Native masks

The standout feature in Color Finale 2 Pro 2.13 is the long-requested ability to use Final Cut Pro’s native masks, including the Magnetic Mask, directly inside the plugin. This means editors can now combine Apple's advanced masking with Color Finale's professional-grade grading tools, unlocking powerful new workflows.

While using native FCP masks inside Color Finale Pro does have some nuances in the way you set them up (such as matching frame rate of the project with the footage), the benefits are significant. Users can now apply FCP masks like Magnetic, Shape, or Draw masks and then use Color Finale’s tools such as Color Wheels, Six Vectors, and Texture EQ within masked areas. You can even combine native FCP masks with Color Finale’s own mask types, using features like Subtract Mode and Invert Parent Mask to refine your grading.

Mask-specific settings within the plugin like Blur, Contour Mode, and Mask + Contour also work with the native masks, giving colorists more control over mask edges and shape. Whether isolating skin tones, enhancing moving objects, or adjusting complex backgrounds, the new mask support adds a huge layer of flexibility.

This is a free update for all users within their active support period.

Improved white balance tool

Also included in the 2.13 update for Color Finale 2 Pro is an improved luminosity-preserving white balance tool. Before, adjusting white balance could unintentionally brighten or darken an image. But now, changes to color temperature won’t affect image brightness, making it easier to get natural-looking corrections without extra adjustments.

Color Finale Transcoder 2.3: Canon video raw to Canon Log

Color Finale Transcoder 2.3 builds on its recent Canon video raw support by adding Canon Log color space options. As a result, editors working with Canon raw footage can now access a broad range of video color space LUTs even faster. Speed up the path to color grading while maintaining full control over exposure and white balance of the raw footage.

Both updates are free for users who are within their support period, and new users can try Color Finale 2 Pro and Transcoder 2 for free with a 7-day trial.

For over a decade, Color Finale has been empowering Final Cut Pro users with advanced, intuitive, and professional-grade color grading tools. With the launch of Color Finale 2 Pro, we introduced a simple, transparent licensing system that remains true to its roots: when you buy Color Finale 2 Pro, the license is yours forever.

Yet since the introduction of our Annual Software Support Program, we’ve noticed some confusion. Some users mistakenly think Color Finale has switched to a subscription model. Let’s clear the air.

How the license works

• One-time purchase, lifetime license: When you purchase Color Finale 2 Pro, you receive a permanent license. That means you own the software outright. It will continue working for you indefinitely - whether you choose to renew support or not.

• One year of support and updates included: Every new purchase comes with 12 months of free support and updates. This ensures you get the latest tools, bug fixes, and improvements during your first year.

What is the annual software support program?

The Color Finale Annual Software Support Program is an optional renewal after your first year. It gives you continued access to:

• Regular feature updates – We’ve rolled out numerous new tools and improvements over the past year, all designed to make your color grading workflow faster, more creative, and more powerful.

• Ongoing compatibility – Stay fully compatible with the latest versions of macOS and Final Cut Pro.

• Priority support – Direct access to our expert support team whenever you need help.

If you decide not to renew, your copy of Color Finale 2 Pro will still work exactly as it did on the day your support expired - you don’t lose your license or access to the software.

Why choose support renewal?

Our users tell us again and again how much they value the continuous flow of features we’ve added since launching the program (view the release notes here). From workflow refinements to entirely new tools, these updates are inspired by the real challenges and creative desires of our community while staying true to the familiar and intuitive interface you love inside Final Cut Pro.

With more updates already in development, renewing support ensures you don’t miss out on what’s next.

Takeaway

Color Finale 2 Pro is not a subscription. It’s a perpetual license. Once you own it, it’s yours for life. The annual support program is simply your ticket to stay at the cutting edge: new features, compatibility updates, and professional support.

In short:

• Buy once, own forever.

• 1 year of updates and support included.

• Option to renew support annually for continued updates and assistance.

• Keep using Color Finale 2 Pro indefinitely, even without renewing.

Color Finale 2 Pro is here to stay - helping you achieve stunning results in Final Cut Pro, now and for the future.

This isn’t night.

This was shot in broad daylight… and most likely you didn’t even notice.

From Cast Away to The Revenant, turning day into night is a long-standing technique in Hollywood post-production.

