Major Project: Post-Production: Colour Grading part 2

Colour Grading Part 2

Following on from my previous colour grading blog post, I've now researched into a couple of other ways into colour grading using similar tools as discussed before. My research led me to a YouTube video from a channel called Roberto Blake who gives a tutorial on basic colour correction and colour grading.


 As well as exploring the previous basic colour correction tools I've already researched, this video introduces two other tools: using RGB curves and Three-color correction. Below shows how I've used this research and experimented using these tools whilst editing Downstage.

RGB Curves

As explained before, RGBs focuses on altering the three prime colours of an image - the reds, blues greens and the whites. Altering either of the four will ultimately have a dampening effect on the image, as well as other colours. Nonetheless, this tool lets you individually alter each colour by having a graph that has a curve running through it, as you can see below:

Nonetheless, altering a certain part of the curve will alter the part of the image - the top part of the curve focuses on the highlights, the middle is the overall image, and the bottom focuses on the shadows. This tool is very handy for our edit due to some of images having a yellow colour tone, meaning once altering the red and the green, you can remove the yellow look from the image. 

I experimented this tool on the shot after Chantelle's audition, where we see Jordan, Jamie and Ruby applauding her audition. As you can see from the first image, the shot has a yellow tone mainly due to the fog. 

]

Original Image

However, once altering the white curve to adjust the lighting in the image and then the remaining three, I was able to get the image shown below. Therefore, this research has proved very beneficial as it can help to remove any odd colour tones during post-production.

Improved Image

Three-color correction

Moving on, the video then explores another method of colour grading, using a tool called the three-color correction. This tool too proved to be very helpful as it enables you to manually alter the mid tones, shadows and highlights separately - great if you're wanting to create a contrast between these three tones of colour, which you can see how to do so below:

The Three-Color Correction effect

However, whilst experimenting with this effect, I noticed how this tool is great for reducing glare and high exposure on characters. This can be arranged by altering the white and black scopes using the input and output levels - it enables you to make the midtones white's become darker whilst altering the output levels to make the background do the same or instead contrast more.

For example, as you can see from the image below, taken from a scene from DownStage, you can see that the image is over exposed on the characters, due to their being too much light emitting onto their skins, causing it to reflect.

Original and overexposed reflective image

However, by simply altering these black and white input/output levels like shown below, you can help reduce this reflection without having to worry about reducing white levels which may leave the skin to have different white patches - a problem which I was facing previous to now.

Altering the white/black inputs/outputs

And below shows the newer image, which has only been edited using this effect. As you can see, Jordan's Peter Pan costume now isn't too over exposed that it reduces its colour, the same for Giles' skin tone. Therefore, this effect works perfectly for helping to reduce over exposure and skin reflection.

Edited Image

By altering both the black/white inputs/outputs and using the three color correction, this effect enables transformations such as the one above, as well as this example shown below.

Original Image - Slightly overexposed and quite warm looking

Edited Image - balance in light and more natural looking skin tone.

Conclusion

To conclude, it is clear that my research is now paying off, as now that I have begun colour grading, examples such as these are now beginning to show a huge and more professional looking transformation. I feel I no longer need to research much more into colour grading and that these effects I have researched should enable me to create a consistent and profound seeming colour tone for DownStage.