Tutorial: Inspecting the Inspector in Final Cut Pro X, Pt. 2

Once you’ve made your mask and you’re happy with it, go back to the Color board in the Inspector. When you open it, in the lower-left corner, you’ll see the word Mask, and just to the right of it, Inside and Outside (Figure 11, below). This allows us to make different color adjustments to the mask and the area outside of it. When Inside is selected, the adjustment will affect everything inside of this mask that we just made--in this case, the sky. Outside is everything outside of the mask--the building, which actually comes in handy, because we can adjust the sky and then just swap Inside for Outside and then adjust the building.

Figure 11. The Inside-Outside Mask controls that appear in the Color board in the Inspector after you create a mask.

So now, with Inside selected, we can work on the sky. We can adjust Exposure; we can pull down the Midtones, and add a little more contrast in the sky to make it pop a bit more. You really can't get much highlight detail back--once it’s gone, it’s gone. So just from that, that little change there, added quite a bit of contrast to the sky, as shown in Figure 12 (below), and back in the Inspector I can click the blue box to the left of Correction 1 to toggle the correction on and off. You see in Figure 12 that the sky has become a lot more ominous-looking.

Figure 12. The sky looks more intense now. To see this screenshot at full size, click the image.

If I wanted to, I could even add a little more blue to the sky by going into the Saturation board (with Inside still selected) and push up the Saturation; I could also push more blue into the sky by going into the Color board and pushing up the Midtones. In this case we're going to do a little of both to give us the look you see in Figure 13 (below).

Figure 13. Our secondary correction added a little more blue to the sky. To see this screenshot at full size, click the image.

Now, I’m pretty happy with the way the sky looks, so I’m going to switch to Mask Outside. This allows us, in our next correction, to ignore the mask and select everything outside the mask--basically, everything else from the building down. I feel like the midtones are a little dark, so I’m going to go into the Exposure board and push the Midtones slider up, just a hair. Then I’ll add a little bit of Highlights. I’ll pull down the Shadows a it to add a little more contrast. It’s all about finesse; you don’t want to too far with it.

Figure 14 (below) shows before and after the changes we made; it’s pretty astounding how much different it looks. Just from using this Color Mask, you can actually increase the perceivable dynamic range of your image.

Figure 14. Before (left) and after (right) the adjustments we made with the Color Mask. To see this screenshot at full size, click the image.

Let’s look at another example. Figure 15 (below) shows some establishing shots through the vines captured on the slider. These vines are silhouetted on the sky. But what if I didn't want them to be as silhouetted?

Figure 15. Vines silhouetted on the sky--not exactly how I want this shot to look. To see this screenshot at full size, click the image.

To begin, I make sure this clip is selected, go into the Color section of the Inspector, and create a color mask. Then I create a mask around the green and the shadows, being careful not to pick up any of the sky.

As you can see in Figure 16 (below), my first attempt to create this mask isn't very clean.

Figure 16. My first mask on this clip--kind of a misfire. To see this screenshot at full size, click the image.

If this happens to you, simply make another selection. With Color Mark still selected, hold down Shift and drag the eyedropper, and you’ll see the little plus (+) sign shown in Figure 17 (below). You can click and add to that selection. In this case, I want to pick up more of this black in the image.

Figure 17. The plus (+) sign indicates that you can add to the selection. To see this screenshot at full size, click the image.

Likewise, if you hold down the Option key, you’ll see the minus sign shown in Figure 18 (below). This indicates that you can actually remove a selected area from the mask. So holding down Shift will add to the selection, and holding down Option or Alt will remove from the selection.

Figure 18. The minus (-) sign indicates that you can remove parts of the selection. To see this screenshot at full size, click the image.

So now I’ll go back to the Softness slider next to Color Mask in the Inspector, holding down Option again, and now that we see the mask in Figure 19 (below), that looks good; it’s going to do what I need it to do.

Figure 19. The mask looks good now. To see this screenshot at full size, click the image.

So now we’re going to move into the Color board, making sure we’re Inside the Mask by default, go into Exposure, and push the Midtones to try and recover some of those midtones in the viney areas, and put some green back into the vines. Then we’ll push the Saturation up a little bit. Next, we’ll select Outside, go into the Exposure board, and pull the sky in the background down just a hair. Figure 20 (below) shows how it’s working so far.

Figure 20. After our Inside/Outside adjustments, there’s a good bit more color in the leaves. To see this screenshot at full size, click the image.

Let’s say we want the sky to look more like it’s sunset, an orangey type of sky. (I probably wouldn’t really do this, but the technique can be useful in other scenarios.) With Outside still selected, in the Color board, we’ll grab Midtones and we’ll push it towards the orange. Figure 21 (below, right) shows how we’re making that sky orange in the background.

So with these quick adjustments using the Color Mask, Figure 21 (below, right) shows how our shot looks now, and Figure 21 (below, left) shows how it looked before. It’s a pretty drastic difference.

Figure 21. Before the Color Mask (left) and after (right). To see this screenshot at full size, click the image.