But here’s the real question: Can you do it too, using just Final Cut Pro? The answer is: absolutely.

In this tutorial (watch the video version above), we’ll show you exactly how to pull off the “day-for-night” effect, step by step, using Color Finale 2 Pro, a powerful color grading plugin for Final Cut Pro.

Example 1

We’ve selected one shot as an example: a man sitting near a window.

We’ll approach it in 4 steps.

Step 1: Reduce Exposure

The first thing we need to do is darken the image. At night, we naturally see less detail, especially in the shadows.

Go to the Layers panel, add an RGB Curves layer, and pull down the highlights, midtones, and shadows evenly. In this case, we’re not lowering the highlights too much; we’ll talk about this in later steps.

At this point, the footage should already look much darker, almost like it was shot at night.

Step 2: Add a Blue color cast

Next, we add a cool blue tone typically associated with moonlight. Create a Color Wheels layer and push blue into the highlights and midtones, from top to bottom, just like light naturally falls in a scene. Make sure not to touch the shadows — we want a natural look, not something overly stylized.

Right away, the scene starts to shift into a believable nighttime look.

Step 3: Desaturate Colors

In real darkness, colors are less intense — there’s very little light bouncing off objects, so colors appear muted to our eyes.

Add an HSL Curves layer, and under Hue vs. Saturation, start pulling color out: slightly desaturate the cool tones (blues, in our case).

Desaturate everything else more aggressively — reds, yellows, and other warm hues.

The goal is a neutral, desaturated look, similar to how our eyes see things at night.

Step 4: Creative Masking

This is the most powerful and creative part of the process: reshaping the light. We’re going to use multiple masks to selectively highlight, darken, or cool different areas. This is why we didn’t lower the highlights a lot. Now we are going to work on a source of light and light reflections.

Let’s put more focus on the subject. First, add another Color Wheels layer. Then, apply an elliptical mask. Place it on the talent’s face. Then, track the mask back and forth. Now we push the highlights up slightly.

Next, add another Color Wheels layer to work on the light coming through the window. Here, an image mask will come in handy. Add an image mask and accurately mask areas where the light hits — the window and reflections on the talent. Blur it slightly. Then, play around with the Midtones and Highlights to set any color you want. Try green or yellow, for example. You can also control the strength of the light by tweaking the Master slider. This is where your scene can truly transform and go from a natural to more stylised look.

Recap & Final Result

Let’s take one last look at the transformation of our shot:

1. Exposure reduced
2. Cool blueish tones added
3. Saturation adjusted for realism
4. Light reshaped with creative masks

You can repeat these steps in your next project to achieve a natural and cinematic look. Also, don’t forget to experiment with masks to replicate the appearance of a real night, moonlight, or late evening, making the viewer believe it’s authentic.

This is how it’s done in Hollywood — and now, you can do it too. Try the free 7 day trial of Color Finale 2 Pro (link top right) to follow along and see how it can improve your color grade.

Introduction

Color Finale 2 Pro is home to a wide collection of color editing tools, each powerful in its own right. They all help to make your video projects look their best. One tool that's been part of the color grading arsenal since the first version of Color Finale is Six Vectors, and in this article you'll learn about this powerful tool and how it's been upgraded in the 2.12 update of Color Finale 2 Pro.

Also in this update we’ve introduced the all-new Texture EQ tool, and we’ll explore that in more detail after we’ve gone over 6 Vectors.

What are Six Vectors?

The idea behind Six Vectors is simple in concept. Primary and secondary colours by their very nature exist in almost any kind of shot. Since all images on a monitor are made out of additive RGB primaries, let's control these red, green, and blue color vectors directly, including their secondary colors - cyan, magenta, and yellow. This elegantly subdivides the color wheel into 'slices' that are granular enough for many common color operations.

For example, if there is a blue sky in the shot, working on the blue vector limits the changes to just the sky if there are no overlapping hues. Green covers the most part of leafy foliage (evergreen trees, fresh grass, etc), and the red and yellow vectors combined cover many types of skin tones. Six Vectors best handles transitions between well-separated colors, it's very precise. So in modifying blues, any teals and magentas (the colors next to blue on the color wheel) remain unchanged.

