iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Effects: The iMovie Catalog

iMovie comes with 18 built-in effects. The following list describes them all.

Adjust Colors

This powerful effect adjusts the actual color palette used in your clip footage. If your footage has an unfortunate greenish tint, you can color-correct it; if you’re hoping for a sunset look, you can bring out the oranges and reds; if it’s a sci-fi flick taking place on Uranus, you can make it look blue and spooky.

The special sliders for this effect affect the hue, saturation, and brightness of your footage. Hue, saturation, and brightness are cornerstones of color theory; you can read much more about them on the Web, or in books and articles about photo editing. In the meantime, here’s a brief summary:

• Hue Shift (Left—Right). Adjusts the overall color tint of the clip. What iMovie is actually doing is rotating the hue around the hue circle, either to the left or the right. In practice, this effect doesn’t do anything predictable to an image; you’re meant to play with it until you find something you like.

• Color (B&W—Vivid). This slider lets you control the intensity of a color, or its saturation. If it’s blue, you control how blue it is: increasing toward Vivid makes the blue more intense.

• Lightness (Dark—Bright). Use this slider to adjust the overall brightness or darkness of the colors in your clip. There’s only a subtle difference between these effects and the Brightness/Contrast effect described below; this slider adjusts the brightness of the colors, rather ...