Difference between Tint wheels in creative tab and colour wheels

Look at the Tint wheels and the Color wheels ... note a rather major difference?

The Tint wheels don't have a Luma slider ... and yea, they do change the bottom end differently. To get very close to the same behavior in the Color wheels, drop the Luma slider for the shadows just a bit. The color wheels sort of "protect" the lower values by not dropping any channel much if at all. Where the Tint wheels as I'd said are more like moving the black points of an RGB Curves tool.

Also, realize the Shadows wheel has a smaller range that it affects ... unless you bring the Tint wheels "balance" (pivot) slider down to about -35 or so. The shadows is already sloping off it's effect on the media by that point as the range crosses into the Midtones in the Color Wheels section.

Every tool in the Lumetri effect is there because it behaves differently than any other tool. It's up to the user to, as you are doing, try and figure them out. I've got a few articles with explanations and examples on my site ... you may well find it useful to see descriptions and examples of what many of the tools do. I use a split screen, the left half is a B/W image of stacked blocks at 10% tonal changes black to white, the right half is a gray-scale ramp.

With the RGB Parade and Waveform up ... you can see exactly what changes the tools make. This is probably the best post to start with. rNeil Photog/ Basic Tab

Trimming? Take an overall look at the color correction/grading process ... most people when starting with color try to find ONE tool to rule them all ... which is bad on several fronts. The color correction process has several steps ... neutralize all clips to a fairly normal tonal and color balance (not perfect just close); match clips down the line (which is vastly easier if they're close to a neutral tones first); then deal with the worst problem cases like blown out windows or blotchy skin; then perhaps set "scenes" to a look, and perhaps even the whole sequence.

So trying to go from out-of-camera to final Look with one tool ... ain't gonna work. It can't.

First, you are far more likely to have noticeable changes to the clips, in that it will look "worked". Artificial colors or tones. And you don't want the result to look noticeable at all, it should seem natural.

Next ... doing much change with one tool practically guarantees that if your media is H.264/long-GOP 8-bit ... you'll get artifacts and noise.

So splitting your corrections up among tools helps give a more 'natural' appearance and helps avoid artifacts/noise. Each step of the process, if there's much to do in that step, should involve multiple tools to correct the media. I'll apply multiple instances of Lumetri each named for what they do ... perhaps on the main video track itself, and also on adjustment layers that can be over individual clips, scenes, or the entire sequence.

And most of the time, I'm doing minor trimming of color/tonality with any one step. I'm including a couple other posts ... and those were from a couple years ago. There's more tools in Lumetri now, and my working has changed so I should post newer articles soon. But these are still quite valid.

A HUGE change came with the Hue/Sat curves a cycle back ... those are incredibly useful!

Neil

(Some other posts ...)

Creative Tab

Starting a Grade: Neutralization

The Tint Wheels and Color Wheels pretty similar but with a couple differences.

The Tint wheels

• have two ranges as you see, rather than three ranges;
• and allow you to change the pivot point ... the area in the middle of the transition between the two.

That "Tint Balance" slider is (in normal colorist terminology) a Pivot control. Moving it up makes the lower range to upper range transition point higher up the value scale black to white. Moving it lower makes the transition or pivot point between the two controls lower.

The White Balance control of the Basic tab works exactly the same as moving the top points of the three RGB curves separately, and all values below them scale in a straight line. So when using a White Balance tool, you only change the whites and some down into the midtones, you make very little if any notable effect on the shadows.

With these "Tint" controls, you can set the color cast ... or correct color casts ... both in the highlights and in shadows, which you cannot do with a WB control. For this, think of the controls as moving the black points of the RGB curves relative to each other with the Shadow Tint wheel, and the white points of the RGB curves relative to each other with the Highlights wheel. (It does not of course change the positions of the curves of the RGB curve tools.)

The wheels in the Color Wheels tab give you three ranges to control ... but don't allow for a pivot point adjustment.

For my work, I nearly always do basic color cast correction to neutral ... what most people think of as "white balance" correction ... with the Tint wheels because of the double ability to adjust lights and darks along with setting a pivot point between the corrections if they are different. I rarely use the WB in the Basic tab.

I do trimming of color ranges with the Color Wheels tab.

Then sometimes for getting a particular look, I'll later in the process ... in a later instance of Lumetri ... use the Tint wheels to get the color tonality feel I want.

So ... they're useful both for basic color cast corrections and for setting a "look" ... but in different instances (layers) of Lumetri effects.

Neil

plz