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Colorama alternative in 32bit Linear working space?
I’ve long been a fan of Colorama for color grading and creating the “look” I’m interested in for my footage. But in 32b Linear color mode, the Colorama effect is difficult to work with my footage (all the dark parts I want to adjust are packed into the last couple degrees of the cycle). Does anyone who’s used Colorama for creating looks have any new favorite effects they’ve migrated to?
For example, if I were going to create the classic “matrix look”, I’d push a little green into my blacks, but let the original color show through on most of the rest of the greyscale spectrum. Is there a more modern solution that will give me that kind of control?
Thanks!
-Greg -
5 Replies
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You grade with Colorama? Wow! Personally, I like Colorista II quite a bit for adjusting color in Ae (though I don’t really like Ae for grading).
When working in 32bpc and feeding linear-encoded images to effect that expects or works best with gamma-encoded input, you can wrap the effect in what I call a “gamma sandwich.” Apply a Levels effect with gamma of 2.2 before and another Levels effect with gamma 0.4545 after.
(With Colorama which is 16b, that could lead to quantization/banding.)
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
I don’t really do color grading for my job, usually, but occasionally an effects shot needs a certain “style” added to it. I haven’t gotten very far into Color Finesse yet, but maybe you can point me in the right direction with an exmaple:
I’d like to isolate a certain portion of the footage’s greyscale spectrum, or maybe even a portion of the hue spectrum, then tweak it’s light/dark, hue, or even alpha channel. In the past I would’ve used Colorama or Hue/Sat. Is there a better package that does this?
Thanks.
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The thing I like about Colorista II vs Color Finesse is that Colorista’s UI, with the exception of its keyer, works entirely in the Effects Control panel; you don’t need to leave the Ae interface to work on the shot.
In both Color Finesse and Colorista, you’d use the effects’ built-in keyers (located under “Secondary” in each) to limit the area you were affecting.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
Bit of a bump: A few alternative color grading programs were mentioned here, but are any of them able to function precisely as Colorama does- as a keyframable circular gradient map? I specifically need to be able to map a linear gradient to either the brightness or hue values of an image. This is useful for spoofing oldschool color cycling-style effects, which is still a nice tool for 2D special effects animation. I’m trying to feed this into another plugin that explicitly requires 32 bit input.
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Colorama is a 16bpc effect so it shouldn’t be too problematic to use it in a 32bpc linear project.
If you want the Colorama effect to treat the source footage as it would in a non-linear project then you’ll need to de-linearize (re-gammify?!) the footage before the Colorama effect. You can do this easily with the Utility > Color Profile Converter effect. With the default Color Management all source footage is converted into the linear working profile, so you can set the Color Profile Converter’s Output Profile to the source profile of the footage to de-linearize it. Example settings might be:
Input Profile – Project Working Space
Output Profile – HDTV (Rec. 709)None of the other parameters should need changing.
The footage will appear washed out in the linear working space but the color code values of the footage will be the same as if the project were not using linear working space. This is valuable because Colorama is expecting perceptually linear (gamma encoded) color values.
Darby Edelen
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