Default Adjust Operation

The default Adjust operation provides a simple starting point for correcting and refining each clip in your sequence. It includes a set of intuitive controls designed to help you fix common issues, such as exposure, contrast, and color balance, and achieve consistency across shots. By starting with global adjustments and then making more targeted refinements, you can quickly improve the overall look of your footage while maintaining control over specific details.

What is the default Adjust Operation for?

If you’re new to making color adjustments for video, don’t worry, the Adjust controls of the Color mode were designed to make it easy for anyone to learn how to fix common problems and make every clip look just the way you want it to. Every clip in your sequence defaults to having a single Clip Adjust Operation that lets you make overall corrections to each specific instance of a clip in a sequence. This can be to correct imperfections such as overexposure or an overly warm or cool color temperature, or to adjust a clip in a scene that’s sticking out to match the other clips in that scene.

Best practices using Adjust

When it comes to adjusting color, there’s no truly wrong way to do anything (as long as you like the results you got).

However, if you’re looking to achieve the most natural-looking results in the quickest way, there are better and faster ways of doing some things.

Here’s how color adjustment is designed to be accomplished in the Color Controls panel:

Before you start: The Heads-Up Displays (HUDs)

Whenever you select one of the color controls, a HUD appears showing you the specific video scope that’s most appropriate for seeing how that control will modify the image, along with custom indicators that are specific to each control that show what you’re doing, point out what part of the graph is being affected, and list any parameter changes that are happening (when relevant). In essence, HUDs are detailed representations of the control you’re adjusting.

The most important thing when making adjustments is to keep at least one eye on the image you’re adjusting, which is why all layouts prioritize a large Color monitor. Video scopes are fantastic tools for providing an analysis of the image and clear indications of when you’re pushing so high or low that you’re clipping the image, but they’re no substitute for learning to focus on the details of the image itself.

For this reason, the HUDs have been designed to come and go on demand, so you can stay focused on the image between adjustments. They’ve been designed to be compact, sitting alongside the image so you can always keep your eye on the picture even when checking the scope. They’ve been simplified to focus on artistic decisions, and they’ve been designed to call your attention to the specific area of the graph or image being adjusted.

If you’ve never used video scopes before, the HUDs automatically choose the right scope for understanding the particular adjustment you’re making, and the overlays and indicators will help you understand which part of the graph you should be looking at and how big an adjustment you’re making. If you’re an old hand at color, you may find the HUDs are a convenient way of getting the information you need when you need it, rather than taking up a lot of screen real estate with the entire video scopes panel, and you should find the indicators convenient ways of understanding the different adjustments quickly, particularly when you’re adjusting two parameters simultaneously.

If you’re doing dedicated Quality Control work, the Video Scopes panel is always available, but we encourage you to get used to the HUDs first; you may find you prefer their contextual nature in many workflows, particularly on smaller displays.

The HUD can be customized by clicking the Wrench menu in the Color Controls panel and choosing Heads-Up Display (HUD) Options.

Begin with the Global Color & Contrast Controls

When making a general adjustment, you should always start with the Color & Contrast controls. More specifically, begin using the global controls before you do anything inside specific zones (if you don’t know what zones are, these are covered later). The global controls have been designed to give you fast, great-looking adjustments to the overall image, and this may be all you need.

More importantly, if you don’t maximize the quality of your image using the global controls first, you may find it impossible to get satisfactory results using the individual zones later because they’re specifically designed to make targeted improvements to an image that’s already largely good. This is one of the few hard rules for getting the best results in Color mode.

Start with Contrast & Exposure

Adjustments to global image contrast (the difference between the brightest and darkest pixels of the image) are the foundation of any grade, and you’ll work fastest if you start here. If your image is a little dark, you may want to raise the Contrast first, then adjust Exposure as needed to achieve the overall lighting you want. The reason is that adjustments to Contrast simultaneously boost the highlights and lower the shadows, making it fast to create the overall contrast ratio you want in the image.

