Shop Talk: Pretty Shiny Colors

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Re: Shop Talk: Pretty Shiny Colors

Postby ZephyrStar » Tue Apr 24, 2012 10:12 am

Taite wrote:shati makes an amazing point that I think people literally forget when color correcting. Skin tone is the most important thing to pay attention to. Always try to preserve the fleshy tones of skin. Even if you're using a blue color for correcting, you can get away with having a very light blue tone to the skin, and really, you can experiment with this and create different moods, there's no right and wrong. You can achieve a "dreamy" affect with some glow and blue, etc. It's all open for interpretation. But cranking up the saturation, using gradients, or adding a very saturated color at all, I advise being careful because it erases the fleshy tones and then it's so obviously color corrected, but in a bad way. Obviously there's exceptions to this-- it all depends on what effect you want. But this is just something to take special note of.


This this this.

Color correction can work wonders for the mood in a video. As far as the technical aspect of doing this, you want to use something that lets you have control over highlights, mids, and lows, and the RGB for each of those. I forget the name of the one in AE (though I use it all the time >____>) I only use the hue/sat adjustment to desaturate so I can go back in and make adjustments over top of that.

As far as what the colors MEAN, check out color theory and color psychology. Really cool for helping to subliminally influence your audience. Everyone likes to throw grunge on things, desaturate things, and just go nuts with it... "oh hey, instant horror video!" But...

-warm colors, that can literally convey the psychological feeling of warmth, are yellows, oranges, reds
-cool colors, blues, purples, etc, are the opposite
-consider that bright almost unnatural greens and yellows are sickly...poisinous, noxious (just look at poison dart frogs)
-reds and oranges can induce appetite (next time you're at a restaurant, pay attention to the menu layout & colors)
-medium blues make you sleepy (well, at least in theory) and have a calming effect
-the same is true for a medium pink surprisingly
-purple is unsettling as it is not found in nature very often, it is the color of royalty, of rarity (also not surprisingly used as a color for supernatural forces in anime)

You can also work with colors that clash to make your audience feel uneasy. This is the only time I'd recommend using gradients, because you can really wreck a piece of footage :D Use very contrasty colors to give the effect of "vibration."

Check out Josef Albers, he was an artist that worked in this kinda stuff. (just google image search his name, notice how some of the images might be unsettling, and some seem to shift as you look at them, or even can make some people sick)

So....for example, alternating shots back and forth that are graded with two of these clashing colors will make your audience very uneasy. And it can be subtle, that's what's great about color grading and color psychology. It's like a secret weapon for influencing emotion.

/artprof
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Re: Shop Talk: Pretty Shiny Colors

Postby Shin-AMV » Sat May 05, 2012 11:45 am

Sweet. Some of this stuff is really useful. Especially the stuff regarding skin tones and matching blacks.

I've been playing around with the color curves tool a lot but I might end up picking your brain some more about that Taite.
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Re: Shop Talk: Pretty Shiny Colors

Postby xDreww » Tue May 08, 2012 10:42 am

What Tatie said.
I would give a big explanation on my color correction, scene a lot of people like it, but I don't feel like reading or writing something big right now. Me being lazy again. but Taite pretty much explained some good stuff. I'll just show you one snapshot I did.
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I basically just use overlay,add on this. Blur for the bottom layer..blue tone..brightness and contrast..color curves always..Same thing with my other edits..color curves..yellow tint..black and white added on sometimes. Just mess around with it I guess.
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Re: Shop Talk: Pretty Shiny Colors

Postby zibbazabba905 » Tue May 08, 2012 5:35 pm

can we see what your color curves window looks like, and aside from the skin tone concept, do you use some type of formula for it, or just do it by eye? (by "you" i mean plural)

and is there a big difference between using "color curves" vs "color corrector"?
"Uhmmm... You know... it was at that point that I realized that maybe Thierry wasn't actually a film maker, and he was maybe just someone with mental problems who happened to have a camera. " -Banksy
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Re: Shop Talk: Pretty Shiny Colors

