Chapter 5. Color And Light: Adjusting And Matching
What is the pinnacle, the sunnum bonum, or (don't speak Latin?) the ultimate achievement of compositing? Pulling the perfect matte? Creating a convincing effect seemingly from nothing? Leaving the last doughnut at dailies for the effects supervisor? Those are all significant, but they pale in comparison with the ability to authoritatively and conclusively adjust and match the color of a foreground to a background. Without this skill, you will not have earned the privilege of the compositor to be the last one to touch the shot before it goes into the edit. No matter how good your source elements are, they'll never appear to have been shot all at once by a real camera. With this skill, however, you can begin to perform magic, injecting life, clarity, and drama into standard (or even substandard) 3D output, adequately (or even poorly) shot footage, and flat, monochromatic stills, drawing the audience's attention exactly where the director wants it to go, and seamlessly matching the other shots in the sequence. This sounds like pure art, doesn't it? It's something that requires a good eye, an ineffable skill that can't be taught? Actually, no. It's a skill that you can learn even if you have no feel for adjusting imagesindeed, even if you consider yourself color blind. And what is the latest, greatest toolset for this lofty job? Most of the time, you're going to use Levels. In some cases, Curves is a preferable alternative (although plenty of talented After Effects artists never touch Curves), and Hue/Saturation remains indispensable for certain situations in which Levels and Curves are too cumbersome. You may use the rest of the tools in other situations, but for effects work the no frills approach of using these tools still seems to be the one that endures, and with good reason: These tools are stable and fast, and they will get the job done every timeonce you know how to use them. This may, nevertheless, leave you with some thorny questions:
This chapter holds the answers. You will begin by looking at how to effectively adjust a standalone source clip, focusing on optimizing brightness and contrast, as well as the more mysterious gamma. You'll then move into matching a foreground layer to the optimized background, and take your adjustment skills into all three color channels to balance color as needed. More specialized color adjustments are discussed later in the book, in Chapter 12, "Working with Light." |