Color expert Patrick Palmer of the Adobe SpeedGrade team once showed me two wildly different scenes from a movie (one balmy & sunlit, the other shivering & wet) and asked how many color looks I thought were involved in telling the story. The answer turned out to be “one,” and the changes came simply from adjusting the color temperature. The example drove home the storytelling power of even simple tweaks to color.
This example from Grade in Kansas City demonstrates the impact color can have:
The colorist has shared some technical details via Reddit. [Vimeo] [Via Aravind Krishnaswamy]
Is there something inherent in motion videos that lets them get such remarkable results? Or are the tools significantly different from those in Photoshop? Or is it simply the addition of movement providing the perception of enhanced depth?
One of my most requested still outstanding RetouchPRO LIVE topics is for “color grading”, which drives me a little nuts since I think of it as time-based. But this demo reel does seem to do pulls that would fall apart in Photoshop.
I’ve only just recently seen references to using Speedgrade for still images. Is there some reference that might explain/explore the differences between motion and still color adjustments? Is there someone you might recommend as a guest that could help us get our collective heads around this from a still POV?