The Secret to Great Color In a Photograph or Film: Post VS Production Design

Of all the comments my work has received over the years, one of the most common has been about the colors. I have to admit, I'm actually a "color junkie" of sorts - I've not only been the Director of Photography on all the films I've lensed, but also the colorist on about 99% of them as well! I'm so into/worried about color that one of the first things I mention when taking on a film related job is that my entire demo reel (which is what nets me all of my work it seems) was not only lit by myself, but also colorized as well. That usually seals the deal. So why am I so anal about being not only the DP, but also the colorist? It's because I understand where great color comes from. Many people erroneously believe post production is "where the magic comes from" - and yes a lot of great coloring effects are available in post, but I feel like most people are REALLY missing out by ignoring what I feel is the true secret to great color: PRODUCTION DESIGN! I can't tell you how many times I've heard of skies, clothing, even eyeballs having their colors not just tweeked, but completely changed in post. A red hat becomes a blue hat for example, etc...  Wouldn't it have been a lot easier to just have had the person wearing a blue hat in the first place? My point exactly. I really believe the first place you should start when it comes to color is production design. If you want muted pastel colors, actually shoot muted pastels! Nothing looks more genuine than an image that starts with authentic colors. Post is important, but I see post more as the next step in the color process, and having a strong understanding of what can happen to colors in post will affect your color choices in the real world your shooting.... See where I'm going with this? It's a kind of duality, yet most people think color is strictly just a post production thing. I've provided an example of careful production design from my latest commercial stock photo shoot. Every color in this image was planned out. Notice how even though the post processing of the image changes, the image, from a color stand point, continues to work. In other words, all the colors still look like they "go together". It's important to note that the only thing I did in the first two color correction examples to change the color was adjust the images white balance - a global color adjustment, meaning all colors are affected - so no funky color channel isolated curve gyrations or selective color adjustments are going on, but I will address that soon enough...

RAW:

Below are two color variations, all of these were done in Camera Raw (CS4), again, using just the white balance to change the colors. One used a very high daylight white balance, the other a somewhat low tungsten white balance. I did use a master RGB curve and a few other tools to tweek contrast, brightness, etc... But all color adjustments were global in nature.

 

Many people like to use more than just a global white balance adjustment to affect an images colors. One of the most popular adjustments is the RGB curves tool, which is kind of a hybrid color adjustment tool in the sense that while all colors can be affected by it, it also has some ability to isolate certain tones, how much depends on the type of curves you draw out. For example, you might want to give all the bright highlights of an image a distinct color cast while leaving the rest of the image unaffected. Even with the changes that can occur by using a tool like RGB curves, the original production design colors can still work. Below is an example of this same image after being processed using an RGB curve adjustment layer in Photoshop CS4. The curve settings are pictured next to it.   I used the tool to accentuate brighter blues in the image, but I also ended up affecting all the other colors that had the same tonality, like some of the skin tones for example. If I were very bent on using this type of post process for a scene, but didn't like the way skin tones were affected, I would need to adjust the actors makeup on set to compensate for something I knew was going to become problematic in post (ie, by warming their skin tone up more in anticipation of loosing a lot of warmth in post...). Remember, good color is a duality, a mix of production design and post processes. Being an experienced colorist, I'm well aware of other post tools and techniques I can use to solve this problem, but it makes you think... What is the most cost effective solution to this problem? The answer could swing many ways depending on the budget of the project, and how complex the entire post solution is VS the on set production design solution. This is why a good film production conducts tests where various aspects of production design are lit, filmed, and post processed. Generally speaking, color correction will cost less if you can avoid complicated selective color adjustments, especially anything involving a lot of moving masks. By now my position should be fairly well understood about the importance of production design, and its subsequent relationship with color post processing. I would like to leave you with a small story about how important it is to understand this relationship, even when you have millions of dollars in your budget. Lord of The Rings, a block buster trilogy shot by DP Andrew Lesnie, had a big color problem. Do you remember what color Aaragorn's cloak was? If you do, I bet you'll say black or gray. The reality is that it's actually olive drab green in not only the novels, but also in all of the action figure products, etc... So why is it black/gray looking in the film? Simple. There was a bit of pride on the part of the costume designer. She choose a fabric she really loved, which was the right color in real life, but the DP had warned her to use a different fabric... because he knew that after it went threw post processing, it would no longer look olive drab green. If only she had listened to the DP. Blog RSS