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.

I am speculating here, but I wanted 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.

Lesson 1: Know the limit of your camera, and try to work around it.

Small cameras are known for their low dynamic range, so to get the most out of this sunset, I took two images at different exposure and merged them together with Pro HDR, right on the phone.  This increased the dynamic range dramatically, making it equal to that of a dSLR.  Then a bit of contrast and saturation boost completed the look.

Lesson 2: Post Processing

This picture came out very bland at first, but a few tweaks in Lightroom 3made it marginally passable.  There are enough apps in the Apple Appstore to edit your photo into oblivion and back.  Some of my favorite apps are Pro HDR, TiltShiftGen and Best Camera. Of course, for the most control, you’d have to use a desktop-based tool like Lightroom or Aperture.

Lesson 3: Color

What the tiny camera lacks in light-gathering ability, it makes up by upping the vibrancy and contrast.  iPhone photos are usually a lot more vibrant and contrasty than what you get out of a high-end dSLR.  Use this to your advantage to capture some eye popping pictures.

Lesson 4: Bokeh

You CAN throw the background out of focus even on a tiny sensor like the iPhone camera, but only if you are shooting in macro.  Just be patient with the focus, it can take a while to get the razor sharp image that you wanted.

That’s all for now, I am still discovering the capability of the iPhone camera.  Let me know if you have any tips regarding digital photography.

Canon EF 100mm F2 @ F22

EF 50mm F1.4

You’ll notice the shape of the flare is very different for different lenses, and also the aperture size(F-stop setting) plays a big part in defining the shape of the flare as well.  In general, large f-number(F22) gives a more defined star-burst shape to the flare, while a small f-number (F1.4) gives a softer looking flare.

Anamorphic lens flares, which looks ‘cooler’ in my opinion, are harder to reproduce on a regular consumer camera because they require special anamorphic lenses.