Postby Taite » Tue May 08, 2012 10:42 pm

Feel free Shin (:

@Drew Tatie?! LOL
Anyhow, Drew gives a good example of how Color Curves can be used to "brighten" up an image without cranking up the saturation, and also just giving it a bit more depth and richness to it. (*coughyou'rewelcomeforshowingyoucolorcurvesdrew*) :roll:


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**Here is an image of all of the color curves applied to one clip, there is the final result, and above is just a few of the presets I use, out of about 30 I've created.

This is an example of what a bunch of color curves can do, even though the result is simple. It's not complicated because there's more, but for me, I tend to have more than one, just because it's so darn fun combining them and seeing what they look like.
( If anyone would like, I can go through and post screencaps of what the color curves looks like (ie, the squiggly lines in the window) and what it looks like on an image., also, feel free to skype me if you're more interested in it. )


Also, I'm not an expert, but Color Correction deals with the mids, lows, and highs. High being the lightest colors (typically the skin tone then, which makes this virtually useless), lows are obviously, then, for the darkest colors, and mids, the stuff in between. Just put a clip in vegas, add the "Color Correction" Reset to None preset, and just mess with one at a time and you can see what it does. It always gives a dusty appearance using Color Correction because, as you can see when you use it in vegas, the selector only allows you to choose ONE color for the mids/lows/highs. So you have 3 colors you can have in your image. You can layer like I did too, but then you only get 6, and 9, and 12, and so on...

Color Curves, on the other hands, deals with the reds, blues, and greens of an image. Now, I can't give it an easy explanation that I can for Color Correction, but this method of RGB manipulates the image on a more personal level, since obviously the amount and place of RGB differs on every scene, just as it does in real life, and therefore giving it a more 'natural' appearance, if you will. You don't just pick one color for the R,G, and B, because how you change the R directly affects the appearance of the B when you use it.
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Re: Shop Talk: Pretty Shiny Colors

Postby Taite » Tue May 08, 2012 10:47 pm

Oh, forgot to add: There is no formula, you'd have to do it by eye, just like Color Correction as well. Color Curves is quite a "free" tool, but very easily manipulated. :P Just a slight tweak of one of the lines can give skin a more bluish/reddish/whatever appearance. You'd think this would be overwhelming and complicated, and it might be at first when you're not used to how moving one line affects another, but you realize just how useful it is later on. And seriously, it's really fun.
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Re: Shop Talk: Pretty Shiny Colors

Postby xDreww » Wed May 09, 2012 2:06 am

Yes...color correcting is fun. I do it a lot. AND NO TAITE! I TAUGHT MYSELF ALL THE COLORSSS. Nah just kidding Alex. Okay you did teach me about yellow tint and more stuff, so yeah, I love you for that.
Maybe I should post up some of my color correction snapshots here like you did. I'm lazy though.
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Re: Shop Talk: Pretty Shiny Colors

Postby zibbazabba905 » Wed May 09, 2012 4:26 am

wow, that's a lot of curves! I'm actually trying to "cartoonify" my colors (even though I made that up, I don't know what that means) but time for another dumb question! Do you use most of these over the full video, or per scene... as in, do you tweak every clip, or the whole amv at the end?
"Uhmmm... You know... it was at that point that I realized that maybe Thierry wasn't actually a film maker, and he was maybe just someone with mental problems who happened to have a camera. " -Banksy
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Re: Shop Talk: Pretty Shiny Colors

Postby Taite » Thu May 10, 2012 12:10 am

It is, but that's just my personal preference, and you really only need one to just make the slightest and best difference. :P

Typically, I use it over the entire amv, so I actually apply all of the color curves to the layer rather than each clip. However, these color curves would look more like the second image on the Tomoya picture I posted. It seriously depends on the amv, but I always have at least a "brightening and richening" color curve on the entire amv. More pigmented colors I reserve for the typical "memory" scenes, or when I'm just going for a different mood. But as a fairly raw editor, I tend to stay with a more neutral color curve on the entire amv.

