What is White Balance?
White should look white, not peach, pink, or baby blue. White balancing footage will help your video look natural by looking at the color temperature in your shot and setting an accurate white, removing any unnatural color cast.
This can’t be done with the color picker in FCPX, but there are ways to make your whites accurate.
Plug-ins for Quickly White Balancing Footage
Dashwood Editor Essentials
Dashwood Editor Essentials is a set of utility plugins that can repair footage or do tasks that would normally require a lot of time and effort. It can make all the difference in delivering your edit on time, including white balancing your footage!
Cineflare White Balancer
With CineFlare’s White Balancer, you can utilize the Apple Color Picker to find your exact white balance color.
Hawaiki AutoGrade
Advanced automatic white balance correction tool with a host of easy-to-use additional grading features. AutoGrade 3 for Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, After Effects & Motion.
- Buy Hawaiki AutoGrade
- Try a free demo: Download comes as part of FxFactory installer.
Ripple Tools for Final Cut Pro X
12 Final Cut Pro X plug-ins that allow you to quickly accomplish a number of effects and editorial tasks, including color balance using traditional color wheels.
- Buy Ripple Tools for Final Cut Pro X
- Try a free demo: Download comes as part of FxFactory installer.
Sheffield Softworks Cinemage
Cinemange can white balance footage and so much more. It’s both more sophisticated and streamlined than almost anything out there. If you’re looking for something to make your footage look ordinary – to balance your whites and tone your highlights, midrange, and shadows – Cinemage is not that plugin. If you’re looking for something that will make your footage look gorgeous, you’ve come to the right place.
CrumplePop SkinTone for FCPX
SkinTone for Final Cut Pro X lets you quickly restore beautiful, natural skin tones in your subjects. Whether you forgot to white balance or had to wrestle with mixed lighting, SkinTone makes it easy to fix the shot. SkinTone gives you the same powerful Temperature and Tint controls found in photo editing applications – right inside FCP X.
HY-FX HyColour
HyColour is a really neat color grading effect for FCPX that brings white balance, exposure, green cast removal, saturation, color bias, sharpening and a broadcast safe filter, together in one place. Super handy, super cool.
NewBlueFX Plug-ins
NewBlueFX has several plug-in packages that include great tools for white balancing footage.
NewBlueFX ColorFast
Quickly correct color balance your image with ColorFast’s powerful white balance algorithm. Just select the whitest part of your image with the dropper tool. It’s that easy… Plus, there are several other plug-ins in the package.
NewBlueFX ColorFast 2
ColorFast streamlines both color correction and color grading in one simple workflow. Use one of the 65 presets or create your own look from scratch. Perform primary color correction with easy to use controls or bring out the full potential of your clips using deep color grading options.
NewBlueFX Essentials Volume 3 – Change white balance and add film gamma to fix white balance issues with footage shot in harsh sunlight or indoor lighting. NewBlue Essentials 3, Volume 3 delivers 8 versatile editing tools built to soften wrinkles and remove blemishes, optimize color and contrast, fine-tune luminance values, and more
NewBlueFX Filters Ultimate – NewBlue Filters 3 Ultimate presents over 250 presets in 22 video effects to instantly enhance video through an array of distinctive looks
- NewBlueFX Filters Ultimate
- Buy NewBlueFX Essentials Volume 3
- Get NewBlueFX ColorFast
- Or NewBlueFX ColorFast 2
- Download a demo of all NewBlueFX Plug-ins
Perform an Automatic Color Balance in Final Cut Pro X without Plug-ins
Premium Beat has an article that explains how to use the Inspector in FCP X to perform a white balance. They explain how to color balance whether the shot has been analyzed upon import or not. Read more here.