Depending on how much you’ve raised contrast, you may then decide that you want to adjust Exposure, which lets you stretch to increase or squeeze to decrease the overall brightness of the image from minimum black up, to compensate for levels that are getting clipped at the top, or raise exposure to put more light into the middle tones of the image.

Conversely, if your image is overexposed, you may want to lower Exposure first, then raise Contrast to compensate for a slightly flat image. Either way, you want to be careful to watch the graph in the HUD to make sure you’re not clipping the signal past MIN or MAX, as that eliminates detail from your image (unless that’s what you’re going for).

Keep in mind that, using the 2D controls in the Color mode, you can raise or lower the pivot point of the contrast adjustment while you’re adjusting contrast. For example, this lets you raise the highlights more than you’re lowering the shadows, so you don’t have to crush the shadows to get the highlights as high as you want. or vice versa, to better control the result. Doing so may spare you the need to adjust Exposure at all and is key to getting better results with fewer adjustments.

Tweak Black (in Exposure)

A feature that might be easy to miss is the drag horizontal for Black adjustment of the Exposure control. While dragging up and down adjusts the exposure, dragging from side to side adjusts the minimum black level, letting you “open up” or “crush” the darkest shadows. Raising the black level can create the appearance of flare, letting you see more detail in shadows, while lowering it can flatten shadow detail for a starker, more graphic appearance.

An important thing to understand is that the Black level you set determines the minimum signal level allowed when using any of the Color & Contrast controls in the current operation, which makes it easy to make a creative choice about how you want the darkest shadows shown and stick to it. If you change your mind, altering Black will automatically expand the adjustment range for all other controls.

Again, it’s vital to understand that you can adjust the Black point at the same time you’re adjusting Exposure. Getting the hang of this will make it easy for you to preview a wide range of approaches to quickly set the overall Exposure, as the Black point will influence the appearance of your Exposure adjustment.

Next, adjust Temperature or Balance

Once you’re happy with contrast and exposure, it’s time to tweak the global color temperature or balance controls if you think the overall color is wrong (for example a color cast is tinting the image in a way you don’t like), or you need to match a clip to another time of day or location that has a different overall color temperature (warmer/more orange or cooler/more blue, for example). You have two control options, and either is a fine way to proceed (you’re not expected to use both).

If you generally like the image's color but want to make it warmer or cooler in a naturalistic way, dragging the global Temperature control vertically will adjust your clip as if you were warming or cooling the image's lighting. If you have a specific problem, such as specialty or cheap lighting that’s too green or too magenta, then dragging the Temperature control horizontally (Tint) will remove green or magenta as needed to make the lighting more neutral. Either way, the two-dimensional Temperature control is designed to make the most common color adjustments easy and controllable.

On the other hand, if the color change you want to make is not obvious or not so neatly aligned to the orange/blue or green/magenta axes, the Balance control lets you freely re-mix the red, green, and blue color channels of the image to push and pull the color of the image in any direction you want. This can make it easier to fix weirder tints (by pulling the control in the opposite direction of the color tint you want to remove, towards the complementary color of the tint), and it can also let you add whatever color of lighting you want just by pushing towards that color in the wheel. Both controls process color in the same way, via chromatic adaptation adjustments that alter the reflected colors in the image to simulate how changing the color of the lighting instruments would.

Adjust Saturation

Once you’re happy with the overall color balance in the clip, you may or may not want to adjust the global Saturation. If you feel the overall image lacks colorfulness, you might want to raise it, which intensifies all colors in the frame at once. If you feel the overall image is too colorful, you may want to tone it down to a level that feels appropriate.

