Effects and transitions

Adjust effects

Auto Color, Auto Contrast, and Auto Levels effects

The Auto Color, Auto Contrast, and Auto Levels effects make quick global adjustments to a clip. Auto Color adjusts contrast and color by neutralizing the midtones and clipping the white and black pixels. Auto Contrast adjusts the overall contrast and mixture of colors, without introducing or removing color casts. Auto Levels automatically corrects the highlights and shadows. Because Auto Levels adjusts each color channel individually, it may remove or introduce color casts.

Each effect has one or more of the following settings:

Temporal Smoothing The range of adjacent frames, in seconds, analyzed to determine the amount of correction needed for each frame, relative to its surrounding frames. If Temporal Smoothing is 0, each frame is analyzed independently, without regard for surrounding frames. Temporal Smoothing can result in smoother looking corrections over time.

Scene Detect If this option is selected, frames beyond a scene change are ignored when the effect analyzes surrounding frames for temporal smoothing.

Snap Neutral Midtones (Auto Color only) Identifies an average nearly neutral color in the frame and then adjusts the gamma values to make the color neutral.

Black Clip, White Clip How much of the shadows and highlights are clipped to the new extreme shadow and highlight colors in the image. Be careful of setting the clipping values too large, as doing so reduces detail in the shadows or highlights. A value between 0.0% and 1% is recommended. By default, shadow and highlight pixels are clipped by 0.1%—that is, the first 0.1% of either extreme is ignored when the darkest and lightest pixels in the image are identified; those pixels are then mapped to output black and output white. This clipping ensures that input black and input white values are based on representative rather than extreme pixel values.

Blend With Original Determines the effect’s transparency. The result of the effect is blended with the original image, with the effect result composited on top. The higher you set this value, the less the effect affects the clip. For example, if you set this value to 100%, the effect has no visible result on the clip; if you set this value to 0%, the original image doesn’t show through.

Convolution Kernel effect

The Convolution Kernel effect changes the brightness values of each pixel in the clip according to a mathematical operation known as a convolution. A convolution overlays a matrix of numbers onto a matrix of pixels, multiplies each underlying pixel's value by the number that overlays it, and replaces the central pixel's value with the sum of all of these multiplications. This is performed for each pixel in the image.

The Convolution Kernel Settings include a set of controls that represent cells in a 3x3 grid of pixel brightness multipliers. Labels on the controls, which begin with the letter “M,” indicate their position in the matrix. The M11 control, for example, affects the cell in the first row and first column of the grid; the M32 control affects the cell in the third row and second column. The pixel being evaluated falls in the center of the grid, at the M22 location. Use this effect for fine control over the properties of various emboss, blur, and sharpen effects. For a given effect, it is easier to apply one of the Convolution Kernel presets and to modify it, than to create the effect from scratch using the Convolution Kernel effect itself.

Last updated 1/16/2012

Convolution Kernel pixel grid, showing the position of each control in the matrix

More Help topics

“Adjust edges, blurs and brightness using Convolution presets” on page 327

Extract effect

The Extract effect removes colors from a video clip, creating a grayscale image. Pixels with luminance values less than the Black Input Level or greater than the White Input Level are made black. Everything between those points will appear gray or white.

Note: The controls for this effect are similar to those of the Extract effect in Adobe After Effects, but the purpose and results of the effect are different.

More Help topics

“Remove color in a clip” on page 326

Levels effect

The Levels effect manipulates the brightness and contrast of a clip. It combines the functions of the Color Balance, Gamma Correction, Brightness & Contrast, and Invert effects. This effect functions much the same as the Levels effect in After Effects.

The Levels Settings dialog box displays a histogram of the current frame (Windows only).

More Help topics

“Adjust luminance using levels” on page 320

Lighting Effects effect

The Lighting Effects effect applies lighting effects on a clip with up to five lights to introduce creative lighting. Lighting Effects lets you control lighting properties such as lighting type, direction, intensity, color, lighting center, and lighting spread. There is also a Bump Layer control to use textures or patterns from other footage to produce special lighting effects such as a 3D-like surface effect.

See examples of using this effect in this video tutorial.

More Help topics

“Add Lighting Effects” on page 328

ProcAmp effect

The ProcAmp effect emulates the processing amplifier found on standard video equipment. This effect adjusts the brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, and split percent of a clip's image.

Last updated 1/16/2012

Effects and transitions

Shadow/Highlight effect

The Shadow/Highlight effect brightens shadowed subjects in an image and reduces the highlights in an image. This effect doesn’t darken or lighten an entire image; it adjusts the shadows and highlights independently, based on the surrounding pixels. You can also adjust the overall contrast of an image. The default settings are for fixing images with backlighting problems.

Richard Harrington provides a video tutorial on the Creative COW website that demonstrates the use of the Shadow/Highlight effect.

Auto Amounts If this option is selected, the Shadow Amount and Highlight Amount values are ignored, and automatically determined amounts are used that are appropriate for lightening and restoring detail to the shadows. Selecting this option also activates the Temporal Smoothing control.

Shadow Amount The amount to lighten shadows in the image. This control is active only if you deselect Auto Amounts.

Highlight Amount The amount to darken highlights in the image. This control is active only if you deselect Auto Amounts.

Temporal Smoothing The range of adjacent frames, in seconds, analyzed to determine the amount of correction needed for each frame, relative to its surrounding frames. If Temporal Smoothing is 0, each frame is analyzed independently, without regard for surrounding frames. Temporal Smoothing can result in smoother looking corrections over time.

Scene Detect If this option is selected, frames beyond a scene change are ignored when surrounding frames are analyzed for temporal smoothing.

Blend With Original The effect’s transparency. The result of the effect is blended with the original image, with the effect result composited on top. The higher you set this value, the less the effect affects the clip. For example, if you set this value to 100%, the effect has no visible result on the clip; if you set this value to 0%, the original image doesn’t show through.

Expand the More Options category to reveal the following controls:

Shadow Tonal Width and Highlight Tonal Width The range of adjustable tones in the shadows and highlights. Lower values restrict the adjustable range to only the darkest and lightest regions, respectively. Higher values expand the adjustable range. These controls are useful for isolating regions to adjust. For example, to lighten a dark area without affecting the midtones, set a low Shadow Tonal Width value so that when you adjust the Shadow Amount, you are lightening only the darkest areas of an image. Specifying a value that is too large for a given image might introduce halos around strong dark to light edges. The default settings attempt to reduce these artifacts. They can be further reduced by decreasing these values.

Shadow Radius and Highlight Radius The radius (in pixels) of the area around a pixel that the effect uses to determine whether the pixel resides in a shadow or a highlight. Generally, this value should roughly equal the size of the subject of interest in your image.

Color Correction The amount of color correction that the effect applies to the adjusted shadows and highlights. For example, if you increase the Shadow Amount value, you bring out colors that were dark in the original image; you may want these colors to be more vivid. The higher the Color Correction value, the more saturated these colors become. The more significant the correction that you make to the shadows and highlights, the greater the range of color correction available.

Note: If you want to change the color over the whole image, use the Hue/Saturation effect after applying the Shadow/Highlight effect.

Last updated 1/16/2012