Hi @Underexposed ,
you asked me once if I will make a video with new color balance module. I don’t plan to, but I’ve had a look at the module and find what @anon41087856 has done very interesting. To demonstrate this, I took a linear grayscale as a starting point, so that you can see what the module does with the help of waveform histograms.
This is how the initial image looks like. In Waveform the grayscale is represented as a diagonal straight line from bottom left (shadows) to top right (highlights):
Since we need a colored image, I colored this grayscale image red in the first instance of the color balance module, so that we can see what happens when we move the sliders in the “master” tab of the module in the second instance of the module:
I won’t go into Hue Slider, because it rotates the colors, which doesn’t need any clarification.
It will be interesting to see what happens when we move the sliders in “linear chroma grading” and “perceptual saturation grading”. We now move the “global” slider to the right for both of them one after the other and compare the results:
linear chroma grading:
perceptual saturation grading:
As you can see, in “linear chroma grading” the red channel is progressively increased in comparison to the brightness axis and at the same time the blue and green channels are decreased proportionally along the brightness axis, so that the lightness remains unchanged and only color becomes more intense.
In contrast, with perceptual saturation grading, the red channel is increased uniformly over the entire lightness range and the corresponding blue and green channels are decreased parallel to the lightness gradient. In this case, color levels appear much more contrasty and darker in the direction of black (this can be seen especially well in the middle gray area). In other words, if you increase the saturation, the brightness contrast will also increase.
I will not go into detail about other sliders in both areas, because they simply influence the corresponding brightness areas.
With “purity” (later possibly called “brilliance”) you can additionally influence the contrasts. Here is an example of a nice logarithmic contrast:
If I want to increase the color intensity in highlights, I can use highlights slider either in “linear chroma grading” or in “perceptual saturation grading” depending on how the color intensity should look like:
linear chroma grading:
perceptual saturation grading:
Note how with “perceptual saturation grading” the color in the mid-grey area is influenced more strongly!