Picture Instruments has reinvented the color wheels

At first sight, one may not immediately recognize the difference between the traditional color wheels and the Picture Instruments Warping Wheels. However, at second glance it becomes clear that the Warping Wheels are far superior to the traditional color wheels.

Advantages of the Warping Wheels as compared to the traditional color wheels

In contrast to traditional color wheels, the Picture Instruments Warping Wheels Plugin provides extra functions for restoring and subsequently adjusting skin tones. Thus in most cases, the time-consuming work with masks is overdue.

With the "Protect Skin Tones" control, the skin tones are protected from the tint of the Warping Wheels. The Boost control saturates or desaturates the skin tones independently of the color wheels. If necessary, the Skin Tone Hue control can also be used to adjust the skin color.

With the range controls on the left side of the three color wheel for shadows, mids and highlights you can now set separately adjust whether the color tint should affect the darker-, the mid- or bright part of the respective range.

With the smoothness control of each Warping Wheel it is possible to set the width of the respective range (shadows, mids, highlights - sometimes known as lift, gamma, gain). A high value widens the range. As a consequence the crossover to the adjacent brightness range gets smoother. A small value reduces the width of the respective range.

Just like with the classic color wheels there is a Master Wheel which lets you tint, saturate and desaturate the entire image or change its brightness. In addition you can tint the various brightness ranges of an image by using the controls in the middle of the individual wheels for shadows, mid tones and highlights. There is also a brightness control for each of the three ranges.

Color Warp Technology

The name Warping Wheels refers to the Color Warp technology invented by Picture Instruments. With the Color Warp technology, colors can be bent very smoothly in the color space. This greatly reduces compression artefacts such as block formation or banding. Since the increased use of smartphone pics and videos as well as mini-gimbals and drones lead to more and more heavily compressed footage we think it’s a very important step to create our algorithms in such a way that they amplify the sometimes inevitable compression artefacts during post-processing as little as possible.

Advantages

• You can work intuitively with the color wheels, since you are already familiar to the classic color wheels.
• You can perfectly adapt the individual range (brightness and width) of shadows, mids and highlights to your footage.
• Advanced skin tone functions to protect and adjust skin tones can avoid using masks.
• Create professional looks in the blink of an eye.