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Plug-ins To The Rescue
While you can obtain great results with your compositing software alone, truly outstanding results may be obtained through the use of specialized plug-ins. The most useful in terms of film-look simulation are CineLook and CineMotion by DigiEffects. They are definitely a must-have if you are serious about the whole process.
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| Composite Suite's Selective Soft Focus softens WIlliam's face while keeping his hair intact. |
CineMotion is a collection of more specialized plug-ins that can be invaluable for digital filmmakers. Interlace Aliasing Reducer, for example, is great for those planning on converting their footage to film or progressive scanning on DVD. Plus is smoothes out interlacing artifacts when converting 30 fps to 24 fps. Banding reducer is another great tool to remove banding that sometimes occurs with DV. The other plug-ins will be discussed in installments to come because they are specific to motion and grain.
Another very useful set of plug-ins for the digital filmmaker using After Effects is Boris AE. Besides a whole bunch of cool effects, it comes with very good color manipulation tools such as Color Correction and Color Balance. Correct Selected Color is a plug-in that lets you pick a specific color range and change it. I used it in the example to give a fall look to the background trees without altering the rest of the image.
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Digital Film Tools Composite Suite is another great collection of plug-ins, especially for those serious about compositing. Their tools have been created during actual production and work extremely well. Of particular interest to digital filmmakers are their grain, focus and color correction tools. Because we’ll cover some of those tools later in this series, let’s focus on Color Correction, Paste Color and Selective Color Correct.
Color Correct gives you control over the master, shadows, midtones and highlights regions, each with individual red, green and blue channels. What I really like about this plug in is that the thresholds have been extremely well designed and tweaking the highlights, for example, has absolutely no effect on the midtones or shadows. This is not the case with tools from most other manufacturers, which have a lot of bleed through. If you want absolute precision, this is the tool to get.
Paste Color is kind of misleading because it does a lot more than the name suggests. Basically it lets you paste an overall color over an image like an instant, easy to use color corrector. But this plug-in does a lot more if you want. It can reference one or two layers. If you use a single layer, it lets you apply gamma and color correction, grain, blurs, etc. If you use a second layer, it does a quick composite based on the luminance and you can apply individual manipulations to both layers independently.
Selective Color Correct does a great job at selecting and tweaking a specific color or range. What’s unique about it is that you select a sampling coordinate for the affected color so as not to influence any other color on the shot. As you can see in the example, I changed the color of William’s facial paint without altering anything else. Took no more than 10 seconds.
I must mention one of my favorite Composite Suite plug-ins, even if it doesn’t relate directly to color correction. Selective Soft Focus lets you soften parts of the image while leaving other parts intact. It can be used to give a dream-like effect to your image in the most extreme cases or it can be used to soften an actor’s face without altering the hair, for example. It can also be used to defocus a background. The effect is applied to a mask that can be automatically extracted from the luminance, hue, saturation, average, red, green, blue, alpha, cyan, yellow or magenta channels. Very cool stuff!
Conclusion
Now that you have been introduced to the concept of color correction related to digital filmmaking, feel free to experiment as much as you want. Do your color correction on a scene-by-scene basis, making sure that the overall tonality contributed to that particular scene’s mood. Color correction may be used very subtly just to avoid the typical video “perfect white” or more aggressively to convey strong emotions. You may also go to extremes and use color correction as a special effect or even to set a style for your whole movie. In the Japanese film Avalon, for example, color correction was used very creatively to identify two different realities.
For more information on the products mentioned in this article, please visit the following web sites:
Apple (Final Cut Pro, G4 Workstation): www.apple.com
Nothing Real (Shake): www.nothingreal.com
Adobe (After Effects): www.adobe.com
Matrox (RTMac): www.matrox.com
DigiEffects (CineLook, CineMotion): www.digieffects.com
Boris (Boris AE): www.borisfx.com
Digital Film Tools (Composite Suite): www.digitalfilmtools.com
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