CHAPTER 10

Creating Looks

The creation of “looks” is probably why some colorists make as much as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and drive around in Lamborghinis. This is the sexy stuff. It’s also the stuff that is virtually unquantifiable. It’s part of what takes color correction from craft to art.

And after a recent trip to New Hat in Los Angeles to visit Bob Festa, I got a glimpse of how it can even be like menu writing at a good gourmet restaurant. As I sat with Festa, he showed me a wide range of looks that he’d created and stored. Like a guitarist with names for each of his treasured axes, Festa did not simply call his looks by some technically accurate name, but with creative descriptive flair that did as much to sell the effect to the client as it did to actually describe it. I saw Brazilian Silver, Cold Steel, Study in Neutrality, and Pearlized Whites. Like a good description of an entrée at a restaurant, they describe the item in a way that makes it desirable.

Pearlized Whites was little more than a simple soft, highlight glow (Figure 10.2). Any colorist can give you a highlight glow … but Festa gives you Pearlized Whites. I think this is more than a mere gimmick. It brands the entire experience and provides a handle for clients that generates creative buy-in to the looks. I doubt that Fuzzy Highlights or Blurry Brights were contenders when he was naming this look.

Festa explains how he created the Pearlized Whites look. He adds a little more contrast to the base shot (Figure 10.1), driving the highlights up. He explains, “Make sure the whites are nice and strong. I’m comfortable with the shape of the shot, the colorimetry. I’m going to add another layer and soften the whole shot. I’m going to isolate just the highlights on her dress, with a nice softness. Now I’m using the 3D keyer and put a garbage matte and a luminance isolation to get rid of the highlights in the curtain.” With the softened shot being keyed through the highlights, the whites of the nightgown take on a beautiful, ethereal patina: Pearlized Whites (Figure 10.2).

Festa describes his Brazilian Silver look: “a very desaturated, silvery look that softens the midtones a bit, low saturation. An aggressive, contemporary, cross between a bleach bypass and a hi-con black and white look” (Figures 10.3 and 10.4).

Fig. 10.1 Base look.

Fig. 10.2 Festa’s Pearlized Whites.

Why “Brazilian?” Why not? It’s a branding statement that does little to describe an actual color or look, but definitely provides a hook to draw in the imagination—and continued patronage—of a client. Can you imagine this client going to another colorist and requesting Brazilian Silver?

It’s similar to the Bozell ad copywriter who coined “fine Corinthian leather” to describe the interior of the Chrysler Imperial and Cordoba back in 1974 when Ricardo Montalban was the spokesman. The leather did not come from Corinth, but New Jersey. But who wants an upscale car upholstered with fine New Jersey leather?

But pitching the look could be argued to be not quite as important as creating it, so we turn to Chicago colorist Craig Leffel of Optimus to explain some of his process for coming up with looks. “Well, I think it’s always a process of working wider and then narrowing.”

Fig. 10.3 Base look.

Fig. 10.4 Festa’s Brazilian Silver.

I ask if some of the time when he’s spinning the trackballs, he’s not really color correcting as much as getting a sense of where the image can go. “Yeah. Sometimes when you make an extreme change you see that you’ve either grabbed the wrong thing or you’ve grabbed too much. It’s certainly the subtle stuff that begins to appear to you when you’ve made a huge change. Then you can narrow down and narrow down and narrow down from there. Also, sometimes when you’re starting to play with a new image, you work in extremes unless you’re being told a very specific thing. But if it’s up to you to kind of come up with a look, then making extreme, radical changes is sometimes helpful. It may not be helpful to the people sitting behind you, but it helps you kind of see where an image can go. How much it can handle. If you really do make those extreme changes up front, I quite often see things that I didn’t think of. Like maybe this image looks really good pink and I never considered that. Or maybe hi-con (high contrast) or way more crushed than you would have ever thought would look good.

“You say, ‘Holy moley, that looks great. I didn’t really mean to do that. I was just kind of rolling through my ranges but that looks really good. I think I’ll work towards that.’ Because quite often that first impression of an image, no matter who you are, no matter how experienced you are, no matter how much background you have, the first time somebody says, ‘Do something really cool with that.’ That first impression that you have may not be the one you really want to go with. And you kind of have to be willing to let yourself find where you might want to go. And obviously it’s a collaborative effort with the people behind you, but quite often, if I’m by myself, I don’t like to trust my first instinct. I like to kind of challenge myself and see if there’s something I didn’t think of. I call it ‘going through my ranges.’ You know, really pushing it around: light and dark, pushing it all the way around the vectorscope.

“If I have a huge time crunch, I don’t do it and if I’ve got someone behind me saying something very specific, I won’t typically do it, but I will push for a little bit of time with the film by myself where I do run through those ranges. Especially if it’s kind of open ended, like ‘Do something cool with this.’

“So that’s my trick,” concludes Leffel. “Push it around hard at the very beginning and then narrow down and narrow down and narrow down.”

Enough Is Enough

They say that great art is all about knowing when to stop, so I ask Leffel when he knows to stop. “Certainly in my line of work, knowing when to stop … there’s a point of diminishing returns. I think I’m usually done when I don’t see anything objectionable in the picture any more. If everything has lived up to what I was trying to do and I don’t see any objections, then I’m usually feeling pretty good about being done. The truth is, you could keep working forever and you’d never be done. You’d just keep going and going and going.”

I ask him to be specific about how he knows where his boundaries are. “Those are the hard things to even verbalize. I think if the lighting I’ve set feels like it’s actually motivated by something outside and I feel like that’s not going to be able to go anywhere past that. If I like their flesh tones; if I like the details in the image. I’m always scanning the image all over the place to see if something is standing out to me or bothering me or drawing my attention and I’m usually trying to consider all things at once, so in a shot, if I’m really trying to be critical, I’m saying to myself ‘Is anything distracting me? Is anything bothering me? Is anything pulling my eye away from what I should be looking at?’ When I can answer all of those questions and say, ‘I’m not being distracted. I feel I’m looking at what I’m supposed to be looking at. I’ve achieved the goal that I’ve set out to do.’ If I can answer all those questions, then I’m usually feeling like I’m pretty done.”