When to use

And so when we talk about working or modifying these colours, what do we mean, and what parameters can we use for this? Often we want to target specific colours to balance them in relation to the rest of the image, for example to draw attention to or from an element.

It’s also useful for shot matching, for example if you need continuity in the color of the sky between shots, or if there is an important brand color that has to remain consistent between shots in an advert.

So Six Vectors is best used as part of your secondary corrections workflow: that is on footage that's been exposure and color balanced, with color regions that are clearly separable. A typical workflow would be to do a primary corrections pass, followed by secondaries with such tools as Six Vectors, and then a ‘tidying up’ step where you go back to your primary corrections to remove any unwanted shifts as a result of the secondary corrections.

HSL controls

Hue, saturation, and lightness (HSL) parameters are a standard approach for intuitive color manipulation. That same blue sky could be given additional 'density' — its visual weight — by increasing saturation while at the same time bringing down its lightness. The lush greens could be too overpowering in the shot, so perhaps pushing their hue into the yellows while gently decreasing saturation could improve the visual balance of colors. Or consider a subject's face that is too red in an otherwise well-balanced shot: shifting the hue of the red vector into yellow could resolve this issue.

And this shifting of hues along the 6 color vectors is often invaluable to bringing cohesion and balance to shots—the difference between a good color grade and a great one.

Skin tone hue

One eagerly awaited addition that we've added to the Six Vectors tool in the 2.12 update is the skin tone hue. While there are many ways to target skin tones, for example with HSL Curves, including this option alongside the primary and secondary vectors significantly speeds up the process of getting the right skin tone.

Texture EQ

The new Texture EQ tool lets you blur or sharpen clips in a unique way. For the purpose of this tool, each image can be thought of as being separated into different levels of detail, in our case 5, and each level — or ‘frequency band’— is individually controlled, and can be sharpened or made more blurry.

This lets you make targeted sharpness adjustments where needed, like only on the details such as eyelashes while leaving the underlying shape of the eyelids — a bigger element — untouched.

A popular way of quickly making skin appear smoother is by frequency separation, and it’s now possible in Color Finale 2 Pro with Texture EQ. And like with many tools in the plugin, you can save useful adjustments as presets that you can use over and over again in your other projects.

Another use is to instead deliberately push sharpness in the mid-bands to add punchy definition to the video, while still controlling for smaller details, making sure there’s still a balance, with the shorter band sliders.

Free trial

Try Six Vectors, Texture EQ and all the other color grading tools for yourself with a free 7 day trial of Color Finale 2 Pro, check the link in the top right for the download. Thanks for reading!

Color Finale 2 Pro 2.12

The 2.12 update for Color Finale 2 Pro includes a new skin tone hue option in the 6 Vectors tool. This addition allows for more targeted adjustments of skin tones, joining the existing primary and secondary color vectors. It enables finer hue corrections without impacting the rest of the image.

We’ve also introduced the all-new Texture Equalizer tool. Inspired by frequency separation techniques, it lets you selectively blur or sharpen different levels of texture in your footage. Whether you’re enhancing fine details or retouching skin, this tool opens up a powerful new layer of creative control.

This is a free update for users with active support. Download directly or ‘Check for Updates’ from the Color Finale app in the Applications folder.

If you haven’t tried Color Finale 2 Pro yet, it’s available as a 7-day free trial. The plugin is currently offered at a limited-time price of $149.

Color Finale Transcoder 2

The latest version of Color Finale Transcoder 2 (2.2.0) now supports Canon raw video (.CRM) files. This new format joins Blackmagic BRAW and Nikon N-RAW in the list of raw codecs compatible with editing directly on the Final Cut Pro timeline.

Unlike Final Cut Pro’s built-in Canon raw support, Transcoder 2.2 includes essential raw controls including ISO, white balance, exposure, and debayer quality — giving you greater control and image fidelity right on the timeline.

More information on Transcoder 2 is available on the Transcoder 2 homepage. Buy it from our store.

Whether you’re about to start a new color grading project or shooting content in raw formats, we hope these updates help you get the best end result possible. Thank you for your support!

Introduction

Diffusion filters are pretty cool. They soften an image by reducing contrast between highlights and shadow areas.

