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color gradient effects
hey everyone,
i’m curious how to achieve a color gradient look that is being used alot lately. it is used quite nicely in the movie “Man On Fire” with Denzel washington. i’ve seen it used in fox sports “Beyond the Glory” as well, and many other places.the look I am describing uses a color gradient, usually red that fades to yellow, then to a cyan color or green, and gently fades into the footage (which is colored normally with no color overlays). Often times it is the sky that is affected most.
How is this look achieved? I have synthetic aperture in AE 6.5, but all i can achieve is color correction or color effects on the entire frame and not a gradual gradient across the entire shot.
Any ideas?
many thanks.
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5 Replies
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Create a layer filled with the gradient colors, stack it on top of the layer you want to affect and use a transfer mode on the gradient layer to blend the two. You can also fade the opacity of the gradient layer to control the amount of colorizing.
Jim Kanter,
Digital Film Institute
http://www.dfilminst.com -
Man on Fire was colored by Stefan at CO3 in a Spirit/DaVinci. One thing I like what Stefan does is use power windows to add touches of color here and there where there wasn’t color before. If you’ll permit me I’m pasting my response from a while back about power windows and how to do them in AE:
This is a standard tool used all the time in film transfer called “Power Windows” all commercials and music videos use them for subtle effect that you don’t directly notice, but a lot of the times (like in this Yamaha spot) they are used dramatically for sky darkening. A power window is a feathered shape that gives the DaVinci another layer of color correction within that shape. In final transfer, we will often use up to 15 power windows in one shot!
So I have created simple power window nodes in Shake, but in AE, it’ll need a little more work.
What a power window truly does is give you additional color correction control whithin a shape so here’s how it would be done in AE:
Have your base footage layer. Color correct it however you wish. Since AE doesn’t have any “good” color correction tools for video internally let’s just say it’s “Curves” that did all the tweaking.
Now to make it true Davinci power windows, we would need an AE tool called “Compound Curves” which would only have the curves effect work on where we gave it a mask (like SHake has on every node!). But it don’t. So we will have to be inconvenienced a bit and copy the footage layer with the curves on it. In the Duplicate (Which should be on the top layer) Create a feathered mask shape. Let’s make it the mask that will “Protect” the color correction you have. So if it is a shot of a guy on a dirt bike, draw an oval around the guy. Now feather the mask heavily (like 100 or so). But you will not see a change because you have masked something over a copy of itself.
Now for the magic. Go back to the bottom layer (your original) and go into the curves and drop the RGB gamma and crush in the blacks a little. Viola! Your sky and surrounding area just darkened. But better yet you have full control. Use the same curves to tweak it’s color or do whatever you wish.
In this scenario we had to copy the color correction and modify it to see a change. However in a real DaVinci or in the Shake node, all you have to do on the second layer of correction is just offset what you want different from zero (no correction). Where as here we are offsetting from the full correction.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com -
tee hee. Do the power windows come with optional power tiers? Not to mention double glazing..:) Had a goo at the davinci website. Impressive looking stuff; i’m presuming mind bendingly expensive, but impressive. Mind you, one thing you can say about adobe; they wouldn’t go charging you a ton of cash for the facility of five extra adjustment layers, not to mention that their forceful masks are bezier adjustable.. go proletariat!
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thanks for the tip…very useful info! thank you very much
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thank you so much for the info…it’s VERY useful and helpful!
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