The Master of Color Manipulation

3D LUT Creator

I learnt image color correction in several stages. First was of course playing in RGB with scanned pictures. I used shareware Paint Shop Pro back in those days, which at some point was acquired by Corel. And it was cool, levels – or actually auto-levels – was all the buzz, as well as Hue and Saturation. Curves felt almost like magic. Then I took a desktop publishing course, read a few books, and learnt about CMYK and prepress. That was the first time I heard about color models, working with channels, as well as various issues that arose from incorrect conversions between various CMYK and RGB profiles.

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Bringing Fun Back To Photography

luminar-fi

On May 6th 2013 I was still working partially as a graphic designer. Adobe announced, that they were moving from selling permanent licenses to their products to the subscription-based model. There were a lot of reactions to this news, some bad, some good, quite a few extreme, as usually happens with something that disrupts the status quo. After the initial ruckus died down, the initial one-size-fits-all offer was expanded to include options for a single app ($19.99 per month) and Photography ($9.99 per month, includes Photoshop and Lightroom). That still left some people unhappy with perpetual leasing plan, opening doors for multiple other solutions on the market that began more aggressively competing with Adobe.

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My 48 Hour Film Project Experience

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In the previous article I wrote how I prepared for this year’s 48 Hour Film Project in Warsaw. Here I want to tell you what actually happened and how the situation unfolded from my point of view. However, before reading further, watch our short, so that I can safely write about it without spoiling it for you.

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48 Hours with Resolve and Fusion

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Disclaimer: Blackmagic Design was kind enough to supply me with a full version of Fusion Studio to check out the latest features. It most certainly influenced this article, but I believe you will find it interesting regardless.

While taking part in 48 Hour Film Project I did have an opportunity to use the latest version of both Resolve and Fusion, and I want to share with you this interesting experience of rapid post-production.

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Two Great Strides in the Democratisation of Colour Grading

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Regular readers of this blog know, that I have been dreaming about a low-cost grading control surface for years. At some point I even considered attempting to build one myself, but this project never got more serious than an extensive set of notes. There were a few remotely interesting ideas around, including the Oxygen TecPro panel, the use of Kingston trackball or some midi hacks with various controllers, but these were either makeshift or still too expensive, not suited for the ultimate goal that was to make every editor have it in their suite. Today the announcement of Tangent Ripple and support for it in the upcoming update of Adobe Premiere Pro and Color Finale for FCPX hopefully closes this chapter.
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Editing Non-scripted Projects: Music Video

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Even though I’ve edited a lot of trailers and commercials, where music played an important part, I had never had an opportunity of working on an actual music video. Thanks to a fortunate coincidence, I was recently contacted by a young singer, Oktawia Kawęcka, who had just recorded a cover of the Oscar winning “Writing’s on the Wall” by Sam Smith (well, at that point in time it hadn’t won an Oscar yet), asking for an editor. It was extremely hard to resist the temptation. So I didn’t.

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