Preset Looks

Bob Festa was one of the few people that I spoke to who described some of the looks that he starts to show clients. Festa is clearly talented enough to develop these looks from scratch on every shot, but he’s also a big proponent of reusing selected elements of these looks as easy-to-apply presets.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve been the architect of a couple of features in the DaVinci, and one of those is something called PowerGrade. PowerGrade is a browser that lets me keep 20–25 of my top techniques in there, and once I get an image balanced and into a place that I like, then I can ripple those PowerGrade effects back on top of it. Those might be everything from a four-corner pin to a bleach bypass to a cross-process look. These are things that might take five or ten minutes to build up from scratch; I can quickly double-click it and dial it in on top of my base, well-balanced image.”

Festa continues, “That PowerGrade library is very influential. And I had a lot of arguments about that with people about ‘Should we be able to dial things on top—with just a single keystroke—of images, or should they be rebuilt from scratch?’ My feeling is, if you want to give your clients a choice, I’d rather show them 25 things that I can do with a single keystroke than 4 things that I’ve had to build from scratch.”

Festa’s PowerGrade Library Revealed

Festa generously shared a glimpse at some of his trade secrets. “Some of the things that are in there are prebuilt PowerTiers. Basically, I always start with a nice balanced image. Then I’ve got a bunch of PowerTiers that I can ripple on top of that. They’d be one or two channels of window or a channel of defocus combined with a key.”

Festa is sitting at his DaVinci, walking through the presets with me. “Just to give you an idea off the top of my head what I have in there: in the top row, I have a complete line of bleach bypass, ranging from 20 percent to 70 percent in 10 percent increments. In a single keystroke, I can ripple that on top without having to go through a whole building process. So I can show somebody 20 percent, 30 percent, 40 percent, boom, boom, boom, just like that.”

“The DaVinci is really clumsy when it comes to setting up soft effects like ProMists, defocus, pearlized whites,” Festa opines. “So I have all of those set up on single keystrokes. Of course, what that does is build a defocus channel and a key channel and a channel of Power Window, just to support it all.”

Continuing through the presets, Festa explains, “I have the Pearlizer, which is just soft whites. I have the swing and tilt, which is just the corner’s softened. I have the ProMist, and the ProMist is divided up into ProMist 1 through 6. And I also have a Mist with what I call ‘demin’ added to it, which is like a richer ProMist also. The ProMist settings don’t have much correlation to the on-camera ProMist filters.

“Textures, which are really hard to create, like bleach bypass and soft effects—I have all those on single keystroke things,” Festa explains. “In addition to those, I have the usual kinds of stuff like Blue Wash #2, duotones, day for night 1 and 2, film noir black and white. Then I have my cross-process looks.”

Festa describes what his cross-processed looks actually do. “So I have those two things built as layers also and those use multiple layers, because a C41 to E6 look really gives a super golden white with a lot of blue/cyan in the blacks. So I use a separate channel for each one of those effects. One channel to warm up the whites give it a golden, dirty look. And also a channel to get that ‘cyan-ey’ blue crap in the blacks.”

Festa summarizes, “To build any of these effects from the ground up is really a five-minute job. So I found, if I had all of this stuff at the top, I could open up this PowerGrade and just quickly show somebody not only my warm, cool, and balanced looks, but here’s some really wacky stuff if you want to stretch out.”

I respond, “Everybody’s got a deadline, so why spend it recreating something you know you’ve done over and over again?”

“Exactly,” Festa agrees, “That was my thought.”

With Festa’s switch to Baselight, he’s also added a new twist to the speed of his look application. With Baselight, Festa is able to do something similar to the look generation in some of Apple’s consumer products, in which you see the source image in the middle with eight choices arrayed around the center. Selecting any of those variations delivers another set of similar choices around the first choice, which now sits in the middle. Using this method, Apple users can dial in a look by simply choosing variations on a theme. Festa does something similar (Figure 10.5).

Fig. 10.5 Nine-way split in Baselight offering up variations on a central look (image courtesy of Chasing Ghosts, screen capture courtesy New Hat/Bob Festa).

Preset Looks in Apple’s Color

Apple’s Color—and many other applications—have this same ability to create preset looks and apply them at the touch of a button. Most of the preset looks that were delivered with the initial release of Color were created by Bob Sliga, who is featured in this book. Bob and I also cohosted DVD training series together for both Apple Color and DaVinci Resolve for Class on Demand. There are also fantastic preset looks available from third-party vendors such as Graeme Nattress, who sells a collection of effects nodes that works in Color. Many of the colorists who are experienced Color/FinalTouch users highly recommend the Nattress plug-ins, which come not only with the effects nodes themselves, but also with entire prebuilt process trees. Sliga also sells a collection of looks for Color called “Scone Looks,” including primaries, secondaries, and ColorFX for Apple Color, plus a new series of Powergrades for DaVinci Resolve.

Film Processing Looks

Many of the highly desired looks that colorists are asked to do actually mimic chemical film processes. We briefly touched on cross-processing, and we’ll take a deeper look into the electronic “reproduction” of the skip bleach and bleach bypass looks later in the chapter, but the following looks give you a quick overview of some of the ways that various film processes can affect the look of an image. The following images are not color corrections, but motion picture film processed chemically in various ways. Understanding how these processes affect the look of the image will help you build your “visual vocabulary.” Because directors of photography are frequent collaborators with colorists, understanding what these processes do to the image will help you communicate better with them.

Often times, DPs will choose to attempt to reproduce these looks electronically in color correction sessions instead of applying them chemically, because these chemical processes are somewhat risky to apply as they can’t be “undone,” and although Kodak educates film makers in how to execute and utilize these processes, it does not recommend them due to the inherent dangers of developing film in ways that were not intended.

Cross-processing creates higher contrast and saturation and distorts colors in sometimes unexpected ways (Figure 10.7).

“Pushing” film—which overdevelops the negative—is used in combination with underexposing the negative to increase contrast and add grain (Figures 10.11 and 10.12). In color films, it also creates lifted, blue shadows and a color imbalance. It is also possible to “pull” process film, which is essentially the exact opposite of push processing.

