Aaron P Kessler on LinkedIn: Tried a new way to get density/subtractive saturation. It's even more… (2024)

Stop arguing about the NFL kicker and watch this. It’s Friday. Have some fun.

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Tonality is everything. There is deeper processing beyond just basic color balance and HSL corrections. The way the foundation of the image is built can have a drastic effect on the appearance of the image.

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Since my last post was critical of a TAC course, I think it only right that I also post about the positives. So far, I have benefited EXTREMELY from these courses. I feel confident that I can call myself a professional colorist now because of them. It's just that one of the courses advertised that it would teach CMY subtractive and Technicolor and it left me with no effective techniques so I felt very, very disappointed. I thought that this would finally be the end of countless hours of fruitless experiments and it turned out to be otherwise. So if you want to learn to be a good colorist, choose TAC by all means! Just don't expected it to teach you how to emulate Technicolor.

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So, one of the TAC Resolve Training courses I took promised to teach me how to emulate Technicolor. Well it lied. What it showed me was a technical exercise in math/logic that almost always had ZERO base impact on the image. Sure, you could play around with it and get interesting results, but nothing like the beautiful CMY subtractive quality of Technicolor. So I decided to start again with my own experiments. I determined that a conversion from the RGB primaries of my footage to that of CMY was the first step. Cyan needed green and blue color information applied to the red channel luminance, compressed into a pure red hue, and then subtracted from the pure red channel luminance. Repeat for the other two "dyes". Normalize saturation in HSL and then add subtractive sat and density in HSL. Convert COLOR ONLY to rec 709 (this really brought it to life. I've held out and been a purist for a long time and tried to do this conversion on my own). Add some minor hue changes at the end to make it look more "filmic", and there we go. I'm pretty happy with the shifting of the primaries. Not sure if it's correct, but it's a good start. Next, I want to see if I can add color information to the shadows, possibly by inverting the image and then adding saturation there, because Resolve operates in additive RGB I suspect I will get a better result there. What is the moral of this story? You gotta do everything yourself...

This is what movies are supposed to look like.

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Hmm... do the experiences shared here reflect the new norm in the industry?

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Changed the density/saturation technique for my Chroma Deous custom color model. The result is much cleaner than with previous builds. The result is a lovely modern vibrant yet neutral look; I like to think of it as a modern Technicolor. I am VERY curious to see if the new density/subtractive saturation tools in Davinci Resolve 19 yield better results than what I am currently using. But I will probably wait until 19 moves out of beta before I upgrade.

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