However, sometimes I want to adjust some of the color curves on an individual clip. This mainly happens when a clip is very dark, and depending on the color curves I'm using, it sometimes is too much 'pigment.' An example of this is the sepia I created, which I gave an example of on the first page. It looks alright on that scene, but when I used that color curve in my latest video (not uploaded,) I felt like the brown almost washed out the clip because the original clip was so one-toned (it was a scene after sunset that was primarily purple and red). :? So I would put that clip on a new layer, add all of the color curves, and adjust them individually til it felt right for that clip.

One thing to be aware of with applying color curves to the layer rather than the clip, is when you fade out. Now, I have my own philosophy on this, which I'll explain, but I've seen a lot of amvs where people don't care to do it, so I guess it really depends. To me, it's very important, but not a big deal for now if you're just messing with color curves.
Spoiler :
When you use the "opacity" type fade (ie: dragging in the end of a clip/beginning in vegas to make a fade that goes from 0 percent opacity to 100), on a clip with color curves, as it fades to black, it won't fade to black. At 0% opacity it will. However, as it's fading, the color of the curves becomes more prevalent on the clip, and so you can see these colors during the fading process, when really it should be fading the entire clip (highs, lows, mids) to black, not the colors.

I literally almost never fade using the "opacity" thing, on every amv of mine, color curves or not (this is a personal preference: I believe it gives a cleaner fade and transition to the next clip.) My method of fading is using the Levels tool and using keyframes to start at normal color, then adding a keyframe to the end of a clip and dragging the Output end to 0. This ensures that the clip is fading to black. However, the levels effect must come after all of the color curves, because vegas renders the effects in order. So If I had a color curves, it would apply that, then I added the fade, so it would fade to black, but then I add another color curves, which will color the fade.

If you have the color curves on the layer, then you can't fade out each individual clip by adding Levels to that clip. You need to add the Levels tool/effect to the entire layer, and keyframe it that way. That's because it's rendering all of the effects on a individual clip, and then applying the effects that are on the layer, therefore creating that "color during the fade to black effect" again.



And as for "cartoonifying," I have an image in my mind of what that means and would look like, though it may not be entirely right. But on that note I'd like to mention that you can also do some other crazy effects with color curves, rather than just "tinting" the image. :P
ie:
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Seriously have no idea what you'd use them for, and I certainly will not ever probably, but if you're on the more creative side, there are definitely some funky things you can manage with color curves.
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Re: Shop Talk: Pretty Shiny Colors

Postby zibbazabba905 » Thu May 10, 2012 5:02 am

this is kinda what I'm looking at right now... (original) (channel blend: oversaturation) (color curves:high contrast)
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I'm gonna have to go with the 2nd one cause its closer to what I want, but I like the 3rd one with how its closer to a distinct red/green/blue

and the main reason I keep screwing with that channel blend is because i get obsessive with numbers :sweat:
"Uhmmm... You know... it was at that point that I realized that maybe Thierry wasn't actually a film maker, and he was maybe just someone with mental problems who happened to have a camera. " -Banksy
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Re: Shop Talk: Pretty Shiny Colors

Postby TEKnician » Sun May 13, 2012 1:33 am

How I color correct on a mac with FInal Cut Pro X is WAY too complicated to put into words. I mean, you'd be SHOCKED to see how difficult it is for me to change such a simple scene in Angel Beats!

I MEAN, JUST LOOK AT THIS! ITS SO HARD A FELT COMPELLED TO MAKE A VIDEO FOR IT

Try and count how many times I had to click the mouse in order to do that. Go on! I DARE YA! ITS RIDICULOUS!
Almost as hard as fighting a Holy Paladin.
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