Tutorial: Inspecting the Inspector in Final Cut Pro X, Pt. 1
This tutorial on Apple Final Cut Pro X inspects the Video Inspector, a context-sensitive area of the FCP X interface that allows you to change settings of various filters and settings, and focuses on making basic but effective color adjustments.
Adjusting Saturation
In the Saturation adjustment, there’s a Global saturation for the clip, and you also have Shadow, Midtone, and Highlights saturation (Figure 8, below). Unlike the Color sliders, which allow you to go in any direction, a full 360 degrees, the Saturation and Exposure sliders let you go only up and down.
Figure 8. Adjusting Saturation with the Highlights Saturation slider.
You can also use the percentages in the area below (Figure 9, below), but I find it more intuitive just to move the sliders because I’m not a numbers guy; I just go by the way it looks.
Figure 9. Adjusting Saturation by percentage.
Adjusting Exposure
With Exposure, the controls are almost identical. They’re differentiated by two things: which is selected up top, of course, and by the little icons that appear at the top of the window when you’re adjusting one or the other (Figure 10, below).
Figure 10. Icons for Saturation (left) and Exposure (right).
Making Exposure adjustments is pretty intuitive: You push up to make it brighter, down to make it darker, and just as with the Saturation slider, there are sliders for Global, Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights (Figure 11, below).
Figure 11. Adjusting Exposure with the Highlights slider.
Now when I work with shots for Cord3Films we really try to get the image as close to finished as possible--we actually do not shoot flat; we shoot with a pretty punchy, contrasty image in the camera. Occasionally, when a clip is a little overexposed, one of the most common things I use to adjust it is the Exposure Midtones, which solves a lot of issues with exposure.
In the shot shown in Figure 12 (below), the image is a bit overexposed, and I feel like the highlights are a little blown, and the midtones are a little light.
Figure 12. This image is slightly overexposed in the highlights and the midtones.
So I’ll grab the Midtone slider (the middle ball), and drag it down and eyeballing it. Then I’ll pull the highlights back a hair, and it will look much better than how it started (Figure 13, below) after just a simple, mostly midtone adjustment.
Figure 13. The midtones-adjusted image.
To toggle the adjustment on and off and see if you really did improve it, hit the back arrow at the top-left corner of the Color Adjustment panel. Then click the little blue square shown in Figure 14 (below) to turn it on or off, and you can see your shot before and after the adjustment you made.
Figure 14. Click this blue square to toggle your adjustment on and off.
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