Magic Bullet already make Looks (see 'Magic Bullet Looks' box), which is less for accurate colour correction and secondary grading and more for creating a 'big look', complete with lens flares, vignettes and spot exposures. As good as the software is, with professional features like LUTs (Look Up Tables of colour information for matching particular broadcast standards), I always found isolating secondaries to be difficult and quite slow. This doesn't help users who want to have secondaries directly in the timeline in Premiere, as they will have to purchase a Premiere license separately and will still have to open a separate window to handle secondary colour correction. Color Finesse allows primary colour correction only in a simplified interface, or full secondaries and scopes in its own interface.

Owners of Production Premium CS5 or Master Collection CS5, both of which include After Effects, will have a bundled copy of Synthetic Aperture Color Finesse 3 LE for After Effects. Of course, this option is expensive and limited to very powerful computers only, so it's not for everyone. Mac Pro users with sufficient dedication to grading can now purchase Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve as a software‑only version for $999, a far cry from the previous control‑surface version, which cost nearly $30,000. If you want correction in the timeline you could use the simple colour corrector, but then you don't have the same array of options for secondary colour correction (that applied to specific colours or areas), so in‑depth work still needs to be sent to Color and rendered. But Color is a separate program, meaning that you have to send your edited sequence to Color and render files back into your FCP timeline when you're done, also known as a 'round trip'.

To get an idea of exactly where Colorista 2 fits in the market, and what it's up against, let's briefly examine the competition.įor Final Cut Pro users, Apple Colour is included and can handle the bulk of grading duties. Magic Bullet Colorista 2, available from Red Giant Software, is a colour correction plug‑in for Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, 4 and 5 Adobe After Effects CS3,4 and 5 and Apple Final Cut Pro. With so many different bundled and third‑party colour correction plug‑ins available, do Colorista 2's new features offer anything special?

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