Saving Private Ryan – Colour Correction

[Kevin Camp]

in addition, stu maschwitz has a great tutorial on doing this technique… it involves using basic color theory to cool the darker tones and warm the lighter tones.

https://www.redgiantsoftware.com/videos/redgianttv/item/23/#

his, of course, uses red giant plugins, but you can adapt it to color finesse, though you can’t push color finesse as far. i’ve also used photshop’s color balance adjustment to do similar effects (and you can push that pretty far), but ae’s color balance effect isn’t as refined, though it may work too.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Jeremy Allen]

With a little tweaking, this old tutorial from Video Copilot may get you close..

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/bleach.php

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.8

C4D 11.5
AE CS5
FCP 7.0.3

[Chris Law]

Being honest I believe that colour finesse 3 can do just as much as red giants plugin if not more. I can always tell what footage has magic bullet looks and I like to variation in my colour correction and to actually say that I corrected the footage rather than paying $100 for some lousy preset that half youtube films use.

Yes I was looking for a saving private ryan look but I would expand on it and change some things and after all my scene was similar in setting and genre.

[Darby Edelen]

Easiest way to get this look quickly with default AE tools is to apply Tint or Tritone, and Curves to an adjustment layer at the top of your comp. Set the adjustment layer’s blend mode to Hard Light (or Soft Light if Hard Light is too intense). You can then tweak this effect with the curves effect.

If you use Tritone you can give the light, midtone and dark colors a new color cast. You can further adjust this color cast with the channels in the Curves effect.

Darby Edelen

[Chris Law]

Thanks for the help. It created a nice desaturated look and still left a bit of the colour which I wanted. Problem is when I add the blue hint it seems to not work very well but anyway I will try some other things.

[Darby Edelen]

Are you using Tritone or Tint to change the color? I usually find that the ‘midtones’ property of Tritone is the best option to add color with this technique. Just change the hue and saturation of the midtone color, and leave the brightness at 50%. Then you can use a Curves adjustment after the Tritone effect to dial in the color/contrast.

The curves effect on the Hard Light adjustment layer does not adjust the overall curves of the scene, but instead adjusts the curves of the adjustment layer (which is then applied to the rest of the scene) so you’ll find that curves adjustments to this layer will have less of an effect than a standard curves effect. You can also add another Adjustment Layer above with only the curves effect applied, this will work more like a standard curves adjustment.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Also, I should suggest trying different permutations of this technique for a given shot. Putting curves before the Tritone effect can be useful. Using Soft Light or Overlay will give you a less heavily contrasted result (which also usually works better when trying to alter the color with Tritone).

Darby Edelen