Shifting specific colors

When you're doing color correction, one of the most handy features is to be able to go in and look at a color and then change just that specific color. Say for example I wanted to change just her hair color, being able to go in and tweak that and customize it is just a real asset. Now we have this in After Effects, and in other programs you're probably using, you probably have something similar to this. I can apply hue saturation for example. And then the channel control dropped down, I can change this to, let's say for example, reds and I can adjust the red hue and it's really wonky it's not super specific.

I'm getting her hair and her face. I can go in and tweak it with this little gizmo here but it's not really intuitive, it's kind of clunky. I just don't like it. I use it frequently when I'm not using Magic Bullet Looks but, but I don't like it. I think Looks offers a much better solution. So I'm going to click Edit to open up the Looks interface. Now what we want to do is go over to the tools and go to the post tools and then apply ranged HSL. So let's go ahead and double click that to apply it. Now ranged HSL, HSL stands for hue saturation and lightness, this gives you in several interfaces here, we can use the numeric interface or we can use the hue saturation or hue lightness.

And it gives us total control over hue saturation and lightness. So say for example I want to adjust the tone of her face, her, her flesh tone. We have an orange area here, which by the way, hue saturation does not give you an orange control, so it's much easier to get to flesh tones. And what I could do is click on, let's say for example in hue saturation. If I want these tones, these orange tones to be more red, I can move them over to red. If I want there to be more yellow, I can move them over to yellow. And when we're working in the hue saturation area here, if we bring it towards the center, we will desaturate. If we bring it outside of the center, we will saturate it. Now same is true of hue lightness.

If we want to darken her skin tone, we could take it towards the center, and if we'd want to brighten it, we can go outside of the circle. So again let's try to practice this and see if we can get this to do something useful for us. If we click the Reset button, get back to square one. I'm going to actually desaturate her skin a little bit and then move it over to the red. There's a little bit of the yellow tint here. That looks pretty good, maybe a little bit less saturated. Her skin is pretty pale in real life. And I'm going to go ahead and click the skin graft and make sure that we're in the right spot.

It looks like we're okay. We have some highlights and things like that that are not registering as skin tone, but it's okay. Mo, we got most of the skin area registering as skin tone. So, click Skin, get rid of that. And we can preview this by clicking the Power icon here on range HSL. We can see the before and the after. So, Initially, she looks pretty okay. But as we took this more towards red, we can see that she was looking a little orangish, a little yellow, a little bit of an Oompa Loompa there, and then we apply this effect and just a nice, skin tone there without the yellowing. Now let's play with her hair a little bit.

she has this pink tone here which is really beautiful but there's a, a blue light coming from behind her and then we have kind of like two-tone hair, almost looks like purple and then pink right here. So what we could do is we can go to the Purple Icon here, the Purple little widget and we can maybe desaturate that by bringing that in. We could also drag it closer to pink, so that it looks like her hair's all the same color and that black light isn't quite as blue. Notice that when I adjust the color in one spot as I move the hue over, it does it in both circles. So, move that back over to red, and if I want to I can come over here to lightness.

And darken that by bringing that in here. That looks like maybe it's in shadow, or I could go the opposite direction, maybe make it bright, probably not desaturated quite as much, bring this up here. Note, that you could also go in and adjust these sliders, right here. So, if I want to bring the green and the background is a little bit green, we could increase the saturation, or decrease the saturation, we could also increase the, oops, get outta here. Go back up to controls, click on Range HSL.

And, I could go ahead and adjust green, make that brighter or darker. And the original shot of this, before I added the Colorista 3-Way, before we started this tutorial, push the black, backslash key to see that. It was very underexposed, really dark, really noisy, so I already pushed it really far with the Colorista 3-Way so we don't have that much latitude to do too much to it so they start brightening up this green. We see a lot of posterization if we zoom in. A lot of noise. So I think I might just want to double-click this and take this back down to zero.

But the controls are here if I want to click and drag. I find that these are much less sensitive, so if you want to fine tune it you might want to go into the actual widgets here, but if you want to go crazy and I want to take her hair in the red and go like really high, really fast, I can change these numerical sliders here. So, they're back down to zero. So as you could see well before and after. We have managed to tone the back of her hair down so it's not as distracting and it matches the main area of her hair a little bit more.

And we've also made her skin much less yellow. So we have very specific controls over what we want to do with different color tones because of ranged HSL.