Grading clips using Adjust

Adjust operations provide a structured way to improve the overall look of your clips by targeting key image properties like color, contrast, and exposure. Designed for fast, natural-looking corrections, they let you start with global adjustments and then refine specific areas using more targeted controls.

What are Adjust Operations for?

The color controls in Adjust are intended for creating targeted adjustments to specific image characteristics intended to correct problems or enhance naturalistic properties of the picture. You can also use these controls to do whatever you want, stylistically. However, more flexible tools for that are available in the Style adjustment.

Adjust has been designed to make naturalistic corrections as fast and easy as possible, which is why every clip in a sequence, by default, has one Clip Adjust available for making specific adjustments to that instance of a clip.

Color & Contrast controls

The Color & Contrast controls are the most fundamental image adjustment tools found in the Color mode. These controls let you adjust the principal characteristics of any image, and while there are many other tools available, you’re best advised beginning with these, and you may find that once you’re done, that’s all you need.

Start with the Global adjustments

Even though these controls are located beneath the color controls, they’re important to understand because they determine which parts of the image they target.

The Global button (on by default for any clip you haven’t started adjusting yet) targets the Color & Contrast controls for the entire image. Additionally, the Contrast and Black controls only work when you’re set to Global, as they must work on the overall range of image tonality to work correctly. When making a general correction, you should always start with the Color & Contrast controls. If you don’t first maximize the quality of your image with the global controls, you may find it impossible to achieve satisfactory results with the individual zones later.

Refine the image using Zone adjustments

After you’ve made your overall image adjustments using the Global controls to maximize image quality, it’s appropriate to start making more specific adjustments using zones.

Zones divide an image into regions of brightness (tonality) by splitting the source image's histogram into percentages of lightness and shadow. Each zone is defined by a threshold above which (highlight zones) or below which (shadow zones) everything from that point onward is adjusted. Each zone is automatically and smoothly blended into the rest of the adjustments you’re making to prevent unwanted artifacts.

By default, you start with two overlapping zones, one for highlights and one for shadows, that blend together through the midtones of the image.

These initial zones are created by automatically analyzing the first frame of the current clip at the playhead position. Hovering the pointer over a zone button gives you a preview of which parts of the image will fall into that zone via an overlay in the monitor, to help you choose which zone you want to adjust.

Clicking to select a zone targets the Exposure, Temperature, Balance, and Saturation controls at the regions of the image that fall within that zone. This lets you do things like lower highlights that started clipping when you raised contrast, cool off shadows without affecting the highlights, desaturate top highlights that look artificially colorful, or add saturation to shadows that seem too flat and gray.

The default two zones, Shadows and Highlights, will probably take care of most tonally specific adjustments you need to make. However, if you want to adjust even smaller ranges of progressively brighter highlights or darker 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.

The math that governs how zones overlap is very similar to tone mapping, which makes zones ideal for cleanly pushing and pulling exposure in the highlights to create highlight differentiation, or to compress highlights in just the right way to accentuate details you want to clarify.

Furthermore, you’ll find that making Exposure adjustments using multiple zones to raise and lower exposure lets you quickly tackle the same adjustments you’d do using an exposure curve in another application. This is no accident; it’s how zones were designed to be used. When combined with zones, the Color & Contrast controls let you make a wide variety of targeted adjustments that cleanly combine into a single mathematical function using nga simple set of controls, rather than having to navigate to multiple tools and take multiple steps to make the same adjustments.

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.

Color & Contrast parameters and HUDs

Here’s a breakdown of the functionality of each individual Color & Contrast control.

• Contrast: The difference between the brightest and darkest pixels in an image; increasing contrast makes an image more pronounced, starker, while decreasing contrast makes an image softer, more subdued, and flatter. Contrast is a 2D control: the vertical adjustment lets you increase or decrease overall image contrast, and the horizontal adjustment lets you move the pivot point of image tonality around which contrast is expanded. By default, the pivot point is at 50% image tonality.

Keep in mind that as you’re dragging, 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.

This Contrast operation is linear in nature. However, the shadows smoothly roll off into black so that global contrast blends with adjustments to other zones. However, if you’re using the Wide Gamut color setup of color management, the highlights roll-off resulting from Output tone mapping will create an S-curve effect that further smooths out the highlights of your contrast adjustment. Contrast cannot be used within a zone. However, you can augment contrast adjustments with zone-specific Exposure adjustments to retrieve details from clipped highlights by lowering exposure in a highlight zone, or to deepen lackluster shadows by lowering exposure in a shadow zone.

