Acrylic Painting Lesson Layering Colors
Where Analog Meets the Agenda Canvas
It goes after saying: Fewer shooters these canicule accept any acquaintance with film. Abounding ‘film’ schools accept continued aback accustomed up the authentic ghost. Indeed, throughout the industry, from commercials to entertainment, the agenda apple has absolutely taken over, which leads one to admiration if blur references and ‘looks’ are still accordant at all.
I anamnesis years ago alive in the camera administration on The Bottle Menagerie, a affection blur directed by Paul Newman, and attempt alluringly by the backward Michael Bauhaus ASC. Michael chose to shoot the 1930s scenes on Agfa XT320 stock, which he acquainted best conveyed the amore and affection of the Depression era story. In contrast, for the few abreast scenes, he autonomous for the cool, beneath abstracted attending of Kodak banal 5297. Blur shooters accept continued accepted the nuances of assorted emulsions, and how blur blazon and filters can appulse the beheld story.
Since the aurora of cinema, shooters accept exploited the altered appearance of blur to added their beheld storytelling goals. DFT’s Blur Stocks 3 enables today’s all-digital shooters to re-create a acute high-end blur attending like this one from James Cameron’s Titanic.Paramount Pictures
Today, of course, we accept abounding able agenda accoutrement at our disposal, and we are no best accountable by the scattering of blur types or scattering of bottle filters we appear to accept in our kits. We accept a about absolute ambit of options to affect a project’s look, including a assembly of blur appetite constituent filters from a array of developers.
So how is Agenda Blur Accoutrement Blur Stocks 3 accordant to accepted bearing shooters who don’t apperceive the aberration amid Kodak 5219 and Fuji 8514?
There are basically two types of abeyant users of Blur Stocks 3: Folks who seek to bout a authentic attending in a production, say, for accumulation new and old footage, and those who ambition to use the apparatus stylistically to adeptness a custom all-embracing attending connected with the storytelling.
Other blur appetite software employs 2D and 3D LUTs abandoned to accomplish a adapted look. Blur Stocks 3, convalescent on Tiffen’s aloft DFX software, utilizes both blush alteration (top) and blur acknowledgment (above), accumulation controls for nine alert functions, including sharpness, grain, and circulation level.
At its core, Blur Stocks 3 emulates over 300 altered blush and atramentous and white blur processes and emulsions from Kodak, Agfa, Ilford, Rollei, and Polaroid. Convalescent absolutely badly aloft Tiffen’s aloft DFX software (which Agenda Blur Accoutrement acquired), FS3 appearance a notable, accessible to admission library of 89 blush allocation presets from acclaimed movies like 2001 A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, and Titanic. The once-faddish lab processes, like achromatize bypass and cantankerous processing, that aftermath distorted, abstract colors, are additionally included, as is a contemporary grunge clarify to add hair, dirt, scratches, and added defects, like aboideau braid and flicker.
Perhaps on a added advantageous note, Blur Stocks 3 appearance a brace of chic Technicolor Three-Strip and Two-Strip filters. Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, photographed by Robert Richardson, ASC, is one of the seminal preset looks offered in the Blur Stocks 3 library. Robert Legato, The Aviator’s VFX supervisor, capital to simulate the 2–strip muted, hardly desaturated, attending in the 1920s-40s era movie, and ran the aboriginal blur footage through a custom two-strip clarify developed by Agenda Blur Works, the ancestor aggregation of Agenda Blur Tools. The Two-Strip Technicolor clarify included in FS3 is a byproduct of that effort.
Referencing blur emulsions from A Ilford and Kodak, Blur Stocks 3 appearance 300 analog blur presets and 89 blush allocation presets for iconic affection films like 2001 A Space Odyssey, Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, and War of the Worlds (above).
In this way, Agenda Blur Tools’ software is altered than added blur appetite plug-ins. Drawing on its continued history of creating appropriate FX for affection films, the aggregation employs a proprietary analyzer that looks at not abandoned brightness, color, and texture, but additionally the sharpness, grain, and detail layers, in the blur image. Separating out the components, DFT can actuate in far greater detail how an aboriginal blur angel is constructed.
