post production tests

Once I had the first pieces of footage rendered, I did some post production tests to create a "post production bible" for the project. This would allow us to apply the same fixes to any scene that needed it. The first thing I did with this scene is fix a glitch that came from the render where the shadow in the bottom corners flickered. I took a still from the image sequence and masked it so it would stop flickering.
Next I realised that the two character should be in shadow because there should be the tree top above which was removed so the camera could be there. I used a duplicated layer with a feathered mask in the region I wanted the shadow, I tried changing the levels however this did not create a nice effect. I found using the saturation effect to desaturate the region and reduced the lightness to created the best shadow.
The next step was colour correction I tried lots of different effects to try and get a nice result however the best were the auto level with most of the original image showing this helped cool of the palette. The colour off set was good to help make the hue slightly greener when under the tree. The levels effect was great for overall small tweaks when the others were not enough, especially using separate levels for RGB.
The final thing I needed to add was depth of field, I found using depth of field in maya difficult and I knew it increased render times. I use a similar method to the other effects I created a new masked layer to blur out the ground. Since I'd already tried many different blur effects in previous composite tests I used the same one which was the gaussian blur.


This is a breakdown of the of post effects added to this scene.