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Welcome to a Best Of edition of the Tao Colorist Newsletter
As promised in our last edition, the Tao Newsletter is on its annual August hiatus.
And as also promised, we've pulled together the three most popular articles from each newsletter in the first 6 months of 2017.
Y'all have some pretty good reading tastes!
Enjoy this special edition, as Tao HQ goes back on a deep dive and disappears until after Labor Day.
We'll be back on September 10...
Have a great
August!
Happy Grading!
- patrick
P.S. - In the last edition of this Newsletter I asked for summer reading recommendations. Holy smokes, did I get a ton of responses! When I'm back from vacation I'll share the reading list recommended by our readers.
And I'll also email to thank you all individually.
I was hoping to pull it together for this edition - but it was too much to do before heading out for vacation.
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- You’ll Never See These 4 Classic Films the Same Way Again - “Films of real beauty - from a colour perspective - tend to take colour into consideration in the pre-production stages and have a considered aesthetic throughout.” Colorist Jack McGinity on four films he has used for color inspiration. (lbbonline.com)
- Taming the Outback with DaVinci Resolve - “McClelland cites careful use of Color Boost in DaVinci Resolve Studio’s Color Match palette as a great way to get the most out of the colours of the
outback.” Aussie colorist Deidre McClelland, CSI, on her workflow grading ‘True Blue.’ (digitalmediaworld.tv)
- DIT Workflow: Gold - "In order to help differentiate the lush tropical jungles of Southeast Asia, to the dry wastelands of Nevada, it was decided to shoot our part on 35mm film, and the rest of the film on Arri Alexa." So how does a DIT data wrangle film? Click through to read this amusingly told story. (ditspot.net)
- Colorist Jack Lewars On Manchester By The Sea - "The idea of giving those flashbacks a different look, and perhaps making it easier for audiences to follow the story without moments of confusion, was considered but rejected." Nice write-up. (studiodaily.com)
- White Light Is A Lie - "Our flashes are calibrated to produce white light. But in the real world, white light is a rarity . . the week also
changed the way Sara thought about light, her most important takeaway being this: 'White light is a lie.' " 100% spot on. This is essential reading for anyone who shapes light! Read to the end of the post to learn how to see light, as an exercise. I love this post. (strobist.blogspot.com)
- Color In Nature: Inspiration In Beautiful Bodies Of Water - "It's been said that 'colors are the smiles of nature,' . . . the oceans, seas, rivers and lakes of our world must be joyful entities indeed, as these bodies of beautiful water are practically beaming with an array of shades spanning every realm of the rainbow. Here are a few
of our favorite flowing kaleidoscopes of color" (colourlovers.com)
- Dark Cinematography - "[it] can seem like a bit of a risk to some brands, but what fun is it to play by the rules? Mix it up a little. Be creative . . . Dark is not a bad thing – it’s natural." Plus embedded videos of this colorist's spots featuring this emerging commercial trend.
(robbessette.com)
- Bringing the Past to Life - “Brazilian artist Marina Amaral has used Photoshop to add a new dimension to photographs that had previously only been seen in black and white.” a 21-year-old artist does painstaking research to bring historic black and white photos into stunning color. (dailymail.co.uk)
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- Top 10 Free Alternatives To Expensive Software - DaVinci Resolve holds the number 3 spot on this list. (lifehacker.co.in)
- Review: Windows ProRes Encoder Beta - ProRes on a Windows machine? It's hit or miss if your post-production software can render to ProRes. And mostly, miss. Is this new product a viable solution? “Windows ProRes is a beta product, and it has a few quirks.” Read this in-depth review. (provideocoalition.com)
- Window ProRes Encoder for DaVinci Resolve - currently this encoder only supports Adobe and Mocha Pro. If you scroll down their homepage you can subscribe to be notified when they have DaVinci Resolve support. Or... do nothing and keep
reading this Newsletter every week! We'll definitely let you know when they push it out. (windowsprores.com)
- DaVinci Resolve: Enhance Your Sky In Under Five Minutes - a quick technique. (premiumbeat.com)
- Is It Worth Round-Tripping To Resolve? - in a split screen, watch a 5-shot sequence get graded with Premiere's Lumetri effect with the same sequence round-tripped and graded in DaVinci Resolve.
