Irfan Post 18b - Correcting the Colours in the night...

(Note - I know a lot of these photos look pretty much the same, and for all you know I could be bulls**tting all of the corrections - but blame jpegs - a nasty codec that strips all humanity and soul from my blog posts...but take a look at the first and the last photos in the post and you will see the greatest difference of before and after)

This blog will look at the colour correcting of Irfan during night scenes, something very different from the last blog post which looked at an outdoor daylight scene.

Here, the grading is a lot more subtle. The whole point of a night scene is that it is dark. There are going to be few problems with digital fade which is often seen during daylight hours where the picture looks washed out. At night, it is the lighting on the set that matter - and thankfully the lighting was good during the shooting of Irfan.

This is the original footage from the prayer scene.



It is actually a beautiful shot, and something I will probably use in the publicity stills (later on). But there were a few additions I added to this shot. Firstly, I tinted the whole picture blue, in fact the whole scene is tinted blue. I wante to give that cold feeling to the audience, a chill, a sense of death. This may sound waffly, but I am a director, waffle is my bread and butter...or my syrup coated waffles...anyways, as part of the mechanics of the plot, this scene is meant to resemble death, and the blue tint across the whole of this segment of the movie for me gives a sense of cold.



Lastly, I put some subtle colours in at the Secondary correction stage. While not clear in this pic, earlier in the clip, when Irfan's face and mosque cap is in shot, I tinted both those features to give a crisper looking Mosque cap and a more vibrant face so we can see the charater's emotions.



You know what, let me back up a few frames in the clip, so you can see the effect the secondary corrections have on the picture quality. This is a shot from the same clip, with the blue tint (primary corrections) only.



And here is that same shot with the secondary corrections now in place. Note the Mosque cap is a lot cleaner while you can see a little more of Irfan's features.



Colour correcting with regards to dark conditions is more subtle. In fact, it is easier. In the daylight, I have to account for the changes in weather, the angle of the sun etc. Night time correction is easiest of all. As it is dark, I am not trying to brighten up (or dull down) the whole picture - hey, it is dark. So the corrections I am making are more focused on subtle points to enhance the story telling aspect. It is more creative, yeah, fun, and less technical as the tech stuff has been done by the lighting crew during the filming.

More fun from the crayon room coming soon...