Magic Bullet Looks

Tool Chain

If presets are the takeout dinner of Magic Bullet Looks, the Tool Chain is like your kitchen, where you can either make dinner from scratch or tweak the meal you just brought home. The range and functionality of Looks tools is incredible, which is why we devote an entire section of this guide to the topic. (See the topics under Working With Tools.) For now, we just want to introduce the Tool Chain and its key concepts.

The Looks Tool Chain containing the default tools for the Classic Zombies preset. The items between the Input and Output blocks are applied tools.

The order of tools on the Tool Chain (which executes from left to right) echoes the traditional workflow of color grading. While Looks lets you arrange tools in any order, it’s again like cooking. Just because you can slather sauce on a pizza after laying down the cheese doesn’t mean you should. The order of operations matters.

If you want to squeeze every bit of value and power from Magic Bullet Looks, we recommend gaining a solid understanding of color grading. And wouldn’t you know it? The Maxon Training Team has oodles of content on this very subject. We suggest starting with Introduction to Color Grading Part 1. There are six videos in the color grading series, each of which runs about two hours.

If the idea of a twelve-hour “introduction” seems daunting, don’t panic. We have a three-minute alternative.

Open the Magic Bullet Colorista plug-in and click on the Guided Color Correction wizard. This will walk you through color space input; setting black, white, and midtone levels; adjusting colors; and more. Accompanying graphs and explanatory text within the wizard help make the workflow sensible and intuitive, so you can translate those same ideas into Looks and the Tool Chain.

How the Tool Chain Works

Tools on the Tool Chain process from left to right, following the same path as light through a conventional cinematography workflow. Any tool from any Tools Drawer category can be drag-and-dropped onto the Tool Chain. You can also click on a tool to add it to the Tool Chain, then drag it to whatever position you like. Be aware that Looks defaults to adding tools to the Tool Chain position it believes to be most appropriate for normal workflows.

Deleting a tool: To remove a tool, simply drag it below the Tool Chain and let go. If a tool is selected, you can also use the Delete or Backspace keys to remove it. Alternatively, you can right-click a tool and select Delete from the pop-up menu. Even more alternatively, if you want to nuke all tools on the Tool Chain (except for pinned items; see below), click the Reset icon in the bottom-left corner, located to the left of the “Look:” field.

Tip: Tool context (right-click) pop-up menus appears a bit below the Tool Chain, so you might not see it if you’re displaying Looks in full-screen mode. Try right-clicking after moving up the Looks window’s bottom border.

Pinning a tool: Two more options appear in tools’ pop-up menus: pin and bypass. Pinning a tool is like locking it. Say you have the Colorista tool on your Tool Chain. You spend considerable thought and time getting the Colorista controls perfect for the primary color grading of your clip. However, if you click on another preset, the new tools tied to that preset will wipe out anything already on the Tool Chain — and all your fine tuning will vanish.

Pinning fixes this. In the event of a new preset selection, every tool on the Tool Chain would be replaced except the pinned one(s). In this way, pinning can help you quickly and consistently apply an adjusted tool across a range of looks without losing your settings.

Bypassing a tool: The bypass option effectively “skips” a tool being executed on the Tool Chain. Toggling the bypass function makes fast work of seeing the impact of a specific tool in your look.

Similarly, the Main Bypass icon, located between the Save Look icon and Strength on the bottom edge of Looks, serves to toggle on and off all tools on the Tool Chain. Turning Main Bypass off shows how your clip appears with no tools applied to it, although the Input and Output settings remain in effect.

Tip: If you don’t feel like interacting with the right-click context menu, it’s even simpler to mouse-over the left and right corners of a tool to interact with its pin and bypass functions, respectively.

Strength, Cancel, and Apply

While not part of the Tool Chain per se, three final features await along Looks’ bottom border.

Strength: This control adjusts the global strength of all tools on the Tool Chain. Remember the Strength control for Looks back in Adobe’s ECP? When you set Strength within the main Looks UI and apply the look to your clip, the Strength value of the Tool Chain will automatically transfer to Strength on the ECP.

Note that global strength on the Tool Chain is different than the individual Strength sliders present for each tool in the Controls pane (see the S Curve tool example below). Individual Strength sliders give you granular control over how much each tool manifests in a given frame, allowing you to fade tools in and out over time. Global strength controls (including the Strength slider in the Looks ECP controls) provide this same ability for the entire look, not individual tools within a look.

Cancel and Apply: When you’re ready to leave the Looks main UI and return to your host program, visit the X (Cancel icon) and check mark (Apply icon) symbols in the bottom-right corner. Cancel will delete any work you’ve done within Looks. Apply will retain your current look, along with all tools and settings, and add it to your clip.

Note: For information on the Input and Output blocks that bookend the Tool Chain, see this guide’s Color Management section.