Color palette implementation

Hello. So today, while browsing the web, I came across articles that featured Wes Anderson movie color palettes. It made me wonder how I could go about translating the colors in a photograph of mine in such a way that it would match those in the palette.

I found a few entries on here such as Palette to clut to application - #25 by afre and A Question on Color? - #10 by Claes but neither of them seem to provide a conclusive technique on how to achieve the effect right.

Examples:

My questions are:
Is a tool that turns a color palette into a clut in the works?

Would there be a way to incorporate that into RawTherapee?

An idea that came to mind was to use the Hue mapper in either HSL or HSV to bring the neighbouring hues closer to the ones existing in the palette, but haven’t tested it yet.

Any ideas :)?

I am starting to experiment with something similar to what you’re asking about.

One thing you should do, is download the film emulation presets, and try some of those out. Do a search on the forum for instructions on where to download and install. The downside is that it’s a tedious trial-and-error process to try a bunch of different film emulations.

Now to target a specific color pallet, you would need a photograph that has colors “pretty close” to what you’re going for at the end result. From there, I have been using the H and S in the HSV equalizer in the color tab.

I also use HH and CH equalizers in the LAB functions in the exposure tab.

You can only push around the hues so much before you start getting artifacts, so your starting picture should have a color pallet close to what you’re going for.

Familiarity with a color wheel helps alot. Keep one open in a browser window to refer to as you explore.

Adobe has a really good one here: https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel/

You can take your example image, as well as the color swatches that you posted, open them in RT, mouseover the colors and get the H value from HSV, then input them into the adobe wheel to see how they relate to each other.

I am not that good at this yet, but I just started really working on it a week ago.

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@stampede thanks, this is helpful. I mean there’s gotta be a way that they do this in movies where they adapt colours :stuck_out_tongue:

Yes. clut Does a palette that colour goes to correspond to another colour and softens the intervals between both.

In the films of Wes Anderson can have used one mask manually.

Erm, a color palette in a film is about using a limited number of colors consistently - in the wardrobe, decor, etc., while a HaldCLUT maps one set of colors to another. In your example, Natalie Portman is wearing a yellow jacket. It’s not yellow because it was originally blue and blue was mapped to yellow. You can’t just map source colors to a target pallet and expect anything other than a Yes We Can poster.

You can make dark colors more green and light colors more yellow - use color toning. You can apply the end result color toning to the HaldCLUT identity image if you’re keen on using one, as described in the documentation

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@Morgan_Hardwood agreed, and they obviously use selectively coloured objects throughout the films, however, there does seem to be a strange consistency going on. What I mean, and I could be wrong, is in the example with Natalie Portman, the similarity of the yellow/orange tones between her coat, the building , the light inside the rooms; also the building’s roof, the distant trees, the man’s jacket and the drapes in the building; and thirdly what I noticed were the browns of the door, the smoke stacks on the building, and even the shadow area of his hand on her back.

To me it seems that there is a little more done beyond simple wardrobe control. I’d think it’s a restriction on tones (because notice how there are literally no other tones in the frame, like at all) to match a narrower collection of tones. Even among the blueish-olive-greens there is little difference throughout the shot.

It is possible that they carefully made sure that there is no …actual red, or blue or anything in between in the shot, but I just have a feeling there may be more to it. I’ll look into cinematography colour correction programs…

Yes, there is definitely deliberate colour and tone correction happening but it isn’t as simple as what was discussed in my palette thread.

No, I don’t know about how they do it. I am guessing that it has something to do with object recognition and keeping tones very distinct, which makes the subjects easier to isolate and manipulate.

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My apologies for asking what might be an incredibly stupid question. But what color space is the Adobe color wheel in? Is it some sort of HS"X" color space calculated from a standard RGB working space such as sRGB, or perhaps specifically from sRGB?

The reason I ask is that dialing in Red 255/0/0 on the Adobe color wheel and asking for the normal HSX Hue, the Hue is 0. Asking for the complementary color in the various HSX color spaces the resulting complement has a Hue of 180, which is Cyan. But the Adobe wheel shows a green color with an HSX Hue of roughly 135 (if the RGB color space is actually sRGB), which has an HSX complementary color that’s magenta instead of red.

