Tutorial: Red Giant Magic Bullet Colorista III

In this article I’ll be taking a look at Colorista III, a color grading plug-in which is part of the Magic Bullet Suite from Red Giant Software. If you haven’t used Colorista before, this will be a good introduction for you. If you have, you’ll notice one of the things that has changed is its simplified interface.

I have some footage that I shot last year of a friend doing some kayaking on a river not too far from me in East Tennessee. It was shot on a late summer morning, and it’s got some nice color. 它有很好的对比. 有一些侧面照明, 太阳仍然很低, and since it’s getting late in the season, the sun doesn’t rise up as directly overhead. 我们有一些漂亮的绿树, some rich earth tones in the rocks and water, 一些鲜艳的红色, 还有其他一些颜色(下面的图1). You’ll see all these visual elements at different angles on the kayak and the kayaker in the video that accompanies this article.

图1. The East Tennessee kayaking footage we’ll work with in this tutorial. 单击图像以查看其全尺寸.

I like this footage just the way it is, but I am going to destroy it with Colorista. 好吧, 不是真的毁掉它, but I am going to make it have a very different quality--maybe not something that you would expect to see in footage like this.

Colorista is a powerful plugin that keeps you from having to bounce back and forth amongst different applications. 如果你在Premiere Pro中编辑, using Colorista for your col grading keeps you from having to use the direct link over to SpeedGrade and back unless you wanting to do something extremely complicated. But you will see through this tutorial that Colorista can do a lot of complicated effects, because you can layer it like you can in other grading applications with primary and secondary layers of color. 让我们来看一看.

Working With Colorista as a Premiere Pro Plug-in

一旦你安装了Colorista, it will show up in your Effects panel in Premiere Pro and other NLEs in similar ways. All you have to do is drag it over, just like any other effect, onto the clip you’re editing (下面的图2). I’ve already chosen a frame that I like because it shows all the colors that I want to adjust in Colorista.

图2. Dragging the Colorista effect onto your clip in Premiere Pro.

就在最上面, you’ll see that Colorista uses Adobe’s built-in masking tools, so you can create a bezier mask of any shape (下面的图3). You can create a square, circle, ellipse--any shape you need, you can create right there. 但你不必总是这样做. 例如, 当你有一个移动的物体, 像桨一样, which moves a lot and dips in and out of the water, you won’t necessarily want to create a mask even if it could be tracked. You might just want to select that color, like you would do in applications such as Photoshop and After Effects. You can do that right in Colorista, and we’ll look more at that later.

图3. Creating a Bezier mask using Colorista in Premiere Pro. 单击图像以查看其全尺寸.

从顶部下来, you’ll see that Colorista has a lot of the same control panels you would expect to see in most other color effects. You’ll see the tri-wheel, the auto balance, saturation, hue, and so on (图3).