Automated Color Matching

[Mylenium]

Hi! Im trying to find a quick way to match the color (and/or histogram) of 2 clips. Photoshop has a great tool called Match Color which does exactly what Im looking to do, although it just works on a pair of images. Unfortunately it doesnt work so well when trying to batch process a sequence either. Does anyone know of a plugin or another approach using after effects?

Thanks a bunch,

Eric

Magic Bullet has some built-in automatism though it is more or less jsut a way of compensating minor variations in brightness. Other than that I don't know of any particular plugin that would do what you want. I can only imagine building a setup with expressions on an adjustment layer, but it requires at least a thir party expression color sampler like e.g. the one in Digital Anarchy's Toolbox plugin set.

Mylenium

[beenyweenies]

Hi! Im trying to find a quick way to match the color (and/or histogram) of 2 clips. Photoshop has a great tool called Match Color which does exactly what Im looking to do, although it just works on a pair of images. Unfortunately it doesnt work so well when trying to batch process a sequence either. Does anyone know of a plugin or another approach using after effects?

Thanks a bunch,

Eric

If you are just trying to match the color of the two clips, but not changing that matching every frame, you just need to do some basic color correction on one of the clips. Here's one way:

1. place both clips in a composition, side by side, with an adjustment layer on top of both - Apply "Levels" to the adjustment layer but leave the controls alone for now.

2. Decide which clip has the color you want to match to. Apply Levels to the other layer.

3. In the composition viewer window, toggle the switch to show only the red channel.

4. Open the controls for Levels on the adjustment layer - drag the input white slider (the one on the top-right) to the left, going as far as needed to blow out the image yet retain some detail. This does a good job of showing you the difference between the shadow color of the red channels in your clips.

5. Open levels applied to the layer you wish to correct. Toggle the channel select dropdown to red. Tweak until the clips appear matched in density.

6. Repeat steps 3-5 for the green and blue channels. If needed, you might need to slam the adjustment layer's Levels call the other way - drag the input black slider (top-left) to the right.

7. Turn off your adjustment layer, and in the composition viewer, toggle the channels back to RGB so you can see your clips normally. If at this point things aren't matching up properly, your clip may need adjustment to the whole clip, not just the individual color channels. Fine tune from here.

[backwheelbates]

Thanks for the responses!! I found a plugin called CompWizard from RedGiant. http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/cowi.html It looks like it should do the trick. I wonder if adobe will port over their photoshop Match Color tool.

Thanks a bunch,

Eric

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