If neither of these adjustments feels entirely right, then you may want to move ahead to either of two additional methods provided to adjust saturation in more targeted ways:

• The Saturation Shift control lets you raise or lower the saturation of specific hues throughout the image. For example, if the reds are just too overwhelming, you can desaturate just red, while possibly raising the saturation of other hues that can’t compete. This often gives you much better results.
• Using the zones of the Color & Contrast controls, you can raise or lower the saturation of all colors within a specific zone of lightness. For example, if the highlights seem too colorful (or not colorful enough), you can use one of the highlight zones to adjust only the saturation in the highlights.

TIP: One thing that’s different than other color tools you may be used to is that adjustments you make that widen image contrast are made in a specific color space that minimizes any resulting changes to Saturation. This makes whether you want more or less saturation a specific artistic decision rather than an automatic byproduct of other adjustments. Additionally, this makes grading HDR immeasurably easier because you don’t get huge uncontrollable saturation increases when you start pushing the highlights into higher nit levels than SDR allows.

After Global adjustments, use Zones

At this point, you may be perfectly happy with your image, and you can move on. However, if everything looks good but you’re now noticing more specific issues, the next available option is to make zone-based changes using the same controls.

Zones are a way to divide an image into regions of brightness or tonality. A zone is defined by a threshold above which (highlight zones) or below which (shadow zones) everything from that point onward is adjusted.

By default, you start with two overlapping zones, one for highlights and one for shadows, that blend smoothly through the midtones of the image for a naturalistic result. These initial zones are created by automatically analyzing the initial frame of the clip you moved the playhead to, either by selecting that clip in the Clip Grid (to select the first frame) or by dragging in the time ruler of the Color viewer. Hovering the pointer over any zone button gives you a preview of which parts of the image will fall into that zone via an overlay in the monitor.

Selecting a zone targets all Color & Contrast controls, except for Contrast and Black, for the parts of the image falling into that zone. Contrast and Black cannot be adjusted inside of zones because they’re mathematically tied to the overall image. However, Exposure, Temperature, Balance, and Saturation are adjustable within specific zones,

Using zones, you can exercise even more specific control over color adjustments in a variety of ways:

• You can raise and lower different sections of shadows and highlights similarly to how you might use an exposure curve in other tools. For example, you might use a highlight zone to pull down image detail that got clipped when you made a global Contrast adjustment you really like.
• Using Temperature and Balance, you can specifically warm up a highlight zone or cool off a shadow zone to simulate different times of day or weather conditions, the way you might use the Luma key of a secondary operation in other tools.
• Using Saturation, you can make the same kind of targeted adjustments you might make with a Lum vs. Sat curve in other tools. For example, you might reduce saturation a bit in highlight or shadow zones that feel somewhat artificial after you increased global saturation.

In short, zones make it efficient and easy to use a single set of controls to make a wide variety of targeted adjustments, without needing to switch among four sets of completely different controls and the additional steps they require.

The default two zones, Shadows and Highlights, will probably take care of most tonally specific adjustments you need to make. However, if you need to adjust even smaller ranges of highlights or shadows, you can add more zones, up to three highlight zones and three shadow zones, which segments your image into six genuinely useful regions of adjustment. This can be done by either choosing to add more automatically analyzed zones or by using highlight and shadow-specific eyedroppers to sample a specific threshold of image tonality that you want to adjust.

Once you’ve started to make zone adjustments, don’t forget that you need to select the Global button to go back to adjusting the global controls.

Having access to multiple zones is more about choosing the right zone. Keep in mind that all highlight zones overlap one another, and all shadow zones overlap one another, so the reason to use one zone over another is that you want more specificity, or because you’re pushing and pulling a particular color characteristic.

Also, zones are not meant to replace the global Contrast control. Yes, you can adjust contrast by raising Exposure in the Highlight zone and lowering Exposure in the Shadow zone, but the result is not as satisfying as using the Global Contrast control with its pivot option. Specific Exposure zone adjustments are great for expanding a Global Contrast adjustment you’ve already made, but they’re not meant as a replacement.