Is Premiere faster, executing the same moves without the round-trip nonsense? This is not quite a real-world test... but it's pretty good anyway. (studiodaily.com)
- [video] Color Grade Photos with Luminosity Masks -
“The best thing about this 10-minute tutorial is that it makes an advanced post-processing technique available to beginners.” Includes a free Photoshop Action for download. (petapixel.com)
- Overview: DaVinci Resolve 'Micro' and 'Mini' Colorist Control
Surfaces - Scott Simmons does a nice job of taking the close-up images from Blackmagic's website, integrates it with the Press Release and offers his own commentary. The full Grant Petty Press Event revealing these panels is embedded here as well. (provideocoalition.com)
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- This Year's Must-Know Color Trends - “There’s nothing your clients will love more than being on the cutting edge of color trends this year …” See what is trending for graphic designers as they use color to set moods for their clients brands. (creativemarket.com)
- [videos] Accentuating Light With Custom Mattes - thoughts about the work done by colorist Steve Scott on Birdman and The Revenant and the hyper use of mattes to meticulously craft the final image. (robbessette.com)
- HDR: An Introduction - "What is HDR? Why does it matter? Will it last? And how
should we handle it? Kevin Shaw casts some light onto the brights and darks of this tech." (finalcolor.com)
- DI Colorist Joe Gawler On ‘Arrival’ - "We did a preliminary pass through an almost locked picture, with incomplete VFX. He and I had a few days to balance and vibe on some ideas, hoping that we'd be able to come back a couple of weeks later to finish the movie." An interesting interview. (studiodaily.com)
- [podcast] Peter Doyle: Meet the Colorist - he's color graded some of the most popular films of all time, including the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the Harry Potter films, and The Matrix. Listen as he goes one on one with Josh Petok, CSI in the Colorist Podcast. (mixinglight.com)
- Color Inspiration: Coastal Cities In Every Shade - bookmark this for those moments of 'artist block'. (colourlovers.com)
- [videos] Analyzing and Mimicking 16mm Film Grain - "I’d say that 16mm
definitely has a different feel to it. It’s not LogC, that’s for sure. Shadows and highlights behave a bit differently and I feel like the look has to be nailed down during the production more than if you were shooting digital." (robbessette.com)
- Lighting Ratios & False Color - “Ratios are no good for color. You have
to develop your project and understand how the color temperature of lights impacts mood and feeling.” How lighting ratios help cinematographers become more efficient and more effective visual storytellers. Plus good info on using False Color for image evaluation. (wanderingdp.com)
- [video] Interview: Colourist Peter Dolye - he has colour-graded eight of the 30
highest-grossing films of all time. Don't miss the Supervising Colorist at Technicolor talk about the changing craft and technology. He is brilliantly spot-on about modern challenges of our craft amid changing technology. But we're not a fan of the dis-embodied head interview thing, though. (vimeo.com via Lucía Blanco)
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- The Simple Formula To Calculate Video Bitrates - "A codec’s bitrate can seriously affect your workflow, so as a video creator you must be able to understand and calculate video bitrates. This article explains in detail what a bitrate is and how to use it to calculate file sizes." Do you ever render? Then read this. (frame.io)
- DaVinci Resolve Micro Panel Review - a very balanced review of this smallest of Blackmagic's new colorist control surfaces. With good advice if you're considering moving off your Tangents. (provideocoalition.com)
- DaVinci Resolve Micro & Mini Roundup and Review - Jonny Elwyn goes in-depth on BMD’s two new panels. Good round up and links about the Mini panel. He shares personal experience with the Micro, with the best image subtitle on this
subject that I've seen, "Now you can grade in a coffee shop, by a window.". (jonnyelwyn.co.uk)
- DaVinci Resolve: Fix Out-of-Focus Footage With This Simple
Tip - i betch'a there are some experienced Resolve users who don't much venture into the Scaling portion of the blur / sharpen tool shown here. (premiumbeat.com)
- [review] Digital Rebellion’s Pro Maintenance Tools -
"the burden falls on us when we’re at the eleventh hour, and a client is sitting beside us, and the NLE’s not playing nice, and we’ve got to fix it. Well, that’s where Digital Rebellion’s Pro Maintenance Tools (PMT) comes into play!" (provideocoalition.com)
- RED’s New IPP2 Color Processing Pipeline - the camera that changed the film industry is changing the way it processes color in its new cameras. Get a good, clear explanation on the Bayer system, and a bullet list of how that changes in IPP2. Be sure to check out the videos from RED, and the download links for additional information.
