I've been working on this for what I think is close to two years now. It's part of a larger color correction process whole. While working on separating out color channels I discovered a potential way of doing true to color day-for-night. Well, not that there's much color at night. Posted is an example. This is steps above my earlier attempts, but I'm still having problems with artifacts/grain/ etc. You can see some of it in the bottom corner as the frame turns to the left. Since I'm just about out of ideas, I figured I'd throw it out there and see what others think.
It was shot one Sunday morning just inside the doors of Becker. I used a t2i with the stock lens. This is pretty much all simple post work done in After Effects. Any ideas are welcome.
Try taking away the golden/warmer tint of the image and instead give it a blue/cooler tint. Simply underexposing the image and giving it a harsh contrast will not give you the look you're desiring When lighting a night exterior the motivated light source for the the area surrounding is usually moonlight which are usually huge 2k-10k lights with CTBs(Color Temperature Blue) on them to simulate that "Cooler" night look.
ReplyDeleteAnd due to the nature of the recording process and codec of the canon DSLRs the more you crush the shadows with harsh contrast, the more digital artifacts will be noticeable. So far as I've seen digital cannot handle the blacks and shadows like film can.
Glad to see you're experimenting with this, let me know if any of the advice I gave helps!
The golden tint is there for the street light. The blue moonlight I prefer using when there isn't any sidewalks or roads.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, I'm not trying to make this look like night time in a movie. I'm going for real night time. Real night is high contrast and the only things you see are what fall into the moon/street light.
I think what I have here is passable, especially after I compressed the hell out of it. But for the sake of perfection I want to try and get every pixel to play nice. Which I'm thinking may require building a new camera rig.