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Digital Filmmaking Part 2 - Color Correction
Understanding Color
 | | FCP's Tint with different settings. |
Those used to video acquisition, but not so familiar with film, make take for granted the ability of video cameras to be adjusted so that they can perceive any light source as being white. This is called white balance and it helps to give video a very characteristic look. Film, on the other hand, is balanced for a specific color temperature and will mercilessly record any variances. A film balanced for the 3,200 degrees Kelvin color temperature of studio lights, for example, will show outside light as being very blue. Even a small discrepancy in color temperature will be noticeable. For instance, if conventional light bulbs are used as light sources, they will appear to be on the orange side due to their lower color temperature. Any adjustments in color temperature, if not taken care off at the time of shooting through the use of color correction filters and gels, must be made in the lab.
It’s a little hard to understand the effect that different color temperatures have on film because our own vision works pretty much like a video camera with the automatic white balance circuitry always on. Our brain is constantly adjusting the color temperature of light sources for us so that they are always perceived as white. In fact, this is why we can tolerate the awful green light that certain fluorescent bulbs emit. Experienced cinematographers have learned what different light sources look like on film and they can think in terms of different colors. But it’s actually a very abstract process because their eyes insist on seeing the light sources as white. A very simple exercise to help understand how film sees different color temperatures is to get close to a window on a bright, sunny day, and turn on the light bulbs inside the room. If you focus your attention outside for a few minutes and then look at the lights inside, they will look very orange. After a few seconds, your eyes will adjust to the color temperature of these lights and you’ll start to perceive them as white. Now look outside and the sunlight will appear very blue. As you can see, your brain will try to always give you the impression that almost any light source is white. All it takes is some time for adjustment.
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 | | After Effects' Color Balance offers three color channels per luminance level. |
Now that you can visualize how film, not being able to automatically adjust to different light sources, captures their distinct differences in color temperature, you can better understand the importance of color tonality in motion pictures. Your ultimate goal as a filmmaker is to invoke the desired emotions in your audience. So keep in mind that, while the brain adjusts color temperatures towards white, it is fully aware of each light source’s true color. This can be used to your advantage because you can really enrich the overall mood of a scene merely by adjusting its overall color tone to match our brain’s perceptions. As a very basic example, we know that fire has a much lower color temperature than the moonlight. As a result, a shot illuminated by fire would tend to have a reddish tone while a shot illuminated by the moon would tend to have a bluish tone if no color correction was to be applied. Because the brain associates the reddish light of the fire to its warmth and the bluish light of the moon to the cooler night temperatures, it’s easy to realize that a shot with an overall reddish tint will feel warm while the same shot with an overall bluish tint will feel cold. If you watch the movie Body Heat, you’ll notice that the filmmakers utilized this psychological color effect to better convey the illusion of unbearable heat by applying an exaggerated reddish tint to the desired scenes.
As you can see, color timing is a very important part of feature film postproduction. This is when the director and the lab work together to give each scene an overall color tonality that not only makes the image more visually attractive but also adds to the intended mood. The equivalent process in video is called color correction and it’s used in a variety of ways.
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