Daniel Shawyer - Week 1 - Colour Grading PT1

This first week I didn't want to do anything particularly stressful. Something easy, something familiar, but necessary.

Colour Correction, or Colour Grading, depending on who you ask.

Turns out it's surprisingly more complicated in After Effects than I expected. I've done similar effects in software like Photoshop and Blender, and it's far simpler it seems.

What's irritating is that it's like when I looked up procedural rain to see if there was anything better than motion blurred rain. Turns out the most advanced tutorial for that was painted rain. The rest used motion blurring. Which is a poor and unrealistic effect.

So I took a few hours to create my own rain procedural editing. I never got around to doing the tutorial as it involved layer channels, heightmaps, noise, lens blur and a bunch of other layered effects that take a while to explain. It ended up looking suitably epic though.

Anyway, back on topic. After going through explanations of processes and the like, I really cannot find any systems that are satisfactory. Most people seem to be satisfied with a brief, crude vignette, + hue/hue saturation shift. Which is silly.

The following videos illustrate how this works:

This guy actually discusses some nice subtle techniques like tinting and vibrancy controls. he has a bit more of a refined process to his correction strategies, which was nice to see.


The other tutorials told you to grab a $400+ plugin to use instead. This is also silly, because After Effects is a massive editing suite and honestly should not require an external plugin to do something like colour grading.

The most popular plugin was Magic Bullet by Red Giant Software, who do a number of high quality video production plugins. The following video illustrates this:

Indeed, it seems to me that After Effects has missed a massive section of usability in it's toolset with regards to this. To take an example, Blender, a free and open source 3D rendering program has a better set of tools for colour grading and effects than After Effects does. Blender's compositing node system allows one to quickly and easy string together layers of effects that allow for massive control quickly. I'll find a screenshot comparing the two systems sometime next week when I spend a load of hours creating my own colour grading system.

Because the current system is absolutely, mind the British, bollocks.

I couldn't find any discussions on creating a clear high colour contrast effect you might see in a Korean or Japanese music video. Where the majority of the scenery is pale and the clothing and people are relatively high colour. Or where you have the reverse of this, the environments are high colour, as well as the clothing, but skin is pale and clear. This is due to cultural differences that I don't have time to discuss. An example of this can be seen in the recent Gangnam Style music video (even if part of the effect is from the camera's themselves.):

Noteably, though, Color Finesse seems to be a very powerful tool. It will be interesting to see what can be done with that. 

Part 2 next week. I'll create a few workflows and see if I can create a general colour grading system that allows one to control the various intricacies easily.