Grading within Apple Color

With the final film finished and the grading completed, I thought I'd post a quick, short but sweet section about how I graded the film. Once I had a complete cut formed, I sent the file into Color to begin grading. Following the information I gathered and analysed from my previous post, I knew that I wanted to give the film a green tint, whilst still trying to achieve a warm tone/feel to the film.

I started by reducing the reds of the original image as the white balance was incorrectly set on location, creating an unrealistic reddish glow on all of the highlight and midtone colours. This can be seen below.

Not only is the image incorrectly white balanced (it seems to be balanced correctly for the exterior shots, which I had noticed in Finchers films that any exterior shots in his films are correctly exposed, say if the shot is from the interior of a car, whereas the car interior is dark), but it is also slightly over exposed in the highlight areas (noticeable around the lamp). This was corrected in Color by first reducing the red curve in the Primary In tab. I then decreased the blue data slightly and increased the green highlight/midtone areas to give it that green tint.

The luma curve was also adjusted in order to achieve the contrasted look, and also increase the amount of shadow detail that is on the subjects face. After this, I then moved to the Secondaries tab and simply adjusted the Saturation curve, mainly reducing the green data and pushing the yellow data higher slightly. This final setting gave me a colour correction that can be seen below.

This final grade was then replicated across the remainder of the footage, adjusting each section in turn to match the previous shot, keeping the colour continuity intact.