By Dr David Smith
One of my favourite and most useful plug-ins for Vegas Pro is Graide Color Match from SeMW-software.com. It let’s you quickly and easily sample the colour properties of a particular frame and then apply that to other clips the match the colour palette, brightness, contrast and so on. It can even be applied dynamically so that, if the light quality changes over time, as when the sun comes out then clouds build up, the colour matching makes the appropriate adjustments automatically. It is very clever software and it works simply and reliably.
I recently discovered a new plug-in they’ve produced called Color Curves. This plug-in allows you to make powerful yet subtle adjustments that go beyond the RGB colour space enabling corrections to hue, saturation and luma in both Y’RGB (brightness, red, green, blue) and HSY’ (hue, saturation, brightness) modes. The manual is well written and comprehensive and provides good insights into the world of colour grading for video
This graph shows how input brightness (vertical) can produce altered output values (horizontal) by altering the shape of the curve from its default straight line, in this case to a sigmoid curve. Input values below 50% will be darkened, while those above 50% will be brightened.
There are numerous presets to get you close to the desired effect, and of course you can tweak each of these, then save them as new presets for later use.
And here are four examples to show how different presets affect the final video image.
Conclusion
Graide Color Curves is a very powerful plug-in that can greatly speed up the process of colour grading. It has a clear, intuitive interface and integrates beautifully with both Vegas Pro and Vegas Movie Studio Platinum. For a recommended retail price of USD$59.99 is excellent value for money and, along with its sister app Graide Color Match, will soon become an indispensable part of your Vegas toolbox. Highly recommended!
For more info go to https://www.semw-software.com/en/colorcurves/
Film, Video & Virtual reality 