They can create a more flattering look over skin make scenes look dreamy, out of this world.

With Color Finale 2 Pro it’s easy to create all kinds of diffusion, anything from simple whole-image diffusion to a more subtle effect, as well as getting creative—like in this image where the shadow areas have been selectively diffused:

This tutorial is for you if you ever need to recreate the looks of diffusion filters, and through this process you will also learn how to use the Image and HSL masking tools in Color Finale 2 Pro. Follow along with a free 7-day trial.

First Example (Diffusion over whole image)

Let's first create diffusion over the whole image, the simplest form, and then see how we can get that looking more like Pro-Mist or Glimmerglass filters.

Instead of duplicating clips like you might do on the Final Cut timeline, we can do everything neatly over one clip from the Color Finale 2 layers panel. Add a filter layer—gaussian blur. We've chosen to have it at around 30%. Set blend mode to Lighten. Control the strength of the effect with the opacity slider.

This works to get the effect up and running quickly, and maybe it'll be enough in some cases. But how can we control it better, that is, can we apply diffusion only to certain regions of the image?

Second example (diffusing highlights)

Let's expand our approach. We've bypassed the previous Filter layer and added another one. Again, we’ve set it to Gaussian blur, and selected the Lighten blend mode. But then, apply an image mask.

The image mask does the following: at first the whole image is masked because the input and output levels capture 100% of the image's tonal range, but when you start to limit the levels, the mask shrinks to that selection.

The composite mask view mode shows the clearest representation of where the mask will be strongest — that is all areas in white are affected.

So we have the blur from the effect layer, but because it's masking the image and the mask has sharp edges, we need to also separately blur the edges of the mask.

These different viewing modes help to quickly switch between the final result and a clear view of just the mask.

So this is what diffusion filters such as Pro-Mist tend to do, the result is that diffusion is limited to specific tonal ranges, for example just the highlights - so you get beautiful halos around bright objects while the rest of the image remains nice and sharp.

Let's compare this with the simpler method from earlier. The former (top) looks overbearing now!

Third example (selectively diffusing shadow areas)

Another way to use the Image Mask that starts to diverge from what’s easily possible in-camera is to diffuse only the shadow areas instead of the highlights. Let’s bypass the previous filter layer. We’ll need one extra step: slightly lifting the shadows using an RGB Curves layer.

Next, follow the same steps as before: add an image mask and configure it in Composite Mask mode. But in this case, invert the mask to target only the shadows and experiment with the mask blur slider to achieve the desired result.

As you can see, we’ve diffused all the darker areas including the hat, vest and shadow areas. Looks pretty cool right?

Let's see how this looks in a different context, for example on a clip from a fashion editorial shoot.

Of course the journey towards the final look doesn’t need to stop here. As a final touch, we can apply film emulation—film grain and halation—to create an old-school filmic look.

Fourth example (HSL Mask)

Here's one more tip for applying diffusion, this time using an HSL mask.

Take a look at the above clip. There’s an artificial light source—a yellow beam of light piercing through the frame. Let’s mask and diffuse just this beam. Add a Gaussian blur and apply an HSL mask instead of an Image Mask. The HSL Mask is the same as Image Mask, but with extra controls for Hue, Saturation, and Luma parameters, meaning instead of targeting just the tonal range of an image, we can also apply the mask over any hue we want. Use the picker to mask only the light beam. As before, adjust the mask’s blur level using the blur slider. Additionally, fine-tune the settings by adjusting the Gaussian blur radius.

It looks very interesting, doesn’t it? We’ve created diffusion solely over the light beam.

The applications of this technique now depend only on your imagination! Try this and more with a free 7-day trial of Color Finale 2 Pro.

Intro

Log footage might look dull and flat right out of the camera — but that’s a feature, and exactly what makes it so powerful. But you’ll need to put in a bit of work to get it looking great.

In this tutorial, we'll tell you how to quickly transform Sony S-Log3 footage into a clean base using Color Finale 2 Pro, a color grading plugin for Final Cut Pro.

We’ll focus on building a strong foundation: normalising and balancing S-Log3 footage as a starting point before color grading.

The workflow that we'll show is designed for Sony's S-Log3 in mind, but the same principles apply to other Log profiles like Canon C-Log, Panasonic’s V-Log, and Blackmagic Film.

