SEEKING ADVICE FOR LOOK DEVELOPMENT

[Muhammad Syed]

Hello Mates,
I am looking for serious advice or guidance on look development. The pictures I shared were colored by one of my favourite colorists, Mahmoud Ali. I have been studying his grades and trying to achieve the same smooth effect that his stills have. No matter what I try, I can’t get that result. Can anyone explain how he makes the entire frame look so smooth, especially the highlights?

 

[Jason Myres]

These are nice stills. So, Step 1: Shoot beautiful images with great production design. To guess on the grade, I would say these were very carefully denoised. They are clean, but not heavily smoothed (rubber duck) looking. Assuming you were using Resolve, you could use temporal noise reduction or even better do three separate noise reduction passes on high/mid/low keys to give you more control. Denoise just until you see it, then back off a tick.

The highlights almost have a glimmerglass like look to them where highlights are slightly soft, but the rest of the frame remains sharp. You could try this with a soft highlight key plus Halation or Glow in Resolve. After that possibly a little bit of mid-tone sharpen along with a soft contrast curve to tread that line between dense and lifted.

Regardless of all that though, keep Step 1 in mind. It all starts there.

 

[Muhammad Syed]

These are nice stills. So, Step 1: Shoot beautiful images with great production design. To guess on the grade, I would say these were very carefully denoised. They are clean, but not heavily smoothed (rubber duck) looking. Assuming you were using Resolve, you could use temporal noise reduction or even better do three separate noise reduction passes on high/mid/low keys to give you more control. Denoise just until you see it, then back off a tick.

The highlights almost have a glimmerglass like look to them where highlights are slightly soft, but the rest of the frame remains sharp. You could try this with a soft highlight key plus Halation or Glow in Resolve. After that possibly a little bit of mid-tone sharpen along with a soft contrast curve to tread that line between dense and lifted.

Regardless of all that though, keep Step 1 in mind. It all starts there.

Thank you for your advice

 

[Rajneesh Kassin]

So much depends on lighting, art direction, and exposure, it's no simple matter to make a completely different shot look like another. Having said that, for visual inspiration for color and lighting, I'd point to the websites below as having a great repertory of images from films & TV shows:

SHOTDECK - #1 Source of HD Movie and Commercial Screenshots

Created by world renowned cinematographer - Lawrence Sher. ShotDeck is the largest library of high-definition film & commercial images and screengrabs in the world.

shotdeck.com

framedetails — Benjamin Packer BVK

www.benpacker.xyz

Flim – Image Database and Screencap Search Engine for Creative People

Search in the world's biggest image database for free: Flim helps creatives to find the perfect screencap or still to express their creative ideas.

beta.flim.ai

bluscreens

This is a site with blu ray screencaps and movie information

www.bluscreens.net

Timeline of Historical Colors in Photography and Film

is a comprehensive resource for the investigation of film color technology and aesthetics, analysis and restoration, developed and curated by Barbara Flueckiger since 2012. In 2024 Sylvie Pénichon joined the Timeline as a co-curator for still photography.

filmcolors.org

Visual Reference Search

Find the perfect frames with our powerful search. Use advanced text search, explore similar shots, filter by film-specific details, and search by credits.

frameset.app

[FILMGRAB]

film-grab.com

Browse TV Commercials & TV Ads

Browse national TV and streaming ads, and unlock key performance metrics to gain industry insights and monitor competitors.

www.ispot.tv

Movie-Screencaps.com — The Web’s Largest HD Movie Screencap Archive

Browse hundreds of thousands of HD movie screencaps from thousands of films. Updated daily with new galleries, high-quality stills, and movie images.

www.movie-screencaps.com

screenmusings.org is almost here!

