Chapter 31 — Exercises

Color correction is a scope-reading skill, and scope-reading is built by doing, not watching. Most of these need only footage you already have (your three projects are perfect) and any editor with scopes — DaVinci Resolve is free and the strongest, but Premiere, Final Cut, and others all work. A few need nothing but your eyes and something to watch. Do the starred ones seriously; they build straight toward the Production Checkpoint.

Exercises are graded by effort and depth:

• ⭐ Warm-up — a few minutes; locks in a concept.
• ⭐⭐ Core — the real practice; do as many as you can.
• ⭐⭐⭐ Stretch — deeper or more ambitious; where the biggest gains are.

Model solutions and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises are collected in Answers to Selected Exercises at the back of the book. Attempt each one before you read its answer — a scope you misread and then understood teaches more than an answer you only skimmed.

A. Seeing color (Eye & Ear Training)

No camera needed — just your eyes and your growing distrust of them.

1. ⭐ Spot the cast. For the next ten videos or shows you watch, pause on any shot with a person and ask one question: is this neutral, warm, or cool, and is it a look or an accident? Write down three examples and your verdict for each. You are training the eye you will then learn not to fully trust. (Answer discusses how to tell a deliberate warm grade from an accidental warm cast.)

2. ⭐ The adaptation experiment. Find a photo or shot with an obvious color cast. Stare at it for a full 60 seconds without looking away, then flick your eyes to a white wall. Describe what you see on the wall (an afterimage in the opposite color) and explain, in one sentence, why this proves you can't correct by eye alone.

3. ⭐⭐ Match-cut hunting. Watch a scene that cuts between two camera angles of the same conversation (any dialogue scene). Look specifically at the wall, the skin, and the brightness across the cut. Do the two angles match perfectly, or can you catch a tiny shift? Note one scene where the match is invisible and, if you can find one, one where it isn't. (Answer provided.)

4. ⭐⭐ Skin on the line. For one day, whenever you see a person on screen, imagine the vectorscope: is their skin warm-natural, pushed magenta (too purple), or pushed yellow-green (sickly)? You can't see the scope, but you can train the judgment it measures. Do this ten times and note any pattern in what "healthy skin" looks like to you.

B. Reading the scopes (Read the Sequence / Settings Drill)

5. ⭐ Read the waveform. A described waveform: the trace spans from a small pile welded flat against the 0% line up to a healthy spread topping out around 85%. Diagnose it in two sentences — what's wrong, what's fine, and the one fix. (Answer provided.)

6. ⭐⭐ Read the parade. A described parade of a shot of a person against a grey wall: on the wall area, Red and Green sit level, but Blue sits noticeably lower at both the top and bottom of its trace. Name the cast (which color, warm or cool) and write the exact correction move (which slider, which direction). (Answer provided.)

7. ⭐⭐ Read the vectorscope. A described vectorscope: the trace forms a modest blob that is clearly pushed off-center down and to the right (toward the cyan target), and the little arm of skin-tone trace is sitting a bit clockwise of the skin-tone line, leaning toward yellow. Diagnose both problems and the order you'd fix them. (Answer provided.)

8. ⭐⭐ Settings drill: three casts. For each described neutral reference, write which slider(s) you reach for and which direction: (a) a white shirt reads with green above red and blue; (b) a grey card reads with red high and blue low at the top of the parade; (c) a white cup reads blue high at the bottom only, but level at the top. (Answers provided; (c) is a trap — think about where in the range the cast lives.)

9. ⭐⭐⭐ Build a scope cheat-sheet. From memory, make a one-page table: the three scopes, what each measures, what "neutral/correct" looks like on each, and what "crushed," "blown," "a cast," and "off-line skin" look like. Then check it against §31.2 and §31.4. This is the reference you'll actually use at the color page. (Model version provided.)

C. Correcting shots (Cut This / Shoot This)

The heart of the chapter. Use your own footage.

10. ⭐ Grey card, one click. Shoot two seconds of a grey card or a plain white sheet of paper under any light, then shoot a subject under that same light. In your editor, use the eyedropper/white-balance picker on the card, apply it, and confirm on the parade that R, G, B line up. Note how close one click gets you. (Guidance provided.)

11. ⭐⭐ Set the range. Take any flat or dull clip. On the waveform only (don't look at the picture more than you must), set the black point down to 0% and the white point up to near 100% without crushing or blowing. Now look at the picture. Describe what changed and whether anything clipped. (Answer discusses what to watch for.)

12. ⭐⭐ Neutralize a real cast. Find (or shoot) a clip with an obvious cast — an indoor shot on auto white balance, a shot under an LED bulb, a shot in shade. Neutralize it using a neutral reference and the parade. Save a before/after still. Write which slider did the work and why. (Answer provided.)

13. ⭐⭐ Five Ways: one shot, five corrections. Take one clip and correct it five times, changing only one thing each: (a) balanced neutral; (b) black point too high (milky); (c) black point crushed; (d) white point blown; (e) a deliberate blue cast left in. Watch all five. Write which is correct and, for each broken one, what the scope showed. (Answer discusses the trade-offs.)

