The Auto Color effect adjusts the contrast and color of an image after analyzing the shadows, midtones, and highlights of the image. The Auto Contrast effect adjusts the overall contrast and mixture of colors. Each effect maps the lightest and darkest pixels in the image to white and black, and then redistributes the intermediate pixels. The result is that highlights appear lighter and shadows appear darker.

Because Auto Contrast and Auto Color don’t adjust channels individually, they don’t introduce or remove color casts.

The Auto Levels effect uses many of the same controls as the Auto Color and Auto Contrast effects.

These effects work with 8-bpc and 16-bpc color.

Temporal Smoothing

The range of adjacent frames, in seconds, analyzed to determine the amount of correction needed for each frame, relative to its surrounding frames. If Temporal Smoothing is 0, each frame is analyzed independently, without regard for surrounding frames. Temporal Smoothing can result in smoother looking corrections over time.

Scene Detect

If selected, frames beyond a scene change are ignored when surrounding frames are analyzed for temporal smoothing.

Black Clip, White Clip

How much of the shadows and highlights are clipped to the new extreme shadow and highlight colors in the image. Note that setting the clipping values too high reduces detail in the shadows or highlights. A value between 0.0% and 1% is recommended. By default, shadow and highlight pixels are clipped by 0.1%—that is, the first 0.1% of either extreme is ignored when the darkest and lightest pixels in the image are identified; these are then mapped to output black and output white. This method ensures that input black and input white values are based on representative rather than extreme pixel values.

Snap Neutral Midtones (Auto Color only)

Identifies an average nearly neutral color in the frame and then adjusts the gamma values to make the color neutral.

Blend With Original

The effect’s transparency. The result of the effect is blended with the original image, with the effect result composited on top. The higher you set this value, the less the effect affects the layer. For example, if you set this value to 100%, the effect has no visible result on the layer; if you set this value to 0%, the original image doesn’t show through.