Face Light filter for each person
Magic Bullet Colorista works as a full-screen filter, but you can also use it to perform the same type of function as Face Light by using Colorista’s round or rectangular masks. All color-correction adjustments may be applied inside or outside of these areas, so it’s great for grading isolated portions of the image, like the sky or a bright window. In addition to the typical lift/gamma/gain color wheels, there’s also an exposure slider that brightens the image in a very photographic way. A number of indie features have been graded entirely with the Colorista filter. It can also be installed and used in Apple Motion, Avid Media Composer and Adobe After Effects.

One more common filter in my recipe is Vignette, another free plug-in from Herrick. Lens distortions — such as lens vignetting, where the outer edges of the image darken — tend to trick our minds into seeing an image as more filmic. Sometimes this is a natural byproduct of the lens selection but often is artificially introduced by the DP. Subtle use of the Vignette filter tends to focus attention toward the center of the frame and sells the image as more artistic. The filter I use not only lets you change the quality of the vignette, but also adjust its position. Sometimes a vignette effect looks best when it’s off-center.

Special effects/stylized control of the image
I grade with a combination of filters to achieve artistic goals but typically stay away from the many stylized filter packages when doing standard color grading. There are many that I do like, including those from Nattress, Pistolero, Magic Bullet, Noise Industries and DV Shade, but I reserve such image effects as Technicolor, bleach bypass and chromatic glows for special cases, like dramatic flashback scenes. The exception is Magic Bullet Looks (Red Giant Software). This is my go-to for more advanced effects that mimic in-camera filtering, including graduated filters, selective focus and swing-and-tilt lens effects. The results appear very photographic and the feature set offers quite a few color-correction tools, like curves, which are missing from the regular Final Cut Pro toolset.

Staying legal
The last step is to apply two more filters across the entire timeline if your master is for broadcast television. The first is FCP’s Desaturate Highlights (or Lows) filter. This is really a single filter, but it exists twice in the folder with either highlights or lows enabled by default. As you lower blacks and raise whites to achieve more contrast, dark colors like reds and blues get shoved to the lower boundaries of the video signal and bright colors like yellow get hotter. Extreme color grading may result in illegal video levels, so it’s necessary to reduce color saturation in the light and dark regions of the image. Be subtle!

I’ll say the same for the Broadcast Safe filter — the second of these last two effects. I’ll create a custom setting that’s not too harsh. RGB Limiting in that filter is disabled because I’m mainly interested in clipping extreme luminance levels. I prefer to fix levels through my grading adjustments and by paying attention to the built-in waveform monitor and vectorscope, so my use of the Broadcast Safe filter is only to clip the last few percent.

Here’s the trick to applying any filter across the board. Add the filter to one clip and set the values. Now copy-and-paste that filter to the browser. Remove it from the clip. Highlight all video clips in the timeline and drag-and-drop the filter from the browser to the highlighted timeline. If you have several filters to apply this way, make sure you maintain the proper order so that the correct filters end up on top. In the case of Desaturate Hi/Lo and Broadcast Safe, these should be the topmost filters on each clip.

There’s nothing left to do but render. Adding this many plug-in filters to a 90-minute HD feature film takes hours to render — often overnight for half of the film, even on a fast machine. So plan on at least three days for your masterpiece — IF you’re fast. Or work in sections and render overnight. Make sure you budget additional time to evaluate the overnight render first thing in the morning. You may not like everything you did when you see it in the cold light of day, so make sure you have the time to tweak.

Happy grading!