Transforming Robot Production Pipeline Volume 10: Compositing

In this lesson, we're going to take a look at the final grade we decided upon for this shot. So here's where we left off. And here near the end, we have some color correcting decisions we need to make. So to begin with, I'm going to move this transform down a little bit and give us some room to work in. And I'm actually going to begin this with a Crosstalk node. Which I don't believe we've had much chance to talk about. What Crosstalk does is it switches or it sort of merges the RGB channels together wherever we ask it to do it. So we can add some Crosstalk in between the red channel into the green channel. And so if we raise this up, what we're doing is saying the red should also affect the green channel. So if we look at this, you can see we can have some very dramatic effects. So what we can do with this is we can actually have the channels sort of override each other, or their intensity values be mixed in with other channels. Now, this is important for fixing or introducing some film problems where some of the channels get mixed together or they crosstalk with each other. But in this case, I'm just going to use it to lower the saturation in the highlights. So let's bring this up a little bit, and what it's going to do is it's going to take some of the white areas that we have, or some of the over-saturated areas that we have and push them more towards white. Because when the saturation is very high, the value is very high in one of the channels. And this crosstalk let's those channels sort of take that overspill and push it into luminance instead of over-saturation. Next, let's drop in a Color Lookup node. And what the Color Lookup node allows us to do is it allows us to draw a curve to remap our brightness values. Now, you've probably heard of the film S-Curve, and so let's just introduce a bit of an S-curve into our composite. So as you can see here, that can really change the look and feel of our composite, and, as with everything, we can come in and we can move these points, we can modify them, and you can see here we can have a really drastic change on our composite depending on where we move these. So while I'm using this, I want to increase the contrast a little bit and have it be a little bit brighter, and also bring out some of these darker areas. So play around with this a little bit, and see what kind of a curve you like for this shot. And, of course, this is highly dependent on the shot you have and the type of look you're going for. And you can always, of course, add in new points with Control, Alt. I just wanted to move our midtones over just a little bit, keeping that very dark foreground, dark and forbidding foreground. All right. So next, we can drop in a Grade node. So let's drop in a Grade. And let's see if we have any ultra blacks. And it looks like we have some pretty dark areas, but we don't have any blacks yet. We do not have any pure black. We have values that are very low, but they're not there yet. So let's increase our black point just a little bit to introduce some of those 0 areas. And you can see how much we've introduced by turning off Black Clamp and taking a look at the resulting areas. Now, you'll notice that even these areas that are not black-- we have introduced a bit of a color shift by setting the blue channel to a negative value. So we can turn Black Clamp on, and that negative value will disappear. So play with this black point. It depends on what kind of a shot and how strong we're pushing this to see where we should set this black point. And, of course, we also have control over the white point. We can lower this to make it brighter. We can raise it to make the entire scene darker. And so let's just raise this a little bit to darken the scene some, and sort of, again, bring in some of the darkness that this transforming robot barreling down upon us is going to give us. Now, finally, we can add in a little bit of a Gamma Shift down. Now, this is a little bit strong, so you're going to always merge this back and forth and see right where your tolerance is for how far we push this composite. And it looks like about 0.55 is right of the edge where I think it's a little bit too strong. And we might actually want to come in and decrease a few of these values, or a few of these changes, just to make them a little less strong. Now, for this shot, we wanted a very heavy green grade to sort of give it a mechanical feel. So let's grab a green here, and let's just introduce some saturation gain into this. And we want to be careful, because we still want some of these orange spots, but we want a very mechanical and green feel to the shot when we are being attacked by this. Because a green sort of is alien, it feels mechanical, it feels strange. So when we have this barreling down on us, again, we want this to have a sort of a green mechanical feel. OK, so this is looking pretty good. Now, this looks good at the end here, when we just have the robot on top of the sky. But let's take a look at what this looks like at the beginning, because this might be too strong of a grade for the beginning of the shot, where we have very heavy foreground-background integration and sort of mixing. Now, this is, again, a very heavy grade, and I don't really like it for the beginning. So what we can do is we can evolve this shot by changing the grade as time goes on. So close to when we're beginning the transformation, we can turn our grade off so that we have our original color scheme. And then once it begins transforming and begins coming at us, it now gets this higher or this stronger color grade. So let's key these on. And this, of course, is very dependent on the project, dependent on the shot, depending on what you're trying to get out of this. And so around 104, 103, let's grade it on. And let's maybe come back to Frame 49. We want to do mid-transition, to where the attack is happening, to mix this back in. So the color correction, with the green tint-- I'm probably going to pull that all the way back. The grade, I kind of like it, actually. I might pull it back just a little bit. It's a little bit strong for the beginning here. And then, as the transformation happens, we have this green tint coming in where the transforming robot is coming at us and beginning to attack us. So remember that you can animate and key these things to help set the mood or help change the mood depending on the shot and depending on how everything is moving and sort of the emotion and the feeling you want to create from this shot. OK. And I always like to jump around. This grade is still just a little bit too strong for me here, so let's bump down this black point a little bit, maybe increase the gamma again. Let's see what we're missing here. It seems like maybe our color lookup is pulling things too far down at the beginning, so let's maybe pull that up just a little bit. As you can see here, color correction is a pretty complex operation, especially when using multiple nodes. So you kind of have to see everything or think about the entire transformation that's happening with your shot whenever dealing with these changes. And let's see if the Crosstalk looks better later on. Let's see here. I don't really like the super saturation that we're getting in some of these areas, and the Crosstalk is a great way to sort of push those towards more normal values. I like how this came out, and I think with the Crosstalk ending this, we might be able to push this grade just a little bit further. Let's take a look here. OK. So this is looking pretty nice. OK. I think I like that. Let's take a look at our color correction here and see if that is working out for us. And, of course, we could animate the Crosstalk or the Color Lookup node, but in this case, I decided not to, doing most of the heavy lifting or the changing with the Grade and the Color Correct and having a base Color Correct with the Color Lookup node-- sort of controlling that initial look. OK. So I like how this came out. So in the next lesson, let's wrap this project up by taking a look at the last few pieces we need to add on-- light wrap, chromatic aberration, grain. We need to check our frame edges because we probably need to increase the scale of the transform during highly motion blurred areas and so on and so forth. So in the next lesson, let's take a look at how we can wrap this up by adding on those little tweaks that really sell your shot.