Lift controls the dark areas of the image, such as shadows. It is here that you do the majority of the image manipulation in both brightness and color.

You generally start your correction on the left (Lift), move to the right (Gain), and end up on top (Gamma).

The plug-in’s interface uses three color wheels similar to the professional tools used in high-end movie production, laid out in a triangle pattern. We tested out the system with Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 on a 17″ MacBookPro. If you are planning on doing a great deal of color correction in After Effects, consider how you’ll monitor the image accurately. While the plug-in will work with After Effects, we question the real usefulness of the plug-in without being able to refer to the supporting vector scopes and waveform monitors that the other applications have. The Colorista plug-in supports an impressive array of host applications for both PC- and Mac-based systems, as long as they start with the letter “A.” Adobe, Apple, and Avid are all supported, with After Effects and Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro and Motion, and Xpress Pro and Media Composer, respectively. The Colorista team has come up with an approach relying on a simple interface, with an extremely powerful back end.

Much like a painter’s palette, the tools involved are deceptively simple, but it is the artist behind the tool that determines whether a picture becomes a beautiful image or just a colorful mess.Ĭolorista v1.0 from Red Giant Software is a color correction plug-in designed to replace or augment the color correction tools that come with your NLE. The color correction of motion pictures is one of those places where art firmly intersects technology.

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