Colour Core is Accord Suite's grading page — "the viewer, scopes, colour wheels and curves, for grading a picture or a film." It works on a single photograph or on every shot of a cut, and it is built around the way colourists work: correct first, then create; measure with scopes, not just with your eyes.
Colour Core in sixteen seconds.
Two words first: correction and grading
Correction makes a shot right: neutral whites, sensible exposure, shots that match each other. Grading makes it look like something: warm and nostalgic, cold and tense. Correction comes first, because a look laid over an uncorrected shot looks different on every shot. Colour Core's tools are listed below in that order.
Reading the scopes
A monitor lies — it is too bright, too blue, or simply what your eyes have got used to. Scopes measure the picture instead. Colour Core has four:
- Waveform — brightness, left to right across the frame, from black at the bottom to white at the top. It shows whether shadows are crushed (piled at the bottom) or highlights clipped (flat along the top).
- Parade — the waveform split into red, green and blue side by side. When a white wall shows three equal columns, it is neutral; when the blue column sits higher, the shot is cool.
- Vectorscope — colour only: hue as the angle round the circle, saturation as the distance from the centre. A neutral shot clusters in the middle; skin tones of every complexion fall along one line from the centre towards red-yellow.
- Histogram — how many pixels sit at each brightness, from dark on the left to bright on the right.
Correction tools
Match to a colour chart. If a 24-patch colour chart was held up in the shot, find the frame where it is flat and evenly lit, draw a rectangle round the 24 patches, edge to edge, and choose Picture ▸ Match to Colour Chart. The camera's and the light's colour come out in one step — the most accurate correction there is, and the fastest way to make two cameras match.
The colour wheels. On the Colour page open Wheels and choose Add a colour balance layer. There is a wheel each for the shadows, the middle tones and the highlights. Drag inside a wheel to tint those tones — towards blue in the shadows and amber in the highlights is the familiar "teal and orange" look — holding Shift to go finer, and double-click to put it back in the centre. Level under each wheel brightens or darkens its tones.
Curves. Open Curves and choose Add a curve layer. Choose RGB to change all three channels together, or Red, Green or Blue alone. Click the curve to add a point and drag: up brightens those tones, down darkens them. A gentle S — shadows down, highlights up — adds contrast; lifting the bottom-left corner fades the blacks for a matte, filmic look; a bend in the blue curve alone tints just the shadows or just the highlights.
Secondary grading: changing one part of the shot
The qualifier. To grade only a sky, a shirt or skin: select the layer that holds the grade, open Qualifier and choose Add a qualifier. Set the hue's Centre to the colour, narrow it with Width and Softness, and narrow further by Saturation and Luminance. Turn on See the key to see exactly what is chosen — white is in, black is out — before grading it. A clean key is the difference between a sky that is bluer and a sky with a halo round the trees.
The colour warper. Open the Warper tool and choose Add Colour Warper. Click a colour on the disc to pin it, and drag the pin to where that colour should go — green to teal, a sky warmer, skin tones pulled together. Reach sets how far round it the pull spreads. It moves colour without changing how bright anything is.
A correction that follows something that moves. Draw a rectangle round a face or a sign with the selection tool, open Tracker and choose Track what I drew. Then select the layer holding the correction and choose Attach its mask (or Attach the selected layer to move the whole layer). The brightened face stays brightened as it crosses the frame. If the track slips for a few frames, put the playhead there, draw a small rectangle on where the point really is, and click Correct to what I drew. The same tracker can steady a hand-held shot: choose Steady to smooth the shake while keeping the camera move, or Lock on it to hold the tracked point still.
Many shots, one look
Keep a grade. Grade one shot, choose Picture ▸ Keep Grade As and a letter. Select the other shots' layers and choose Picture ▸ Apply Kept Grade with the same letter.
Versions. In the Chain panel, click New Version: the grade as it is now is kept, and you carry on with a copy. Click a version to switch the shot to it; rename versions so you remember which was "warm" and which was "client". Trying another look never costs you the one you had.
Looks as .cube files. A .cube file is a 3D look-up table (a LUT): a recipe that maps every input colour to an output colour, the common currency of looks between programs and cameras. In Tables, set the Strength, then Import a table (.cube)… — it arrives as a layer of its own, so you can mask it or lower it. To hand your own grade to another program, select the layer holding it and choose Export this grade as .cube…. You can also drop a .cube file straight onto the window.
Colour spaces
Picture ▸ Convert to Profile — keep the picture moves a picture into another colour space and keeps how it looks. Assign Profile — reinterpret the numbers is for when the colours were read in the wrong space to begin with.
Building the grade as a node graph
Layers are a stack; a node graph shows the same picture as wiring — which grade feeds which merge — the way compositors and colourists in node-based tools think about it.
Open the Nodes panel and click Convert to Node Graph: the picture stays exactly as it was, and its wiring becomes the definition. Drag nodes to arrange the graph (moving one changes no pixel); drag from an output onto an input to connect them. Add Merge composites two pictures — Background and Foreground — and its Blend can multiply, screen or lighten instead of laying one over the other. Delete a node and what it sat between is rejoined. For the compositing nodes (keys, corner pins, masks, split screen), see animation.
Grading a whole film
On a film, Colour Core grades its shots — every clip, colour matte and gradient cut into the timeline — so a grade can be kept and applied across them. For one change over a span of the cut, an adjustment clip on Video Core changes everything beneath it at once. On a photograph, the same wheels, curves and qualifiers work on the single picture.
Where to go next
Cutting film in Video Core · Editing photographs · Every way to export · The overview
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