Skip bleach and bleach bypass are processes in which the film is either not bleached at all to remove silver or is partially bleached, leaving various amounts of silver. The remaining silver increases the contrast of the film. Wherever there is more developed dye, there is more silver, so you get higher-contrast, blacker blacks and less saturation (Figures 10.13–10.15).

Fig. 10.6 A print from Kodak 5245 negative film processed normally with the ECN-2 process.

Fig. 10.7 A print from one of Kodak’s reversal films, Ektachrome 5285, which has been processed using ECN-2.

Fig. 10.8 A print from Kodak reversal film Ektachrome 100D processed normally.

Fig. 10.9 A print from Kodak negative film 5279 processed normally.

Fig. 10.10 A print from Kodak Ektachrome 100D cross-processed.

Fig. 10.11 This image is printed from a black and white negative with normal processing.

Fig. 10.12 This image is printed from a black and white negative pushed two stops.

Fig. 10.13 A print from normally developed Kodak 5274 film.

Fig. 10.14 5274 with a bleach bypass processing of the camera negative.

Fig. 10.15 5274 with skip bleach processing of the print.

Now that you’ve seen how these looks are created photochemically, the following section will describe how to electronically attain one of the most common of these looks: skip bleach or bleach bypass.

Skip Bleach or Bleach Bypass

Bob Sliga did his first pass at this image by simply dropping Graeme Nattress’s bleach bypass Color Effects node on it (Figures 10.18 and 10.19).

I ask Sliga if he could reproduce the look just using the primary and secondary rooms. “This shot is pretty nicely balanced, and the blacks all match but in the gammas, there’s a bit of an angle’ with red higher than green higher than blue,” Sliga explains. “That’s because this shot is balanced a little warm. And there are purists who might say that this shot needs to be balanced perfectly and that those levels should match.”

Fig. 10.16 Original source footage courtesy of Artbeats.

Fig. 10.17 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: RGB Parade. Upper right: vectorscope. Lower right: composite waveform. Lower left: RGB Parade zoomed in 5x to blacks.

Fig. 10.18 With the Nattress Bleach bypass effect dropped on in Color Effects.

Fig. 10.19 Data from Nattress “G_Bleach_Bypass” node in Color Effects.

I explain to Sliga that I’ve been looking at this shot with the basic grade of the original Artbeats’ image, so I’m used to seeing it a little warm. Sliga agree, “It should be warm. This shot wants to be warm. When I think of balance, I think of making the blacks black” (Figures 10.20 and 10.21).

Fig. 10.20 Primary correction.

Fig. 10.21 Data from Primary room.

With the shot in a good starting position, Sliga turns his attention to giving it a classic bleach bypass look. “We’ll favor the bleach bypass on the cool side,” he says as he takes the gamma and highlights toward blue a little with the hue offset wheels. “Then we’ll go to secondaries.” In a secondary, Sliga doesn’t bother qualifying anything before he pulls the blacks down in the entire image—using the secondary like a second level of primary correction (Figures 10.22 and 10.23).

“I’m going to be clipping that blacks and blowing the whites out,” he explains as he stretches the gamma back up a bit to compensate for his big black drop. Then he drops saturation in each of the tonal ranges. Then adds another secondary and qualifies the brightest portions of the sky and building adding even more contrast, correcting the outside of the secondary—which are the shadows, in this case—making them darker (Figures 10.24 and 10.25).

Fig. 10.22 First secondary correction.

Fig. 10.23 Data from Secondary room.

“It hurts the eyes after a while when you look back and you see how far it went,” Sliga comments. “That’s one way we could go.” Bleach bypass is a matter of crushing gammas, crushing blacks, blowing out whites. How far that you want the blacks to be is really the key. You have to have a broadcast safe filter on it, because you’re blowing it all out. If you don’t have a broadcast safe filter on it, you’re going to get hosed.”

Fig. 10.24 Second secondary correction.

Fig. 10.25 Data from second secondary.

Greg Creaser expounds on the look of bleach bypass as he drops a bleach bypass effect on the Artbeats Marines scene (Figures 10.26–10.28). “Typically, bleach bypass has more saturation than that, depending on how it was done or how long it was let out of the bleach.” To correct it to a more classic bleach bypass look, he goes back to primary, adds saturation, pulls blacks down and pumps up highlights. “It would be a little edgier, like that,” he says.

I ask Creaser to define the look of bleach bypass. “That’s an interesting question,” he says. “There’s multiple ways to do skip bleach. You can skip the whole bleach or half of the bleach. What usually happens with skip bleach is that you end up with a saturated/grainy/gritty image. It changes the contrast of the film. It really depends on what kind of film stock it is and how it was bypassed and whether it was overdeveloped or underdeveloped on top of that.”

Fig. 10.26 Source image courtesy Artbeats.

Fig. 10.27 Tektronix WVR7100. Upper left: RGB Parade. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower right: vectorscope. Lower left: RGB Parade expanded to see blacks.

Fig. 10.28 a) Image with no correction except bleach bypass node in Color Effects Room. b) “Edgier” version after Creaser adds saturation, lowers blacks, and raises highlights.

Match the Look

One of the common requests to colorists is to give an image a look from a popular movie, TV show, or music video. Obviously, for the colorist, this requires a fairly decent command of popular culture and a decent color memory.

I ask Matusek if it’s a big help when someone provides visual references to other media. “Do you feel like you have to be up on the latest movies or watch a lot of media or TV so that if somebody says, ‘Hey I want it to look like Crash,’ you can say ‘I know what that means’?” Matusek responds, “Totally. I get Netflix. Newer films are a good place to look for looks. With older films, it was color timing and they were not as extreme. Commercials are great resources to look for really pushed looks. I did the GoDaddy spots the last few years and the look we were going for in those spots was CSI: Miami. Hypersaturated … well, not hypersaturated, but make the sky yellow and the water cyan and push the contrast. Generalizing, that campaign had that look. Or the ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ spots were kind of contrasty and cyan, duotone with a flesh tone that’s desaturated. It’s tough to have seen the same movie as your client, or see the same spots as your client. It’s mostly about saying, ‘Is this what you mean?’ and doing a look and then trying something else. Usually you can find something you’ve both seen.”

