Hue/Saturation Curves, part 1 - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

- Hue saturation curves can allow us to target a specific hue, luma or saturation value in an image and then adjust it in a variety of ways. In this movie, we're going to take a look at adjusting a specific hue value and changing its color, saturation and overall brightness. So I'm here in my chapter 3.2 project and we're going to take a look or our first look extensively working with the hue and saturation curves inside of Final Cut Pro X. I'm going to select the first clip in the project by pressing C. Press Command + 6 to head to the color inspector and let's add, from here, a hue and saturation curves effect. If you decide to add a hue and saturation curves effect from the effect browser because it's available there, I do want to make mention that under the color category, there happens to be two hues and saturation effects. The hue and saturation curves effect is the one that you want as it would give you the controls here from the color inspector versus the hue and saturation effect which would not be added to the color inspector. It'll just be added as an effect. I'm just going to close down that effect browser and let's see some of the magic of these curves by first of all, looking at the first three curves in this interface and the first three curves target hue values in their image. What I'd like to do is actually target this gentleman's red shirt. I'm going to click the eye dropper. I'm just going to sample it and you'll notice that on this hue and saturation curve, it actually adds a few points. Here is the pixel that was selected and these are kind of like boundaries. So the idea here is now by selecting a certain hue, I'm able to change that hue. To see this in action, I'll drag the point that was just added. Now we can see, voila, we've made a pretty cool adjustment here to his shirt. If you selected for any reason, too many pixels in the shot or you find that unwanted pixels are entering in such as his lips here in the scene just ever so slightly, we could always go back and close down the range and the falloff from the selected pixel to tune in or hone in on our adjustment. But for a few minute's work, that's not too bad there, the adjustment that was made to this gentleman's shirt. Let's see how this could be applied to hue versus saturation. We might be thinking here on this particular shot that while this is a nice shirt, it's just overall too vibrant or we want to bring it out even more. We could select the shirt yet again under this hue and saturation curve and notice, again, it samples that same region and if I drag down, some saturation is removed from the shot. If I drag up, more saturation is added to the shot. Now of course when you're doing this, if I press Command + 7 and head to my vector scope, we do want to make sure that we aren't reaching or going into saturation levels that might be unwanted for a broadcast. So just something to keep in mind as we're making our adjustments and targeting certain hue values. And this starts to bring up the conversation, just to let you know, of secondary correction because we are targeting certain colors within our image and this can actually be expanded as you can see later with masks in terms of shapes or even color masks. But there we were able to make a pretty cool shirt adjustment and finally, we'll just look at this last curve in this movie, which is our hue versus luma curve. And again, what this allows us to do is select a hue or a range of hues in the shot. It will add or basically select that pixel and here is ideal or basically a range falloff of various hues that are involved and then we can either lower the luminesce or increase the luminesce in that particular hue and this could be very powerful for targeting specific colors within your scene and with a couple basic adjustments, I was able to change this man's shirt and we were able to drastically alter the scene. There's another clip here in this project. Feel free to select it and from your color inspector, add yet another hue and saturation curves effect where you can see if you can adjust the color of this person's shirt. So there you have it. We worked with the first three curves here in the hue and saturation curves effect. We're going to take a look at the other curves in the next movie to take your hue and saturation game to the next level.