I was digging into how the Colour Warper works. Not an intuitive color tool, so I had put it aside for a while, but it was time to revisit. There is very little useful documentation, and few videos. It seems to be a forgotten tool in the dust of MasterGrade, yet holds some useful tools that don’t exist elsewhere in Flame.
Question: In all the documentation and videos it shows a vector scope as part of the view port which is not only informative but potentially critical in using it. Yet, despite searching and looking around for quite some time, I can’t make it appear.
In fact it supposed to be controlled from the ‘Setup’ screen in the Color Warper. But that setup screen is blank as of 2024 at least. There are no controls to enable / disable the vector scope anymore. I can’t find any other view specific options, contexts, etc. that would turn it on or off.
Am I missing something, or has the vector scope been lost by accident?
The part that fascinates me about the Colour Warper and is potentially important as an equivalent to Resolves much more versatile color warper, is the actual warp function.
A few things that I have learned, and some that still puzzle me:
- The shadow/highlight correction is an absolute (generally classic) hue correction. It does however change only chroma and does not change luma, which differs from other apps that maintain luminance when changing chroma.
- The mid-tones correction is different, not an absolute correction, but one that influences a set of RGB curves (visible in histogram). Each time you turn the ball, it moves the curves accordingly, and only with in the mid-tone range which you can calibrate in the histogram. As such you can stack multiple changes on top of each other, including other ranges that all get saved in those curves. Because of this stacking, the ball resets after each move which is dis-orienting when you come from any other color app.
- The global warp is yet different. It too appears to be making multiple stackable adjustments on some not displayed curve. In this case the target range is hue (and luma limited?) by the ‘src’ color pot. It doesn’t seem you can’t influence the range control/fall off of that correction. It is what it is. There’s a luma corrector that can be applied as a separate move.
Of course you can do the whole thing globally, and then three more times constrained by a standard selective key.
So if you want to move a color around Resolve style, your best bet is the global color warper in the master. Pick the source color and then move it. It will shift just the hue of selected range in whatever direction you want. You can safe-guard it with selective, but that’s not required per se. That mimics a horizontal move in the Resolve color warper.
To move vertical, you can use the saturation control and move it in the desired hue angle. Looks like you can only add, but not reduce saturation though.
What is nice is that you can do both additive and subtractive hue adjustments.
