The Tao Colorist

The Craft

• Are you Qualified? Secondary Corrections - A short excerpt from Steve Hullfish's book, Art and Technique of Color Correction. It's an explanation of what a secondary color correction is and the terminology surrounding it. I highly recommend his book. (masteringfilm.com via Steve Hulfish)

• [Video] Grade Breakdown: Secondary Corrections - Normally I'd put this under Tools since this tutorial is using DaVinci Resolve. But every technique in here can be done on any app that allows qualifications and has 3-Way color wheels. It's well worth your time to watch. And if you want to understand more about how controlling your blacks is the key to effective 'Look Building', check out this post I wrote last summer on The Singularity Effect. (Vimeo.com)

• Colour perception - A short blog post on tetrachromatic vision with a few links on the subject. The Discover Magazine article is worth the read about how scientists find tetrachromats (who are always women). (philtechnicalblog.blogspot.com via Tom Parish)

• Pimp your Vectorscope Ride - I've personally felt that Waveforms and Vectorscope visualizations are an area ripe for new thinking. Colorist Alexis Van Hurkman and software scopes vendor Divergent Media both agree. Alexis has developed a new graticule for the Vectorscope and Divergent Media is shipping this new graticule with their latest update to ScopeBox. In this post Alexis explains his rationale for the new design. Good job gents! (vanhurkman.com via David E. Bell)

• [Video] Assimilate Webinar: On-set Color Correction - Topics include "basics of color theory; evolution of look creation and color grading on-set; relationship between image color, look generation and lighting; relationship between on-set and post-production color grading; how to use tools like SCRATCH Lab to achieve looks and color grades on-set." (vimeo.com)

• Log vs Raw: The Simple Version - What's the diff? Well explained. (provideocoalition.com via @JimWicks)

• [Video] Avid DS: Introduction to LUTs - This video deals mostly with using LUTs to move between color spaces and offers up different ways to visualize gamma and gamut. (Vimeo.com)

• Digital Cinematography vs Film: Tides are Turning - I really enjoyed reading this post about how digital cameras have changed how DP Shane Hurlbut shoots, "I sat blown away in the Technicolor DI suite with Mike Sowa, our colorist at the wheel. The digital file had more data, more information, more latitude, and more color depth." Be sure to scroll down to the last image of the post for a good quick chortle. (hurlbutvisuals.com via @post_vfx)

The Tools

• [Video] How to Remove a Green Screen in DaVinci Resolve - Good tutorial on the basics of pulling a key and repositioning the image over a background. (youtube.com via @post_vfx)

• [Video] Resolve "What Codec am I Grading?" - Colorist Warren Eagles on four different areas in Resolve where you can find metadata about the codecs in your projects. (youtube.com via @warreneagles)

• Recovering Highlights with DaVinci Resolve - Using CinemaDNG and RED Epic footage with the LOG color wheels. (juanmelara.com.au via @videoEditorwoo)

• Assimilate Updates Scratch for Sony F5/F55. Canon C500, BMCC - (studiodaily.com via @postcolorist)

• [Video] Understanding Premultiplication for Transparency and Mattes - A very deep dive into this topic. This video takes us through many compositing apps including After Effects and Nuke. (filmmakeriq.com)