Subtitles of the Movie

Color Correction is an art in and of itself. It allows you to take a regular piece of footage, whether it's a still image or a video or animation and change the entire look of it by manipulating the pixels that make up the color tones in that image. Let me give you an example. Follow along if you like and grab the image in the Work Files Folder called Long Road. I took this photograph while driving in New Jersey. And don't worry, I was the passenger. Now, this is an overcast day. What we can do is make this image like a sepia tone. Or we can make it look like we're on the surface of another planet. Now, one of the things you're going to find is there are a lot of different filters in the Color Correction Category. I mean, look at that. This list is longer than this whole menu. So you pretty much have to experiment and find the one that will give you the result you're looking for. In the case of the sepia tone effect I'm going to go for, I'm going to choose Hue and Saturation. Now, right away we have some effects up here in the Effects Panel. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to choose Colorize and right away we have a nice effect. But what I want to do is further customize this so I can use these little dials here and the sliders that appear in these little twirlies. For color, what I can do is change the actual color or the hue. So if I want a nice sepia tone, I can go to like a brownish area and then I can use this slider here and I can really adjust the saturation of that. By taking the saturation all the way to the left, I pretty much take all the color information out of that image and I can blow out the saturation by going all the way to the right. So I'm going to choose something like right around here, heading towards de-saturation and now I have a nice, antique photo. That's just one example. So let's go ahead and delete this one. I'm going to make sure I have it selected and hit Delete and that's gone. I'll go back to that menu and let's try something different this time. Of course, if you use Photoshop you're used to the Auto Levels and Auto Color and Brightness and Contrast. But there really is a lot of stuff in here. You can even use a Channel Mixer, you can go for Color Balance, Colorama, Curves, Exposure and so many more other things that you, really it doesn't make much sense at how much is in this menu. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to choose the Color Balance. Now, the Color Balance has a lot of stuff in there, like you would fully expect. As you can see, it allows you to work with the pixels and change how they look in this image and I can work on shadows, mid-tone regions and highlights. Let's go ahead and work with the midtones. Now, I'm looking in this image here and I don't really have much red but this brown would probably count as red. So I'm going to twirl this down and I'm going to drop this down all the way to the end and look how I pretty much took the red out of that mid-tone. Or I could bump it up. So that's just another example as how we can make this image look more realistic; by slowly but surely color correcting it. We can do the same thing with the blue, which would affect our mountains and the sky. So I'm going to increase this to add a lot more vibrancy to this image or I can make it look more unreal and have it go towards a more green cast. So I'm pretty much taking the blue out and introducing more green. So those are two examples of how to use the multitude of Color Correction Tools that Adobe has provided for you. I would suggest taking the time and experimenting with them and finding out what they can do for you. As you can see, you can really take an image that's pretty much blah and you can add a lot more vibrancy to it and you can even make it look more fantastical, just by experimenting with the different sliders and dials that you find in the Effects Controls.