Company3, Tinting blacks/neutrals, Contemporary blue look

[Rihards Sarma]

Hi folks.

I've been chasing and trying to understand how to achieve a certain blue look very so often seen from the top shelf houses and their colorists.

I will use references from a music video, YG -Scared Money

This was graded by one of the senior colorists at Company3, Joseph Bicknell. https://www.company3.com/artists/joseph-bicknell/

While they don't seem to be very eager to disclose whatever techniques they use, there is a finite amount of techniques that can be utilised and I suppose they are not wizards, well arguably at least.

I've tried various acrobatics with curves and color spaces, LGG bouncing, RGB mixer, and color warper which got me the closest.

I'm curious how you guys would approach this sort of challenge?

Please check out the references.
Notice the blue tinting in neutrals as well as the overall blue tone.

Ref.2

Ref. 3

My Results, Color Warper + CST+Balance+PFE 2393

CST+Balance+PFE 2393

Node Tree and Color Warper Adjustment

 

[Adeyemi Ibikunle]

You dont need more than two nodes to achieve this look, apart from the first one where you balance. Making three in total.
You also dont need extras like plugins or colour space transform.

First of all.. The blue is secondary. Use your hue vs hue to change the primary blues to cyan green.

Add cyan green to ur shadows. And some red to your midtone. Add a little warmth to your highlight towards the yellow green palette, then desaturate it (your highlight) with lum vs sat.

Its a complimentary colour scheme. Red and cyan.

You might also want to shift the red to a slightly megenta hue using hue vs hue.

Yes the grade is nice, but the photography is great.

 

[Rihards Sarma]

You dont need more than two nodes to achieve this look, apart from the first one where you balance. Making three in total.
You also dont need extras like plugins or colour space transform.

First of all.. The blue is secondary. Use your hue vs hue to change the primary blues to cyan green.

Add cyan green to ur shadows. And some red to your midtone. Add a little warmth to your highlight towards the yellow green palette, then desaturate it (your highlight) with lum vs sat.

Its a complimentary colour scheme. Red and cyan.

You might also want to shift the red to a slightly megenta hue using hue vs hue.

Thanks. Feel free to share the visuals of your workflow with us.

 

[Adeyemi Ibikunle]

Send me a clip of your video.

 

[Ryan McNeal]

I think based on the reference from your video provided, there is not enough exposure separation between the subjects face and the shadows of the image, and thats where that cyan-blue needs to go, so you aren't getting that nice separation of cool shadows warm highlights. I agree with Adeyemi, these creative looks are deceiving because it seems like something complicated is going on, but they are in actuality fairly simple.

A nice contrast curve and creative primaries are going to get you 80% there. HuevsHue and shaping windows can do the rest. No need for luts, transfers, qualifiers, or any of that. Also dont desat too much, there's still plenty of saturation in the Co3 ref, but they've eliminated and merged extraneous frequencies of hues so that it is a very simplified color pallet. Production design and location are both doing the heavy lifting there.

 

[Rihards Sarma]

Send me a clip of your video.

I'm sure a still would suffice to illustrate your point?

 

[Ryan McNeal]

I took a look at your still.

Couple things:
- Image is compressed, hard to get a clean look with the blocking, used grain to combat (Joseph prolly used grain, he usually does, difficult to say with the Youtube compression).
- 422 color vs 444. As a result, the image is overly responsive, so uphill battle on retaining pitch colors with smooth roll off
- As noted previously, exposure on the face is under compared to the comparison ref. As a result, I had to separate mid-tones and shadows a lot to get a similar shadow roll-off on subject.
- A lot of use of curves to reign in the desired hues and remove/merge the correct ones. Key curve here was the luma vs sat to remove sat from highlights (more towards film aesthetic in that regard)

Attaching my attempt as well as the DRX so you can see the nodes. Here's what I would do if a client had asked me to emulate that look (corrected for subject similarity):

 

[Alex Zolotarev]

Src is low quality, but anyway)

 

[Kemalettin Sert]

also i remember he was on this forum

 

[Kye Leslie]

I see this look all the time on shows. It's a normal orange/teal grade, but the detail that stands out is that the teal hue rotates as it goes towards the shadows and the darker it goes the more towards navy blue and away from green it rotates.

This video by Juan Melara explains one method in detail:

I'm also not sure, but the Kodak 2383 LUT might do it for you if you were also chasing a film emulation look as well. The 2383 has much more orange/teal than the 2393 I've found.

