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First Color Grading attempt

S

SJP

First Color Grading attempt (*Update)

Here is my first attempt at color grading. I basically just played around with various settings (curves, balance..etc) until I got this. It is not great, but I defiantly learned a few things. i used a cheap camera so the image may be a little noisy. The second one is better though.

Color Grading Test

Used Blender composite nodes. Any tips on how to improve my color grading would be awesome.

*UPDATE

Did another Color grading test. This time I lessened the vignette.

Another Color Grading attempt

Click on Image to view larger.

Here is the node tree..pretty simple.


Red curve, blue curve, and hue saturation curve.



 
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You're really crushing the blacks. Be careful of that. It looks fine in this shot, but when you've got an entire scene, you can lose a lot of really important details.

Color-grading can only do so much. How you shoot it is far more important.
 
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Cracker Funk said:
You're really crushing the blacks. Be careful of that. It looks fine in this shot, but when you've got an entire scene, you can lose a lot of really important details.

Color-grading can only do so much. How you shoot it is far more important.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the feedback. When I did this, I didn't really know how to color grade properly, so i just played around with it until I got this.

I also used a pretty cheap camera in my friends basement. I had another shot taken ten feet away that had really bad lighting, so all attempts at color grading just sucked.

In the future, I plan on using lights and try out other color grading effects.
 
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Ive seen plenty of films where they crushed the blacks, so..not an issue if you are looking for something creepy. Im just now figuring out how important proper lighting and exposure are so you can have latitude in post.
 
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dandevans said:
Good first attempt - vignetting is a little too strong for me. Also don't fall into the trap of using THAT colour scheme for everything - a LOT of films use it and its starting to look pretty cliched.

Push it to the logical extreme and you get this abomination: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC67kNZGpeA

(You're a long way off that, but it illustrates the point)
Click to expand...
Thanks for the feedback, I'll pull back on the vignette next time
 
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For the vignette... the goal is generally to focus attention to the subject (or part of frame you want them to see)... I've been trying to figure these out in blender as well. The vignette model that Andrew Price uses at blender guru is limited. My concept is that you can use another layer's alpha channel as a black and white matte. Since blender allows you to make shapes, you could make a circle squished into an oval, then render an alpha pass and use that as you vignette mask.

Here he's lightening for a muzzle flare, but using basically the same effect, we couls also darken the outside... and if you give it a really heavy blur, then lower the opacity of the correction, you can make the correction almost unnoticeable (since you want the attention on the subject rather than the vignette) :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xTZtgApuDI

and there's a tons of FCPX grading tutorials on youtube that even if you're not using the software, show the basics of grading in a really concise fashion (I was looking for a specific tutorial, but couldn't find it again -- I can get lost in youtube's free online education goodness ;) ).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNaD3U2vujM ( this is brilliant! The whole series :) )
 
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knightly said:
For the vignette... the goal is generally to focus attention to the subject (or part of frame you want them to see)... I've been trying to figure these out in blender as well. The vignette model that Andrew Price uses at blender guru is limited. My concept is that you can use another layer's alpha channel as a black and white matte. Since blender allows you to make shapes, you could make a circle squished into an oval, then render an alpha pass and use that as you vignette mask.

Here he's lightening for a muzzle flare, but using basically the same effect, we couls also darken the outside... and if you give it a really heavy blur, then lower the opacity of the correction, you can make the correction almost unnoticeable (since you want the attention on the subject rather than the vignette) :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xTZtgApuDI

and there's a tons of FCPX grading tutorials on youtube that even if you're not using the software, show the basics of grading in a really concise fashion (I was looking for a specific tutorial, but couldn't find it again -- I can get lost in youtube's free online education goodness ;) ).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNaD3U2vujM ( this is brilliant! The whole series :) )
Click to expand...

Yeah, I thought the vignette on mine was a little harsh. Next time I will blur it more and make it less noticeable. Another thing I though would be interesting in certain shots would be to render a mask that was not an oval, perhaps roughly outlined the subject, then run that through a blur node, overlay, and lower opacity. I think I will make it out of a shaped bezier circle, and then give it a shadless material.
 
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Yep, and if you then make it so the blur is over the transition between subject and background on the image, you can even track it to them if they are moving... and if it's subtle enough, the motion edges should hide the vignette.

You can also slightly desaturate the background, or colorize it using this technique. Inversely, because you have this mask, you can separate your color corrections with it and pull flesh tones (perhaps even using a second chroma keyer set to flesh orange) so you can adjust them to true while leaving the rest of your image unaffected by that correction. More pleasing images can be built this way by really giving the viewer healthy looking flesh tones on your actors, but still allowing the control you want over the rest of the image. This is hugely powerful stuff that you can use to direct the eye of the viewer and really deliver the story you want by almost forcing attention on the screen to one part or another.
 
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knightly said:
Yep, and if you then make it so the blur is over the transition between subject and background on the image, you can even track it to them if they are moving... and if it's subtle enough, the motion edges should hide the vignette.

You can also slightly desaturate the background, or colorize it using this technique. Inversely, because you have this mask, you can separate your color corrections with it and pull flesh tones (perhaps even using a second chroma keyer set to flesh orange) so you can adjust them to true while leaving the rest of your image unaffected by that correction. More pleasing images can be built this way by really giving the viewer healthy looking flesh tones on your actors, but still allowing the control you want over the rest of the image. This is hugely powerful stuff that you can use to direct the eye of the viewer and really deliver the story you want by almost forcing attention on the screen to one part or another.
Click to expand...

Wow, the possibilities are endless. Defiantly going to try this stuff out.
 
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I have a blender thread going elsewhere with some links to people on http://www.blendercookie.com doing cool VFX workflows that show some of the more complex ways that the masking can be done. Also some mango project chatter about using that project to push dev on the filmmaky / FXy aspects of blender!
 
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Tried some selective color correction correction on some photos in gimp using masks. It came out great. Im going to shoot some more footage for me to color correct.
 
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