Color Correction Look Book: Creative Grading Techniques for Film and Video

Chapter 4. Blurred and Colored Vignettes

This next technique is another way of using shapes/Power Windows to make some wild iris effects. The basic idea is to use a shape to add a combination of color and/or blur to the outer border of an image. I first pulled this out for a dream-sequence opening in the feature Oral Fixation. Shortly thereafter I also saw the same idea used in 2008’s Wanted (Stephen J. Scott, Supervising Digital Colorist, EFILM) to indicate altered perception for a character’s point of view (POV) shot. This technique works best when you’re using a shape with an extremely soft edge. In the following example, a soft oval is used to limit a Gaussian blur and Gain color balance adjustment toward red to the outer edge of the image ...