Blender Institute just released a bunch of test renderings from their upcoming movie Sintel, and I couldn’t help it but try my hands on giving those wonderful images some aggressive color-grading. I’ve included the before, after and a short justification for my choice of grading. Criticisms welcome!
The Sintel team simply isn’t doing a good enough job, they are doing a GREAT job, and I am sure color grading is a planned part of their pipeline. I just got carried away a bit playing with these images :D
Even though snow should be white, it doesn’t hurt to give it some tone to communicate the extreme coldness. Blue works well in this case.
Wow, the team is doing a great job with facial animation. This looks like a very somber scene, so it calls for some gloomy color. I also added a dark gradient from the top, anime style. Split toning is used to maintain the skintone while pushing the background to a cool blue. This is the classic ‘orange-teal’ Hollywood color palette that everyone’s using. Some love this, some hates this.
I am speculating here, but I think we want to create a contrast between the safety of the warm tent and the harsh cold outside. So things close to the fire is made warmer, things further away is pushed to a chilling blue. The histogram is also very left-biased (dark), so I brightened up the image a bit.
Here, our main character isn’t emphasized enough in this (what I assume would be) high motion scene due to the similarity in color. I added a warming filter to highlight Sintel to convey the classic warm-vs-cold, good-vs-evil, light-vs-dark concept.
Just added some warmth to make the image look a bit more organic and less CG.
Everything is done in Lightroom, which is an awesome postprocessing package for photos, but the same effect can be easily achieved in Blender’s composite engine. But seriously, Sintel is going to be amazing.
This is great improvement, the institute should consider to deploy it to make the film perfect, shouldn’t it.
The only one I thought you overdid was the hut scene.
I can not wait to see the finished product!!!
If there’s anything you know, its your post-processing, Mike!
Really like what you did with the second image of Sintel, it does go with that anime style.
But I have to agree with RH2, a fire that size doesn’t emit such uniform, strong light.
Wow, what a surprise! These are indeed very fine color grading results. I love the bluish tone you added to the snow scene, it gives it so much emotion and connection. Nice! ^_^
-Reyn
These are some really fine color corections I think u could even send to to the Durian team maybe they will like it as well. Great job
http://theabyssgazes.blogspot.com/2010/03/teal-and-orange-hollywood-please-stop.html
Not that pushing the cool/warm dichotomy in an image is always a bad thing. But doing it all the time is a bit like writing all your music in one key.
Cessen, I must admit I am still a big fan of that look. Although i can see why people think it’s overdone and cheesy.
I agree very much with the choice of color on image sets 1, 2 and 5. Especially the blue grading on image 1 made the icy temperatures tangible.
Image set 4 (the tent) looks very incorrect when color graded. It reminds me of how hue and color shifts can appear in older 8mm films in bad lighting conditions.
Image set 5 (dragon and Sintel) is a nice idea but suggests that there is a warm source of light near Sintel. If there is such a thing, then ok. If not then, to me, the character actually looks more a healthy, strong and superior character, detracting from the potential sense of a main character caught in an very hostile situation and environment.
But again, the snow image set is really spot on.
I think you over did the hut scene, but also it looks like you gave some of the scenes that are supposed to be dark and gloomy more of a lively sense, which I think it could do without.
In retrospect, seeing my own color correction on a different monitor makes me want to barf. The color is way too saturated on some of the corrections, which might be attributed to the crappy laptop screen i was using.
And I whole-heartedly agree that I overdid a few scenes.
My favorite change was the warmth in the “back road of the city” scene where Sintel is lifting a plank. I really liked that effect! I thought the blue snow was neat, too – I agree.