Grading with Color Wheels

Olivers Peters has results of his casual testing of Grading with Color Wheels in a variety of apps including Avid, Apple Color, Aperture, Magic Bullet Looks, Colorista, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Color Finesse. There's plenty in this article which may pique your curiosity to compare further. Oliver was interested in:

"how each treated the image when you used the color wheels. After I did a quick test, it was obvious that FCP and Avid don’t process the image in quite the same way, even when you push what appears to be the equivalent control in the same direction. So I decided to dig a bit deeper. [snip]

In my opinion, Synthetic Aperture Color Finesse produced the most pleasing results out of all of these video images. A version of Color Finesse is also available as a standalone grading application, which uses a similar workflow to Apple Color. In any case, it’s right inside Adobe After Effects [it ships on the install disc], though many editors aren’t even aware of the power they already own if they have the CS3 or CS4 bundle!"

Update: see also Controlling the Color Wheels in Final Cut and Apple's Color by Patrick Inhofer.