The new Colorista - anybody tried it?
- Thread starter Jet Nine
- Start date
kwoff
Well-known member
Looks a little overpriced to me at $299. I have the first version of Colorista, but doubt I will try version II. Given that the plug-in is for use with a software suite that already includes Apple Color, it seems to me that all one gains is the convenience of using Colorista II without leaving FCP for smaller CC tweeks that don't demand all the features of Color. To me that benefit is not worth $299, or even the $99 upgrade price, particularly when one considers the absence of a hardware control option. This was a great piece of software to have before Apple added Color to Final Cut Studio, but I have used it only very infrequently since Color came out. Perhaps the target market is people who edit in Premiere Pro and do not have Color.
Bought it yesterday (the $99 upgrade as I already had Colorista v1). I think it's a fantastic tool and will easily take the place of Color for me on most jobs. The major advantages Color still has are custom shapes for secondaries, the FX room, built-in tracking, and the ability to very quickly apply a saved grade to a new shot or group of shots.
I really hope custom shapes will be included in Colorista II at some point, but until then you can do masks in After Effects and apply that as a workaround. Same thing with tracking.
I love the new keyer in CII and the HSL saturation/brightness controls. They really do work remarkably well. The additional methods of manipulating the 3-way color wheels are great too (independent saturation and hue). Being able to double-click anything to return it to default was a serious no-brainer that somehow never made it into version 1, so it's great to have that now as well.
The simple auto-balance works incredibly well, too - much better than my old workaround of using FCP's 3-way to do a highlight white balance. With CII you'll notice a much more pleasing result when balancing even from imperfect sources. It shifts the blacks as well as the whites when removing color casts from shots and it makes a big difference. It really does feel more like correcting WB on RAW footage.
Highlight recovery on the other hand doesn't seem very useful to me; it probably doesn't matter much on 5D/7D type footage with highly compressed acquisition codecs. At most it seems to return tinted highlights to pure white if you've put a color cast over the rest of your shot. Not something I'm likely to use very often.
I also wish they could allow manual manipulation of the Curves, the way one can do it with AE's curves. Using a slider is just lame if you're used to tweaking stuff manually. However it's great to have Curves inside of FCP that work quite well, and one upside of the slider approach is it's harder to ruin an image without really working at it, whereas with manual Curves you can do it right away if you're not experienced.
The 'Pop' slider (local contrast enhancement) is nice as well and I can see this taking the place of Unsharp Mask for a lot of shots. Definitely possible to push it too far into HDR/tone-mapped territory, but used gently it helps a lot.
I also love having optional numeric sliders for everything now. Just another way of viewing the data and making fine adjustments. It's definitely helped me out on a few shots already.
The only major downside to CII so far is that having Primary, Secondary and Master all in one plug-in can make for complicated fine-tuning adjustments later on if you don't remember which room you did a particular adjustment in. Being able to bypass each room's output makes this easier, but once you stack 2 or 3 instances of CII it can get really hairy. This is more the colorist's problem than CII, though - with greater control comes greater complexity once you start to tweak things later on.
I don't expect many colorists are going to drop Color and start working with Colorista II in the FCP timeline, but for the editor who is also his own colorist, and has clients who regularly ask for new changes late in the game (i.e. there is not a traditional 'picture lock' workflow in place), CII is awesome. It's just a better way to work in those situations where you're basically mastering in the NLE, which rightly or wrongly happens a lot these days.
I really hope custom shapes will be included in Colorista II at some point, but until then you can do masks in After Effects and apply that as a workaround. Same thing with tracking.
I love the new keyer in CII and the HSL saturation/brightness controls. They really do work remarkably well. The additional methods of manipulating the 3-way color wheels are great too (independent saturation and hue). Being able to double-click anything to return it to default was a serious no-brainer that somehow never made it into version 1, so it's great to have that now as well.
The simple auto-balance works incredibly well, too - much better than my old workaround of using FCP's 3-way to do a highlight white balance. With CII you'll notice a much more pleasing result when balancing even from imperfect sources. It shifts the blacks as well as the whites when removing color casts from shots and it makes a big difference. It really does feel more like correcting WB on RAW footage.
Highlight recovery on the other hand doesn't seem very useful to me; it probably doesn't matter much on 5D/7D type footage with highly compressed acquisition codecs. At most it seems to return tinted highlights to pure white if you've put a color cast over the rest of your shot. Not something I'm likely to use very often.
I also wish they could allow manual manipulation of the Curves, the way one can do it with AE's curves. Using a slider is just lame if you're used to tweaking stuff manually. However it's great to have Curves inside of FCP that work quite well, and one upside of the slider approach is it's harder to ruin an image without really working at it, whereas with manual Curves you can do it right away if you're not experienced.
The 'Pop' slider (local contrast enhancement) is nice as well and I can see this taking the place of Unsharp Mask for a lot of shots. Definitely possible to push it too far into HDR/tone-mapped territory, but used gently it helps a lot.
I also love having optional numeric sliders for everything now. Just another way of viewing the data and making fine adjustments. It's definitely helped me out on a few shots already.
The only major downside to CII so far is that having Primary, Secondary and Master all in one plug-in can make for complicated fine-tuning adjustments later on if you don't remember which room you did a particular adjustment in. Being able to bypass each room's output makes this easier, but once you stack 2 or 3 instances of CII it can get really hairy. This is more the colorist's problem than CII, though - with greater control comes greater complexity once you start to tweak things later on.
I don't expect many colorists are going to drop Color and start working with Colorista II in the FCP timeline, but for the editor who is also his own colorist, and has clients who regularly ask for new changes late in the game (i.e. there is not a traditional 'picture lock' workflow in place), CII is awesome. It's just a better way to work in those situations where you're basically mastering in the NLE, which rightly or wrongly happens a lot these days.
Last edited:
PerroneFord
Deals in Lead
People in Premiere have Color Finesse, which while not as fully featured as Color is still a darn fine piece of software.
The REAL targets for this software should have been Avid folks, Vegas folks, and those looking for a standalone color corrector. But the software is currently not available to ANY of those user groups.
I think they are aiming this at people who don't want to commit the time to learn Color, have an older version of FCP which didn't include color, or who have no idea how to run Color Finesse.
In many ways, it's like MB Looks. It's a fine product that is "almost" right. It's close. MB Looks is missing some key features that keep it from being pro, and Colorista seems to be targeted to a very small market segment currently. I hope they do well enough to expand it out to the userbase who is clamoring for something like this tool.
The REAL targets for this software should have been Avid folks, Vegas folks, and those looking for a standalone color corrector. But the software is currently not available to ANY of those user groups.
I think they are aiming this at people who don't want to commit the time to learn Color, have an older version of FCP which didn't include color, or who have no idea how to run Color Finesse.
In many ways, it's like MB Looks. It's a fine product that is "almost" right. It's close. MB Looks is missing some key features that keep it from being pro, and Colorista seems to be targeted to a very small market segment currently. I hope they do well enough to expand it out to the userbase who is clamoring for something like this tool.
Matt Gottshalk
Resident Preditor
I bought it just because I could get the upgrade for $99. Looks great.
I'll use it for quick projects that I don't have time to take into Color.
I'll use it for quick projects that I don't have time to take into Color.
brandondull
Well-known member
I just downloaded the trial version.