This Michael DeVowe fellow, has a pretty great little tutorial on color correcting by the numbers using curves in After Effects and in Photoshop.
“An in-depth tutorial on color correction using Curves inside of After Effects and Photoshop. This method explains how to color correct most any footage “by the numbers”. It’s a bit of a science that requires only a minimum amount of understanding of RGB values.”
Color Correction Tutorial After Effects [The Right Way!] from ? Michael DeVowe on Vimeo.
Using Photoshop for color correction is really a lot easier than you may think. In this tutorial, the method is very simple and fast – NO rendering multiple frames, NO importing video files into Photoshop, and easy access to making color changes.
This tutorial is a tad long at 15 minutes – please bear with me as I fully explain the techniques here! (It was recorded it in the middle of the night. 🙂 Hopefully you will find the techniques helpful.
TIPS:
- Choose areas that are large enough to sample and don’t contain color casts or Chromatic Aberration
- Remember to use common sense. If the colors are just not looking right, either sample a different area or adjust to your liking.
- Your footage may have different areas of brightness or color shifts throughout the video. Animate your Levels for differing brightness, and animate your Curves for differing color where needed.
- Sometimes having crushed blacks or blown highlights are okay – especially in video. Keep this in mind when working with the Levels effect and don’t worry if you have either of those in your final result.
RGB Color Correction Values Reference (also at 10:18):
Highlights  245
Midtones  135
Shadows  > 12
After Effects Color Correction Example: vimeo.com/14400218
To see other After Effects tutorials (including 60p to 24p Slow Motion Conversion, SUPER Slow Motion, Anamorphic Widescreen Tutorial, and more), go to:
vimeo.com/channels/aetuts
devowe.com
Audio: Zoom H4n + Redhead Windscreen