[proposal] Ben Roderick's Color Grades

[Benclank01]

Hello everyone from FanRes.com, my name is Ben Roderick and I've always interested of doing a filmic look on animated TV shows like an anime show or a traditionally Western animated show. So, that's why I'm doing a proposal to show you my color grade of these animated TV shows.

What I do is to rip from any promo or bumper from an action animated block called Toonami and I converted these videos by using Freemake Video Converter (1080p!), then I do some video shaders from one of the popular video players: MPC-HC (Media Player Classic - Home Cinema) and do a codec filter called ffdshow by fully modifying the video and then I save an image from one of my videos and then I go to the Adobe Photoshop and I use an adjustment to making it an filmic approach to any anime or Western animated show.

Let me show you an example and I hope you will understand:

Original: http://imgur.com/1dCHznW =====> Roderick Color Grade: http://imgur.com/0Feyd9X

Pretty cool, huh? This is why I called "inspiration" because of you guys who been doing these good transfers from any movie to make any DVD/BD transfer better.

@ Ben Roderick

P.S. Is this proposal against the rules? Please tell me!

[spoRv]

Welcome aboard! I think the idea is good, we need always "fresh minds", BUT... here you are some tips that may help you a bit:

• I strongly encourage you to use a video editing tool for your project, as using photoshop to regrade ANY frame, one by one, is insane!
  
• for your comparisons, I suggest to use http://screenshotcomparison.com - like this: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/122800
  

Follow your passion, but be aware: you'll spend A LOT of your free time, and at the end you'll never be free to watch a movie (or a toon) without thinking "well, it needs a color regrade" or something like this!

[Benclank01]

Welcome aboard! I think the idea is good, we need always "fresh minds", BUT... here you are some tips that may help you a bit:

• I strongly encourage you to use a video editing tool for your project, as using photoshop to regrade ANY frame, one by one, is insane!
  
• for your comparisons, I suggest to use http://screenshotcomparison.com - like this: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/122800
  

Follow your passion, but be aware: you'll spend A LOT of your free time, and at the end you'll never be free to watch a movie (or a toon) without thinking "well, it needs a color regrade" or something like this!

Well, I humbly thank you for that. But there are two things, 1. I think of having Adobe Premiere Pro, but I tried to install by using uTorrent and the whole disable connection thing is not working. (It works on Photoshop, but not on Premiere Pro) 2. I can't do on screenshotcomparison, because my Photoshop-graded images are like 3 MB and that makes it slow and I think it won't enable to see on the website so I think any DVD or Blu-Ray or web-ripped images needs to be up 'til 5 MB. Sorry about that.

@ Ben Roderick

[spoRv]

I think you should use a video editing program, to avoid make the color correction frame-by-frame, that will be a lot faster!

About screenshotcomparison, for a quick-n-dirt comparison you could always save the images as .jpg; the quality is good enough to show color grading differences.

[Benclank01]

I think you should use a video editing program, to avoid make the color correction frame-by-frame, that will be a lot faster!

About screenshotcomparison, for a quick-n-dirt comparison you could always save the images as .jpg; the quality is good enough to show color grading differences.

Thanks for that advice! Does that the whole .jpg thing is common? Because I don't remember about that.

[spoRv]

usually 1920x1080 png files are about 2-3MB each, so each comparison could be easily up to 6MB - that's why I make just single comparison with png files, because my slow connection doesn't allow me to do more... but, if you have to not show finer details, JPGs are good, in particular to show color regrades.

[Benclank01]

usually 1920x1080 png files are about 2-3MB each, so each comparison could be easily up to 6MB - that's why I make just single comparison with png files, because my slow connection doesn't allow me to do more... but, if you have to not show finer details, JPGs are good, in particular to show color regrades.

That sounds good. I'll get into that!

[Benclank01]

All right everyone, after some advice from sporv, I decided to do some examples of my color grade for any Western animated TV show or anime by doing a different filmic look of these shows.

The first example is a web rip from a bumper of Dragon Ball Z Kai from Toonami.
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/122948

Pretty cool, huh? Here's another one!

The second example is a web rip from an Toonami music video called, "The World Needs All Kinds" and it has Ghost in the Shell as one of the animes that are shown in this one-minute music video.
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/122950
(Sorry for the image synchronization. I promise I won't happen again.)

And here comes the last one that I'm gonna show you today or tonight!

Of course, the example needs some western animation and so this is web rip from one of the bumpers of Samurai Jack from Toonami (in an modifying aspect ratio).
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/122951

I hope you guys all enjoy it and also I'm not doing like a DVD of those transfers. Those are examples of my color grade and maybe it is for inspiration, I don't know.

@ Ben Roderick

[spoRv]

Ghost in the Shell is too dark for my tastes - you are loosing too many details in the shadows...

Apart that, are you following other sources for these color grading, or they are only your "artistic decisions"?

[Benclank01]

Ghost in the Shell is too dark for my tastes - you are loosing too many details in the shadows...

Apart that, are you following other sources for these color grading, or they are only your "artistic decisions"?

Artistic decisions.