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mrks
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Join Date: 5/25/2003
Posts: 333
Location: Berlin
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ok, so i've been reading a question in another thread about this, so i
thought i might make small tut about this topic. basically there are
two types of color correction and i'll only cover one here. there's
"general image enhancement" and "color matching", the latter is color
correcting two scenes to match eather other visually. turning day into
night, cloudy day into sunshine, etc. but since this is kinda complex
ill only do the general image enhancement part. I'll be using after
effects 7, but the techniques apply to every other app aswell.
let's
get started. i took a simple pic from q3 and loaded it into afx. excuse
the huge screenshots, but i thought it'd be better if you see
everything :] sorry for the missing anti-alias too, but it wont be that
apparent later on.
let's
first look at the histogram, which will show us the general brightness
of each channel and of the composite. as we see we have a lot of dark
but not so much white.. (ofcourse that could change during the sequence
but i'm only focussing on this single shot here) - also we see that the
image is generally quite dark. so i will brighten it up by a notch.
what you generally tend to do with the histogram editing is to use the
full bandwith you have at your disposal, so that the diagram fills the
entire area it could theoretically fill up.
the
next step was to enhance the contrast. that S-Shape of the curve there
simulates the look of film with its smooth rolloff into the highlights
and dark areas, but generally its just a higher contrast - you have
more control with the curves though. with these two filters we have the
luminance of the image roughly sorted out.
i
felt the image was a bit too red/yellow-ish so i took out some
green and blue (general rule: dont add, only subtract - afx works in
8bit by default and you might clamp the image) then ive gamma'd it up
cause i lost some brightness and added some saturation back in (might
pull some saturation later one i thought at this point). this is the
part where you can get artistical, but try not to overdo it. the
plug-in i use is from the DFT Composite suite, but any other will work
fine (i think theres on in the color correct menu). i've also change
the frame in the sequence here to see some other angles. i might
totally change the look later on, but for now i just try to get the
colors to look good.
moving
on, the next two plugins do something that i like a lot - soft image
and noise. softfocus is kinda like a blur not entirely. it simulates a
slight out of focus. noise is pretty self explanatory, i like the look
so i use it (there will be even more noise incoming later) well,
nothing great happening here. i did this here because it'll have a
slight influence on the next step.
ok
here it comes - the shaolin look. that great glow everybody loves (or
not). duplicate the layer (i made a sub comp here, that way it doesnt
has to render all the previous stuff twice), boost the saturation
really high, brighten it up, blur it, and use one of the additive
blending modes (lighten in this case, add was too strong) with a
low opacity. bam. thats really all there is about it. enjoy it :)
at
this time i had a closer look at what we did so far - i took another
look at the histogram and the luminance has changed a lot so i adjusted
that again (this time for each channel seperately) as you see the image
is now nicely balanced - but imo way oversaturated.
took
a lot out here actually, generally i do something around -8 in the end
cause i tend to oversature it when doing color stuff, this time i went
to -24, which is really pretty much, but it gives a nice look :] i
think we're done with colors here for now.
actually not..
still felt there was a slight red tint in it so i used curves to fix
that, but i'll skip that to get to a much more interesting point.
...
the
crash of after effects that happened now. guess it felt that i was
almost done. anyway, i loaded the screenshot i made of the last step
and continued
if
you've seen the 300 trailer you know what i mean - grain grain grain
(if not you really should, will be a great movie, make sure you watch
it in hd though). love it. the afx plugin for it is really good, but it
takes a long time to render, so this is the last step (it also isnt
mandatory :P)
well this concludes my little tutorial here, hope you enjoyed
Obsession > Kfo - The movie > CeTuS - The movie > CeTuS - The movie 2 > freeform > Reaching Aural Nirvana > Cattuthaj Jhana
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Posted: 2.6.07 @ 6:12 PM
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Fragalishus
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Join Date: 4/25/2005
Posts: 356
Location: Dallas
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Well I don't have anything to add on the tut, just wanted to say if you want to stream an HD trailer for 300 you can do so at GWchannel.tv. It's the only instance I'd recommend using IE (for those that use Firefox and don't want to install activeX), and you need to install the Powergrid plugin and restart the browser, but it's worth it. Trailer looks awesome full screen, at least on my lcd it does. They have the Transformers trailer in 1080, as well. Friggin awesome streaming quality.