 

[Kemalettin Sert]

Let me upload the screenshots REDs look different on my monitor compared to the screenshots you guys shared.

 

[Rajneesh Kassin]

@Stefan Ringelschwandtner dissects these looks on his MonoNodes.com website all the time, and his technique is very clever and interesting. If you take a finished shot like this and then make it look "normal," you can (to some degree) reverse engineer what was done.

I can tell you the original "color contrast" orange/teal look was popularized by CO3's Stefan Sonnenfeld more than 25 years ago with commercials and music videos. Back then, we were using daVinci 2K, long before Resolve, so the techniques were simpler than you might imagine. Having great art direction and good lighting helps.

 

[Kye Leslie]

I can tell you the original "color contrast" orange/teal look was popularized by CO3's Stefan Sonnenfeld more than 25 years ago with commercials and music videos. Back then, we were using daVinci 2K, long before Resolve, so the techniques were simpler than you might imagine. Having great art direction and good lighting helps.

It's also a look that occurs in nature. At sunset for example, things directly lit by the sun will be warm and things not directly lit will be bluer as the light illuminating them will have a higher proportion of light from the blue of the sky than reflected from other objects. I've verified this myself - just take a couple of sheets of copy paper outside at sunset, put one facing sun and one facing away and take a RAW photo and crank up the saturation - instant orange/teal.

 

[Adeyemi Ibikunle]

This video by Juan Melara explains one method in

This has become even way too complicated for my liking.

 

[Kemalettin Sert]

BTS photos

 

[Kye Leslie]

This has become even way too complicated for my liking.

The basic look is two nodes, the skin blending node is one more, then it's look adjustment and fine-tuning.

If that's too many nodes then I'm not sure what to tell you - I thought that kind of node tree was relatively simple and pretty standard.

As a reference, here's a video with Walter Volpatto talking about colour grading and he shows his standard node tree too, which is about 24 nodes. I haven't watched this particular video, but it looks similar to his masterclass which was excellent and if this is anything like it then it's definitely worth watching.

[edit: he starts explaining the node structure about the 15:00 mark]

 

[Rihards Sarma]

I see this look all the time on shows. It's a normal orange/teal grade, but the detail that stands out is that the teal hue rotates as it goes towards the shadows and the darker it goes the more towards navy blue and away from green it rotates.

This video by Juan Melara explains one method in detail:

I'm also not sure, but the Kodak 2383 LUT might do it for you if you were also chasing a film emulation look as well. The 2383 has much more orange/teal than the 2393 I've found.

Thanks for linking this Kyle. Juan Melara has a wealth of insight on his channel. Iv'e seen that video many times, it very well illustrates the technique of LGG bouncing. And I agree with what you say about the 2383 PFE which I tried but opted for 2393 as it has slightly brighter reproduction of reds, which BTW were not addressed or the focus at the time of sharing my screen shots so yes my reds are not even close, the focus was on the blacks and neutrals and the tinting in them. And also yes both the 2383 and 2393 have a slight blue push in the shadows but not to the extent of references.

 

[Rihards Sarma]

It's also a look that occurs in nature. At sunset for example, things directly lit by the sun will be warm and things not directly lit will be bluer as the light illuminating them will have a higher proportion of light from the blue of the sky than reflected from other objects. I've verified this myself - just take a couple of sheets of copy paper outside at sunset, put one facing sun and one facing away and take a RAW photo and crank up the saturation - instant orange/teal.

This!

Of course there is a very Michael Bay look there but there's two obvious things going on. The sun is out but its low and the blue sky tints the reflections blue as indicated by red accents. Now when you compare the references and the bts that Kemalettin shared. There is one thing obvious to me. This blue "reflection" is added in artificially but in a very controlled way.

 

[Rihards Sarma]

Src is low quality, but anyway)

Thanks. Would you be willing to share your workflow with us?

 

[Adeyemi Ibikunle]

There is one thing obvious to me. This blue "reflection" is added in artificially but in a very controlled way.

I doubt a blue reflection is added. It all boils down to colour seperation. Tweak ur blues using hue vs hue till its cyan green. Push alot of your shadows towards cyan green, till it starts to wrap around the mid tone, then the the mid tone to dial back some skin.. (Push it the opposite way) .

Use hue vs hue to push ur yellows towards orange.