All language subtitles for 5. Color Correcting the Base Layers

It looks like we're looking much closer to the original image now,

which is exciting, but it looks like we need to color correct this a little more.

So let's start by getting these tonal values to be closer

to the values that we see over here,

and it looks to me just off the top of my head,

that these blues look much bluer,

and the contrast and the saturation of the values over here are wrong.

So let's take a look at fixing those.

So the first thing I want to do is lay these two images on top of each

other so that I can take a look at them as an A and a B.

So I'm just going to close down this panel so that we have one Viewer.

Since I'm working with Viewer1, I'm going to go find Viewer1,

which is right here,

and I'm going to connect it up to the other image we want to look at,

our original image.

I'm hitting Shift bracket on the keyboard,

I'm hitting Space to bring this up nice and big,

and I'm going to select wipe and change the B to the Read Node so that

I can see the difference between these two planets.

I'm just wiping back and forth,

and it looks like our lights are a little softer and yellower,

it looks like some of these colors need to change.

So I'm going to hit Spacebar and go back to our original texture.

I'm going to hit Tab and drop a ColorCorrect Node in

here right after that original texture.

So, if we look at this here,

this ColorCorrect Node is going to affect the image we see on the left.

So what I ended up doing here is I ended up leaving

the saturation the way that it was,

I boosted the contrast up just a tiny bit to 1.

15, and I slid the gamma a little,

and then in the gain I went into this color picker and I tilted

it just a little bit towards the softer blues.

And that gives us a pretty close look,

and I think what's hurting us here is the crispness of our image versus

the softness of the final render that we're seeing here.

So another thing that you can do is drop a Defocus Node in here,

and any element that is a photograph that you're using in compositing,

generally tends to be more perfect than it's supposed to be.

The camera's never going to pick up things perfectly in focus.

So I always like to add a little defocus to the image itself.

So I'm going to turn this wipe off,

and I'm going to just toggle that off and on to see if it makes a difference.

Then I like to pipe this up to like five so that it's crazy,

and if we turn this off and on, yeah that makes a big difference.

So I'm going to split the difference, so like 2.

5.

I'm also going to copy and paste that Defocus into the clouds.

So, this one was our shadow layer and this one was our clouds,

so I'm going to put it in here actually,

and that's way too soft on the clouds,

so the clouds you might want to bring it down to like a 1,

maybe even a 0.

5, let's see if that's affecting it.

It just softens it up just a little bit.

So now if we take a look at the two different images back to back,

ours is looking a little closer, so let's see what else we can do.

I guess what we can do is we can change those lights a little.

So, let's go back to where we have our lights,

this is, you remember, this is a red channel,

turn that off,

this is a red channel that's being piped into all the

color channels to make them white,

and after that operation we can drop another ColorCorrect Node down.

I'm going to hit one on the keyboard so I can look at my changes.

I'm going to go to the gain, and I'm just going to slide these a little,

give them a little bit of a yellow tint.

If we go back down here to look at the overall correction,

you'll see that these lights get yellow.

So that's what we had before, it's just a softer,

more human form of city lighting.

So that helps us a little, and let's wipe back and forth now,

and see where we're at.

So it looks like we're pretty close.

I see some of the continents on the dark side of the planet.

I kind of like that ours is dark, that it just has these lights over here,

but it looks like ours are too pronounced.

So I'm going to come back up here,

and since we're just laying the lights on top of the final image of the earth,

I'm going to go into this Merge Node,

and I'm just going to slide its effect down a little.

You see if I go all the way down to 0 the lights turn off,

and if I'm at 1, they're at their brightest.

So I'm just going to mix them in a little to just give the hint of lighting,

maybe like a 0.

3 back there.

It's a little softer.

So I like that.

I'm starting to like that.

So I think what we need to do now is we need to give the planet its nice,

soft, blue atmosphere,

and that's just going to be another layer we add on top of

our image the way that it is right now.