Use Saturation/Hue/Lum Shift controls

Once you’re satisfied with the fundamental adjustments you’ve made with the Color & Contrast controls, it’s time to move to the next set of image adjustment controls (if necessary), which adjust specific hues in different ways using the Shift controls. These are great for making fast and accurate tweaks to a distracting background, an inaccurate product color, a range of hues that’s not rich enough, or an interview subject who’s looking a little red.

Similarly to how zones are automatically analyzed, a set of color patches corresponding to the most significant hues in the image is created by automatically analyzing the initial frame of the clip you moved the playhead to, either by selecting that clip in the Clip Grid (to select the first frame) or by dragging in the time ruler of the Color viewer. Hovering the pointer over a color swatch or a Shift control shows an overlay on the monitor that previews which parts of the image overlap the selected hue.

If there isn’t a color swatch for the hue you want to adjust, you can use the eyedropper to sample the color on the monitor. If the color you sampled is distinct enough, a new swatch will appear. Otherwise, a neighboring unused swatch will be updated to the new hue and selected, or a swatch that overlaps that color will be selected in the case you just didn’t recognize it.

To adjust a color, select the color swatch, and then use any of the three two-dimensional controls above to adjust the Saturation, Hue, or Luminance of everything in the clip with that color. Drag vertically to control the amount of adjustment (more or less saturation, one direction or another of hue change, or brighter or darker color) and drag horizontally to adjust the range of hues that are being adjusted (narrower and more specific to the one hue, or wider and more inclusive of neighboring hues). Once you get the hang of this, one fluid motion will be enough to adjust the hue and the falloff range to achieve the perfect result.

Again, restraint is the best advice when using the Shift controls. Don’t feel obligated to adjust every single hue swatch just because you can. Focus on hues that really need to be tweaked and leave well enough alone. Making too many specific adjustments can over-segment an image and make things look artificial (unless that’s what you’re going for).

Tweak Texture and Sharpness

Lastly, the Texture and Sharpness controls let you sharpen or soften textures of varying granularity in your image.

• Texture is a simple vertical slider that lets you soften or sharpen medium-sized details of the image (there is no horizontal adjustment for Texture).
• Sharpness is a two-dimensional control that lets you create a greater impression of sharpness by dragging vertically to increase or decrease sharpening, while dragging horizontally adjusts the threshold at which image detail is sharpened, letting you omit smaller details from this effect to focus more on sharpening the edges of more prominent details.

These two controls work together nicely to create numerous effects. For example, you can lower the Texture control to soften unwanted blemishes in a subject, but then raise Sharpness and drag to the right to raise the threshold to add a bit of sharpness back to the key details of the subject to avoid adding too much softness.

You’ll be able to do a lot of good with the default operation of these controls, so it’s always worth starting here. However, both can also be expanded to enable multi-parameter adjustments for even more precise control.

• Selecting the Sliders button below Texture switches this control to a set of five vertical sliders, each of which adjusts an independent band of image texture from fine to coarse. Using these sliders, you can soften some bands of texture while sharpening others, to create extremely specific adjustments.
• Selecting the Sliders button underneath Sharpness switches this control to three vertical sliders that let you independently adjust the Amount, Radius, and Threshold of the unsharp mask effect.

Once expanded, you have enormous control over image texture. Keep in mind that the main reason to have access to these added controls isn't necessarily to use them all, but to have access to the right band of functionality for what you’re trying to achieve. Keep in mind that the more bands you use of the Texture control, the more processor-intensive this effect becomes.

Using Style Operations to Create a Look

After you’ve matched a clip to the other clips in a scene or improved its overall appearance, you may want to try giving it a stylistic look. While the Adjust controls can be used for almost anything, the specialty modules available in Style operations make many more creative image modification techniques easier to accomplish. Additionally, you can draw from a library of ready-made Style Presets to experiment with different looks, each of which you can customize to fit the vibe of a scene or project.