 bit, 16 bit and 32 bit per channel color.
So as you can see here a load of great information and great tips and tricks coming up in this chapter.