Let’s get started.

Normalising Your Footage: Three Practical Workflows

Log footage isn’t designed to be viewed directly — it encodes dynamic range using a logarithmic curve to fit more highlight and shadow information into a compact digital format.

On a side note, is there a difference between a raw video files and log? RAW is unprocessed, linear sensor data — very flexible but requires extensive post-processing and a process called debayering. Log footage is further down the line. S-Log3 is already encoded video, only one that uses a logarithmic transfer curve to preserve dynamic range in a compressed format. It’s processed to some extent, but still offers that crucial flexibility that makes it great for colour grading.

To make Log footage viewable and gradable, we need to transform it into what we’ll call a video-like colour space — typically based on Rec.709.

Color Finale 2 Pro gives you three practical ways to do this:

1. Technical LUT – Fast Log-to-Video Conversion

Use a technical conversion LUT to bring your Log footage into a video colour space.

• Add a LUT layer in the layers panel

• Select a conversion LUT that matches your Log format (e.g., S-Log3 to Rec.709)

• If available, use exposure-compensated versions (for example -0.5EV). This is to better match the lighting conditions in your shot.

This method is quick and convenient — but the transform is baked in and not colour managed. It’s useful for speed, but you’ll have limited control over the image once the LUT is applied.

2. Log Wheels – Display-Targeted, Scene-Aware Grading

A powerful second option is to grade directly in Log using Log Wheels, then apply a display LUT or film look on top.

• You shape the tonal range manually within the Log space • And then apply a LUT as a final output transform

This tool is ideal for balancing the image while maintaining full dynamic range. A few adjustments here can go a long way:

• Lower the overall exposure slightly using the Offset wheel

• Add warmth by nudging the Offset tint toward orange and yellow

• Balance shadows, midtones, and highlights for a clean, natural result

This method isn’t fully scene-referred (because we’re still grading for a specific display), but it offers maximum control over how Log data is interpreted before display compression.

You can always go back and adjust Log Wheels under the LUT to recover or enhance shadows and highlights. Just make sure to keep the Log Wheels layer below the LUT layer.

This is a preferred method for many colorists working with Log footage — it's flexible, intuitive, and powerful.

3. ACES – Scene-Referred Workflow

If you’re working with supported cameras and want a structured, scene-referred pipeline, Color Finale 2 Pro supports ACES:

• Set your Input Transform for example, S-Log3/S-Gamut3.Cine)

• Set your Output Transform, typically Rec.709 at 100 nits works well

This keeps your grading decisions tied to the original scene lighting. It’s consistent and technically robust — but best suited for professional environments and supported cameras.

Summary

• You can use a technical LUT for fast conversion, but it’s the least flexible option.

• Log Wheels: full control under your own terms, within a display-targeted context.

• ACES: robust scene-referred workflow for supported cameras.

Try for yourself

Interested in trying these features out for yourself? Try a free 7-day trial of Color Finale 2 Pro to see how it can improve your Final Cut Pro workflow!

Let's take a quick look at the new Color Atlas tool in the 2.11 update for Color Finale 2 Pro. It’s available now to all users who are within their support period, and it’s free to try for 7 days with the Color Finale 2 Pro trial.

The Color Atlas tool makes it possible to assign colors to tonal values of a video image easily and conveniently. By building up a color palette, you can get some really great results.

You can use it to color grade your footage or get creative with it. It’s very expressive.

To begin using Color Atlas, find it in the layers panel. Add at least two points and start changing the color of one of them. You’ll start to see a split tone effect forming.

At this point if you select a blend mode such as soft light and start to play around with the opacity slider, you can effectively colour grade your footage like this.

Use the HSL controls underneath the color gradient editor to change color. Add more points to develop your palette. If you’ve gone too far, simply right click to delete.

Color Atlas is the perfect tool to create duotone style images and other creative effects.

The left side of the color gradient editor represents the shadows, the right side represents the highlights, with mid-tones in the middle. So when you add a point and select a color, this color is then mapped to the corresponding tonal value in the image. Control the softness of the transition by moving points either closer or further away from each other.

