Free FCPX Colour Grade Effect - wvl_ColourGrade

Light Weight Colour Grade Effect


I had a look at what FxMahoney did with his Levels Effect and rigged the levels filter to mimic the Gain, Gamma, Pedestal controls in Color Finesse and Fill Light and Blacks in Lightroom.

There is also a saturation control and the Color Balance effect is thrown in for good measure.

Levels levels things off so if you want to recover highlights above 100 turn in it off with the Tone checkbox and use the Colour Balance Highlight control to bring them down.
[correction 9/12 - you can leave the tone checkbox checked and recover by bringing down the gain]

I use this to make quick adjustments and also, by playing with the blend modes, as a look creator.

Should mention if you are going to use this to do your primary grade and create a look it is best to apply two instances.

For the grade I apply it to the clip then for the look I apply the effect to an adjustment layer (title without text) like RGB House's Total Adjustment.

That way you can apply the look across multiple clips and the blending modes don't mess up your primary grade. You can also easily stack, name and try out multiple looks.

Another trick is to use multiple adjustment layers within an audition to try out different looks.

Tested this with my own color grade effect and the color board with Total Adjustment and a textless title.

Place an adjustment layer on top of the clip(s) right click and duplicate as an audition (or alt y) Do this for as many looks you want to try. Cycle through each audition and add effects, color board adjustments to taste. You can also name each version in the info tab of the inspector.

[I found that if you drag an adjustment layer onto an existing layer and choose add to audition that the changes in the audition aren't reflected in the viewer, although if you finalize the audition they are applied]