As for looks from movies that are often requested or copied, Stefan Sonnenfeld has developed some of them that have been copied so much that he almost feels as if the look is being parodied, “There are a lot of looks that I have been teased for. I think I was one of the first or if not the first to do those kind of greenish and orangey skin tones. (Think Transformers, though the look goes back at least a decade before that.) Then I did a film like Man on Fire and I guess there are three other movies that are literally copies of that.”

Matusek picks out the Marines shot from Artbeats (Figure 10.29) and decides to give it a look of another popular movie. “For this image, I’m just trying to give it a more high-contrast, maybe go for a skip bleach kind of a look. Kind of a Blackhawk Down—I hate to be cliché, but it is kind of a cool look.”

Matusek begins his grade. “So in this shot, I’m just playing on the contrasty image, because there’s already nice highlights here. I’m just kind of pushing that. Letting the sky blow. There’s some nice blue there. Sometimes a client will have you spend 20 minutes on making the sky blue—the subject is the soldiers” (Figure 10.31).

Matusek points to the highlights on the bright sides of the helmets and continues with a great tip: “I’d probably grab a highlight and defocus some of that stuff, because if you defocus the highlights, you can push the contrast even more. When you do too much, some of these pushed highlights start to look a little clipped, which doesn’t look that good. So if you throw a nice, soft defocused highlight, that kind of smoothes out that transition and allows you to go a little more heavy-handed with the contrast.”

Fig. 10.29 Source image courtesy, Artbeats.

Fig. 10.30 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left, YRGB Parade. Upper right, composite waveform. Lower right, vectorscope. Lower left, vectorscope zoomed in 5x.

Fig. 10.31 Matusek’s primary correction.

Fig. 10.32 Data from Primary room.

Matusek takes some time working on getting a saturated sky before explaining, “I’m doing what I said I disliked when the clients asked for it, but I’m putting a little blue in the sky. Usually it works out to look pretty good.” He creates a big oval window along the top. “I would prefer it without the blue sky, but a lot of clients would prefer that,” he says, showing off his newly tweaked sky (Figures 10.33 and 10.34).

Continuing with the soldier/look theme, Matusek comments on a recent project of his. “I worked on a documentary called War Tapes. They gave a bunch of cameras to soldiers and they documented their year’s stay in Iraq. So what we did was, all the footage in Iraq, we gave it a higher contrast, warmer look. We gave it a little grittier look. And then they would cut from the soldiers to their families. On the home front, it was a little softer, it was more saturated and had truer colors. Just trying to create a separation. And it’s all subtle. It was a documentary, so the Iraq footage wasn’t like Blackhawk Down.

Fig. 10.33 Secondary correction to tweak sky.

Fig. 10.34 Data from outside of the qualification in the Secondary room.

Looks for Promos and Opens

One of the popular images that the colorists in this book chose to give a look to was Artbeats’ image of a football being readied by the center (Figures 10.35 and 10.36).

To give some context, I ask Shooters Post colorist Janet Falcon to grade the image as if it will be used in an open for the Super Bowl.

Fig. 10.35 Original source footage, image courtesy of Artbeats.

Fig. 10.36 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: RGB Parade. Upper right: vectorscope. Lower right: composite waveform. Lower left: RGB Parade zoomed in 5x to blacks.

She considers the request, then dives in to the grade. “Then you’d go for something a lot more contrasty and a lot more pushed and forced. Depending on what other things are in there, you may stick with normal color. I just want to save it along the way so I can play with a few different things. Every time I get something, I save it. I use my DaVinci notepads a lot. Maybe go with a blue-black if you want not ‘off’ colors, but not normal colors.”

She continues, “Opens are usually high color. Like if you’ve seen the open for Survivor. Really bold, wild colors. You could go something more like that” (Figures 10.37–10.40).

Fig. 10.37 Falcon’s primary correction.

Fig. 10.38 Data from the Primary room.

I ask for a different look because the Chicago Bears were in the Super-Bowl the year we did this: cold and tough. (GO BEARS!) “We could go for cooler. You can shift colors when you’re doing master gain and master lift. As you track up and down, you shift color. I usually like to do luminance only in my vignettes and then go in separately and adjust more or less saturation.” Falcon’s last sentence describes a fairly unique ability of DaVinci to affect luminance without affecting RGB. Many other color correctors, including Apple’s Color, don’t have this capability, so the workaround is to go back and change saturation after gain and setup adjustments that raise or lower saturation.

Fig. 10.39 Secondary correction.

Fig. 10.40 Data from inside the qualification in the Secondary room.

Fig. 10.41 Falcon’s new “Chicago cool” primary correction.

Fig. 10.42 Data from Primary room.

Pete Jannotta also gives the football image a look of his own. He works for a while before I prompt him to tell me what he’s doing. “I desaturated it,” he explains. “I’m just experimenting. I want this one to feel strong. Not too clean. Feel gutsier, because of his tape, the dirty tape, and go with that suggestion of it being tough.” It’s a telling point that he derives the direction of his correction from an element of the picture, like the tape on the player’s fingers.

“Then the other thing I was thinking of with this picture is softening the outside. But then I looked at it, and it’s kind of already done. It does it naturally. I don’t know if I really need to get on top of that and mess it up. But I do think I can do more with the fingers.”

Fig. 10.43 Vignette correction in first secondary.

Fig. 10.44 Data from outside of first secondary room.

Jannotta cranks up the highlights and pulls down the setup. “Maybe just make it burn a little. White’s go up, blacks go down, gamma goes down. It always makes it more theatrical … printlike. It looks more like it’s on a movie screen this way” (Figures 10.47 and 10.48).

Jannotta continues, “I don’t like that his hand is so flat. The ball looks good, the grass looks pretty good. His hand’s kind of not happening. Boring. So I’m going to go into secondaries and put a vignette on, and enable this and enable the vignette and draw something. I’m going to make a sloppy shape around here like this,” he says, drawing a mitten shape around the hand. “I’m not sure how it’s going to work when he moves, but I’ll figure that out later.”

Fig. 10.45 HSL qualification for second secondary correction.

