Final Cut is an amazing editing software, but one thing it lacks is advanced color grading
features.
It seems quite a few Final Cut users are switching over to Davinci Resolve for this reason.
But in my opinion, they don’t need to be.
The majority of them at least.
The reason being, the plugin Color Finale 2 Pro has a lot of the same, important tools
and features that Resolve has when it comes to color grading and you’re able to create
some really beautiful looking shots without ever leaving Final Cut’s UI.
Now I know some of you might be Resolve users that clicked on this video ready to tear me
a new one so I need to preface this by saying that Davinci Resolve is the gold standard
when it comes to color grading.
But for the majority of creators who use Final Cut, other than maybe professional colorists,
Color Finale 2 Pro can absolutely get the job done and is infinitely better than the
native tools in Final Cut.
Here’s why.
The plugin allows you to dial in big, gradual adjustments with the standard color wheels,
which you can do with Final Cut’s native built in tools obviously, but it also has
LOG wheels like Davinci Resolve to help give your footage little pushes to fine tune things
without making big, linear adjustments.
If for example, you have a shot where your exposure is sitting at a level you’d like
it to be at, but it seems your highlights are clipping just a bit, instead of pulling
the exposure of your highlights using your primary wheels, which as you can see makes
more of a gradual adjustment to your shot, affecting different luma values other than
just your highlights, using the log wheels allow you to essentially compartmentalize
that adjustment so the rest of your shot’s exposure sits where you’d like it to be.
The same goes for adding a bit of color.
If you want a small push of orange in your highlights to fine tune your look without
affecting the rest of your shot, you can make the adjustment in your log wheels.
So just like Resolve’s primaries and log wheels, you have more control over your shots
hue, saturation, and luma values than you do in FCP’s native tools.
One of the things that got me interested in Davinci Resolve is the ability to use qualifiers
to isolate specific sections of your shot to make more precise adjustments.
Final Cut Pro gives you a similar option using an HSL mask, but the issue lies in the lack
of a blur or smoothing feature to make these changes more gradual.
Why is this Resolve feature important?
Let’s say you really want a certain look.
I’ve already made a selection protecting our talent’s skin and isolating the background.
If you really try to dial in a certain look, your image might start to break a part.
You can clearly see where the selection chosen for her skin is and where the selection chosen
for this added blue color is.
It looks terrible.
And this is something that unfortunately happens with the native tools in FCP if you are really
pushing around your colors.
But all it takes is some blur of the HSL selection and you get a way smoother gradation of colors.
The image smooths out and the adjustment looks way more natural.
This is a feature that is essential to creating better looking color grades and it’s one
of the big pros of the plugin for me.
Color Finale 2 Pro also supports an ACES workflow.
​​It allows users to perform ACES color transformations within the plugin and work
in the ACES color space.
If you’re unsure of what ACES is, it’s a set of rules and guidelines set up in order
to standardize color, so that creator’s work will look the same on any display.
Ideally, you’d want to select ACES if you are working within a complete ACES pipeline,
but you can still apply it to shots for general color grading even if you don’t have to
provide an ACES compliant master, which Final Cut cannot.
I shot this with a Sony A7siii in Slog 3.
All I did was add the Sony LOG to Rec 709 transform LUT.
And this is with ACES color management instead.
Obviously it adds more contrast, so just for this explanation let me add a bit back into
the standard clip.
And you’ll see that not only is the highlight rolloff prettier and smoother with ACES, but
look at her skin as I go back and forth.
The color science of Sony cameras is known to add a bit of a yellow, greenish tint to
skin tones, and an ACES color transform takes this into account and transforms it into a
shot that’s more realistic to how the image looked at that location.
Then from here, you can add contrast and adjust the pivot like in Resolve as well.
This is a feature that Final Cut does not have natively unfortunately.
Something else that’s enticing about Resolve and something which we’ve been asking from
Apple for a long time, is the ability to name and group color corrections.
You can rename color masks in FCP, so why not the corrections themselves?
Who knows.
Nevertheless, you can in Color Finale 2 Pro.
This just makes it infinitely easier to see what you have going on and stay organized.
The grouping feature also comes in handy for organization as well as using some of the
masking features because then those masking selections can apply to multiple corrections
in the group at once.
The other thing that the plugin has that Resolve has, which is very useful, in making isolated
corrections are all the different masking features.
We already went over the HSL mask but these options are similar to power windows in Resolve.
And they’re all trackable as well.
You have these masks available in FCP’s native tools, but the plugin also gives you
this edge mask, which allows you to make a graduated linear adjustment, similar to tools
in Lightroom.
And the B spline mask and the bezier path are essentially the draw mask tool in Final
Cut Pro but for color corrections.
You also have an image mask which lets you make adjustments to ranges of value, or brightness,
in your shot.
You can use the image mask in tandem with blend modes to give a little pop to bright
areas of your shot.
This is something else that Resolve has that FCP does not have natively . The ability to
adjust blend modes on individual corrections.
Now this brings me to the last bit where I reiterate that this plugin is not the color
grading powerhouse that Resolve is.
It can be buggy at times and it definitely does not have as many features.
Nevertheless, the point of this video is not to say that this plugin is better, because
it’s most certainly not, it’s to show you that this plugin has Resolve features
that I believe can satisfy the vast majority of FCP creators color grading needs.
This in turn cancels out the need for a roundtrip to Resolve and back again, which usually poses
certain issues and can be time consuming anyways, and it can save those who like editing in
Final Cut the hassle of having to switch to another software.
If you’re curious to try it out for free, I’ll put a link in the description.
Have a great rest of your day guys.