Publishers note: Team Mixing Light is thrilled to welcome our newest contributor – L.A. based, freelance colorist Cullen Kelly to the team! Cullen’s technical and creative expertise is deep and we’re excited to share his first (of many) tutorials here on Mixing Light. Be sure to welcome Cullen in the comments below. You can read Cullen’s bio and get the link for his website on our About Page.
A Different Way Of Achieving “Colorfulness”
At some point in any grade, you’re going to find you or client want a frame to look more colorful. We most commonly scratch this itch with some form of saturation, but is this always the right choice? Is there any other approach?
One alternative is to increase your color separation, meaning the extent to which the dominant colors in your frame contrast against one another.
The greater this contrast, the more separation, and the greater ‘colorfulness’ we perceive. Learning to assess and increase an image’s color separation is one of the most valuable tools you can add to your kit as a colorist, and it opens up a whole new realm of imaginative possibilities beyond making a simple saturation adjustment.
In this Insight I’ll show you three techniques for increasing color separation:
- Refining your image’s baseline color temperature to find the “sweet spot” for maximum separation
- Using custom curves to increase color separation across your image’s tonal regions
- Using the Hue vs Lum tool to increase separation by adjusting the luminance of a particular hue
If you have any questions, comments or something to add to the discussion please use the comments below
-Cullen