For finer control you can turn on the image preview and use the picker to select the exact value you want to add to the color gradient editor. This preview is also useful because it lets you reference the original image in grayscale at all times.

The tone menu lets you pick what part of the image drives the color mapping. By default, Color Atlas uses a mix of all three RGB channels to figure out brightness, based on how we naturally see light and dark. But if you want a different look, you can choose to base it just on the red, green, or blue channel instead. It’s a simple way to get creative and control how tones are turned into color.

At the bottom, click on the plus icon to save your color palette to use again later.

That’s it for this quick intro to Color Atlas, we hope you have fun using it in your next project.

Try yourself

Interested in trying these features out for yourself? Try a free 7-day trial of Color Finale 2 Pro to see how it can improve your Final Cut Pro workflow!

Color Finale first launched on February 25, 2015. From the start, it introduced a powerful toolset that brought professional color grading to Final Cut Pro—without leaving its familiar interface.

Over the years, we’ve expanded creative possibilities with additional tools for working with raw footage and LUTs, continually refining the Color Finale experience.

Now, a decade later, Color Finale 2 remains an essential plugin for color grading in Final Cut Pro. It redefined the workflow by introducing an intuitive floating panel, allowing users to build an almost limitless number of organized layers.

Both Final Cut Pro and Color Finale have evolved. While Final Cut Pro now offers more native grading tools than ever, our users continue to choose Color Finale 2 Pro for its flexibility, intuitive workflow, and powerful layer-based approach.

We are truly grateful for your unwavering support over the years. Your feedback, enthusiasm, and passion have been instrumental in shaping Color Finale into what it is today. We couldn’t have done it without you, and we’re honored to have you on this journey with us.

Would you like to enter our 10th anniversary giveaway? Watch our YouTube video to learn how to take part.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. What’s a good skin tone?
3. Tools of the trade
4. Scopes
5. Image analysis
6. Primary corrections
7. Six vectors
8. HSL curves
9. Camera matrix
10. Subtractive grading
11. Advanced: using masks

Why does the person above look healthy, and the one below, doesn’t?

Our vision is highly attuned to recognise healthiness in individuals, we've had hundreds of thousands of years of practise. We're really good at it. So seeing even small deviations from that can have a big impact on our enjoyment of a film or video.

We’re going to show you how to colour correct your footage to create natural-looking skin tones using the powerful tools in Color Finale 2 Pro, a colour grading plugin for Final Cut Pro.

Download the free 7 day trial to follow along.

What's a good skin tone?

We can all agree that there probably isn't such a thing as a 'perfect’ skin tone in videography, but we can consider a job well done once skin tones read well within the context of a scene.

The best thing anyone can do to promote this is to get as much as possible done well in-camera, at the time of shooting. That along with primary colour correction where you set appropriate exposure and white balance might just in itself fix the appearance of skin—but of course in practise, in your colour grading role you will inevitably be faced with footage that needs a lot of work.

Tools of the trade

Color Finale 2 Pro has everything you need to help you create high quality results.

So when down in the trenches you’ll be using various tools to inspect, then change the luma, hue, and saturation values of an image. We'll go through several of these shortly.

To evaluate the result, you'll use your eyes as well as the built-in video scopes.

Scopes

Scopes give an additional way to analyse a video image and can be invaluable to getting quality and repeatable results across multiple clips.

The waveform monitor (top left) shows luminosity levels, or tones. It's great for checking black levels and highlights. In RGB parade mode (top right), it's also useful for white balancing since each colour channel is displayed separately. Then it's easy to see what the effects of a parameter change are on a single channel, for example on red.

Now the vectorscope (bottom) is basically a colour wheel that displays the hue and saturation (or chroma). Glancing at it you can easily see if there is any overall colour cast, and how saturated the colours are. The closer to the edge, the more saturated.

Image analysis tools

Pair these scopes with Color Finale's image analysis tools to discretely analyse any part of the image. This is where it gets good for skin tone work. For example, if we isolate the face you can see that the vectorscope only shows those colours that are within the image analysis mask. And same for the luma waveform, but for tone instead of colour.

Select the plugin in the inspector to see on-screen controls

Quick side note. You must always have the plugin selected in the inspector to see Color Finale's on-screen controls and graphics, like these image analysis tools. This is how modern Final Cut Pro interacts with all plugins.

