Flexible Controls

Control the gain, gamma, pedestal, hue and saturation of your images. Work in HSL, RGB, CMY, or YCbCr color spaces. Control the overall image, or work with individual color channels. Flexibility is the key to getting just the look you want, and flexibility is what Color Finesse offers with its myriad controls and tools.

Individually adjustable color channel curves let you define exactly how color levels will be processed. Levels control determine input and output black, white, and gray points.

Secondary Color Correction

Want to change the color of a scarf or punch up a bland gray sky? Color Finesse's six-channel secondary color corrector allows you to isolate up to six separate colors which can be adjusted for hue, saturation, and hue offset. Each of the six channels defines a color range based on up to four color samples with settable luma and chroma tolerance, and a range softness control, allowing you to easily isolate colors without harsh edges.

Automated Color Matching

Need to match the color in one frame to a color in another frame? Color Finesse provides single-button color matching to provide natural-looking color matches without fiddling.

Smart Color Limiting and Soft-Clip

Color Finesse's 32-bit floating-point color space allows you to make radical changes in color and luma levels without clipping, but before final output you'll need to bring things back into range. Color Finesse provides accurate luma soft-clipping, as well as color limiting to meet NTSC and PAL broadcast standards.

Plug-in User Interface

New to Color Finesse 2 is the plug-in user interface, which gives you access to the most commonly used correction controls directly in the host application. Available controls include HSL and RGB corrections, the hue offset wheels, curves, and the broadcast limiter.

You don't need to invoke the full Color Finesse UI just to make simple changes, although it's always there when you want it.

High-Performance Correction

Color correction is important, but no one has all day to wait for it. That's why Color Finesse is optimized for use on multi-processor systems, and takes full advantage of the PowerPC AltiVec (Velocity Engine) instructions on Macintosh G4 and G5 systems, and the SSE/SSE2 instructions on Intel processor systems.

And as a software color corrector, Color Finesse 2 doesn't require a specific video card, specific type of slot, or limit you to workstation-style systems with multiple monitors. Use Color Finesse on a laptop, on a desktop system, or anything else you'd like.

In order to achieve this performance, Color Finesse 2 does require a PowerPC G4 or G5, or an Intel Pentium III or later system.

Telecine Suite Tools

Color Finesse also provides the monitoring tools you would expect to find in a telecine suite, including waveform monitor, vectorscope, histograms, and correction curve displays. Displays are available individually or in a convenient combination display.

Preview and Reference Options

While making your color corrections, Color Finesse previews your results with options for split-screen wipes to easily compare before-and-after images. The split can be done at any angle to make it easy to compare the part of the image that matters to you.

A reference gallery of images make it easy to compare frames from different scenes to accomplish color matching.

Previews can be directed to a second computer monitor for full size previews, or sent to an external video monitor via a FireWire (Mac only) or other video output device, including AJA Kona (Mac only), Blackmagic Design, and nVidia Quadro SDI (Windows only).

All previews can make use of LUTs to ensure accuracy.