If you’re using an older version of Final Cut Pro, Colorista works as a plug-in to let you perform color correction.

Colorista brings powerful yet streamlined color-correction capabilities to your favorite video editor or motion graphics program. Of course, most digital video software already offers standard three-way color correction tools, and Final Cut Studio 2 even ships with Color, a pro-level color-correction app. But Colorista occupies a happy middle ground: It’s flexible and has an easy, simple interface, unlike Apple’s Color. Priced at $199, it’s also within the reach of just about any serious video editor.

Colorista works as a plug-in filter that you can add to Final Cut, Motion, Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro, or Avid editing software. Its interface looks very much like Final Cut’s three-way color-corrector filter, with three palettes that let you adjust the luminance and hue in an image’s shadow, midtone, and highlight areas, along with overall white balance, color, saturation, and exposure levels (all keyframe-able, too). But Colorista makes it easier to make fine adjustments to those values, and it also doesn’t introduce extra noise or other degradations (like posterization) to the picture. Colorista produces a more refined, cleaner image - and image, as they say, is everything.

Colorista also makes it easy to apply a host of specialized changes to the same video. You can correct an isolated part of the picture (like an actor’s face) by creating an elliptical or a rectangular mask, feathering it, and then animating its position over time via keyframes. And you can apply multiple versions of the Colorista filter to the same image, with each version affecting it in a different way.

The bottom line. Colorista is a flexible and affordable tool for anybody who’s getting serious about color correction. You can make fixes or stylized looks very quickly, and the software works with just about any digital video tool around.

COMPANY: Red Giant Software

CONTACT: www.redgiantsoftware.com

PRICE: $199

SPECIFICATIONS: G4 or later or Intel processor, Mac OS 10.4 or later, 1GB RAM, dedicated ATI or nVidia graphics card with 128MB video RAM (256MB required for HD)

Powerful correction tools. Easy interface. Great image quality. Works with major video apps. Affordable. Universal binary.

Beefy hardware required. Some controls don’t let you enter numeric values. No custom mask shapes. No easy way to reset a control to default value.