Tutorial: Inspecting the Inspector in Final Cut Pro X, Pt. 2
This tutorial on Apple Final Cut Pro X takes a closer look at color correction in the Inspector, exploring the Balance Color, Match Color, and Color Mask and Shape Mask features.
Using the Shape Mask
Directly to the right of the Color Mask in the Color section of the Inspector is the Shape Mask (Figure 22, below).
Figure 22. The Shape Mask. To see this screenshot at full size, click the image.
If you click it, you'll see a circle appear, and that's the default shape of your mask. The circle has several points you can drag to change the shape of the mask; it’s got four green points on either corner, and you can stretch it out and make it look more like an oval (Figure 23, below).
Figure 23. Dragging the Shape Mask to an oval shape. To see this screenshot at full size, click the image.
You can also click the clear dot and drag it left and right to square off the corners. It also has a green center handle that lets you rotate it. The outer circle is actually the mask’s feather; you can adjust the feather of the mask.
As drag around the shape, you won’t see any changes in the image because we haven't defined anything yet; we’re just defining the shape of the mask first. Once you have the mask in the shape you want, you can step into the board and as with the Color Mask, you’ll see Mask Inside and Outside. Inside is going to affect everything inside the mask and it’s going to feather our changes from the inner shape to the edge.
Let’s say we want the center of our frame to be a little bit brighter. We can start to raise the Exposure in the center, and as you can see in Figure 24 (below), it trails off on the edge.
Figure 24. Adjusting the Exposure inside the Shape Mask. To see this screenshot at full size, click the image.
One good use I’ve found for the Shape Mask is to add a really nice vignette. A lot of vignettes in various programs are basically just a black-to-transparent vignette and they look awful. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to use the Shape Mask to make a vignette that uses a sort of color burn on the edges. This how I use the shape mask more often than not.
So let’s add a Shape Mask and stretch it out. We're going to make it similar to the shape of the frame. We’re going to square off the corners just a bit, and then step in the Color board and choose Outside. We want to leave the inside alone. We want to affect the outside, because we want to burn the outside of the image.
Next we go to Exposure; I find that if you drag the global exposure, it tends to crush the blacks. As you can see on the edges of the frame in Figure 25 (below), the blacks are getting really inky and dark and it just doesn’t look very good.
Figure 25. Blacks are too crushed here. To see this screenshot at full size, click the image.
So I found a good alternative to that affects only the Highlights and Midtones. First, we bring the Highlights down. So it gets dark without really crushing stuff, and you can just kind of pull midtones down a little bit too. Once we’ve got the settings we want in the Color board, we can make adjustments to the mask; we can adjust the feather or fall-off of the mask. We’ll add a subtle amount of highlights to the couple that highlights them in the frame. It draws your attention more to the center of the frame, and you can see the effect on (right) and off (left) in Figure 26 (below).
Figure 26. Before the edge burn effect (left) and after (right).
You can also add multiple shape masks by simply clicking the Shape Mask icon multiple times, giving you multiple Shape Masks within the same frame.
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