Can someone point me to a tutorial or insight in how to properly color match black and white values in Mastergrade or the image node.
The color warper has the plot and match features, but I can’t find anything equivalent in mastergrade. Shouldnt this be the first thing to do?? Am I missing something?
Thanks in Advance
If you’re talking about technical matching for comping elements together, I think your best bet is to use the Color Corrector. Unfortunately, the Color Corrector and Mastergrade nodes don’t concantenate, so you’ll be stuck using the color corrector (or take a hit in quality)
If you’re taking about balancing different shots together as part of grading, I believe the recommended workflow is to use the scopes to evaluate levels between shots. At least, that’s how I do it.
Never sure what concatenate means.
I am using the grade (action type node) a bit more recently as an experiment because it works better with linear but I can do color warper type stuff.
F8 is your friend to see the key you pull. Three things I do to match; one is use the color picker that’s in the viewer for blacks and whites and two is use the color warper vectorscope preset in the second viewer for chroma and three is by eye with high and low gamma in the viewer.
It’s annoying there’s no front back and matte though.
However on a tight deadline I usually slip into log and and use cc with a matte without a matte anyway I want it.
Yeah ive always wondered that. Nuke has rhe Grade node where you can set the blackpoint then match it to the plate. Its a really good and quick way to get those in the right space.
I tend to use the CC and sample the values then match them up. Switch to the RGB channels and make the final tweaks for each one.
You can use the cc RGB histogram to do this too.
Because the facility I work at uses a scene linear pipeline, I have to constantly add color management nodes to the CC or CW as they dont work with scene linear correctly. It just seems to me that these types of features should be directly in the mastergrade node?
Ha, yeah, concantenate is a 10 dollar word for something that’s pretty simple - it just means that if you have a string of similar nodes in a row, the application will boil all the transformations or color changes into a single change without re-processing everything at each step of the way.
You’ll see this more often in Nuke - Grade node to do black/white level balancing and then a string of CC, Exposure, and Grade nodes to dial in the look. As long as the nodes are all together, then the calculation is the same as if it were done in all one node.
If you adjust the black and white levels using the histogram in cc you’ll get a similar effect to grade node (as Ben noted) and get a much better response in the cc node in linear.
But I still maintain it doesn’t matter how you get there. Most colourists I’ve talked to grade in log.
I heard about this because of Nuke.
In Action if you chain a bunch of axis together and scale an image up then down and up again you don’t get any degradation. That is concatenate. If you try that using the same amount of 2D transform nodes in Batch, you will have totally messed up your image.
Recently I was just using the MasterGrade to match blacks. I was using the scopes but it can be tricky when there is so much information in your scene.
I had a particularly dark phantom shot with some very curious blacks that kept changing colour throughout the shot so I devised a technique I’m calling black theft. I basically luma keyed the background and multiplied, keeping only the blacks and then did a blur divide (dilate) to fill the frame with the black in the scene. Think of it like pixel spread interpolate. I then replaced the black in my CG with this black using a combination of grading and keying the CG back into the black. In this instance it worked really well. When my CG was in the blacks it was really in the blacks.
I don’t mind jumping around my colourspaces if a tool works better in log. But I have been really enjoying the MasterGrade
I’m a fan of the ‘white balance’ node in the Image pipeline to get you started.
Hi Andy
Where can I find the white balance node?
Is it in the image node ? Or is it a matchbox?
Better to learn the basic technique than look for a magic node.
You can white balance any image in 5s if you set it up, and not black box, so you can refine.
Starting point - stock image I intentionally messed up:
Note that I enabled the color picker in the viewer and moved the sample square on top of an area that should be neutral white. A piece of sky, white wall, teeth, eye whites, neutral gray. Anything that doesn’t have a hue on it IRL. Always exists in 99% of images.
Then open the scope, and see the vector scope. The round circle represents the color of your color sampler. The vector scope shows hue of every pixel in your image. In the center is white & black (neutral hues), the further out from center the more saturated the hue is.
As you can see the circle is in the bottom left, which on the color wheel is green, as you’d expect looking at the image.
Now in the mastergrade node, grab the center dot of the ‘gain’ wheel and move it in the opposite direction, watching the dot on the vector scope, and center it, as in the screenshot after…
Resulting image:
Once you get hang of it, takes 5s or less. It’s like playing a video game.
Over time you’ll get practice and can just look at the vector scope without having to use the sampler.
If you need black balance, same process. Put the sampler in a deep shadow area that should be black. Instead of ‘Gain’ you move the ‘Lift’ wheel.
These are the two buttons you’ll need in the right hand menu, next to the view menu:
left is to enable the color sampler, right is to pop up the scopes.
You can do this in a 1-up view, but I highly suggest a 2-up view.
adittional lifehack.
If you have linear input data and set mastergrade to linear and then activate sliders you can just manipulate 2 of the 3 color channels in the exposure or “multiply” (thats what it does) mastergrade set to linear.
You would pick the liwest of the channels and the adjust the other 2 to match, you would do the same when whitebalancing a monitor using rgb controlls
@allklier is there a way to park a sampler and just see RGB values like in nuke?
There is also a whitebalance matchbox that ive used where you can sample a area that should be grey but tbh its super fast for me at least just doing it with rgb multiply.
You can also use a look node in batch on linear data “slope” in a cdl is multiply to neutralize a plate and then you can just invert that in the end
Yes, when the sampler is active, it has a floating window which reads out values and can keep a palette. You can switch the read out between the different formats (hex, 8bit, 16fp, etc.)
It’s not as fancy as the pixel analyzer in nuke with medians, etc. but it has all the basics.
if you wanted to white balance with that, switch the master grade gain to RGB sliders, and then manipulate until all three values are roughly equal.
Is there a place to set the preference for the master grade node to be lift gamma gain instead of exposure contrast offset? I don’t see it anywhere in the preferences.
Yes, Preferences / Tools & FX:
You should pick the one that fits your footage. They do handle differently, and if you use the less ideal combination you might fight very narrow ranges vs. having more control.
Thanks @allklier I found this explanation very useful.
To add a bit, when using the channel sliders I like to use the printer light keyboard shortcuts that are mapped to the numeric keypad on the keyboard.
I really find them helpful when matching cameras since their adjustments are in set increments…way more precise than using the stylus and easier to undo if you start adjusting in the wrong direction.
I think Grant did a video on the Learning Channel about them.
https://help.autodesk.com/view/FLAME/2025/ENU/?guid=GUID-A992A5B0-9106-4653-9CED-B2813EC25D90
