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.