Colour correction for each clip in Video by Zaweba

Every clip you put on the timeline in Video by Zaweba has its own set of colour controls in the Inspector. They cover exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, temperature, tint, saturation, vibrance and hue, with a faded film control for a softer, lifted look. Copy, paste and reset buttons save you from setting the same values twice. This is where most correction happens, before any creative look goes on.

Correction and grading are worth keeping apart in your head. Correction makes a shot look right: properly exposed, neutral where it should be neutral, matching the shots around it. Grading gives a set of shots a mood. The per-clip controls are mainly for the first job, though they can do a bit of both.

Working through the sliders in order

Start with exposure. It lifts or lowers the whole picture and should get the main subject to a sensible brightness. Contrast comes next, setting how far apart the darks and lights sit.

Then refine the ends. Highlights and shadows work on the bright and dark parts separately, so you can pull back a bright sky or open up a shaded face without moving everything else. Whites and blacks set the very ends of the range. Pull blacks down a little and a grey, washed out shot gains depth. Push whites up and a dull one gains sparkle, though too far clips detail.

White balance follows. Temperature moves the picture between blue and orange, and tint between green and magenta. Indoor light often looks orange and shade looks blue, so nudge until things that should be white or grey look neutral.

Last come saturation, vibrance and hue. Saturation strengthens every colour equally. Vibrance is gentler on colours that are already strong and on skin, so it is often the better choice for faces. Hue swings every colour round the wheel, which is rarely needed for correction but useful for effects.

Copy, paste and reset

Once one shot from a camera position looks right, copy its colour settings and paste them onto the other clips from the same position. You'll get most of the way there in seconds and only need small tweaks. Reset takes a clip back to neutral when an experiment has gone wrong.

Section switches and extra grades

The colour settings are split into sections, and each has a bypass switch. Turning one off is the quickest way to see what that part of the grade is doing, and to check you haven't gone too far. Flick it on and off while the preview plays.

When one set of controls isn't enough, more grades can be added as a Colour grade effect from the Effects tab. That lets you stack a second correction, perhaps a broad fix first and a finer one after, or keep a creative look separate from the basic balance.

Tools that help you judge

Your eyes adjust to whatever is on screen, so it helps to have numbers. View, then Scopes opens a waveform, RGB parade, vectorscope and histogram. The Colour page in the View menu puts the colour controls beside a large viewer with a histogram, an RGB parade and a before and after split. For shots that should match each other, Colour match and Auto colour can get you close before you fine tune by hand.

Common slips

Pushing saturation to fix a dull shot usually makes it look cheap. Fix the contrast and the blacks first, and the colour often comes back by itself. Correcting each clip in isolation is another trap. Play the cut through and judge shots against their neighbours, since a match matters more than any one shot being perfect.

The per-clip controls in Video by Zaweba are simple to read, and that is the point: get each shot right here, and every later step works better.