Color Grading

Myself and Luke worked on the Color grading of the Video, this turned out to be more difficult than we intended as we discovered that some of the shots were filmed with different settings on the cameras, predominately we filmed using cine style with one camera, however this camera was placed on a steady-cam and once it was on we couldn't take it off due to the time it would take to set it back up. This in mind we set-up two other Canon 550D cameras on different pieces of equipment (a Jib and a Tripod) although in the rush of setting up, these two cameras were not set to cine style, one was set to standard and the other was set to faithful, these three different styles all look very different which made our job a big problem.

The first problem we encountered was between two shots (which can be seen below), one of these shots had direct light hitting Cara's face and the other was filmed with a different camera style without so much direct light.

Comparison of two shots with different styles

As you can see from the above images the one on the left hand side is more washed out which can be seen if you look at Cara's jumper, after adjusting the color with color correcting effects we still couldn't match the colors of the two shots, the skin tones wouldn't match which was a big problem as the two shots followed each other.

To solve the problem I researched into skin tone adjustments and color correction in Adobe premier, I managed to find an Adobe tutorial which helps someone to use a secondary color corrector, this tool helped us to change the saturation and the color of an individual color in the shot. The tutorial is seen below.

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adobe-evangelists-jason-levine/basic-secondary-color-correctiongrading-in-premiere-pro-cs55/

By using this tutorial we could use masks, and color pickers to select certain aspects of the shots and adjust them while leaving the aspects that don't need changing as they are. This helped us a lot and from the tutorial we could change the colors so the two shots matched a lot better to each other (shown below).

Images after color correction

I worked a lot more on the color correction of the warehouse scenes, for these shots I made the blacks a lot harsher, and I increased the saturation on the shots, also the warehouse shots looked very cold, so I made the shots look warmer by giving them an orange tint. This made the color look a lot more powerful, which can be seen in the comparison of the glitter, the right hand image looks a lot more vibrant where as the left hand image looks very washed out. The two images on the bottom are very different, the left side image looks very blue and washed out, the image on the right has been adjusted so that the blacks are harsher and the color has been made warmer. The two images on the right hand side have a slight difference between them but the images are still very similarly matched.

Comparison of two different shots before and after color correction