Maxon colorist and International Color Authority instructor Maximus Raharjo has posted many hours of incredible content in his Max On Color YouTube series. If you’d like to understand the ins and outs of color and how Magic Bullet Looks (and other Maxon applications) manipulate color, we strongly encourage you to enjoy this series. In particular, we recommend spending 90 minutes on the “Looks Breakdown” episode. We’ll touch on some of the concepts offered in this video below, but the source episode is a must-watch.
One key takeaway from “Looks Breakdown” is an answer to the question: What’s the point of using Looks? Since Looks is a color grading tool, this is another way of asking what color grading is good for. In short, color grading intensifies the visual communication from artist to audience. Just as the writer of this paragraph must ponder variables such as word choices, sentence cadences, and use of italics to convey a specific set of concepts for (hopefully) optimal understanding in the reader, visual artists do much the same with color, diffusion, and a range of other tools. Magic Bullet Looks presents these tools in refined ways for maximum convenience and optimized workflow.
In color grading, a “look” is a certain combination of underlying appearance variables (color balance, exposure, the characteristics of how light moves through celluloid film) applied to a shot or scene. Within Magic Bullet Looks, Maxon has provided hundreds of preset looks as well as the means for you to create and easily adjust any number of additional custom looks. Essentially, the Looks workflow has three steps:
Apply the Looks plug-in to a clip in the timeline of your host application. (We’ll be using Adobe Premiere Pro in this guide.)
Select and/or manipulate the look to fit your artistic taste.
Exit the Looks interface with the look applied to your clip in the host program.
With the above ideas in mind, you can see how Looks interface is designed around function and flow. Let’s take a stroll around the UI.
Assuming you have already run through installing the Magic Bullet suite, your next step is to load the Looks plug-in. In Premiere Pro, click on the Effects tab to bring up the Effects panel. (If you don’t see the Effects tab, click on Window > Effects.) Within the Effects panel, you’ll find Looks under Video Effects > RG Magic Bullet > Looks. Alternatively, you could type “bullet” into the Effects search field and see this:
Drag and drop Looks onto your desired video clip in the timeline. When beginning a new Looks project, your Effect Controls Panel (ECP) will look like the following top image. To enter the Looks Designer and get to work with your color management, click the Edit... button.
Once you apply a look, your ECP interface will show small thumbnails of the tools comprising that look (shown at bottom).
The Strength control functions much like an opacity control, governing how much the look impacts the underlying video. Typically, you would leave this at 100 percent. The other “control” is the Edit button, which is your gateway into the main Looks interface.
When you enter the main Looks UI, you’ll be greeted by something like this:
Areas of the Looks UI upon first loading: 1) The Looks Drawer, 2) the Info Bar, 3) the Controls pane, 4) the preview window, and 5) the Tool Chain.
The following pages of this user guide will provide deep dives into each of the areas outlined in the image above. Additionally, clicking the vertically oriented word TOOLS in the bottom-right corner will replace the Controls pane with the Tools Drawer. Clicking the vertical LOOKS in the bottom-left will retract the Looks Drawer and reveal the word SCOPES, which, in turn, reveals the Scopes pane.
The interplay between presets, tools, and controls is core to Looks’ power and utility. To illustrate, consider the setup shown above. We’re in the Blockbuster Cool collection of presets in the Looks Drawer, but the feel of the image isn’t what we want. So, we click on the Frye preset.
Notice how the tools on the Tool Chain change, both in number and name. Rather than the Colorista tool that was part of the prior preset, Frye uses the 4-Way Color tool as well as other tools. The controls for that tool are exposed in the Controls pane.
Every preset is comprised of its own tools, and each of those tools has its own controls. You can add or subtract tools from a preset, change the values of any control parameter, and save all those tweaks as a new custom preset.
Alternatively, you could simply click on a preset that matches the look you’re after, make no changes, and click the check mark in the lower-right corner to apply the look to your clip and return to your host program.
Magic Bullet Looks is really that easy. Or that detailed, rich, and flexible. You decide.