Original subtitles

In the filmic look drop down of the color management tab there are a few contrast base looks

to choose from. the default one is puzzlingly named none but actually that's the same thing as the

medium contrast one and then we can climb up and down the contrast ladder by going high contrast,

very high contrast, super duper high contrast and so on. needless to say the base contrast

look plays an important, probably pivotal role in the image formation so it cannot be overlooked.

it is also worth mentioning that the adjustments that we do in the color management tab are applied

after the post-processing chain, basically they are applied on display transform, the last step in

the rendering pipeline and of course we also have the RGB curves there, the difference between this

tab and the RGB Curves in the Blender compositor is that the RGB curves from the color management

tab are applied the last as we have just said, as a neat bonus it doesn't have to be rendered, it is

applied in real time, that's why I love adjusting contrast and for that matter adjusting the RGB

base curves look right from this menu without even going into post-processing, well at least

as a look and feel preview. I *love* doing that. it is especially attractive in my opinion for mocking up

a specific look by curving the red green and blue channels individually, for example we can take away

some greens from the shadowy areas of the image and boost some greens in the highlights instead.

better to stay away from the acidic adjustments and just keep it subtle. and going along the

same line, maybe the shadows could benefit from less blue, which would then go into highlights.

so something like that anyway. I usually use it as a way of quickly previewing the look

I'm aiming for before even touching the post pro nodes, I tend to think about such curving

of digital red green and blue channels as trying to emulate the color idiosyncrasies of film, as

we know the color layers of film were designed in such way to display a very non-linear interesting

behavior depending on the part of the wavelength that hit the film, so it's fairly interesting to

think of it in such way as to emulate a specific film look let's say. actually thinking of it, maybe

we should make a separate video on film emulation at some point, that's such an interesting subject.

not to take away the importance of a proper color balance via the color balance node in the Blender

compositor though. let's make some room... and Shift A then and add the color, color balance node, because

the Lift Gamma Gain mode is slightly problematic for the reasons we won't go into, the Offset Power

Slope node is the way to go. the three sliders, offset, power and slope allow you to affect the

hue in the given tonal range. the offset affects the shadows the strongest, the power affects the

mid tones, while the slope affects the highlights the strongest. the grayscale slider in each of the

bends is yet another way of adjusting the contrast. so here for example I boosted the

contrast ever so slightly and now I'm about to shift the hue of the mid tones to a certain color,

I'm thinking about creating the complementary contrast between the warmer mid-tones and the

cooler highlights, that's a typical trick of enriching the lighting by splitting the mid

tones and the highlights in terms of color temperature, here you can see me adding some

punch to the highlights and by the way if you click the color, the value can be set higher than

two for a more pronounced effect, that doesn't mean that we have to set it higher than two, but we can.

it could be a good idea to cool down the highlights to create the

complementary contrast by pushing this slope color wheel into the cyan areas.

yeah, in my opinion that could work! that could actually work.

so that is our color balance node in the Blender compositor with offset power and slope controls.

too bad it almost never boils down to a singular node, we have built a fairly

elaborate post-processing chain already and the effects of every new node ripples through this

chain, so more often than not after for example tweaking the color balance we may discover that

we now have to adjust the temperature and the tint and maybe something else, it becomes even

more... I wanted to say confusing :) but let's say, interesting and complex if we add the

color management into equation. as you remember we have curved the red green and blue channels

of the Filmic display transform, so we can use that as well on top of everything else to add a

little bit of sophistication. by now I realized out of sudden that I have probably swept the

colors a little bit too far away from our original intention, so I brought some warmth back, so these

are our basic color grading options pretty much, we have one more to go which is situation though.

saturation refers to how *colorful* the color is and when dealing with lighting, the effect of

chromaticity on the overall impression is not to be underestimated obviously.

taken a step back, the better place to plug our saturation node would be just before the color

balance. then we can make the whole colorfulness of the light sources more dim or more pronounced

on the contrary if you would like to. the higher saturation values though can look pretty funky,

it's better to to keep the effect subtle, just like any other effect within the Blended compositor to

be honest. to be on a safer side and not to clip the individual color channels and stuff

like that, sometimes it's more convenient to tweak the light colors instead of tweaking

the saturation slider, so for now I'm gonna M to mute our newly added saturation node.