For review, complementary colors are:
Red and green;
Yellow and purple;
Blue and orange.
One of the rules we learn as painters is that color opposites cancel each other out when mixed. In other words, when we combine a pair of complementary colors on our palette, the original or parent colors lose their intensity or chroma. They mix into a black or brown.
When you study each of these chromatic scales, you can see how just a small amount of the complementary color starts to de-saturate the parent color; the intensity of the color or chroma immediately begins to decrease when its complement is added.
The big change that digitization made was it made it much easier to apply a single color scheme to a bunch of different scenes at once. The more of a movie you can make look good with a single scheme, the less work you have to do. Also, as filmmakers are bringing many different film formats together in a single movie, applying a uniform color scheme helps tie them together.
One way to figure out what will look good is to figure out what the common denominator is in the majority of your scenes. And it turns out that actors are in most scenes. And actors are usually human. And humans are orange, at least sort of!
Most skin tones fall somewhere between pale peach and dark, dark brown, leaving them squarely in the orange segment of any color wheel. Blue and cyan are squarely on the opposite side of the wheel.
Unlike other pairs of complementary colors, fiery orange and cool blue are strongly associated with opposing concepts — fire and ice, earth and sky, land and sea, day and night, invested humanism vs. elegant indifference, good old fashioned explosions vs. futuristic science stuff. It’s a trope because it’s used on purpose, and it does something.
Red is the color of fire and blood, so it is associated with energy, war, danger, strength, power, determination as well as passion, desire, and love.
Orange
Orange combines the energy of red and the happiness of yellow. It is associated with joy, sunshine, and the tropics. Orange represents enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, determination, attraction, success, encouragement, and stimulation.
Yellow
Yellow is the color of sunshine. It’s associated with joy, happiness, intellect, and energy.
Green
Green is the color of nature. It symbolizes growth, harmony, freshness, and fertility. Green has strong emotional correspondence with safety. Dark green is also commonly associated with money.
Blue
Blue is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, and heaven.
Purple combines the stability of blue and the energy of red. Purple is associated with royalty. It symbolizes power, nobility, luxury, and ambition. It conveys wealth and extravagance. Purple is associated with wisdom, dignity, independence, creativity, mystery, and magic.
White
White is associated with light, goodness, innocence, purity, and virginity. It is considered to be the color of perfection.
Black
Black is associated with power, elegance, formality, death, evil, and mystery.
The monochromatic color scheme uses variations in lightness and saturation of a single color. This scheme looks clean and elegant. Monochromatic colors go well together, producing a soothing effect. The monochromatic scheme is very easy on the eyes, especially with blue or green hues.
Analogous Color Scheme
The analogous color scheme uses colors that are adjacent to each other on the color wheel. One color is used as a dominant color while others are used to enrich the scheme. The analogous scheme is similar to the monochromatic, but offers more nuances.
Complementary Color Scheme
The complementary color scheme consists of two colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel. This scheme looks best when you place a warm color against a cool color, for example, red versus green-blue. This scheme is intrinsically high-contrast.
Split Complementary Color Scheme
The split complementary scheme is a variation of the standard complementary scheme. It uses a color and the two colors adjacent to its complementary. This provides high contrast without the strong tension of the complementary scheme.
Triadic Color Scheme
The triadic color scheme uses three colors equally spaced around the color wheel. This scheme is popular among artists because it offers strong visual contrast while retaining harmony and color richness. The triadic scheme is not as contrasting as the complementary scheme, but it looks more balanced and harmonious.
Tetradic (Double Complementary) Color Scheme
The tetradic (double complementary) scheme is the most varied because it uses two complementary color pairs. This scheme is hard to harmonize; if all four hues are used in equal amounts, the scheme may look unbalanced, so you should choose a color to be dominant or subdue the colors.
You need to do is drag and drop your footage into After Effects. You want to set your project settings so that you are working in a 16bit or 32bit depth. The reason you do this is so that when you add effects and grade your footage, you are not limited to the 8 bit color values (0-255).
