Color treatments

[Sawyer]

Seems like everything at the movies right now has some sort of coloring done to it. The most frequent one is the over exposed over saturated look where the blues or greens really stand out. Industrial scenes are cold & blue dry western scenes are warn yellow orange. What is this? What do I call this? How can I do this in ps?

 

Does this make any sense?

 

Thanks.

[DennisHolland]

It's called ambiance (in my academy-years) and it's supposed to give you an in depth kinda feeling without noticing it (exept for professionals who are actually into the color-business like cg). You can add this trick with the color balance tool in photoshop, or the chromatica plug. Be carefull with it and make sure your screen is calibrated before you scare people away

[William Alexander]

Sawyer,

 

On the same note, much is done and has been done with an 'underpainting' technique. You know the one Ernest has used quite a bit. In CG & VFX production it's frequently a colored gradient and or gradient mask. Set to multiply, screen overaly in PS, what ever works right. In video compositing the possibilities are numerous to get those effects. Of course for Video just a lense filter on the camera can work just as well, LOL

 

WDA

[Sawyer]

Ok I don’t know what I am doing but this is the kind of “coloring” I am referring to. (this is just a random picture) The colors are really sharp and kind of glow. A lot is washed out. Is this ambiance?

[William Alexander]

It almost has a gouche look to it.

 

If it's a still....

Lab color mode, levels adjustment

Lightness channel increase gamma thighten to histogram

a channel center gamma on bump and pull left and or right in

b channel center gamma pull left and or right in

 

Basically the colors saturated and washed in the image all directly correspond to the lab colors and lightness channel. Lab color is a tricky nut.... wish I could explain better

 

My 2cents

WDA

[Tim Nelson]

Good topic guys. I am trying this out on a current rendering right now.

[Tim Nelson]

Wow I think I'm really going to like this. Here is something I just did, starting to play around with WDA's techniques. I'm really not pushing it far on this one sinc e I do need the materials to all come across fairly accurately. But it sure is a big difference from the original image straight out of the renderer. Also used psd manager for individual object/material adjustment.

[Chad Warner]

Which of WDA's techniques did you use, or both? The end result is definitely worth it. Looks good!

[Tim Nelson]

Well I tried playing around in Lab mode for a while which looked really cool, but then I kept the real version in RGB because I was afraid something awful would happen when I tried to print. What I did this time that I haven't done before is use a couple colored gradients and then switch them to Overlay. I used a red/yellowish color at the bottom, and a more cyan color at the top. I also used this on the backround image a little. It's still new to me, so I really don't know what I'm doing yet. Looking forward to trying this on the rest of my renderings.

 

The biggest change from the original to the final in this rendering was simply adjusting levels. Most Vray renderings usually come out pretty gray, especially if you are using HSV color mapping.