Original subtitles

The Viewer can be a powerful friend when it comes to

comparing different images in our comp.

Professionally, we call comparing images, ABing images.

That's to say we're just flipping back and forth between

two separate images so our eyes can see the difference

between the two quickly and easily.

Take these two images of the earth for example.

Side by side at a glance they look pretty similar.

The discerning eye is going to notice the blue haze around the earth on the

left or that it's absent from the image on the right.

However,

there's an easier way to compare these images and see the difference right away,

and that's to use a comparison wipe.

I'm going to start by deleting this Viewer and by adding a new Viewer,

I'm just hitting Tab and adding a new Viewer,

and I'm going to select this image,

and I'm going to select an image with the blue haze around it.

That's two.

So right now we're ABing the image by hitting one and hitting two on the Viewer,

and that's a pretty easy way of doing this,

but what the comparison wipe lets us do is view parts

of the image over the other image.

That'll make sense in a second as I show you here.

I'm just going to slide this over,

and up here is a box that gives us options for the comparison,

and I'm going to pick white and I'm going to say for

the A wipe we want the Read Node,

which is connected to this number one in the Viewer,

and in the B, I want this Merge5 Node to be viewable.

And you'll notice that these two options are being populated by the Viewer.

So anything you have connected to the Viewer will pop up in this dropdown,

and this dropdown's the same on either side.

So we're going to compare the Read Node as A with the Merge Node as B,

and you'll notice as soon as we make that selection,

we're seeing both of the images all at once.

We're seeing the Read Node as the A image over here,

and we're seeing the B image over here as the Merge Node,

and you'll notice that right away that we're seeing over here the A side,

which is the Read Node, and over here the B side,

which is the Merge Node.

Also notice that this crosshairs has appeared,

and if we hover over the crosshairs,

we'll see the icon change to this Omni-directional icon and we can

just left-mouse button click and drag this back and forth to wipe

between the A image and the B image to see what the difference is

between the two nodes.

Likewise, if we hover over this end of the crosshairs,

we'll be able to rotate this around.

So as you rotate this,

you can see the difference between the A side and the B side.

You'll also notice that there's this little handle

connected to the crosshairs here,

and this little handle basically works as an interface for

cross dissolving between the A and the B.

So if I grab this handle by left-clicking on this dot,

I can cross dissolve between these two.

So, the left side represents 0 opacity,

and the right side represents 100% opacity.

So if you're taking a look at this and you're saying to yourself,

well, so what, you know, I can just go to the Viewer and I can hit one and two,

and I can AB between these two images,

I don't need to use this wipe to see the difference between my two images.

I've got a pretty savvy eye.

If I go over here and I add a Color Correct Node,

I'm going to pop this Color Correct Node in here,

and I'm going to connect to Viewer to this Color Correct Node,

and let's say I'm going to change the game to be slightly red.

Here's where this comparison comes in really handy.

If we know this is basically the same image,

but we have this color corrected red image,

we can hold down Ctrl on the keyboard and left-click on

the image to place a sampling dot,

and you'll see down here at the bottom of the screen that we have an

information bar for our A image and for our B image.

And that's really important because right here really quickly,

if we're sampling this pixel,

we can see very easily in numbers what the difference in the

values are between the two different images that we've got

stacked on top of each other here.

So I don't want to dive too deep into this because this

is probably a course in and of itself,

but if you get an image and you're color correcting something,

you're color correcting two plates, one is red and one is not red,

and you want this color to match this color,

well you have access to this data now.

So I'll add a Color Correct Node, and I'll put it right here,

and I'll connect our Viewer to this new Color Correct

Node so that it's the A side and our B side is the side

that's already color corrected, let's say we want them to match.

I can go into the data for the Color Correct Node on our left side and say,

well, red is the same, but green is different,

and on the A side, my green is much higher than on my B side.

So I can take the slider,

and I can just bring it down until the color values roughly match,

and I can do the same thing with these blue values over here.

I can just bring these down until they roughly match,

and you'll see right now there's really no difference between these two images,

and we can really go in here and slide the opacity and see there is really no

difference that the eye can tell between these two images.

And again if I just set these back to where they were,

these two images are very different.

So that's kind of the lazy-man's way of Color Correcting an image,

and that's how you use the Comparison wipe in the Viewer to look at two

different images at the same time and compare between them.

In the next clip, we'll take a look at proxy modes,

I'll explain proxy modes and lowering the display

resolution of individual Viewers.