Using Gradients to tweak the sky

Hmm... I can't seem to get it to work properly. So i'm trying to tweak a shot where i have a face on the corner of the screen and a washed out sky. I add a gradient generator, change the color a bit, set it on overlay, and it goes right across the face... Do i matte out the gradient layer and feather that? How do u guys use the gradient?

Is your sky completely unsalvageable? Because if there's some blue to be recovered, you could consider using a very modified version of the shot (eg. with Saturation jacked way up) as your matte, rather than a gradient.


www.derekmok.com

>Is your sky completely unsalvageable?

It's white on the monitor, and a flat line across the top of the vector scopes. Yes, which is why I use a gradient. Equatorial regions are much harder to shoot due to the intensity and angle of the sun at noon. I used to include a feathered matte of the video and color that to get some gradients in the sky, but now i'm thinking of using the gradient generator instead.

I would us a garbage matte feathered up a bit to hold back the foreground.
Next time break out the polarizer.

Linear gradients on skies are lame. Skies don't look like that. I spent a lot of my time at The Golf Channel color correcting camera filter gradients that the cameraman used on shoots. You ever see a purple gradient sky on a golf course? Yuck.

If it's a lock down camera shot, I would mask off as much foreground as possible and go out with a digital camera and take a few stills of a nice blue sky (on the same angle as your clip) with some scattered clouds for texture. Finishing with Color Correction / Vignetting in After Effects. Here's 2 perfect examples from 2 spots I did:



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Nice one, Joe! I love the Donald Trump one. What I actually used to do, was to use 2 layers of a feathered matte above the footage that i was on, and tweak different colors to them on with the 3 way. But nothing beats real clouds. Hmm... Getting the clouds behind Donald Trump's moving head must have been difficult. Motion tracked that one?

I'm still kinda lost the moment i hit the overlay mode with the gradients. i'd like to know how that works as well. So it's about feathering and matting the gradient layer?

My pet effect in color balancing, is actually to tweak the whites one direction, and the mids towards the complimentary direction to even out the tone. Since the whites usually affects the sky, and the mids will bring the tone on the buildings back, it adds a certain tone to most footages. But man! that's a nice tip on the sky.

Would be great if i can get colorista up and running on this system. I was having this problem with sunset clouds- everything was yellow, which was nice, but when i tried introducing some whites, I had yellow residue left on the edges of some of the clouds (which fell midway between white and mids, i guess).

Damn, that's some nice work, Joe!

Is it all masking, or if the sky is truly that blown out, can you use a luma key to pull it out?

The Donald's hair is so feathered already that I'd be afraid to feather anything around his head...


Jeff

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Getting the clouds behind Donald Trump's moving head must have been difficult. Motion tracked that one?

Rotoscoping (frame by frame) in After Effects with multiple feathered masks. Each of these clips are around 5 seconds long (150 frames each). That shoot was on the most miserable day and Donald is very particular about his hair so I made sure not to choke the mask too tight around his head

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.