Color Adjustments

Color adjustment effects animate tonal and channel-level color properties on individual cues. WATCHOUT provides 14 color effects: global adjustments (brightness, contrast, exposure), tone mapping (temperature, gamma), color manipulation (hue, saturation, invert), and per-channel corrections (red, green, and blue gain and offset). All animate over time and combine freely.

Color effects are accessed through the Effect > Color submenu. Each effect is added individually — choose which color properties you need and add only those.

Available Color Effects

Adding Color Effects

To add a color effect to a cue:

1. Select one or more cues in the Timeline.
2. Open the Effect > Color submenu.
3. Click the desired color property (Brightness, Contrast, Hue, etc.).
4. The effect appears in the tween area beneath the cue, within the Color group.

Color effects are added individually. You can add as many or as few as needed for your purpose. All color effects share the Color group header in the tween area.

Understanding the Color Controls

The color effects fall into three functional categories:

Global adjustments — Brightness, Contrast, Exposure, and Gamma affect the entire image uniformly. These are the most common adjustments for matching content to venue conditions or creating mood shifts.

• Brightness and Exposure both affect overall lightness, but in different ways. Brightness applies a linear shift — it moves all values up or down equally. Exposure applies a multiplicative change that mimics camera behavior — highlights shift more than shadows, producing a more natural look. For simple adjustments, either works. For photographic-quality correction, Exposure is generally preferred.
• Contrast widens or narrows the gap between the darkest and brightest pixels. Increasing contrast makes darks darker and lights lighter. Decreasing it pushes everything toward the midpoint.
• Gamma targets midtones specifically, leaving deep shadows and bright highlights relatively untouched. This is useful for adjusting the perceived brightness of content without clipping highlights or crushing shadows.

Tone and color manipulation — Temperature, Hue, Saturation, and Invert change the color character of the image.

• Temperature shifts the color balance along the warm-cool axis. This is particularly useful for matching content shot under different lighting conditions, or for creating mood shifts (warm for sunset scenes, cool for moonlight).
• Hue rotates the entire color spectrum. Small shifts (10–20°) subtly change the mood of an image. Larger shifts create dramatic color transformations. At 180°, every color becomes its complement.
• Saturation controls how vivid colors appear. Reducing saturation toward 0% produces a grayscale look; the default 100% preserves the original color intensity. Values between create a "washed out" aesthetic, and values above 100% over-saturate for more vivid, intense color.
• Invert blends between the normal and inverted image. Partial inversion (around 50%) produces a flat, low-contrast look. Full inversion (100%) reverses all colors — useful as a creative effect or for working with negative-format source material.

Per-channel corrections — Red/Green/Blue Gain and Red/Green/Blue Offset provide independent control over each color channel.

• Gain scales a channel multiplicatively. Reducing Red Gain from 100% to 50% halves the red intensity everywhere, shifting the image toward cyan. Gain is best for overall color balance adjustments.
• Offset adds or subtracts a flat value to a channel. Adding Red Offset shifts the entire image toward red, including areas that originally had no red at all. Offset is useful for tinting shadows (which Gain cannot easily affect since they start near zero).

Animating Color Changes

Color effects work like any other effect — add tween points at different times with different values and choose transition types to control the interpolation:

1. Place the time needle at the moment where you want the color to start changing.
2. Set the tween value (for example, Saturation at 100%).
3. Move the time needle to the end of the transition and add a point with the target value (for example, Saturation at 0%).
4. Choose a Transition Type for the interpolation curve.

For smooth, natural-looking color transitions, Cubic InOut or Sinusoidal InOut easing curves work well. For sudden shifts (like a lighting change on a beat), use Linear with a short time interval.

Common Use Cases

• Day-to-night transitions — combine decreasing Brightness, decreasing Temperature (cooler), and slightly decreasing Saturation over a long duration for a gradual sunset-to-night effect.
• Desaturation for emphasis — reduce Saturation on background content to 20–30% while keeping the foreground cue at full color, drawing the audience's attention to the foreground.
• Color matching between sources — when mixing media from different cameras or lighting conditions, use Temperature and per-channel Gain/Offset to bring content into visual alignment.
• Mood shifts — animate Hue rotation over time for a psychedelic or dreamy color-cycling effect. Even small hue shifts (5–10° over several seconds) can create a subtle sense of change.
• Highlight/shadow coloring — use Gain to reduce a channel in the highlights (bright areas) and Offset to add a different channel in the shadows (dark areas), creating a split-toning look.
• Flash effects — briefly spike Brightness or Exposure to a high value and immediately return to normal for a camera-flash or strobe effect.

Processing Order

When several color effects are active on a cue, they apply in a fixed order: contrast, brightness, exposure, temperature, hue, saturation, invert, then per-channel gain, then per-channel offset last. Gamma is applied separately, before the others. Color effects are computed in WATCHOUT's linear, wide-gamut working space — see Color Pipeline.

For moderate adjustments the order has little visible impact; it matters most at extreme values.

Quality Considerations

• Extreme values can clip. Pushing Brightness, Contrast, or Exposure to high values can clip highlights to pure white or crush shadows to pure black, losing detail that cannot be recovered. Work with moderate values and check the result on calibrated output.
• Color effects are per cue. When cues overlap on Stage, each cue's color effects apply only to that cue. WATCHOUT composites the cues together afterward, so one cue's color effects do not affect another.
• Temperature adjustments are most accurate on neutral content. Shifting temperature on content that is already heavily color-graded may produce unexpected results because the correction assumes a roughly neutral starting point.
• Monitor vs. projector differences. Color adjustments that look correct on a workstation monitor may appear different on projectors, LED walls, or other display hardware due to differences in color gamut, brightness, and black levels. Always verify on the actual output.

Combining with Other Effects

Color effects combine well with:

• Opacity — fade in while simultaneously shifting from desaturated to full color for a dramatic reveal.
• Blur — combine desaturation and blur for a "flashback" or "memory" aesthetic.
• Linear Wipe — wipe in content while transitioning from a color-treated look to the natural image.

Practical Tips

• For show-wide looks (such as making all content warmer or cooler), apply consistent color tween values across related cues rather than adjusting each cue individually. Consider using Tween Expressions driven by a variable to control color adjustments globally.
• When color-matching multiple sources, start with Temperature and Brightness to get the broad feel right, then fine-tune with per-channel Gain and Offset.
• Keep Gamma adjustments subtle (typically between 0.7 and 1.5). The scale is non-linear — small changes near 1.0 have a visible impact, while extreme values produce harsh, unnatural results.
• Test color effects on calibrated outputs when possible. What looks right on a workstation preview panel may shift noticeably on the final display hardware.