Blender VFX Tip: Film look and lens flares
Kenan Proffitt writes:
In this quick Blender VFX tutorial, learn how to manipulate the light in your scene to add anamorphic style lens flares, then polish off your scene with some cinematic color grading, all inside the blender compositor.
Great tutorial. No background music, straight down to business, well spoken, and some good tips. I’ll certainly be trying out some colour grading this weekend.
Hi Kenan, great tutorial. Clear and straight. But I want to make two comments about it.
First, about the lens flares themselves. A lens flare is a flare caused but very bright sources (even when they’re not in the frame yet) and this mug totally isn’t one of them. Actually, the only things that might cause flares would be the inner of the lamp’s screen and the outside. Although it would be very rare.
It could have be great for the tutorial (and for the result) to teach how to mask that mug and subtract it from the Luminance Key.
The second one is about your method to color grayscale maps (like the Luminance Key or the noise texture in your Laser Gun tutorial). You use a RGB Curve node but this is nothing but intuitive as you need to input the opposite color that you want. There are two ways to do it, very simple and fast. Using a ColorRamp node changing the white color or even simpler: use a Mix node with Color blend type.
I hope this has helped and not annoyed you ;)
Cool and very useful tutorial, Kenan!
And thank you Antoniobuch for your tip about how to solve the opposite color input ‘problem’.
Adding your solutions makes using the color wheel much more intuitive, as you said.
I’m glad I’ve helped (:
Color grading and lens flares. The two most overused techniques in modern cinematography. Useful, but far too overused by people trying to look fancy.
I would say, Master them, keep them in your arsenal, and use them, but please, for the sake of the future of our art form, use them wisely. Or else, you’ll become another J.J. Abrahms. lol
Actually, color grading has been used in almost every film in the whole cinema history. Since black and white and, of course, with the color coming. So it’s not overused and it’s not from modern cinema.
But I agree that lens flares are overused. And I would add two more: vignette and chromatic aberration.
Yes, I didn’t mean to indicate that color-grading or even lens flares are only some new technique brought out by digital film-making. Image editing and manipulation techniques are old and standard.
I’m specifically referring to the current trends in color grading where people nowadays rush to the aid of ready-made Affect Effects filters and Video Copilot and such.
So much of production (both indie and industry) nowadays use over-saturated color-grading (overuse of color grading, really), overblown HDR with poor use of contrast, gimmicky lens flares everywhere, which all sterilizes the heck out of imagery.
No balanced aesthetics, no artful color use–just a bum-rush of directionless trendy editing. A copy-and-paste formula to cinematography. Little thoughtfulness behind the use of editing, in favor for packaged trends.
No complaint about this tutorial, though. Just pointing out the caveat, since we see it ignored soooo prevalently nowadays–even in professional industry. (Again, J.J Abrams. Hahaha!)
And yes, you’re so right about those other two overused effects: vignette and chromatic aberrations.
Great tutorial, but the anamorphic mask should be on the last place of the chain… Because when you put the Color Balance node and “turn the blacks a little blue”, you’re changing the color of the mask, and nothing look less professional than those frames not being truly black… hahahaha
Very good tutorial . There is one issue though, you should’ve changed the resolution or the aspect ratio of your footage instead of having black bars on the edges. If you have black bars, they would have blur if someone is watching the video on a low resolution, and on a widescreen monitor the video would have black bars on the edges because the video is still 16:9 but the edges are just black. Great video though I found the lens flares especially useful! Do more if you enjoy doing this!