Exploring the Colorista III HSL Keyer in Final Cut Pro X

The FCPX Desert Island Challenge: Follow Up

A few months ago I wrapped my in-depth look at how I’d color correct in Final Cut X, if I had no option of color correcting in a dedicated color grading app. As part of that series, we looked at Red Giant’s Colorista III color correction plug-in. At the time it had a bug that prevented me from showing you how I’d use Colorista III as a secondary tool, to select pixels using its HSL Keyer.

It turned out, the bug was on the Final Cut Pro X side, which couldn’t handle the Colorista III HSL Keyer interface when it was at the end of a chain of multiple filters.

Then, a member emailed me this week asking if I’d follow up and show the Keyer in action?

This Insight is a follow-up to my original look at Colorista III

You’ll notice that I’m working in a third instance of the Colorista plug-in. The first two instances were used to do the initial contrast expansion, color balance, saturation, and shot matching. This third instance is being used to isolate an element in the image and alter it by pulling a Hue Saturation Luma Key.

I love Colorista’s HSL Keyer User Interface

Specifically, I love that this HSL Keyer maximizes the use of our limited screen real estate by allowing us to directly select the pixels we want to key… directly on the vectorscope itself!

It’s a terrific way of working and in this Video Insight I’ll take on a tour of this interface.

If you’re new to Colorista III, be sure to watch Parts 1 and 2 first:

• Part 1: An Overview of Colorista III in Final Cut Pro X

• Part 2: Advanced Functionality in Colorista III

-pat