Auto Tone Feature

Thank you.  The Auto Tone feature is a good starting point for me.  I am very familiar with the Basic Color Controls to use to further adjust the color correction.

In my experience with this, the tonal controls seem to do a pretty good basic job of neutralization ... no crushed blacks or clipped whites yet contrast expanded to fit the dynamic range of the sequence. Decent choices on shadows and highlights.

Any user will normally want to modify them slightly to taste of course, but they do a pretty good job for a base.

As to color ... again, in my work ... they seem to over-jump the white balance and over-saturate along with it. So I normally cancel the color changes it makes. You may find it at least a useful start.

Understanding White Balance versus color casts is crucial to getting good color hues. White Balance is precisely that: balancing the relative white points of the R, G, and B channels. Go to the RGB Curves tool and drag the color channels white points away from each other. Look at the results in the box.

The white points are most separated ... at the mid-point, there's half the correction. In upper shadows, at most a quarter the correction.

But think about color ... where is the area of most saturated, most critical color?

The mid-tones.

So doing a white-balance if there's an overall color cast down through the shadows will not fix your color. You need to deal with the color cast. And that is easily done via the Creative Tab's Shadow/Highlight tint wheels, which is what I nearly always use for color balancing a clip. Or of course, you can use the 3-way Color Wheels tab.

I like to correct color balance/cast with the Creative tab's 'tint' wheels leaving the Color Wheels tab to do more "to taste" things.

Neil