Exposure Control

Often during simple compositing operations, we find something that looks good on our monitor, but as soon as it's shown on film or certain television sets, the composite no longer holds together. Take this following example:

We have this nice background plate footage here:

And this garbage-masked green-screen footage ready to be keyed here:
So we pull the key with Keylight, and this is what we get:
Now obviously it's too bright and there is not enough contrast in the above image, so we add a grayscale adjustment layer, and play around with the keyed shot until we have something that we think looks good, like this:
Unfortunately, those shadows would pull apart from the background when displayed on many TV monitors, such as the one I have connected to my workstation. A great but little known tool for just this is called Exposure Control. As of CS3 you don't have to be in 32bpc in order to take advantage of it. It's located in the bottom right hand corner of the comp window, and is very useful in performing a slightly modified version of 'gamma slamming.' When we crank up the exposure, we can see that the shadows on his black shorts are much too bright compared to the black rails in the background, or even the shadows on the ground in the corner:

So now we can do some further adjustments, and notice that the shadows of the shorts match much more closely with the background than before, and they have a nice fade-off into the lighter shades, just as the darks on the floor do:The final composite (of just the shadows) can be seen here. Obviously we still have the highlights, shadows, midtones, and color to worry about...but that's a different post.

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!

NOTE: If you cannot see all of the images try refreshing your page.

Sin City Effect Part 2

It's finally here!In this video tutorial, Creative Cow contributing editor Grant Swanson will cover important and useful techniques for working with alpha channels that are specifically derived from certain color luminance values. He will explain how to extract the color of a certain area of the image, turn it into an alpha channel, and use it to manipulate the image.

This has been a while in the making. I've tried several different techniques for this, and finally I came across what I teach in the tutorial. I hope it satisfies those of you who have been anxiously waiting for a part 2!

Don't forget to stay tuned for the next tutorial - improving your DV (especially SDDV) footage!

DV to Film Techniques

Right now I'm in the process of creating a new tutorial that's all about improving your DV footage. I'm going to cover how to be sure you are staying at maximum quality throughout your workflow, and several tips and techniques on how to add some style to make your shot look more cinematic. This will go over everything from basic color correction to adding in-camera lens effects, such as realistic gradients, filters, etc...

Here's a sneak peak of what's to come, although I don't have it all planned out yet. Notice how much more cinematic the second image is compared to the first one.

Original Image from the DVX100B
Even by just cropping the image to a 2.40:1 aspect ratio, we are already adding some punch that wasn't there before. Add only three of the many techniques discussed in the tutorial to that, and we've got a professional-looking image.

Stay tuned for this tutorial, it's a good one!