Requirements: Digital Fusion 4.0+, DFX+ 4.0+ with Module 2
Flow: N/A
Images:  Off Balance,  Reference
Archive: N/A

How often has a clip of footage come to you where the camera operator has not matched his white balance? It happens often enough for most of us. Using the color corrector tool, this can be quickly resolved if provided a match clip.

Start with a new flow, and add 2 loaders.

1. Add a loader pointing to the clip "Off_Balance.tga"
2. Add a loader pointing to the clip "Reference.tga"

Looking at the clips, you can see that "Off_Balanace" was shot without white balance. It is distinctly blue in tint. Rather than trying to guess, and match the clips by eye, we'll use the match histogram function of the color corrector.

3. Add a color corrector to your flow.
4. Connect the Off_Balance.tga to the background (brown arrow)
5. Connect the Reference.tga to the color corrector match reference (green arrow)

6. Select the histogram button under the correction tab

7. Select the match button at the bottom of the controls.

Notice now how the image is much closer to the original reference shot. Be sure to use the snapshot match function to limit the matching histogram if you are working on a running clip. If you don't, as the reference clip runs, it adjusts the match curves of the histogram.

This is a good place to use the A/B split wipe function in the display to compare before and after, or the reference clip and the corrected clip.

At this stage you may notice a bit of color aberration in the highlights of the snow. In the next few steps I'll show you how to go in and remove the saturation in this area to clean up the image.

8. Open the ranges tab.
9. Adjust the curves to clip your effect on the highlights, like so:

10. In the corrections tab;
    1. Select the colors button
    2. Select the highlights button
    3. Adjust the tint to 0.65
    4. Adjust the level to 0.4

This will tune out a lot of the basic green tint left in the snow. The colors are still a little dull, so we'll adjust the levels to make them pop a bit more.

11. Ensure you are in the highlight mode (highlight is the selected button) and adjust the gain slider to about 1.2

There you have it, a quick and simple color correction using the match function. In this case we specifically adjusted the snow to compensate for color aberration. Another method we could have used, is to smooth the histogram match curves.

For complete details on how the color corrector match function works, be sure to consult the Digital Fusion Reference Manual.