14. ⭐⭐⭐ Correct the mixed-light scene. Shoot a shot with two colored sources at once — a person by a window with a warm lamp on the other side (your own Café Scene). There is no perfect white balance. Balance for the face (the dominant/story light), confirm skin lands right, and deliberately let the lamp stay warm. Explain your choice of which source to neutralize. (Model answer provided.)

D. Matching (Recreate It / Cut This)

15. ⭐ Two stills, one look. Grab two shots from different moments of the same location (or two clips of yourself filmed minutes apart). Put their waveforms side by side. Match the second shot's black and white points to the first. Note how much of the "mismatch" was just brightness. (Answer provided.)

16. ⭐⭐ Match the reverse. Shoot a simple two-angle conversation setup (or use your interview A-cam and B-cam). Correct the wider "hero" shot fully, then match the reverse to it using the four steps: tone, color, skin. Play the cut. Can you see the seam? Fix until you can't. (Guidance provided.)

17. ⭐⭐ Match to a hero. Take a scene with at least three shots. Pick the hero, correct it, and match the other two. Constraint: neutral only, no look. Time yourself; note which step (tone, color, or skin) took the most fiddling. (Answer provided.)

18. ⭐⭐⭐ The rainbow event. Find or stage footage of one subject shot under three clearly different lights (window, lamp, overhead). Match all three to one consistent neutral baseline so they cut together as one scene. This is the multicam/event matching problem in miniature. Save before/after. (Model answer provided.)

E. Fixing failures (Fix the Shot)

19. ⭐ Fix the crush. A colorist proudly shows you a shot with "deep, rich, cinematic blacks." On the waveform, the entire bottom third of the trace is welded flat to 0% and the shadow side of the subject's face is a featureless black shape. Name the problem and the fix, and explain what was lost. (Answer provided.)

20. ⭐⭐ Fix the order. Someone applied a warm "cinematic look" to a whole scene and now complains that some shots look great and others look orange and wrong. They corrected nothing first. Explain, using the correct-before-grade rule, exactly why this happened and the order they should have worked in. (Answer provided.)

21. ⭐⭐ Fix the sterile café. An editor "corrected" a warm, lamp-lit café scene until every source read perfectly neutral grey, and now it looks like a morgue. What did they misunderstand about correction and motivated light, and what should they have balanced instead? (Answer provided.)

22. ⭐⭐⭐ Fix the banding. A shot of a sunset sky was pushed hard in correction — big contrast, heavy saturation — and the sky now shows visible stair-steps of banding. Diagnose the root cause (reach back to Chapter 3), explain why more correction can't fix it, and give the on-set choice that prevents it next time. (Model answer provided.)

F. Workflow and judgment (Settings Drill / Fix the Shot)

23. ⭐⭐ Write the workflow. From memory, write the six-step primary-correction workflow (single shot, then scene) in order. Then explain, in one sentence each, why step 1 (contrast) comes before step 2 (cast), and why matching (step 5) comes last. (Answer provided.)

24. ⭐⭐ The monitor problem. You're correcting on an uncalibrated laptop in a room with a colored lamp on behind you. Your corrected shots look great on your screen and terrible when a friend watches them on their phone. Explain what went wrong and the single free thing that would have kept you honest. (Answer provided.)

25. ⭐⭐⭐ The on-set fix. You're about to shoot a two-camera interview you know you'll have to match in correction. List four things you'd do on set — before rolling — that would make the color pass fast and the shots match automatically. Tie each to why it helps in post. (Model answer provided.)

G. The project (Production Checkpoint work)

26. ⭐ Correct one Project 1 shot. Run the full single-shot workflow (steps 1–4) on your best talking-head shot. Save before/after. (Guidance provided.)

27. ⭐⭐ Match a Project 2 scene. Take one scene from your documentary short with multiple shots and match them all to a hero. Play it back and hunt for jumps. This is real progress on Project 2's finish. (Answer discusses what "done" looks like.)

28. ⭐⭐⭐ Correction-lock Project 3. Do the full Production Checkpoint on Project 3: every shot corrected to neutral, every scene matched, verified on scopes, no looks. When you can play the whole piece and no cut jumps in color or brightness, you've correction-locked it and it's ready to grade. (Model process provided.)

H. Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)

29. ⭐⭐ Exposure to correction. Take a clip you deliberately under-exposed by a stop (Chapter 5) and one you exposed correctly, then try to correct both to the same neutral, matched look. Compare the shadow noise. Write two sentences connecting on-set exposure to how easy correction is — and why "fix it in post" is a lie about exposure. (Answer provided.)

30. ⭐⭐⭐ The whole pipeline in one scene. Take a single scene and narrate, in writing, every stage it passed through to reach correction: the frame and shot sizes (Ch. 6–7), the light (Ch. 11–13), the audio you'll mix later (Ch. 14–15), the cuts (Ch. 26–28), and now the correction. Then name the one on-set decision that most helped your correction and the one that most hurt it. This connects the whole book to the color page. (Model answer provided.)

When you've done these — especially the correcting and matching ones — you can look at any shot, read its scopes, and pull it to a clean, matched baseline. That is the professional's invisible half of color. Chapter 32 is the visible half: now that everything is true, we make it feel like something.