How to achieve this look

[scott william]

How do I achieve this look in post using AE?

I'm more interested in the highlights bloom effect not the golden skintones.


This was probably done with a promist but wondering if anyone has achieved a similar look in post.

 

[Tom.Wong]

The way I'd start tackling this would probably dive into a toned down sepia, a good combo of red and yellow to get that brown you want, almost chocolate look. do a major contrast expansion to get the blacks right and the highlights a little blown up, maybe play around with a bleach bypass, add some grain and possibly even re light it with secondaries if it wasn't light with high enough contrast. and take down the saturation.

JCVD was an awesome movie

 

[Matt W.]

Looks like someone is trying to copy my boy Robert Richardson, who mastered this style in JFK and Natural Born Killers.

There's a firestarter or leko over his right shoulder (arbitrarily way far over key) and he's filled primarily with soft lights on either side of his face (a bounce card would work, too, but look at the reflection in his eyes: those are soft lights). It's shot anamorphic with a soft (promist, classic soft, net, etc.) filter and then processed using bleach bypass or ENR or more likely some digital look meant to emulate either.

Getting this look in digital (other than the oval bokeh) is fairly easy; magic bullet and color have presets that can be tweaked to induce highlight halation. In any case the effect is a modified version of a beauty pass: superimposing a blurred image using the add transfer mode over the original image; the only difference is that you'd want to desaturate the blurred image pretty significantly and then put a strong s-curve on it (crushing everything but the highlights to near-black, bringing the highlights to pure white) so the halation only occurs around the highlights. The effect is cleaner optically since this will look a bit wonky as light sources enter and exit frame in a moving shot, but it's not really a big deal.

 

[Tim Sutherland]

Other than the color I would use a diffusion or blur effect with a luminance map and either transparency or blending mode change. Could be done in AE or in a simple node tree in Color.

Tim

 

[scott william]

Thanks guys i will look into the magic bullet plugin.

 

[Matt W.]

You can do this in Final Cut, too. Obviously it's slower and less flexible than with After Effects or Color. If you use Final Cut let me know and I will post directions here. I have nothing to do today except sit around with a bad cold.

Or just get Magic Bullet. One could grade a feature in two days with that and it might look disturbingly almost acceptable.

 

[scott william]

hey matt im using cs5 not final cut. Have you any experience with AE?

 

[Matt W.]

This should be pretty easy in After Effects but I don't have it installed on this computer at the moment. I don't use color finesse, which I understand is very good, so AE is actually like my least favorite app for grading. It's ridiculous that Final Cut's 3-way color corrector is so much better than the tools available in an application apparently made for compositing.

Give me a few hours and I can put something very basic together, though. Like everything, this is 99% in the lighting. If you don't light this right in the first place (very low contrast and soft except for nuclear highlights), no color correction suite (or combination of filters and chemical process) will give you the look you want.

 

[paulherrin]

matt is right on.

best you can do in post is grade it how you want it overall (using plugins or whatever) and use an overlay of another copied layer, desaturated and blurred (try lens blur, not gaussian) with the highlights boosted and everything else knocked down. play around with layer styles and transparency that you like. screen will probably be a good one, soft light, or overlay, but there are others - doesn't take long to flip through and see what you're working with.

 

[Matt W.]

Unfortunately, I won't have access to a computer with AE today, but this is completely correct:

best you can do in post is grade it how you want it overall (using plugins or whatever) and use an overlay of another copied layer, desaturated and blurred (try lens blur, not gaussian) with the highlights boosted and everything else knocked down. play around with layer styles and transparency that you like. screen will probably be a good one, soft light, or overlay, but there are others - doesn't take long to flip through and see what you're working with.

Although I just use fast blur since it's acceptably good and a lot faster. To get the bronze look in the first place I use curves, photo filter, and h/s/l.

 

[scott william]

ok guys i will play around. may post a still later if i can get something close to what i want.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Looks to me like a combination of several things: great lighting, a little tweaky digital bleach-bypass look, at least one power window, and a defocus key on highlights. Very easy to do with any of the high-end color correctors (Baselight, Resolve, etc.).

Richardson does absolutely stellar work. He works mainly in film, but I'm very curious to see his new Scorcese project, Hugo Cabret, all shot on Alexa. He shot on just about every format for the Rolling Stones Shine a Light, and it was a challenge to match 35mm, Genesis, 16mm, DV, you name it. The end result held up very well, though.

 

[Rob Ruffo]

I think what is important to remember here is that the shot was well designed for the effect, including lighting, composition and set design.