Orange highlights

[Ryan Mast]

Can you post frame grabs or a DPX file from one of your shots?

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Meteor makes pretty.

[Stig Olsen]

Thanks Ryan, I just sent you an e-mail.

Stig

[Ryan Mast]

Ok, here’s the image from the Britney video I’m using for reference:

And here’s an ungraded still from your video:

Set up a simple parallel node set to do a simple color cast over the whole image, but isolate selected highlights. In the first node, pull the shadows down to green, midtones to cyan to preserve some color differentiation on the floor, and push the highlights up a wee bit to red/magenta:

In the first of these two parallel nodes, pull the shadows down to set black, and adjust midtones to taste. We’re not dealing with the orange highlights yet, just setting overall levels for the image:

For making the orange highlights, I set up a qualifier key and a curves window on a node, and blurred the key and expanded the radius a bit. With the selected area, I pushed up the gamma, lifted the shadows to orange to create a bit of a glow around the window panes, and pushed the highlights even further to orange:

At the end, I’ve also got a node to clamp the saturation to about 50% across the whole image. Not really necessary on this particular shot, but on some of the closeups, this keeps the highlights on skin tone from doing anything too extreme, while still keeping the color I want:

Hope that gets you going in the right direction. In the Britney video you mentioned, they created most of the effect with lighting, but you can fake it to a certain extent in post. I threw this one together pretty quickly, so it’s still Michael Bay-ed pretty hard. Although your reference has its shadows pretty far down to green/cyan, there are a lot of bits of desaturated cyan in the midtones, and they decently preserved the skintones.

—
Meteor makes pretty.

[Stig Olsen]

Thank you Ryan, I did go for a more industrial look. I will post when its finished. I will add some rust and metal colors with flares for the orange pick up.

Stig

[Ryan Mast]

Nice. Yeah post a link when it’s done — I’d love to see it.

—
Meteor makes pretty.

[Stig Olsen]

Hi,

You you watch the film her at our facebook-page – https://www.facebook.com/SheriffFilmCompany

[Eric Mc guire]

Thank you so much Ryan Mast, your lil’ tutorial really helps a lot and totally nails it! – – cheers – –