The Adobe color wheel also isn’t based on LAB because if it were, the LCh hue opposite of LCh hue=90 has an LCh hue of 270. But the color opposite LCh hue=90 on the Adobe color wheel (which is about ten degrees past whatever-color-space-it-is H=90 on the Adobe color wheel) has an LCh hue of 302.

So what color space is this Adobe color wheel in? And how do the dialed in color relate to known color spaces such as the reference color space LCh or sRGB’s HSV?

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This is partially correct, I think. Realistically, the entire set, wardrobe, location, angles, and more are all specifically chosen to fit the vision of the director. Literally nothing is left to chance by someone like Anderson (to great effect as evidenced by his films). This is one of those things that are super-neat for film analysis once you realize it. Every single thing in the shot is being controlled for in some way.

So yes, tones are specifically being mapped, and wardrobe/set/location are all being chosen to complement this. The good news is that once you have an idea of what you’d like to accomplish, you can start to control for these variables when shooting better with the post-work in mind.

Every set piece and wardrobe was specifically chosen to complement the desired color scheme, and this is just a simple TV comedy series on NBC…

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@patdavid speaking of this example here. I’m noticing the cyan/teal I think is the name of that blueish tone I see, it’s a cast on the dark chair, and on the black dress of the girl on the far right, also strong on the boy’s pants on far left, and in the periodic table on the wall. Then there is the reddish/magenta in the girls’ sweaters that also matches the periodic table. It could technically be careful planning …

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It makes complete sense to be confused. Read https://forums.adobe.com/thread/164812 for more context on the colour wheel being used. The thread was written in 2007, so I don’t know how much of it still applies.

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Thanks! @afre - here are some more links about that Adobe wheel:

I watched a movie the other day with a very obvious orange/blue pallet. The characters from scene to scene always were dressed in one of those colors.

Example: kid riding a white bicycle past a row of blue houses and wearing an orange sweater.

Scenes filmed at night time lit the background with lights that had blue gels and characters up front dressed in orange.

For a video project I was doing a while back, I had gotten footage from a college kid taking film classes. I was cutting his video of the same event together with video that I had shot on my consumer-grade camcorder. His camera was a lot nicer than mine, but the footage looked crappy.

“Dude…what’s up with this shitty video? It’s all desaturated. Everything looks dead.”

He tells me that the camera does it that way on purpose and you add the colors back in post production, or something. I did not really ask for more details.

Keep in mind at the time, I did not really know anything about color grading or saturation. Adjusting the white balance was about all I knew about color.

So maybe it has to do with shooting deliberately muted colors, and the boosting saturation for specific hues in post production. If you find out, please let me know. Now you have me curious!

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Raw or log video generally doesn’t look good, just as our raw photo files, until you apply your lut and other processing. Also see:

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Yes, that’s a good analogy. His video footage looked as bad as an unprocessed raw photograph before RT introduced automatched tone curves. You can still get that look by opening a raw file and choosing “neutral” profile in RT.

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A lot of slaves tracking masks if the camera moves :imp:

Here they are all dresses of the same colour in an armed stage is easier

The orange/teal is not usually applied blindly, but push orange into upper mid-tones and lower high-tones while usually keeping whites closer to white and pushing blues into the dark tones, sometimes tinting all the into deep blacks. It varies depending on the colorist and editors of course.

It’s funny you mention that. That character in the show is the nerdy, uptight, smart character in the group. Is it coincidence that the smart girl in class is matching the periodic table on the wall… ? :wink:

In green I circled highlights where the orange was not pushed all the way to upper tones - they are still mostly white (so don’t just apply orange to upper tones indiscriminately). See the post from @anon41087856 about this same subject for more info too:

start color-grading your stuff

It would be well look for the original scene and try re-create them in natron / gmic

pep

Very limited palette. And this that the image has noise of compression