Color Correction

[Ergin Ozturk]

Hi,

I play with Apple Color for for getting Hollywood type blueish film look. Here is the result. I put small grain also.

http://www.vimeo.com/6537681

[Noah Kadner]

I like it but I think it's a little too blue- especially on skin tones. The steely look is great but remember people must have normal skin, not blue in the shadows. But that's easy to fix up with your secondaries. Keep up the great work- nice cinematography.

Noah

[Tim Sutherland]

I'm not sure that people must have normal skin tones. I just saw an Academy presentation of several older films with strong color shifts of the entire image, and it still looked great. It may be the common way to do things now, but requiring a certain skin tone seems a bit odd.

Plus, when you have a higher contrast lighting ratio as in the example shots, then you'll have a tough time pushing the shadows blue without also sending the skintones blue in the shadows.

I think it looks nice. It looks as if you have one strong source, and the ambient blue light from the environment is working as a weak blue fill on the fill side of the faces.

Not that correcting back skintones with secondaries would be wrong, I just don't think it is definitely necessary.

[Ben Holmes]

Here's an excellent guide to achieving the current 'Blockbuster' look, from one of the masters:

http://library.creativecow.net/artic...o-tutorial.php

In it, Stu describes the way skin tones must be maintained - although the amount of chroma in them can vary wildly - almost orange in some - but their still in the same part of the colour spectrum. One of the best presentations on this I've ever seen.

[Ergin Ozturk]

Ben, i've watched the same tutorial in creativecow and i tried to apply same method to my footage. But it takes time to practice.

[Luis Ismael]

Ergin

Just get the look you feel it´s great.
If you ask 1000 guys you get 1000 ways.
Get YOUR way :)
I´ve seen it and like it.

[Ron Shaw]

It is nice

[Rudi Herbert]

Ergin,

Cok guzel! You got the look already, that's what it is. It's impossible for the skin not to show some blue tones when everything else around it is pushed so far towards blue/green, but as long as the skin retains enough warm tones, then that's the idea. Of course, what I do when shooting scenes I have control over, is to place red, yellow or orange objects inconspicuously around the scene, to introduce other contrast elements between the blues and skin tones. Things like a lamp, a light, a piece of clothing do the trick...

[Johan Malmsten]

I think you've got the "fashion of the day"-blockbuster look already... But then again, I'm soooo bored with every single movie looking exactly the same way these days. It's like looking at a propaganda piece from Sverigedemokraterna (pseudo rightwing-extremist almost neo-nazi party here in sweden). Everything is in shades of blue and yellow, like the flag of our country. Although, I'm just an out of work video-hobbyist and wannabe film-critic in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Sweden so my opinion on this matter doesn't weigh in that much, I guess, does it? ;)

Anyhoo' (got a bit carried away off topic there I'm afraid)

I've been trying some ways that's been talked about, all the way from the threeway CC to a rather complex way using colorama to produce a mask that'll follow color-ranges. But the one I took a liking to is the Hue/Saturation-way... in AE for me...

- Choose to adjust only the primary color you want.

- Pump the saturation so you'll see what range you're affecting. (no worries, this'll look ugly, it's just to help with the next step)

- Adjust the range on the color-scale to get the areas you want.

- Pull back the saturation and adjust it and hue and brightness to your liking.

- Add another Hue/sat for other specific colors.

I use this mostly because I lack the threeway color corrector wheels that the tutorials talk about and I can get at specific colors in a more simple way for me. This is my one of a thousand ways of doing it as Luis put it.

[Henk van den Doel]

I like it, looks great. Skintone often doesn't look like skintone at all in some of the most amazing looking series or films. Nice work!