Week 2 - Colour Correction Part 2

My Giddy aunties. Why are people so incompetent!?

Ok. So that's a tad over dramatic. Needless to say, After Effects is a perfectly effective and capable system for colour correction, there is absolutely no need to fork out hundreds for a plugin. It's quite clunky and not very user friendly (Sliders are far less intuitive than one of those colour circle thingys).

I started with this image that I rendered out in Terragen recently. I saved it as an OpenExr so I could take advantage of the extra information made available by the 32bit format. As you can see, it's fairly flat in terms of contrast and colour depth and so on. But there is quite a decent amount of colour variation. A good base to work from.

Note that examples will be illustrative of effects. And not really meant to be particularly strong aesthetically.

The first thing I noticed was that the exposure tool didn't work properly, thanks to the way After Effects interprets this kind of imagery. I checked a bit on OpenExr documentation, and someone mentioned EXtractoR. So I tested, and it did the job.

I actually blew the colours right down for this. The cloud arch had some nasty exposure issues.

Anyway, there isn't much point going through every detail, so here's a few pointers I've gotten from experimentation.

If you want a wash like colour correction, use Tritone and check Blend With Original. You get to pick the highlight, midtone and shadow colours and the blend makes it look less obvious. It's easy and quick. Note however, Tritone isn't particularly effective for all but a few general effects, you really want to use it to control the overall colour set, and layer on more effects.

For those who want a bit more control over their footage Gamma/Pedestal/Gain is an extremely powerful base to work with. As it essentially allows you to control those three effects per colour channel. Need to bump up the red? Drop the other two, add more contrast? Fiddle with the gain and gamma. In the end though, you can only work with what's there...

Other options for controlling colour levels include the Levels (individual controls), Colour Balance, Hue/Saturation, and Selective Colour.

The next and last point of call is a really powerful one, and that's the Change Colour tool. Which is dangerous if you use it too much, but it essentially does exactly what it says, changes whichever colour you want into another one. Don't like that nasty blue? No problem, use the eye dropper and pick it out, then get to work.
If you want to select multiple colours, you will need multiple layers of this, and be sure to fiddle with matching softness if you get nasty borders between colours.

To illustrate, I made the sun green. But I do not advise doing this quite so aggressively unless you want people to laugh at you, a lot.

Or you may want to reconsider your editing package...

Blender may be more usable, but unfortunately, at 1080p resolution, it'll be slower, especially when you start computing frame by frame. So don't go hopping over just yet peeps.

Till next time folks.