Examples

To keep focus on skin tones the following example material has already been brought into the Rec.709 video colour space. This gives us a working tonal range, or contrast.

Setting the exposure and white balance: primary corrections

So let's set the exposure and white balance first. Under soft sunlight, ideal skin tone falls between 40 and 70 IRE.

Turn on image analysis. Use the exposure parameter to adjust to somewhere within this range.

Next, white balance. Keep the waveform scope open, but change it to RGB parade. Use the temperature and tint parameters, or pick a neutral grey (if there is one) for auto white balance.

Now, the image might look balanced, and if the skin tone looks correct then fantastic!

But chances are the overall image exposure and white balance may look good, but something is off about the skin. It's not as full of life as we'd want it to be. So we'll need to target the skin and work from there. Here's what we can do about that. Time for secondary corrections.

Six Vectors

Six Vectors exposes hue, saturation, and luminosity parameters for six colours - red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow. That's the primary and secondary colours—and they are actually marked as targets on the vectorscope. There is a one-to-one connection.

Human skin is predominantly in the reds and yellow no matter the talent's complexion, so let’s adjust these two colours. Because this task is generally hugely important, there's a predefined 'skin tone' line that you can show on the vectorscope. So while we have the image analysis mask turned on it's just a matter of intuitively matching what's displayed on the vectorscope with the line.

Quick and effective!

HSL Curves

You can also use the HSL curves tool to target and modify skin tones. Keep the vectorscope open.

• Use the Hue vs Hue tab to shift skin tone towards red or magenta.

Command click on the line to add points along the curve. However, you might find this more useful: sample the middle-tone with the colour picker. You’ll get an automatic set of modifiable control points to work with.

• Use Hue vs Sat to adjust saturation.

But this is a very precise tool, watch out for artefacts as a result of big adjustments. For example, banding between close colours.

For convenience, you might find that Six Vectors works best for 90% of the tasks, and you can supplement that with an HSL curves layer for the fine-tuning at the end.

Camera Matrix

Camera Matrix is designed for fine independent adjustments to the hue and saturation of the red, green, and blue channels. This functionality enables precise control over primary colour components, making it useful for a wide range of colour correction tasks, such as skin tone adjustments. It lets you modify primary colours without affecting the overall white balance, which is essential for fine-tuning colours without disrupting the entire image. Simply adjust the red channel's hue and saturation sliders until the colour aligns with the skin tone line.

Subtractive grading

In one of the latest updates to Color Finale 2 Pro we introduced exciting new film emulation tools, including halation and bloom. But for now, let’s focus on the Subtractive Grading tool.

You don’t have to be doing film emulation to use subtractive grading. It’s just one of the features available to you and happens to be based on a traditional analogue method.

It can be incredibly helpful for adjusting skin tones. By working on Magenta and Yellow, you can achieve a clean, accurate skin tone with minimal effort.

Masking: advanced skin tone isolation

The examples we’ve covered so far were relatively straightforward, but what if the corrections for the skin tone affect the background as well? For example, if on the rare occasion your character and the set share a similar tint, all adjustments to the skin will clearly affect the colours of the set in the same way.

In such cases, masks such as the AI Person Mask are likely to be your best friend. They let you isolate the talent, so you can adjust the skin tones without impacting the rest of the image.

Simply apply the person mask to a layer group, then move or add your corrections inside. Combine Person Mask with an HSL mask to also exclude clothing and accessories.

Artistic vs. Technical Accuracy: Pushing Skin Tones to the Limit

The Matrix is a good example of pushing colours into the greens

Sometimes, skin tones don’t need to be technically perfect. Skin tone correction is part of color correction, ensuring consistency and realism. But color grading is an artistic choice that sets the mood and style of a project. The skin tone line is a suggestion not a rule. Not everyone is standing under soft sunlight all the time. Color grading isn’t just about correction — it’s about storytelling.

Final Thoughts

We hope this helped you better understand how to achieve great-looking skin tones. This article is the text version of our video on skin tones. Consider subscribing to our YouTube channel for more tutorials about Color Finale 2 Pro and our other products. Thanks for reading!

Reference

Apple — Displaying Final Cut Pro Scopes