Going Down The Wrong Path

We’ve all been there. Spending what seems like an eternity grading a problem scene. The minutes drip by like Chinese Water Torture but still nobody is prepared to sign off on that look.

So you add more warmth. You step back on the greens. You darken the left side of the screen and brighten the right side. You boost the highlights, obviously, and you feather the shadows (nobody knows quite what this means but everyone agrees it needs to be done).

Since it’s still not working, you give the talent a little extra eye light and you reduce the slight glare on his nostrils. Still nope. So out of sheer desperation you slap on a huge vignette and then you … you get the picture.

But that picture still doesn’t look right. For some inexplicable reason the damned scene doesn’t match any of the others you’ve already graded.

The clients love the previous shots. The previous shots look like the Garden of Eden in cherry blossom season. But the shot we’re currently working on might as well be Hell’s parking lot in mid-December. All you did was adjust a few parameters and now it’s total chaos. How did the session end up here?

Of course, even the slightest of changes can have an enormous knock-on effect. “Feathering the shadows,” for instance, washes everything else out. So you try to compensate for that by finessing the luminance and increasing the overall saturation. But now it’s starting to look a little cartoonish. So you compensate for that with more contrast and decreasing the saturation in just the mid-tones. Hmm. That didn’t work all. Now it just looks weird.

Clearly, you’ve gone down the wrong path and got yourself lost in the color grading wilderness. You can almost hear the ominous twang of a Hillbilly banjo on the audio track timeline. But it’s being drowned out by the executive producer’s sighs and groans. Alas, this time consuming detour was definitely not in the budget. Are we going to have to pitch a tent and come back to this tomorrow?

The best thing to do in this situation is to return to base camp ASAP. Turn off all the color nodes and FX until all that remains is your primary set-up. This is the color grading equivalent of realizing you were following the 20 Best Hikes In Appalachia maps when you should have been consulting Street Guide to NYC.

At this point, when the color and contrast are back at their original settings, at least one of the clients will say. “That looks good. What did you do?”

“I’m trying something else,” you reply, hoping they don’t notice you’ve simply erased all the labors of the past half-hour in favor of what came out of the camera.

“I like it,” everyone says, and you are the hero who saved not only the day but also the producer’s bottom line. Even more so when you add just the tiniest amount of warmth and practically invisible vignette, while keeping a keen eye on your grading GPS. “Yeah,” everyone agrees. “Let’s move on.”