Fig. 10.46 Data from second secondary.

He saves his shape and goes back to secondaries to adjust inside the mitten shape. Jannotta spins the mids down a lot and the blacks down some, exclaiming, “Now I’ve got dirt! Make that dirt pop.” He cranks up the highlights. “On the outside of the hand vignette, I might desaturate that a bit. I like what’s happening there. Maybe not the areas it’s happening in, but I like that blend of the warm with the more neutral. Let’s watch it as it moves. Yeah, not too bad,” he says approvingly before he pulls down the mitten shape to include more of the football (Figure 10.49).

Fig. 10.47 Jannotta’s primary correction.

Fig. 10.48 Data from the Primary room.

Fig. 10.49 The final look in secondaries, though the correction to the outside of the vignette is made later.

Fig. 10.50 Data from the inside of the vignette in the Secondary room.

“I’m thinking the blacks are too compressed on the inside, but boy, I like the hand that way. Jannotta goes to the color effect room and adds sharpness, bringing it down a little from the default sharpness setting (Figure 10.51).

As a final touch, Jannotta proposes one last change: “I feel like adding blue to the outside. It’s going to pop the ball more and his hand. It doesn’t necessarily make sense that it’s that desaturated on the right side but it’s interesting” (Figure 10.52).

Fig. 10.51 Jannotta’s color effect is just a Sharpen set to .621550.

Fig. 10.52 Data from the outside of the vignette in the Secondary room.

Of course, the natural colorist to take on this image is Chris Pepperman, who was a colorist at NFL Films when I sat down with him to grade this shot. Pepperman starts with primaries. “I want to make everything black and white.” (The primary correction is simply pulling all of the saturation out.) He pulls an HSL key in secondaries, qualifying warm tones. Then he cranks the contrast, crushing the blacks.

When Pep realizes that some posterizing was starting to happen in his correction, he stops to refine the qualification of the HSL key, saying, “I always want to push the limit and then come back, because I want to know what my range is. I reference it to a golf club. You swing a nine iron. You swing it as hard as you can. You know how far you’re going to hit it. And then, when the target is closer, you soften it up a bit. You don’t swing as hard until you get the right distance.”

“What I’ve done here is just create a contrasty image, and I just desaturated the red a little bit, and I’m really pushing the blacks and I’m giving it a very contrasty look (Figure 10.53) ’cause this is for an open and they tend to be glossy. I might add some blur to it. I might add some grain. I might add sharpness to it. Make it sizzle a little bit. So it gives it a very gritty 8-mm-type look. I see grain structure. I see maybe film scratches. I also like to do desaturated looks where you desaturate everything and then just feather back in a little bit of color. That might work very well here too. Keep everything black and white, then just add a little of the red and black back in” (Figure 10.55).

Fig. 10.53 First secondary correction to the warmer tones.

Fig. 10.54 Data for the first secondary corrections.

Fig. 10.55 Second secondary corrections to green tones.

Fig. 10.56 Data for the second secondary corrections.

True Grit

One of the images that definitely called out for a tough, gritty look was the SWAT team storming out of the truck from Chasing Ghosts. Several colorists were inspired to give that scene a shot.

Pete Jannotta starts off. “Well, what’s coming to mind for me on this one is gritty, desaturated, crispy, which I don’t know how to make it on this machine.” I ask Jannotta to define “crispy” for me, as it’s a term that I’ve heard lots of colorists use. “‘Crispy’ is sharpening and highlight accentuation, which I would do with a curve in DaVinci. Really peak the top end only. Stretch it. That makes all the highlights pop up. And sharpening makes the grain pop; it makes all the edges pop. I’m looking at this thinking it needs to be meaner. It has to have a mean feel. It’s too sweet. So again, we’ll look at our contrast on this stuff over here and balance,” Jannotta says, checking out his RGB scopes.

Fig. 10.57 Source image from Chasing Ghosts, courtesy Wingman Productions, Inc. (The green tint came from a bad film scan.)

Fig. 10.58 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: RGB Parade. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower right: vectorscope. Lower left: RGB Parade zoomed in 5x to blacks.

Then he points to his vectorscope, explaining, “I see a lot of green down here and I see a lot of green up here.” He points to the monitor. I point out that the green is not only coming from the grass behind the truck. Jannotta agrees, “No. It’s not just the grass. He looks over at his RGB parade. “Whoa. That’s not good. Blue is way out of line in the blacks,” he says, before he balances it out with the shadow trackball.

“Now I’m looking at that gray courthouse wall and trying to get a better balance overall than what we had before.” He cuts back and forth between source and correction. “Well, that’s what I wanted it to do. I just wanted to get it more balanced to begin with, then I can start doing the weird stuff. As long as I know what kind of picture I really have here.”

Jannotta’s ready to move on, saying, “Now I want to desaturate it. Then really stretch the heck out of the top.” He rolls the highlights way up as he says, “Burn it and compress the bottom end of the grayscale so that everything gets pulled out.” Jannotta makes a hand gesture like he’s pulling taffy. “There’s more tension that way, I think” (Figures 10.59 and 10.60).

With the primary color correction out of the way, Jannotta wants to sharpen the image, so we go to FinalTouch/Color’s Effect room and add Sharpening. The process tree was simply a Sharpen node set to 0.671350—a fairly similar setting to the sharpening he did in the last correction. “There you go. Now it’s a SWAT team. That sharpening effect is pretty cool. It makes it really dangerous-looking.”

Jannotta is pleased with his correction and decides to take it one step further. “I’m going to try, just for fun, a more simple vignette on this one.” I notice that his “simple” vignette is—as usual for him—a hand-drawn shape instead of a simple geometric shape. I tease, “And once again, you refuse to use a square or a circle.” He responds, “Yeah, I do. I don’t like ’em, because I want to have the handle … the control and the ability to move.”

He finishes drawing a big D shape and darkens the edges (Figure 10.62), then starts adjusting the shape with the correction in place. “I had the shape too tight. But you don’t know until you do it. That’s why I like these custom shapes and adding the softness up front to the shape.”