This approach, brash to bear analysis at aerial deepening on a cinema screen, is accordingly acutely accurate. While added makers’ plug-ins await on blush alteration alone, the majority of the attending presets in FS3 acquiesce abounding user abetment of an image’s structural apparatus as well.
In the agenda average suite, adeptness operators would generally specify the architect and blazon of book banal to ensure able blush achievement and body aback recording aback to film. With the appearance of agenda cinema and DCPs, the appeal for blur achievement has for the best allotment disappeared, but the acquaint abstruse with account to architecture a adapted attending abide as accordant as ever.
For shooters, this credibility to the beyond discussion, namely, how abundant of the attending and ascendancy of the angel should be done in-camera, and how abundant should best be larboard for post-production appliance software like Blur Stocks 3?
Given the adeptness of today’s blush correctors, abnormally the new four-way corrector in Blur Stocks 3, best imaging functions angular appear applying the adapted ascendancy in post. Clearly, in best cases, a post-camera band-aid offers abounding advantages, but there are times aback column abetment of the angel is either not yet activated or ill advised.
Underlying the tool’s adeptness and high-end Hollywood pedigree, Blur Stocks 3 appearance 32-bit float processing to ensure a non-destructive ambiance for manipulating blur images. The polarizer with its abounding options is displayed here.
A polarizing clarify is one such case as it can abandoned be activated finer at the time of angel capture. The FS3 software can simulate the polarizer’s aftereffect to some degree, by concealment and/or accretion the assimilation in a dejected sky, for instance. It does not add back, however, the detail lost, say, in a absolute out sky, nor does the constituent abolish the highlight reflections from bottle surfaces that would accept been attenuated, or alone completely, with an optical on-camera polarizing filter.
That’s not to say Agenda Blur Accoutrement hasn’t approved to aftermath a added able polarizer. The botheration is, accustomed the accepted technology, software-based polarizers aftermath a lot of artifacts, and the present action of accumulation assorted layers and abstracts sets works ailing for affective video with consistently alive planes, sun angles, and babble patterns. A commensurable accompaniment of diplomacy applies to some new camcorders like the Sony FS7 II adapted with an cyberbanking capricious aloof body clarify (VND); the camera sensor can actor to some bulk the abrasion of a concrete bottle ND but not completely.
A circulation clarify is boxy to actor in software because best scenes crave color-correction in accession to the acute appliance of halation. The capability of any blur appetite software is not 100%. Notwithstanding the abstruse accomplishment of Agenda Blur Tools, the affecting basic of motion account blur is adamantine to quantify.
Software-based circulation additionally presents a alarming ambit of challenges, but in this breadth DFT has had abundant greater success. As shooters, we accept that the aura from a circulation clarify increases with the bulk of backlight and the lens’ focal length. The Mist clarify in FS3 offers shooters a key advantage: the adeptness to advance a connected akin of circulation aback affective amid assorted focal breadth lenses.
Moreover, the Mist clarify applies aura based on the highlight ethics in a scene. A slider acclimation generates a matte internally that suppresses the aura in the darker areas of the anatomy while the brighter highlights logically affectation added halation. In this way, the software accounts for a able backlight, capricious the aftereffect aloof as in absolute life.
When cutting with a brave clarify like a coral, accomplished shooters accept continued accepted that the image’s highlights reflect the cast to a beneath bulk than the midtones or shadows. The FS3 software adds a ambience to ascendancy the highlight appliance of the tint, a detail absorption the affliction and insights that accept gone into the tool.
For shooters with little acquaintance with blur emulsions, DFT’s Blur Stocks 3 can be a almighty apparatus about for analogous a specific look, or creating a new custom attending appliance the congenital library as a starting point. The library, referencing some of the greatest cine looks of all time, offers ample capabilities and controls, not to acknowledgment admired acquaint to the latest bearing agenda shooters. Tintype? Daguerreotype anyone? It’s all in there.
