Creative Grading Techniques for Film and Video: Blurred and Colored Vignettes
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This next technique is another way of using shapes/Power Windows to make some wild iris effects. The basic idea is to use a shape to add a combination of color and/or blur to the outer border of an image. I first pulled this out for a dream-sequence opening in the feature Oral Fixation. Shortly thereafter I also saw the same idea used in 2008’s Wanted (Stephen J. Scott, Supervising Digital Colorist, EFILM) to indicate altered perception for a character’s point of view (POV) shot. This technique works best when you’re using a shape with an extremely soft edge. In the following example, a soft oval is used to limit a Gaussian blur and Gain color balance adjustment toward red to the outer edge of the image (Figure 4.1).
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Figure 4.1 A blurred, colored vignette provides an easily altered sense of reality.
This idea can be combined with an aggressive grade inside of the shape or with the cross-processing simulation technique presented in Chapter 5 to create nonlinear alterations to image color.
In Figure 4.2, a seemingly innocuous establishing shot of a house is lent a faded, vintage air by virtue of two different curve operations messing with the color channels, one inside and one outside of the vignette.
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Figure 4.2 Different cross- processing simulation effects applied to the inside and outside of a vignette. The blurring is already there, courtesy of the moving camera’s motion blur.
Never underestimate the effectiveness of a simple vignette.