Jannotta starts pulling out even more saturation. I ask him what the saturation move is accomplishing. He replies, “I want it to feel colder and more scary. More tension. So pulling the color out and adding a little blue to it, making it real crispy like that. Closing it in,” he says, pointing to his vignette with darkened edges (Figure 10.61). I note that he’s got deep shadows and punched highlights. “Yeah,” he says, “I think of pulling the picture like this.” He makes motion like pulling a scroll open from top to bottom.

Fig. 10.59 Jannotta’s primary correction.

Fig. 10.60 Data from Primary room.

Feeling in his element with the action of the scene, the colorist for 24, Larry Field, also gives the image a shot.

Field explains his approach, “It’s yellow/green. It could be changed to a few different things. I’ll just quickly balance it. We can neutralize it somewhere in there. Those white balanced gammas weren’t too bad. You may want contrast in a shot like this because crazy things are happening. It would add to the excitement—the intensity of the shot. If this were 24, we’d have this nice and warm, desaturated, and as grainy as we could get it. Then do a lift of luma-only, which grits it out and gives it a bleachy feel. Then, because it’s film, we can really push the grain; desaturate it. Very high-con, low-saturation to bring up a grit of it and the intensity.” (Unfortunately, the settings for Field’s corrections are unavailable, so I can’t show the final or the settings he used to get there. From memory, it was similar to Jannotta’s correction.)

Fig. 10.61 Jannotta’s image after the secondary was added.

Fig. 10.62 Data from the inside of the qualification.

This shot also appeals to Chris Pepperman, who works on a look for it. Pep starts, “Okay, this is a good shot. I want to make sure I’m out of the clip.” He pulls the gain down a bit before continuing, “And I want to balance everything. I know it has a green texture to it. I see that. But what I’m trying to do is eliminate that and balance it to what it would look normally by eye.”

Fig. 10.63 Data from the outside of the qualification.

“You’re assuming that the green is not something the DP wants,” I interject. “That’s right. Assuming that that’s not what he wants. Now I’m going to take this image and do it like we’re doing a very high-contrast almost reenactment kind of scene, and what I would do is, in this particular case, I’m going to take the primaries and I’m really going to go to town and crank the video levels up and bring the black levels down and create this very, very high-contrasty look. As I’m doing that, it’s affecting the greens in the highs and the midrange, so I’m going to clean that up a little bit as we go along. I can see it in the wall. The background is almost blue and the pillars themselves almost have a green texture to them, which doesn’t bother me. I like it. Everybody tries to stay away from that green green green. I kind of like it where you can really stylize. Everybody always used to stay away from that yellowish-green because it always looked like it was bad video. Looks come and go. Everybody does windows. Everybody does the cross-processed look. It’s the guys who innovate and try to melt those looks together and come up with different images.

“Right now I’m adding just a little warmth into it,” he explains. “There’s still a little contamination in the blacks, so I’m really trying to clean that up a little bit. I’m seeing a little bit of purplish in the blue. I just want to add some cyan. I’m liking what I see, though it’s cyanish here,” he says, pointing to the shadows in the truck (Figure 10.64). “Now once I got that look, I would isolate the reds and bring the reds down a little bit.”

Fig. 10.64 Pepperman’s primary correction.

Fig. 10.65 Data from the Primary room.

Pepperman qualifies the skin tones with an HSL key and starts to add a vignette to garbage mask them, when I warn him that the shot is a Steadicam shot that follows the team. Pep continues, “I use vignettes all the time on motion, and I just track it and keep it very soft” (Figures 10.66 and 10.67).

Pep adds another secondary, creating an oval, then rotates it and changes its position and aspect. I notice that Pepperman falls into the “grade-with-vignettes-sharp” camp. He agrees, “Right, because I want to see the difference between the two. I always do softness last. I want to see the difference.” He cranks down the gain outside and cranks up the gain inside before softening the oval. “See now I went too far, so I’m just backing off the vignette a little bit. See how I like to go deep, and now I’ve come off of it a bit. So now you can’t see the vignette. It’s transparent” (Figure 10.68).

Fig. 10.66 Image after the first secondary was applied.

Fig. 10.67 Data for first secondary correction.

In an interesting side note, Pep’s vignette was “transparent” on the eCinema display, but on the Dell computer monitors attached to the Mac, it was still pretty obvious. This is one place where the gamma display differences between the computer monitors and the real grading monitor were obvious.

Fig. 10.68 Image after second secondary correction was added.

Fig. 10.69 Data from second secondary.

Pep continues tweaking the look of the shot by adding another secondary and qualifies the green grass using an HSL key and a vignette (Figures 10.71 and 10.72), being careful to select the grass but not the green of the pillars.

Fig. 10.70 Image after the final secondary correction was added.

Fig. 10.71 Data from final secondary correction.

“Once again, I’m trying to give it this chromatic look. A high-intensity Ektachrome look. So what I’m doing is I’m almost wanting that green of the grass to glow and look ultra green.”

Obviously feeling liberated by the ability to add up to eight secondaries in Color, Pepperman adds yet another secondary, qualifying and tweaking the blue of the SWAT team uniforms.

Graphic Looks

From the frantic energy and grittiness of the SWAT scene, we’ll transition to the Zen-like simplicity of Artbeats’ image of a man sitting at the end of a pier. It was an image that spoke to Mike Matusek.

“I look at this one and I think of it as more of a graphic image,” Matusek explains, “So I’ll try doing a few looks. First a silhouette, maybe crush it a little bit and see where that goes. Maybe that’ll be too muddy. Then sometimes what I do is bring the blacks to zero and don’t crush, but I want to get it darker that that, so then I’ll go to the midtones and bring the midtones down, so I’m not necessarily crushing the blacks” (Figures 10.74 and 10.75).

Fig. 10.72 Source image courtesy of Artbeats.

Fig. 10.73 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: YRGB Parade. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower right: vectorscope. Lower left: vectorscope zoomed in 5x.

“Sometimes when you go blue, you get kind of hypersensitive to the hue and you see a little pink in there. You almost see a little bit of magenta in the water. So, do you want to go more cyan blue? Do you want to go a little more true blue? If you go to more true blue on the scope, it looks more magenta all the time, at least to me, so I tend to go a little bit more towards cyan. There’s a lens flare there, so that clues me in that the sun is maybe still a little bit out. Maybe get more contrast. Throw a vignette on there real quick to see what that does to the mood of it.”