FragTV |
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Posted: 1.2.03 @ 4:29 AM |
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mrks
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Location: Berlin
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| Fragalishus wrote: | | Well I don't have anything to add on the tut, just wanted to say if you want to stream an HD trailer for 300 you can do so at GWchannel.tv. It's the only instance I'd recommend using IE (for those that use Firefox and don't want to install activeX), and you need to install the Powergrid plugin and restart the browser, but it's worth it. Trailer looks awesome full screen, at least on my lcd it does. They have the Transformers trailer in 1080, as well. Friggin awesome streaming quality. |
stream it on the apple website, you dont need to install any plugins. except quicktime.. but quicktime pwns as we all know.
Obsession > Kfo - The movie > CeTuS - The movie > CeTuS - The movie 2 > freeform > Reaching Aural Nirvana > Cattuthaj Jhana
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Posted: 1.2.03 @ 10:51 AM |
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auri
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Posts: 892
Location: Berlin, Germany
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Very guuuuuuud my brother.
Let's add some noise to the second dimension too, that might rock ;D
I will look for the 300 trailer now.
Good day. John
Dang.. best trailer ever :)
Vecchi (10:47 PM) : auri is ROX!!!! |
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Posted: 2.7.07 @ 2:18 AM
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moviegear
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Location: Solaris, Earth, Russia, Maykop
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nice work!
the biggest minus of this tut is damn german language of AE =]
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Posted: 2.7.07 @ 3:20 AM |
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Bunny
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Posts: 408
Location: Germany
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@Auri: Trailer? Did I mIss Something? :o
btw good job, couldnt it make better :D
Download PulpFraction Part I
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Posted: 2.7.07 @ 4:52 AM |
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auri
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"if
you've seen the 300 trailer you know what i mean" is what mrks said.
I looked it up on google. Incredible graphics on that one:
http://www.moviemaze.de/media/trailer/2744/300.html
.. Hello Steve :)
Vecchi (10:47 PM) : auri is ROX!!!! |
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Posted: 2.7.07 @ 5:06 AM |
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spookmineer
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Location: the netherlands
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Very useful tut, thnks! Moved to tut section yesterday, but forgot to make it a sticky because of the time.
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Posted: 2.7.07 @ 5:30 PM |
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Samuraigamer
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mrks
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| Samuraigamer wrote: | | mrks,in case u 've seen a recent q3 movie called dreaming illusion, i would like u to explain how to make that look - i mean: the 'brighter spots' of the maps look like they're glowing or something.is it about color correction or is it a filter? |
good that you speak about it, it's actually a pretty good example for bad color correction. dont worry though, i'll tell you how it's done after i explained why you shouldn't do it :]
if you take a look at the title screen:
and now at the Plot Scanline you'll see that most parts of the image are just plain white. (imagine the plot scanline showing the image from left to right and its luminance) the histogram has a huge peak at pure white (255) .. theres no full black either. the result is that the video is overbrighted by a huge amount - it's clamped in the whites. you really want to avoid that because you lose information in your picture. everything above 255 is just lost, you cant get it back when you turn your brightness down later on, the information is gone in 8bit colorspace.
if this doesn't sound scary enough i tell you what can happen next. let's say you burn your video to a dvd to watch it on your nice tv screen. during the process you'll have to interlace your video. no problem, it's all digital, so it doesnt really matter (it wont matter on lcd's anyway) when you play it back your dvd player will most likely convert the video to an analog signal to play it back on your crt, which shows the half-frames. 2 things can happen now: the waveform is really big (look at the plot scanline, it somewhat shows what i mean) so the half-frames may overlap on your screen (really ugly artefacts). the colors will also bleed out, but thats a minor issue compared to the artefacts. the worse thing is that it can affect the audio track (the signal actually jumps on the audio track) and you get ugly sound artefacts (i'm not sure here if this isn't only an issue of DV tapes). this is the reason you normally should not go above 90% luminance for broadcasting - or every other analog format for that matter. might not be that important for playing back on a computer, but you dont know if some people want to play it on their tv. it's ok if you have some peaks above 90% but in the case of dreaming illusion, most part of the image is just 100% white.