The Contrast HUD shows a waveform monitor analysis of image luminance, where a graph consisting of multiple overlapping waveforms shows the ranges of luminance occupied by the pixels in each line of the image, with darker pixels appearing as dips in the waveform that fall downward closer to the bottom, and lighter pixels showing up as peaks in the waveform that stretch up farther towards the top. An indicator line shows the pivot point, and arrow indicators show the expansion of highlights and shadows stretching away from the pivot point. The Contrast value itself appears in the upper left corner.

• Exposure: Exposure adjusts image brightness by stretching the video signal towards or away from the highlights while keeping the black point pinned in place. Exposure is a two-dimensional control where the vertical adjustment lets you increase or decrease Exposure, and the horizontal adjustment lets you increase or decrease the Black point, which determines the minimum signal level that’s allowable when using any of the Color & Contrast controls in the current adjustment. By raising the Black point, you can introduce flaring, an opening up of the details in the shadows by lifting the darkest parts of the picture. Lowering the Black point can crush or compress the darkest parts of the image.

Exposure expands or contracts luminance with a smooth roll-off at the shadows but a linear progression into the highlights. However, if you’re using the Wide Gamut color management setup, the highlights that roll off due to Output tone mapping will create an S-curve effect. When Exposure is used within a zone, each adjustment rolls off into the next zone with an automatic width, keeping transitions smooth while preventing you from inverting the signal and accidentally solarizing the image.

The Exposure HUD shows a waveform monitor analysis of the luminance range across the image, with indicators for the Black point (the MIN luminance indicator becomes the BLACK indicator when you adjust Black), and the expansion of Exposure from the Black point up (or contraction from MAX down). The Exposure value itself appears in the upper left corner, in stops. The Black value appears next to the BLACK indicator. When used within a zone, the threshold of that zone will be shown as an indicator, and the expansion or contraction of Exposure within the zone will be shown as an arrow travelling from or to that threshold.

• Temperature: Temperature is a color temperature adjustment that combines Temperature (shifting the image between warm/orange and cool/blue) via a vertical adjustment and Tint (shifting the image between green and magenta) via a horizontal adjustment, using this 2D control.

These adjustments are made via chromatic adaptation math that alters the reflected colors in the image, similarly to how changing the color of the lighting instruments would have been during the original photography. Temperature follows the warming and cooling of light along the black-body locus of the CIE 1931 graph. Temperature can be used within a zone.

The Temperature HUD shows a vectorscope analysis of image chrominance (hue is represented as an angle around the circle, and saturation as the distance from the center), with two arrow indicators showing the relative amount of Temperature and Tint shifting being applied along the axes of adjustment. Separate Temperature and Tint values appear at each axis of adjustment.

• White Balance Eyedropper: You can select this eyedropper and use it to sample pixels in the image that are supposed to be neutral white or gray to automatically correct a color cast (color temperature imbalance) that makes the image look tinted.
• Balance: A traditional color balance control that lets you simultaneously rebalance the red, green, and blue channels in the image to change the overall color temperature in a freeform manner. This is a polar control: pushing the balance control from the neutral center point towards a particular hue at the edge of the color wheel tints the image with that color. Similarly, pulling the balance control away from the hue of a tint in the image that you don’t want (towards its complementary color) cancels out an unwanted color cast.

While this control affects the entire image when used globally, it rolls off towards the shadows to smoothly blend into other zones, and as a result, global use of this control avoids contaminating your deepest blacks. Similar to Temperature, Balance adjustments are made via chromatic adaptation math that alters the reflected colors in the image, as if changing the color of the lighting instruments would have during the original photography. Balance can be used within specific zones, and a smooth transition is maintained at the border between any two zones to prevent artifacts. If you like, you can force a contamination of the blacks of your image by making a large enough balance adjustment in one of the shadow zones, if that’s your thing.

The Balance HUD shows a vectorscope analysis of image chrominance (hue is represented as an angle around the circle, and saturation as the distance from the center), with a single arrow indicator showing the direction into which you’ve pushed color balance. No value appears for this control.

• Saturation: A one-dimensional control, dragging vertically intensifies or reduces the saturation or colorfulness of the image. Dragging all the way to 0 results in a black-and-white grayscale image. This control uses the same saturation algorithm as Adobe Photoshop. Saturation can be used within a zone, and if used across multiple zones, provides similar functionality to the Lum vs. Sat curve found in other tools.

