Color adjustment with Color Correct

- [Instructor] Maya has many tools for adjusting the color of a texture or other shading node. In this movie we'll look at the color correct node, and we'll adjust this image here so that it's a black and white photograph. And this is super useful because we don't have to spend any time in an image editing program. and we can, for example, create many versions of an image based upon the same file texture. So I've got this connected already to the base color of my standard surface, and actually we can do some limited color correction directly in the file node itself. I'll select that file node and open the attributes with control A, go into the color balance section. And here we have the ability to, for example, change the brightness. We can adjust the exposure value and bring that up, or bring it down. Maybe set it back to its default of one. We also have the color gain which performs a similar operation except that's linear rather than logarithmic. The color offset is the black point, so we can bring up all the blacks in the image, but we don't really have the ability to adjust the contrast curve or make this into black and white by de-saturating. We can do that using the color correct node. The color correct node is part of a plugin that is enabled by default, called the look dev kit. And if you don't find the color correct node anywhere in Maya then you may need to go into the plugin manager and enable the look dev kit plugin. I've made sure that that's already turned on, so let's go ahead and create this color correct node. One way to do that is from the hyper shade menu. We can go to Create, Color Utilities, Color Correct. Take the out color of the file node and connect it to the in color of the color correct node. Take the out color of color correct, and connect it to the base color of the material, and select that color correct node. And in the Attribute Editor with the default values we see no change in our image, but for example, we can adjust the hue. We can adjust that hue shift and get a kind of strange color, or maybe set that back to its default of zero. What I want to do here actually is reduce the saturation to get a black and white image. So I'll bring that saturation down to zero, and that looks pretty good, but I think I can make this better by adjusting the contrast and brightness. We've got the value and color gain, which are very similar. We can, for example, increase the value. Let's bring that up to a value of two. And now the brightest points in this image have a value of two rather than one, and that could result in some clipping, but it actually is giving me a good aesthetic result here. The other thing I'd like to do is adjust the contrast and that can be done with the gamma adjustments here. We've got separate gamma for red, green, and blue, and I could plug in a value here such as 0.5 into each one of these, but if I was going to keep the black and white look, then I might want to adjust all three of those at once. So let's do that and I'll set the gamma red back to one and create another node that I can then feed into these gamma inputs. So that node is going to be a color constant node. We can find that once again in the Create menu under Color Utilities, Color Constant, and that's just simply a flat color. We want to connect that out color to the gamma inputs of the color correct node. Let's expose those. Select the color correct node and press the three key on the keyboard, and that exposes all of the inputs. Take the out color of color constant and connect it to the gamma input. Here it is, color gamma. And now we can see that the same value has plugged into all three of those, and we've got a very contrasty image. I'll select that color constant node and back in the Attribute Editor change the color slider value and see how that affects the image, or I can go into that color and just click on the swatch and adjust the value numerically. Maybe I'll set that to a value of 0.5 and press enter. Now I'm adjusting the gamma on all three RGB channels equally, and that's how to use the color correct node for basic adjustments. If we want to compare this to the original, we can just simply temporarily connect the out color of that file node back to the base color, and then maybe go back to the out color of the color correct node and see how that changes our image.