what happen's is: you lose information and you risk to make your video not being playable on crt screens.
ok, that being said, you could do it by duplicating the layer, blurring it, maybe play with the colors/luminance a bit, and use the ADD blending mode. turning down the opacity is a good idea here, because you basically double your luminance with that. if you want the glow only to happen on the bright spots then color correct the blurred image to have more contrast.
there's also glow plugins in every compositing app. so you can take the easy way and put a plugin on here (which is what was done in Dreaming Illusion i think) or recreate the effect yourself and have more control over what you - and maybe not run into the troubles i explained above.
on a side not you can get that bright dreamy look without those problems, but i leave that to you :p
this ended up almost being a tutorial on its own. hope it helped though :]
Obsession > Kfo - The movie > CeTuS - The movie > CeTuS - The movie 2 > freeform > Reaching Aural Nirvana > Cattuthaj Jhana
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Posted: 2.7.07 @ 7:45 PM
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GinZzA
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Join Date: 6/19/2004
Posts: 327
Location: Groningen, Holland
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Thanks for
this tutorial. With my game Unreal Tournament (ut99) I already have two in game
options on direct gamma corrected output. Now I’m really wondering if I should
use this, if I should only use your way or both. I’ll do some test and then I
might come back on that.
When I went
trough your tutorial and worked on my own test footage I found it really hard to
decide on the colours I want to have less. I don’t really understand why you
like using the noise effect. To me it feels like you make the picture less
sharp. I also don’t totally understand the grain part. Does it mean you have to
grain the background or the whole picture and doesn’t that take a lot of time?
It took me
quite a lot of time finding the right options, since all the screenshots are in
German. That’s why I though I should give translations for all options (and
where u can find them).
Pic 1/2:
Tonwertkorrektur
= Levels (can be found under “Adjust”)
Pic 3:
Kurven = Curves
(“Adjust”)
Pic 4:
CS Color Correct
= CS Color Correct (“DFT Composite suite” if u have it)
Farbton/Sättigung
= Hue/Saturation (“Adjust”)
Pic 5:
C2 SoftFocus
= C2 SoftFocus (“DigiEffects CineLook 2” if u have it)
Rauschen =
Noise (“Noise and Grain”)
Pic 6:
Helligkeit und
Kontrast = Brightness & Contrast (“Adjust”)
Gausscher Weichzeichner
= Gaussian Blur (“Blur and Sharpen”)
Pic 9:
Körnung hinzufügen
= Add Grain (“Noise and Grain”)
Btw
Cattuthaj Jhana is one of my favourite movies.
Nicknames:
Unreal Tournament (ut99): GinZzA (oldschool) or ginz (today)
UT99 NW CTF bible by ginz – Part 1 UT99 NW CTF bible by ginz – Part 2
ginz collection of links for movie making Unpredictables forum (tips and tutorials for ut99 movie making) |
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Posted: 2.28.07 @ 3:30 PM |
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[PT] TANIA
![[PT] TANIA](/avatars/useruploaded/[PT] TANIA604164proclamation_avatar.jpg)
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mrks
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th0ca
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Kindred
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very impressive mrks. :D
I have a question though, how do you know all that in depth technical stuff?
Machinima coming soon
CONTACT:
AIM: INDREDKAY
MSN: k1ndred@hotmail.com
My In Depth After Effects Tutorials |
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Posted: 7.24.07 @ 10:12 PM |
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auri
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I tought him a long time ago :)
Vecchi (10:47 PM) : auri is ROX!!!! |
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Posted: 7.25.07 @ 4:52 AM |
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