The Saturation HUD shows a vectorscope analysis of image chrominance (hue is represented as an angle around the circle, and saturation as the distance from the center), with a circle showing the direction into which you’re pushing saturation; out towards the edge of the ring intensifies saturation, while inward towards the center reduces saturation. A simple value from 0 to 2.0 appears for this control.

Color Shift controls and HUDs

The Color Shift controls are great for making fast and accurate tweaks to specific colors wherever they appear throughout the image. Using these controls, you can desaturate a distracting background, change the hue of an inaccurate product color, darken a range of hues that’s not rich enough, or neutralize an interview subject who’s looking a little red. If the problem you’re having with the picture can be tied to a specific hue, these controls can help.

To use these controls:

Choose a color to adjust using Hue swatches

To help you work quickly, this effect creates a set of color swatches corresponding to the most significant hues in the image by automatically analyzing the initial frame of the current clip, to which you moved the playhead.

Hovering the pointer over a color swatch or a Shift control shows a preview of which parts of the image overlap the selected hue as an overlay on the monitor. Selecting a swatch targets it with the Saturation, Hue, and Lum Shift controls.

If there isn’t a color patch corresponding to a hue you want to adjust, you can use the eyedropper to sample the desired color in the monitor. As you move the eyedropper over the image, an overlay shows which colors you’re targeting for sampling. Selecting samples, the color you’re hovering over, and if the color you sampled is distinct enough, a new swatch will appear. If it’s not sufficiently distinct from an existing unused hue swatch, the existing swatch will be updated to the new hue and selected. Otherwise, a swatch that does overlap that color will be selected in case you just didn’t recognize it.

If the first frame that was sampled wasn’t representative enough of the colors in the rest of the clip, you can move the playhead to another frame in that clip, select the Plus (+) button, and choose Extract Hues (Default). The new frame will be re-analyzed, and new swatches will be created.

Alternatively, you could create a standard set of Full Spectrum color swatches consisting of primary (red, green, blue), secondary (yellow, cyan, magenta), and orange hues, or a set of well-known Memory Color swatches that target common hues people expect. Both options are available in the Plus (+) menu.

Whenever you sample or load a whole new set of hues, whatever hues haven’t been adjusted yet are overwritten by the new ones. Meanwhile, hues that have been adjusted (indicated by a dot under that swatch) are retained in order not to lose adjustments you’ve already made.

Making adjustments using the Color Shift controls

Once you’ve selected the hue you want to adjust, the three available Shift controls let you adjust the Saturation, Hue, and Luminance of everything in the frame with that hue.

• Sat Shift: Dragging up raises saturation, while dragging down lowers saturation. Dragging right expands the range of neighboring hues adjusted by this control, while dragging left narrows it to just the selected hue. Sat Shift is a good substitute for the Global Saturation control, as you can target specific hues, raising hues that could be stronger and lowering hues that are distracting, to better sculpt the saturation in more sophisticated and creative ways.

The Sat Shift HUD shows a vectorscope analysis of image chrominance (hue is represented as an angle around the circle, and saturation as the distance from the center). A single pie-slice indicator shows the section of hues you’re adjusting in the Vectorscope, and it pushes out towards the edge if you raise saturation and pulls toward the center if you lower saturation. The pie slice widens and narrows as you widen and narrow the range of hues affected by this adjustment. A simple value from 100 to -100 appears for this control.

• Color Shift: Dragging up and down lets you change the hue of the targeted color by rotating it around the color wheel shown in the HUD. Dragging right expands the range of neighboring hues that are adjusted by this control, while dragging left narrows the range to just the selected hue. Color Shift is a great tool to use when there are colors that aren’t quite right, such as an actor looking a bit too green, a red product logo that looks too orange, or a cyan sky that you wish were a bit more blue.

The Color Shift HUD shows a vectorscope analysis of image chrominance (hue is represented as an angle around the circle, and saturation as the distance from the center). A blue pie-slice indication shows the section of hues you’re adjusting as they rotate around the vectorscope, while a dotted-line pie-slice shows their original location before you started rotating them. The pie-slices widen and narrow as you widen and narrow the range of hues affected by this adjustment. A simple value from 100 to -100 appears for this control.

