Color curves

While you should always try to capture the best image you can with the camera, color curves give you the ability to produce almost as good an image as should have been captured by the camera and fulfill the director’s promise to be able to “fix it in post.”

Color curves were not initially offered with Final Cut Pro; they only became available in late 2017 with version 10.4. They are now a well-used alternative to the color board and the color wheel. Color curves should definitely be part of your color correction arsenal.

The following section looks at the different curves in detail.

Luma curve

All color curves are displayed as graphs; the horizontal axis is at the bottom and the vertical axis is on the left side. I’m going to start by showing the Luma curve, which represents black and white and grayscale, from 0 (black) to 255 (white), with the bottom-left corner being black and the top-right corner being white. There is a 45-degree...