Matusek adds an oval vignette with softness and rotates it, then darkens the upper left corner (Figure 10.78). I comment that as I watch a lot of people use vignettes, it is a way to focus attention, but it also seems to be a way to take a flat expanse of color and give it some depth or texture. “Exactly. Once you get a vignette on there, it’s a little more shaped. Because it seems just flat and uninteresting, so if you add a vignette to it there’s much more depth to it. So now there’s more depth and it brings your focus to him.”

Fig. 10.74 Matusek’s primary correction.

Fig. 10.75 Data from the Primary room.

Fig. 10.76 Secondary correction was applied to the inside and outside of the vignette.

Fig. 10.77 Data from the inside of the vignette.

Fig. 10.78 Data from the outside of the vignette.

“He looks like an old guy reminiscing. That’s why I went cooler with it. I think if I’d gone golden, that evokes a different emotion.” I ask if it wouldn’t be hard to get this image to be golden and Matusek seems ready for the challenge.

Matusek starts off by mentioning that his blacks are close to being clipped, and I ask how he knows how to stretch a specific tonal range. “If I wanted to get detail out of the blanket over his legs, bringing the black up would just make it milky, so riding the lift down and the gamma up until I’d stretched that little area and get more detail out of it. If this was shot on video, it’d just be noise.”

Matusek continues, “If I’m going to go golden, I’d probably go a little more contrasty with it. This is more of a graphic image, so you don’t have to be realistic. You can definitely have some more fun with it. It’s really the color of the water and then the guy and the pier is pretty much grayscale. There’s not much color information. So you can really be more graphic with it” (Figures 10.79 and 10.80).

Fig. 10.79 Matusek’s primary correction for the “gold” look.

Fig. 10.80 Data for the Primary room.

Matusek goes to the secondaries and adds a soft oval in the Upper left corner. “You can do a few things here. Maybe add some more color in there. You can even do this, which is interesting sometimes,” he says as he makes the vignetted area cyan (Figures 10.81–10.83).

“So you’re playing one color off another?” I ask. “Right,” he responds. “That’s not creating contrast with luminance, that’s doing it with color.”

Matusek continues with his experimentation. “I can do one more thing with this, because, as you said, the planks are kind of cool on the pier,” he says, increasing the contrast in the planks of the pier, creating a nice texture to the shot (Figures 10.84 and 10.85).

Fig. 10.81 Secondary correction done both inside and outside of the vignette.

Fig. 10.82 Data from inside the secondary vignette.

Fig. 10.83 Data from outside the secondary vignette.

Fig. 10.84 Second secondary correction to increase contrast in the planks.

Fig. 10.85 Data from second secondary correction.

Day-for-Night

Day-for-night shots are one of the requests that colorists have to pull off on occasion. We tasked several colorists to walk us through day-for-night shots on several scenes.

Bob Sliga starts on an indoor scene that was shot as camera test footage by my good friend and respected documentary and feature cinematographer, Rich Lerner (from the tutorial footage: “sleeping_woman,” Figure 10.86).

Fig. 10.86 Original source footage courtesy of Rich Lerner.

Fig. 10.87 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: YRGB Parade. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower right: vectorscope. Lower left: vectorscope zoomed in 5x.

“One of the things to remember in day-for-night is that saturation isn’t plentiful. A lot of people really overdo blue,” states Sliga. “You should feel it, but you shouldn’t be hit in the face with blue.”

I ask, “So you use the science of how the eye sees at night time?” “Exactly. And that’s how I come across a lot of my looks. I’ll walk around and look at things and almost reference them like I have a video scope. I mean, I’ve done it for so long. I’ll look into shadows. I’ll look into other areas. Overall color textures. Highlights off of building reflections downtown. Then thinking, ‘How would I emulate that in here?’ Then at night, you go outside; after a while, obviously your eyes will adjust, and you can see more and more into the night, but you never see more and more color. It’s not there.”

“I remember reading that your eye has a harder time seeing red saturation in low light,” I say.

Fig. 10.88 Primary correction.

Fig. 10.89 Data from Primary room.

“Exactly,” Sliga agrees. “So you feel the cooler tones. I’m doing this all in my primary in room, and what I’m doing is throwing away the detail that I don’t want to keep. But I’m not clamping it off. I’m not plugging it in the basement,” he says as he points to the fact that the blacks aren’t incredibly crushed. Then, as Sliga lowers gammas and shadows, the saturation increases, and he compensates by lowering saturation in those areas as well as using the wheels to push a little bit of coolness into all of the tonal ranges.

“Let’s go into a secondary room now,” Sliga continues. “The first thing I’d like to use on this is a luminance key.” He qualifies mostly the lamp and spill on the wall with a little of the highlight on her forehead and arm (Figure 10.91). “Now I’m going to go outside the qualification and throw more stuff away. Now I’m sliding some of that blueness in. Not a lot, just a little bit.”

Fig. 10.90 First secondary correction.

Fig. 10.91 Data from first secondary correction.

Sliga notices the strong red tones of the blanket. “This is still coming through pretty strong,” he complains as he goes to the saturation curve in secondaries. “So I’m just going to go in and try to grab reds in the saturation curve and pull them down. Attempting to fix the redness of the blankets with the saturation curve does not create the look he is after, so he resets the curve and tries another tack.

“I’m going to go into another secondary and pick that red. That’s a very strong selection, because it’s looking back at the original color of the source. I’m going to use the color picker to isolate that down just a little bit more. Then I’ll throw a little blur on it. On the inside of that qualification, I’m just going to pull saturation down. We can even come down on the outside of the qualification and bring the red gain down as well,” Sliga adds as he goes into the Advanced tab to affect the red gain (Figure 10.92).

Fig. 10.92 Second secondary correction bringing down the red saturation in the blanket, mainly.

Sliga adds a third secondary to qualify the lamp and the spill on the wall using luminance. Then he softens the qualification, picking up some of the highlights on the woman’s skin. With that done, he pushes a good deal of warmth into the highlights, making her face quite warm.