When you add your footage to the timeline, the first thing you should do is denoise the footage. The best consumer noise removal tool out there right now is a software called Neat Video. By removing digital noise, you will somewhat mitigate the ugly digital look of your footage, and also have the ability to edit your footage more aggressively. When you denoise your footage, you introduce banding. The reason for this is that areas with subtle gradients previously had variation in the color (noise), now that the variation has been removed, those subtle gradients are more solid/constant making banding more apparent. To remedy this problem we have several options:
Add color grain
Blur individual channels
Use the ramp scatter effect
A combination of all three
I recommend playing around with all three options and seeing what produces the best results. After you have cleaned up your footage, you are ready for FilmConvert.
FilmConvert takes your DSLR footage, and transforms it to look as if the footage was shot on film stock. This is achieved by applying grain, and messing with the colors. You can use it as a stand alone software or as a plug in. The color adjustments is simply to make it look as if you shot the footage strait to a film stock and not to a digital camera and is not intended to be a substitute for color grading.
By now your footage should be free of ugly digital artifacts, have the properties of whatever film stock you chose to mimic, and ready to be color graded in a 16 or 32bit color depth.
Color Grade Your Footage
If you plan on grading in Davinci Resolve (which is free and really cool), render out your After Effects project in one of three formats:
DPX
TIFF
Cineform
ProRes
Uncompressed native (h.264 .MOV for Canon)
By rendering your video in DPX or TIFF, you avoid degrading your video quality via compression. Exporting DPX files is a more advanced option. If you don’t know what you are doing, you can easily screw up your files when rendering them out. I would not recommend using DPX unless you already know what it is and how to use it. TIFF files will be lossless and, like DPX files, result in extremely large file sizes. If you don’t have the hardware to handle it, opt for Cineform or ProRes. Cineform and ProRes are the two most popular intermediate codecs for amateur filmmakers. If you plan to stay in After Effects, then just leave the footage alone, proceed to the next step with your FilmConvert adjusted footage.
If you want to get even fancier, let Adobe Media Encoder handle all the encoding. In general, working in lossless is a good idea if you are doing professional/paid/commercial work. If you are uploading to Vimeo or Youtube just for non commercial reasons, it is a waste of time and resources. You would be better off working with lower quality files, and spending the saved time and headaches on shooting more footage. My recommendation is this: use cineform, or just work with the original files until the final render.
The Film Look Color:
Today everything is greenish/bluish. I think if you are going for a big budget, crime, thriller, action, or political thriller, than this look is fine. But don’t over do it on the blue/green. If you saw my film look examples or my Criterion look examples, you will see that this is not the look we are going for in most cases. The everything is blue except for skin fad is something that has only become popular in recent years. If you look at older films, you will see that they don’t have this crazy color grading. Here is what the current trend looks like:
Adding Film Grain:
After you have finished color grading your footage, you should add a little bit of extra film grain. The reason I prefer to add even more grain (remember, we dithered the footage with grain, then FilmConvert added additional grain) is because I upload my videos to the internet. And if you read my page about YouTube and Vimeo compression, you will see that when you upload your file, it gets heavily compressed. I often notice that the grain I added to my footage does not show up very well on the internet, so by adding more grain than usual, I am anticipating the effects of compression. I recommended using the film grain provided by Rgrain or Garilla Grain for this job. Both Rgrain and Gorilla Grain are cheap solutions for getting good looking grain. You get multiple grain styles packaged as video loops. By using video loops, you make rendering and editing much less stressful on your computer hardware. If you want film grain that is real and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, buy Grain35 by CrumplePop. If you want grain that is even better than Grain35, go with CineGrain or IndieScans. CineGrain and IndieScans provide robust packages of very high quality film grains that are very easy to edit. Unfortunately their prices are too steep for amateur filmmakers working with tiny budgets.
Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
White
Black
NOTES 