The owner of this domain has not yet uploaded their website.

screenmusings.org

http://stills.gallery/

Timeline of Historical Colors in Photography and Film

is a comprehensive resource for the investigation of film color technology and aesthetics, analysis and restoration, developed and curated by Barbara Flueckiger since 2012. In 2024 Sylvie Pénichon joined the Timeline as a co-curator for still photography.

zauberklang.ch

There's some great ideas there, and at least you can get a sense of what's been done in major Hollywood films, TV series, and music videos. Bear in mind that some productions actually commit on the day to using colored gel lighting on set, so not all you see was done by the colorist -- much of it was done in-camera. My experience is if you're dealing with a great DP, you barely need to touch the adjustments: most of the heavy lifting has already been done.

 

[Ryan McNeal]

Control and limit the contrast between the mids and highlights. Check out the two-shot bench still and look at the luminance in the mids vs the specular of the background. The specular and highlight range has been brought down a lot, so the roll-off from mids to highlights is quite smooth in contrast. It is not realistic, but it feels like a painting, where the dynamic range is inherently limited by the medium.

The colorist is doing a similar thing with the bottom of the range as well, but through the lifted toe technique to provide the illusion of low-contrast shadows, while still maintaining some weight there. Notice how all the blacks are well above the actual black bars in luminance. Look at these stills in the waveform scope and try to sculpt your scenes contrast to be similar before working about color.

 

[Tony Sal]

Hello Mates,
I am looking for serious advice or guidance on look development. The pictures I shared were colored by one of my favourite colorists, Mahmoud Ali. I have been studying his grades and trying to achieve the same smooth effect that his stills have. No matter what I try, I can’t get that result. Can anyone explain how he makes the entire frame look so smooth, especially the highlights?

Muhammad,

I suggest contacting Mahmoud directly to ask him about his creative and technical workflow.
Many established professionals are willing to help out the next generation of aspiring colorist and filmmakers. I have been fortunate to chat with several of the LGG forum members who have been more than willing to talk "shop."

 

[Julio Acosta]

Mahoma,

Sugiero contactar directamente con Mahmoud para preguntarle sobre su flujo de trabajo creativo y técnico.
Muchos profesionales consagrados están dispuestos a ayudar a la próxima generación de aspirantes a coloristas y cineastas. He tenido la suerte de charlar con varios miembros del foro LGG que se han mostrado muy dispuestos a hablar de su trabajo.

¡Qué suerte tienes! Nunca he recibido consejos, ayuda ni apoyo sin pagar. Y a veces, incluso pagando, como en Lowepost, consigues algo más que charlas sin sentido sobre cómo lograr las cosas.

 

[Joe Marler]

I realize this is an old thread, but the OP question gets asked a lot. IOW, going only by examination of the final material, how do I produce that look using only color grading tools, and what was the technique?

As already explained, going solely by the final graded shot, it is difficult to determine that. That said, I found a final shot and a matching BTS shot of material Mahmoud Ali graded, and it is informative.

It shows the expected equipment for a mid- to upper-level commercial shoot. There's a Sony FX6, Sachtler Flowtech tripod and head, ARRI Skypanel, and several robust "combo" stands. The stand at bottom left shows a weighted bag, probably full of lead shot, which implies it may be supporting a larger light control device out of frame.

I don't think the monitor on the FX6 is Atomos, so the material is probably internally-recorded 4k 10-bit 4:2:2 XAVC-I (All Intra). That is decent quality, and if used in Resolve Studio, Camera RAW controls are available for color temp, tint, and ISO. Only the FX6/FX9 shooting S-Log3 in Cine EI mode give that feature.

So, going from what we see and some implications of what's out of the frame, significant attention has been given to light control. Had someone grabbed a mirrorless camera and shot the subject walking across an outdoor field, it's unlikely colorist Mahmoud Ali could have achieved his signature look.

Someone could argue, "I saw one of his graded shots from a sandy desert scene; they couldn't have had all that light control equipment in the desert." (1) You don't really know what they used, and (2) It was probably shot at a specific time of day using sun-angle prediction tools like Sun Seeker Pro, and planned for specific sky cover conditions, possibly requiring multiple attempts. Such planning is itself a form of light control. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sun-seeker-pro/id1233920976?mt=12