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The Reset control, found at the upper right-hand corner of the Primaries palette, lets you reset every single setting in the entire palette. However, there are a variety of parameter-specific reset controls available to make more targeted resets.
— Each pair of Color Balance and Master Wheel controls have a reset control that resets both.
— Each numeric parameter can be individually reset by double-clicking the name of the parameter.
— The numeric parameters underneath each Color Balance and Master Wheel control pair can be reset by double-clicking the color label that appears underneath them.
Color Wheels and Bars
The Color Wheel palette’s Primaries Wheels mode lets you rebalance color and adjust contrast via the traditional DaVinci controls, which govern three overlapping tonal ranges referred to as Lift, Gamma, and Gain. The Lift/Gamma/Gain color balance and Master Wheel controls are tied to the YRGB Lift/ Gamma/Gain sliders found in the Primaries palette; adjustments made to one set of controls are mirrored in the other.
Though they may look different, the Wheels and Bars controls both actually adjust the same components, but in different ways.
These tonal ranges are defined by image lightness, on a scale where 0 is absolute black and 1023 is absolute white. The following illustration shows an approximation of how the Lift, Gamma, and Gain tonal zones broadly overlap, and how each zone’s influence falls off towards the opposing extremes of image tonality.
Lift Gamma Gain
Graphic displays the relationship of the Lift, Gamma, and Gain controls over the image brightness range that they control
The Lift color balance control region of influence starts at black, and then falls off through the middle grays to diminish to no influence at white. Meanwhile, the Gamma color balance control has its greatest influence over the image in the middle grays, and its influence diminishes towards black and white. Lastly, the Gain control is the inverse of Lift, having its greatest effect on the image at white, with its influence falling off to diminish at black.
Because these tonal ranges overlap so broadly, you can make very soft, subtle, naturalistic adjustments using these controls. Furthermore, you can capitalize on their overlap by moving an adjacent color balance control toward a color that’s complementary to an adjustment you’ve just made to restrict further how much of the image is affected.
The following image shows the interaction of extreme corrections made to a grayscale image using all three Color Balance controls. Lift has been pushed toward green, Gamma has been pushed toward blue, and Gain has been pushed toward red.
Extreme adjustments showing the overlap of the Lift, Gamma, and Gain color balance controls
Notice how, even though these corrections are extreme, the colors blend smoothly. This is the reason for the broad overlap among all three controls, and why Lift, Gamma, and Gain are so effective in making corrections to the ambient color temperature of a scene to account for inconsistencies in lighting or camera settings.