Working with Looks

     Working with different film looks is never easy. because you have to figure out what the film's colorist did to achieve the looks that you're seeing. For this training, we are given tasked to try copying the looks of Fast and the Furious 7. 

     This is just one of the looks in the film that I tried to re create. I will be applying the above look to the image  below.

Here are my nodes.

     So first, I balanced the image then I created a parallel node. The reason why I used the parallel node is to apply the colours separately, I applied orange tones on nodes 2 and 5, but I did more on node 5. Blue tones in node 4. After some tweaking with the tools I applied a vignette to give the viewers some focus.

And here's the after image. I did also some color boost and saturation to really make it look like sunny.

     In this scene, they applied the orange and teal look to make the inside shots cooler. But as you can see, the skin tones are not saturated. It looks natural. I'm going to try to apply this look to the image below. 

Here are my nodes.

     As you can see from my nodes, I only used 4 nodes to achieved the look. Sometimes it works on a few nodes sometimes more, it depends on what look is it or what the client wants to see.  After balancing the image, I add some colours. To achieve this look, first, I dragged the gain to blue then the gamma to orange/yellow. Then I did some color adjusting to the skin by adding color boost, saturation and also manipulating the whole image using Hue vs. Hue. 

     I increased the contrast as well to darken it a bit. Then I applied vignette's for the face to lighten it a bit and for the background so that the talent will be the focus of the scene. For me it's not that perfect but at least I manage to do a look closer to my source.