I ask about the change to the woman’s face. “You’re not worrying about what happens to her face, just the lamp, right?” “Right,” he says, explaining, “I’m trying to find something symbolizing a little bit of warmth coming out of that lamp.” To fix the face, he creates a soft vignette and positions it over the lamp, eliminating the corrections on the woman’s skin (Figure 10.94). “So we came from here to there,” he concludes as he checks back and forth between the starting source image and where he ended up (Figure 10.93).

Fig. 10.93 Third secondary correction, bringing warmth to the lamp.

Fig. 10.94 Data from the third secondary.

Mike Most also works this image into a day-for-night.

“What I would do is bring this way down,” Most begins by pulling down midtones and shadows. And I’ve also got to bring down saturation first, because one of the things about night is that saturation is much lower and, point of fact, red saturation is much, much lower. It’s not so much that things go blue. They don’t really, but what they do go is minus red because the red disappears. You don’t want it to greenish but cyanish is probably okay. What I’d probably try to do is put a little bit of a window around her. It doesn’t make physical sense, but I’m going to play this as if there’s another key down here. It doesn’t make sense, but sometimes it just works” (Figures 10.96 and 10.97).

Most draws an oval around her face, raises the gain inside the vignette, and then softens the edge. “I’d have to do something very different with the outside area,” he comments. “What I’d actually like to do with the outside area is make it a little warmer. That whole green thing is driving me nuts. Once again, take some of the saturation out. I’m desaturating the outside” (Figure 10.100).

Most cuts back and forth between the original image and his correction. “Considering that you started from that … it’s not great, but it’s not horrible.”

“Looks like night to me,” I say.

Fig. 10.95 Source shot—“sleeping_woman” from tutorial footage.

Fig. 10.96 Most’s primary correction. (This data was created in FinalTouch2K and reimported into a Color Project. I feel like the correction is not quite the same as the way Mike was seeing it.)

Fig. 10.97 Data from Primary room.

Fig. 10.98 Secondary correction inside and outside of vignette.

Fig. 10.99 Data from inside of the vignette.

Fig. 10.100 Data from outside of the vignette.

Pete Jannotta takes on the Artbeats scene of the Marines (Figures 10.101 and 10.102) to attempt another day-for-night shot.

Jannotta goes straight to secondaries to try to select the sky. He picks a spot that selects the left side of the sky, then widens the qualification with the HSL selection sliders, grabbing almost the entire sky. Switching the HSL selection so that it used only luminance improved the qualification.

Jannotta thinks this selection will be good enough, but it isn’t, because as he brings down the luminance in the qualification, it brings down the right side of the sky before it brings down the left side.

Fig. 10.101 Source image courtesy of Artbeats.

Fig. 10.102 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: RGB Parade. Upper right: vectorscope. Lower right: composite waveform. Lower left: RGB Parade zoomed in 5x to the blacks.

“A little blue always helps for the suggestion of night. But this,” he says as he points to the sky and the way the matte transitions to the helmets, “is not good.”

Instead of being impatient with the mistake, the challenge of the shot energizes Jannotta. “This is fun. This is a real shot that someone would come in and say, ‘I want this to be nighttime.’ And whether or not it’s easy doesn’t matter. So it’s actually a good exercise.”

I ask Jannotta what things he has to do to create the day-for-night effect. “Desaturation, all the levels come down, a little blue added. Pretty much that’s it,” Jannotta responds. He starts with desaturation. “I’m just compressing the bottom and bringing the highlights up a bit. We could cool those off a bit too. I’m pushing it into the flesh tones. It can get pretty trite to get really blue, because it just looks hokey. But most everyone sees blue and dark and they think ‘night.’ If you go overboard, then it’s sad and sick looking. It could almost be okay to do a little bit of cyan. A little bit of green/blue is okay, too” (Figures 10.103 and 10.104).

Fig. 10.103 Jannotta’s primary correction—day-for-night.

Fig. 10.104 Data for Primary room.

Greg Creaser completes our final day-for-night scene. Actually, it’s more of a night-for-night scene as he works on the “nightgown” scene from “Kiss Me In the Dark” (Figure 10.105).

“If this was typical moonlight, it’s not going to be warm. We started out a little warm and a little bright, so around in there … would be a good starting point. I think this would be a creative decision on the part of the client. I’d stick it there and say, ‘Where do you want to go with it?’ It’d be maybe more to the cyan side or the bluer side. My own opinion on night stuff is that I don’t like to see it always blue. I like to see it clean. Maybe cool yet not blue blue. A lot of time you see night shots and they’re just extremely blue. I kind of try to stay away from that, but that’s my personal choice, and that’s not what a client may want so, maybe I’d put it here and they’d say, ‘We want it cooler’ or this or that” (Figures 10.105–10.108).

Fig. 10.105 Source image from “Kiss Me In the Dark,” courtesy Seduced and Exploited Entertainment.

Fig. 10.106 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: YRGB Parade. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower right: vectorscope. Lower left: vectorscope zoomed in 5x.

Fig. 10.107 Creaser’s final day-for-night correction.

Fig. 10.108 Data for correction in FinalTouch UI.

NOT Doing a Look

Veteran colorist Mike Most explains that not every colorist “does looks.” Colorists often have niches. Most explains, “Look creation is not really my big forte. Everybody’s got their forte. My forte is fixing problems and I’m really good at continuity. Making sure that scenes play consistently. The whole look creation thing: that’s the Bob Festas of the world, the Jais Theirrys of the world, the Beau Leons of the world, the Stefans of the world. They’re really heavily into taking something and making it into something that it wasn’t. I’ve never been that guy. For me, what always came naturally was just bringing out the beauty of something that’s already been shot and try to make it more than what it was but not something that it wasn’t.”

Plug-In Looks

With editors being pushed into service as “colorists” more and more without any formal training, many vendors have seen a market for prebuilt looks and a kind of automated look generation based on plug-ins for common editing software. One of the most common of these is MagicBullet Looks 2, which is available for Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Sony Vegas. There were also prebuilt looks from Graeme Nattress and Bob Sliga for Apple Color.