(redsharknews.com)
- Five Killer DaVinci Resolve 14 Features - a good rundown with deeper insights written by one of BMD's featured demo artists this year, Steve Hullfish.
A good explanation of what's important to understand about DaVinci Resolve 14. (provideocoalition.com)
- Free Updated DaVinci Resolve 14 Keyboard Cheat-Sheet - "This cheat-sheet is mainly an editing focused
cheat-sheet but I also added the Color and Nodes menus this time but I had to make them smaller to fit everything in two pages. Feel free to download, print and pass these along to anyone that might find them useful." (provideocoalition.com)
- Why Would you Want to Sync Clips in DaVinci Resolve 14? - “First and foremost, it’s free! And extremely powerful… (surpassing) paid programs like PluralEyes in both speed and flexibility.” (blog.frame.io)
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- Color Constancy: This Photo Has No Red Pixels - it's an optical delusion. The key, never mentioned in this article, is the white field surrounding the no-red strawberries informing our brains of the green'ness of the color of the key light. The brain subtracts out the green and the delusion presents itself. (petapixel.com)
- Geoff Boyle: Why RAW Rules - i found this 2013 interview in one of our items this week. It's just as fresh today as it was four years ago. Listen to Geoff awesomely proclaim why RAW rocks. Hint:
It's all about craftsmanship. (vimeo.com)
- On The Set of Rogue One - an interview with DP Greig Fraser, ASC, ACS and some great shots of the set. Including massive dimmable LED lighting banks (with almost zero use of anything else but one set of HMIs). And why he prefers these lights over using gels with traditional lights. (theasc.com via Marc Wielage)
- Creating the color of Hacksaw Ridge - “Keywords were desaturated, Kodachrome and, the phrase “twist the primaries a touch” was used a bit!” Colorist
Trish Cahill discussing the look and workflow on the Oscar nominated film. (filmlight.ltd.uk)
- The Right Color for Every Room - an infographic
(according to color theory) that identifies the effects you can get color by color, room by room. Not mentioned: color suite grey. (homeadvisor.com)
- Colorist Podcast - Dave Abrams, monitor calibrator and owner of Avical, geeks out about HDR, OLED, plasma, LCD
monitors and the importance of calibration, “if you’re just looking for a computer monitor for REC709 HD broadcast work, there’s a lot of options out there.” (mixinglight.com)
- The Big Bang: Color Noir on Film - from the DP of
this indie film, " I think I had 7 different gel colors that I restricted my choices to, then paired them as the scene dictated." Proving that color grading begins in pre-production. And the value of black in anchoring Looks. (shellyjohnsonasc.com)
- Meet the Colorist - “Brimstone was shot on ARRI Alexa XT full-frame raw with ARRI Master Anamorphic primes. We used a full ACES EXR workflow for the VFX, and I graded in ARRI Log C wide gamut.” Martin Klein, who graded the motion picture talks about his workflow and dialing in the look of the film. (studiodaily.com)
- The Science Behind Eye Color - there is more than meets the eye when it comes to eye color. Pretty neat infographic. And check out the famous
anomalies. (framesdirect.com)
- Defining the Cinematic Look - “Many of us talk about “the cinematic look” without defining what it is… Cinematic images are artistic images. They are not reality, they are interpretations of reality.” One filmmaker’s deep dive into exploring cinematic imagery. (provideocoalition.com)
- How Long Will This Grade Take? - “Things that impact on the time quoted are conforming, unfinished VFX shots, cut not locked, the number of cuts in the show, or a director that wants to experiment!“ Warren Eagles, CSI, provides some examples to the age-old question colorists get asked all the time. (redsharknews.com)
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- How Apple Alienated Mac Loyalists - "internal turmoil has taken a toll. More than a dozen engineers and managers working on Mac hardware have left for different Apple teams or other companies in the past year and a half." (bloomberg.com)
