Free Cinematic Presets!

After the release of my last tutorial, I thought I'd create a few (five) sneak peek free cinematic presets that will apply an overall look to any of your digital video. These are very high in quality, and will work on just about anything. They are a preview to a part of a collection that I'm currently producing.

I thought it would be fun to demonstrate these to you using the newly-released trailer for Quantum of Solace. Here we have a shot of Bond and Felix speaking in a pub (below), the first image is obviously our plain shot taken straight from the trailer, and the following five each have a look applied. Note that these are all at full strength though...when you use these I recommend applying them to an adjustment layer, and bringing the opacity down a bit, just to mix the look back in with the original image. I also suggest you correct the black and white points of your images before applying these as I demonstrated in my tutorial Creating Digital Cinema, although it's not necessary.

I was careful not to clip any values - white, black, red, green, or blue, which is why many are accomplished using a curves effect, and the rest use levels, pulled in the opposite direction, so they don't clip.

Here's the link to download them, simply unzip the file and place them in your presets folder of the After Effects directory on your hard drive:

Grant_Swanson_Presets.zip

Here's an example of the looks:

Notice how skin tones stay relatively normal on all of these. Here's a little hint for you: if you are out looking to purchase a preset collection or maybe even a plugin, check to be sure that the looks you are buying don't destroy skin tones. Here is an extremely popular preset applied to the same image as mine, except skin tones weren't taken into consideration, and, well, you can see for yourself...
Not to mention we've carelessly clipped both white and black values, creating an amateur and accidental look.

Have fun!

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