Have you noticed certain movies have prominance of one color. If u consider Lord of the Rings it was golden color that struck your eyes. And it was black in Harry Potter. Actually movies are shot normally but while editing this kind of effect is added.
Does any one know whats it called technically?
I think what you are referring to is called color balance,or at least thats what its called in Sony Vegas Movie Studio.
I'm just guessing but colouration. 
Like the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan where the blood stands out the most there's lots of colour balance being messed around with. Saturation is another word for it, if it's not the same thing it's similar and those are the kind of effects your looking for. Tweak the levels of RGB if you can do that in your editing software.
It's used to create contrast in films or create a particular mood, as you probably realised.
| Josso wrote: |
Like the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan where the blood stands out the most there's lots of colour balance being messed around with. Saturation is another word for it, if it's not the same thing it's similar and those are the kind of effects your looking for. Tweak the levels of RGB if you can do that in your editing software.
It's used to create contrast in films or create a particular mood, as you probably realised. |
Yeah, I would say that is is saturation, but it may be contrast as well... They might change the contrast to affect things like shadows and stuff...I think you guys undersood what i am talking about but you are talking in terms of image processing terms. Yes in that case I would call it contrast stretching or saturation but what about movie making or cenamatic terminology for that?
The process is "Colour Correction" there are more terms for it but this is one of the most common within the industry.
Colour Correction is an essential part of any film making. One needs to balance colours in a scene. If you imagine a scene where the camera is shooting two people talking but its shot reverse shot ( looking at one charachter then cutting to the other person opposite).
In these scenarios the editor must make sutre that the lighting and colour temperature is the same in both shots to make it look like its the smae room. The human eye is very suseptibale to subtle changes in light and if its even a tad off then the brain picks up on this and makes one think it could be a diffrent location.
From playing around with this people have created styles of colour correction to suit the needs of the film. Some process can be automated and are quite esy if lighting has beend done right. the other end of the scale involves completely desaturating the footage to black and white and then re colouring the footage to suit (Sin City for example).
Digital Grading is what they call it in Lord of the Rings. If you pick up the extended editions of LotR, they have great documentaries called the Appendecies where it goes over all the cool stuff like that. Made me appreciate them all a lot better.
In photography this can be done by increasing the saturation and thus the contrast of one color channel or just adjusting the white balance so that all images look more orange or blue or some combination of the two.
That effect always got me too. I can do it to film and photography but it always seems 'fake'. Or not quite right, I can use the channels the saturation and the colour balance but everything seems better in films, why is this? Am I overdoing it, I do not know.
So, I accidently stumbled onto some software that does exactly what you're talking about: http://www.synthetic-ap.com/products/cf/index.html. From the small screenshot at the bottom, this looks exactly like what I saw on the screens of the computers that edited the film for Lord of the Rings. It looks like I've found the exact piece of software.
I hope this helps inform, I personally thought it was a very cool find, albeit accidental.
And to zakarykinnaird. I think it would be better for you try adjusting the white balance as apposed to adjusting the saturation in each channel. I know that most image editors and even some organizers (like Picasa) have support for that kind of thing built in. Usually there will be two sliders: one with blue to yellow spectrum and another with green to red. Through these sliders you can adjust he colors of your image relatively and without messing anything up. Good luck. Synthetic Aperature's Color Finesss is pretty good. Magic Bullet has Magic Bullet Looks (formerly Look Suite) that has some popular movie presets. Final Cut Pro now comes with the app Color, which was formerly Final Touch or something, and it is probably the most powerful color grading application that is actually cheap enough that most people could afford it.
One thing that you may be talking about is sometimes referred to as 'secondary color correction'. What you do, is you go in and select one color in a scene (say red). Then you 'limit effect' to that color only. You can the tweak only that particular color, and maybe desaturate the rest of the scene, so everything is black and white except for red....red will show up anywhere in the scene, but anything that isn't red will be black and white. Easy to do in FCP (and probably most other NLE's as well) and has been used in movies like Schindler's List and the TV show Pleasantville......in fact it is sometimes called 'the pleasantville effect'. CHV actually has a plug in that allows you to do it with one click on the color you want to keep and automatically desaturates all other colors to black and white.....they call it the 'pleasantville effect'.
A simple term like color correction or color level adjustments, any good film editing software should have it.
