Color correction is a post processing effect that takes a frame rendered by the engine and changes its output of colors in various ways.
This effect is typically used in film to enhance scenes with effects such as Hue and Saturation, Contrast and Brightness, Luminance and Color Curves, and so on.
Take a reference image that hasn't been color corrected yet and shows a wide range of colors from an open level. Avoid using high resolution image captures though, as they won't improve color correction quality, but rather only increase the processing time when saved later. In this example, I captured a 1280x720 TGA image.
Copy/paste THE COLOR CORRECTION LOOKUP REFERENCE CHART into this reference image using Photoshop. It is important to use the color chart supplied by Crytek, as the resource compiler will need this file later on, to detect and extract the chart.
Flatten all layers, and save the file before beginning this tutorial.
Let's learn how to color grade our levels.
Begin by making the desired color adjustments in Photoshop. In this example, apply a bleach bypass color gradient to my scene:
- When color correcting the reference image, ensure that the changes are affecting the added THE COLOR CORRECTION LOOKUP REFERENCE CHART.
- Once the desired changes have been made, you may now save the new image as a
CryTIFFfile in your root directory underTexturescolorcharts. It is essential that you follow the naming convention:filename + _cch.tif. - Having now created our modified COLOR CORRECTION LOOKUP CHART, let's integrate this into our scene.
- First, set the console variable r_ColorGrading to 1, which enables it.
- Next, set the cvar r_ColorGradingCharts to 2.
- Setting r_colorgradingcharts to 2 works similar to setting it to 1, but in addition it displays debug information in the upper-left corner of the perspective view with the color chart lookup table, blending information and name of any static color charts that are loaded.
- Finally, in order to load and use a static color chart that overwrites the dynamic blending results mentioned earlier, use the console command
r_ColorGradingChartImageand specify the path to the color corrected reference image.For Example,
r_ColorGradingChartImage textures/colorcharts/ filename + _cch.dds.
Color correction in CryENGINE 3 takes a reference image that gets color corrected by a beautification artist or a designer. This image includes a default color lookup chart so all transformation steps applied to the image can later be reconstructed into the scene through the color correction post effect.
When activated through the console with the parameter r_ColorGradingChartImage, it loads the defined color chart image.
You may want to know more about why the _CCH naming convention must be used or how to capture frames directly from the engine for color correcting.
If you follow this naming convention, the resource compiler should automatically pick ColorChart as the preset to be used. Make sure that the image is not tiled in the Resource Compiler. If you wish, you may generate the output manually in order to create a file with a .dds extension.
As some artists may prefer to use uncompressed TGA images to adjust the settings, they can be output from the editor using the capture frames command:
This will save a tga screenshot of the perspective viewport to the CaptureOutput folder by default. This can be adjusted using the capture_folder console command.