Major Project: Post-Production - Interview Colour Grading: 'Creative' Tool Effects

Introduction

As mentioned in my 'Interview Colour Grade Research' blog post, I am aiming to make the interviews have a different viewing perspective than the rest of the actuality - enhancing the colours to reinforce that it's an interview purely just for viewing gratifications. My research led to me how an image which has been edited has general vibrance enhancements and that it is beginning to look slighting unnatural in comparison to the rest of the actuality which you see. Therefore, I begun research before coming across a video on YouTube from a channel named Larry Jordan - an American editor who creates Premiere tutorial videos, as shown below:

Nonetheless, part of the video investigates into using the Lumetri Colour effect which I've used before, shown in my 'Colour Grade' blog posts. As well as using the basic correction tool to contrast the blacks and the whites, altering the temperature to make it seem natural and so on, the video explains how using the creative tool underneath can help to give your image a more cinematic and enhanced look, which you can see the difference in the two images below on what it can do:

Vibrance, Saturation & Sharpness

Original image after basic corrections

Edited image using the creative tool. As you can see, Ruby seems brighter and her colours are slightly enhanced.

To do this, the creative tool offers you to alter the sharpness of the image, the vibrance of the image (altering the colour saturation without effecting the skin tone), normal saturation and then giving your image a shadow or highlight tone. Despite the last tool not being entirely useful for DownStage, as we only want to enhance the image rather than give it say a blue or red tone, the vibrance tool works effectively for giving the image a more enhanced look. This vibrance stands out even more once the saturation has been altered,which provided the image shown above by altering the tools shown in the image below.

I then experimented with this tool with other interviews, which you can see below:

Edited Image

Original Image

Original Image

Edited Image

Hue Saturation Curve

Likewise the video then introduces how to use the hue saturation curve - he explains by saying how the graph enables you to individually alter the saturation by the exact colour - enabling you to enhance specific colours without altering the master saturation, as shown in the graph below:

This tool helps me to create this enhanced interview style - as you can see, by dragging out the blues during Chantelle's first interview, I can enhance the blue from her top without enhancing anything else within the shot.

Original Image

Edited image - the colour is now much more vibrant without any other saturation being effected.

To conclude, I feel that despite the effects only being minimal, this creative tool effect will enable me to create these enhancements for my interview shots. Nonetheless, I am also aiming to slightly adjust the softness of some of the interviews - making an interview seem softer helps to add to this cinematic feel, in addition to adjusting the brightness and contrast so it seems more of a parallel. This will soon be researched and then updated onto my blog with the results!