• Lum Shift: Dragging up lightens the targeted hue, while dragging down darkens it. Dragging right expands the range of neighboring hues that are adjusted by this control, while dragging left narrows the range to just the selected hue. Lum Shift is a tricky tool to use, as larger adjustments reveal compression artifacts in the image more readily than any of the other Shift tools. However, used judiciously, it can be helpful for lightening parts of the image that are difficult to target in any other way, or for adding richness to colors by darkening them just enough.

The Lum Shift HUD shows a waveform monitor analysis of image luminance, where a graph consisting of multiple overlapping waveforms shows the range of luminance occupied by the pixels in each line of the image, with darker pixels appearing as dips in the waveform that fall downward closer to the bottom, and lighter pixels showing up as peaks in the waveform that stretch up farther towards the top. While you’re making an adjustment, the parts of the waveform graph that correspond to the color you’re adjusting are highlighted, so you can see how much you’re brightening or darkening pixels consisting of the targeted hue.

Texture controls and HUDs

Image texture is generally defined as “the small-scale structure perceived on an image, based on the spatial arrangement of color or intensities.” The appearance of fine details, noise, the sharpness or softness of focus, the amount of contrast, and numerous other image characteristics all contribute to the viewer’s perception of texture in the image, whether it appears rough or smooth, whether details seem fine or coarse. As control over these aspects of image processing has improved over the years, adjustments to texture have become an intrinsic part of the color adjustment experience.

Texture HUDs

All texture controls share the same HUD, a high-contrast, desaturated representation of the image that highlights the range of fine-to-coarse textures throughout the image. This HUD exaggerates the results of texture adjustments, making it easy to see which parts of the image are being affected by each texture control, even if the resulting effect in the image is subtle.

Basic use of Texture and Sharpness

The Texture and Sharpness controls provide different methods of sharpening or softening textures at different frequencies or granularity in your images. By default, these appear in their simplest form, which lets you make fast and easy adjustments to image texture:

• Texture: A simple vertical control that lets you soften or sharpen medium-sized details of the image (there is no horizontal adjustment for Texture). Drag up from the default to sharpen, drag down from the default to soften. There is no horizontal adjustment for texture. A small button to the upper left of the Texture control lets you enable or disable Detail mode, which toggles between two methods of texture adjustment in high-resolution media that yield different results.
• Sharpness: A two-dimensional control that selectively increases contrast at edges and within fine details to create a greater impression of sharpness. Drag up to increase sharpening. Drag right to raise the threshold at which image detail is sharpened, which lets you omit smaller details from this effect to focus on sharpening the edges of more prominent details. Be aware that adding too much Sharpness can result in artifacts ringing the details being sharpened.

You can also use this control to blur the image by dragging lower than the minimum amount of Sharpness.

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. Then, raise Sharpness and drag to the right to raise the threshold to ignore smaller details and add a bit of sharpness back to the edges of the subject to avoid making the image look too soft.

Advanced use of Texture and Sharpness

Selecting the Sliders button beneath either the Texture or Sharpness controls expands the controls to enable multi-band and multi-parameter adjustments, giving you even more precise control.

• Texture (slider mode): A set of five vertical sliders, each of which adjusts an independent band of image texture from fine (left) to coarse (right). Using these sliders, you can soften some bands of texture while sharpening others, to create extremely specific adjustments. Dragging each slider up from the default sharpens that band, while dragging each slider down from the default softens that band.
• Sharpness (slider mode): A set of three vertical sliders that let you independently adjust all three parameters of this effect.
  • Amount: The amount of contrast applied to increase the appearance of sharpness. Raising the Amount above a certain threshold automatically lowers the Radius (if you’ve raised it) to make it easier to create the most naturalistic adjustments.
  • Radius: The number of pixels surrounding adjusted pixels that will also be affected. Raising the Radius above a certain threshold automatically reduces the amount, making it easier to create the most naturalistic adjustments.
  • Threshold: Lets you omit pixels from the sharpening effect based on how different they are from the surrounding area. The practical result is that you can progressively omit fine to medium levels of detail from being sharpened, to avoid exaggerating noise and details you don’t want to sharpen, while focusing the effect on edges and more prominent high-contrast details.

Particularly with the Texture control, keep in mind that the main reason to have access to these additional sliders is not necessarily to use them all, but to have access to the right band of functionality for what you’re trying to achieve, which varies with the size of the subject and the nature of the details it contains.