Rediscover The Basics – Saturation

Working Saturation Without Touching The ‘Sat’ Control

Welcome back to Mixing Light for 2015!

A new year brings a new start and as I was making my new year’s resolutions I thought to myself what can I do in the world of color grading?

My answer was to rediscover the basics!

I am guilty of a few things in the grading suite. I find contrast curves that I love and the client loves and keeps using them instead of exploring the image fully.

So my challenge to myself and to all members is to try and challenge your self in January by rethinking about things you take for granted or don’t spend much time thinking about.

Saturation

First up in this challenge series is to think about saturation!

We all think about saturation when looking at a scene but I want you to push the concept further.

Instead of thinking about high saturation or low saturation on a global scale see if you can break it down further.

Look at every single color in the scene and think to yourself how can I build a look by just adjusting the saturation in the scene.

See if you can make your image feel more cinematic or go in the opposite direction and make it more glossy.

In my insight, I used the saturation, hue, and Y only controls which was challenging but a lot of fun.

My Thoughts

Trying this knocked me completely out of my comfort zone!

I felt like my hands were tied and I couldn’t make the image feel as cinematic as I wanted or even push it as glossy as I wanted but it did force me to look at each color in the scene and try to get the best from them.

Check out my insight below to see how I got on

– Dan