- Why the new Mac Pro might never come - the thrust of this opinion piece is that whenever the new Mac Pro is released, it's likely to be in a form factor that creative pros won't be satisfied
with. (macworld.com)
- The Mac Pro Lives - an important post you've probably already heard about - but the Newsletter hadn't covered yet. (daringfireball.net)
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Current Colorist Control Surface Drivers |
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- [video] A Hacker’s Tips on How to Browse the ‘Net Anonymously - Kevin Mitnick, author of "The Art of Invisibility," explains how to remain anonymous online. Not because you have bad intentions - but because you want to protect your identity. Or so you tell your friends. But this is good, pithy and you should know it. (youtube.com)
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- Some Apps Scream For A Mac Pro - "The debate is raging. "Where is the new Mac Pro?" Others are saying, "Why do we need a Mac Pro?" Let me offer you a few examples of when a Mac Pro is useful." 2016 Retina MacBookPro vs. 2015 5k iMac vs. 2013 New mac Pro vs. 2010 Mac Pro, on After Effects CC. Notice the score of the 2010 MacPro. (barefeats.com)
- So, How’s That Mac Pro Working Out For You? - "It’s been a little over two months since I became that guy who actually bought a three-years-old-out-of-the-box Mac Pro . . . now that I’ve used it for two months, let’s take a look back at how it’s working out." A perspective from someone coming from a 2008 MacPro. (subfurther.com)
- Apple releases a new Mac Pro – a year from now - Would you wait? This sit down really happened. Apple really admitted this stuff. “So where does that leave the faithful Apple-loving post-production crowd?“ (provideocoalition.com)
- [Review] Blackmagic Resolve Mini Micro Panel Packs Quality - besides the headline being wrong, I found the most interesting observation was at the very end of the article. And that has nothing to do with the panel itself. (nofilmschool.com)
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Th- Th- That's ALL Folks! We'll see you in September. Happy Grading! 12,450'ish Stories Shared
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The Book Shelf- Color Correction Handbook, Updated - Alexis Van Hurkman has updated his Color Correction Handbook, which has set the standard for learning all things color correction. (amazon.com)
- Color Correction Look Book - This is the second part of the Color Correction Handbook, exploring the creative techniques for over 200 different visual looks. A sort-of recipe book for colorists. (amazon.com)
- The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - Read how a dozen different colorists grade the same footage with the same gear, differently. A fantastic approach to learning the craft of color grading by Steve Hullfish. (amazon.com)
- Color Grading with Avid and Symphony - Written for version 6. Fully applicable to version 7. I was a contributor. (amazon.com)
- Digital Cinematography: Fundamentals,
Tools, Techniques and Workflows - Don't let the title fool you. I'm only a third way through this book and its explanations of how digital images are recorded, sampled and viewed is essential knowledge for anyone who's craft intersects with digital images. Not light reading. But not filled with math either. I highly recommend this
book. (amazon.com)
Have a book you think should be in this list? Reply to this email and let me know!
FCC Disclaimer: Links in this email to Amazon.com, B&H Photo, or ToolFarm are Affiliate links that help support the TaoOfColor.com. FSI is a paid sponsor. Tao of Color, Inc. is part owner of
MixingLight.com—which is a sponsor. BlackMagic Design is sometimes a client.
We thank you for your support.
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Managing Editor:
jim@jimwicks.com
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Published by:
Patrick Inhofer, CSI
Colorist, Coach: TaoOfColor.com | MixingLight.com patrick@taoofcolor.com
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