Hello people, ImAFutureGuitarHero here.
I've got another SFM tutorial for you guys, and it's one of a few, hopefully, that show the procedures for certain things I do in Source Filmmaker.
In this video, I'll be showing you how I render...
...with a flat colour profile.
Now what is a flat colour profile?
Odds are a few of you might not know what I mean by a flat colour profile, so,
in its most basic description,
a flat colour profile refers to an image having a dimmer and more subdued look -
a flatter look, if you will.
This flatter look is favoured for people who do photo editing,
because it means that the image has extra headroom to play with colour correction to bring back the natural colour of the scene.
To demonstrate what I mean, I'll use this picture I shot a while back of my cat, who, sadly, passed away recently,
and I shot it with a flat colour profile.
I want to also preface this by saying I am in no way an expert on any of this, so, yeah.
If I shot it without a flat colour profile, it would look something like *this*.
Everything's too bright, there's no detail in most of the white parts of his coat,
and if I were to try and change the exposure and colour correct it to fix that,
that brickwalling in the upper histogram range would prove problematic for that.
With a flat colour profile, however,
that pushes all of the detail of the image into the middle of that histogram,
meaning that there's all this space on either side to pull that back out and create something more balanced,
like *this*.
Nothing is overexposed, colours pop, and the image as a whole looks much better than before.
Now of course, this same principle of using a flat colour profile can be applied to Source Filmmaker posters, and even animations,
and in this video I'll show you how I go about doing that.
Let's begin.
Alright, with SFM open and a map loaded...
...we need a picture to render.
H e r e ' s o n e .
As we can see with this picture, everything is posed and the scene is lit,
and if we set it to render now, this is how it's going to come out,
but if we wanted some extra flexibility to adjust the colour correction somewhat drastically later on,
we would run into problems with the exposure of the artwork and the brightness of some of the lights as it is.
To help alleviate this, we're going to overlay a filter on the camera so that it dims the colours and dulls the image,
and there's a few steps to this process.
First, start in the Clip Editor and scroll down to the "Overlay" row.
This section contains any effects that change how the camera view looks and renders.
Right-click "Effects" and select "Add Clip to Track".
In the menu that pops up, select "Engine Post Effect", then click "OK".
By default, it'll overexpose the scene and add a vignette and some subtle film grain, which we will change.
Click and drag the end of the overlay clip to cover the entire working area on the timeline, and rename it if you want to.
Then right-click the clip and select "Show in Element Viewer".
Here we can see the parameters for the overlay effect.
Deselect the "vignette" and "noise" options to get rid of those, respectively.
You'll notice that even though we've disabled the vignette, there's still what looks like a vignette on the screen,
and that's due to these two numbers down here: "localContrastVignetteStart" and "localContrastVignetteEnd".
Setting them both to 2 or higher will get rid of that extra vignette.
Scroll down until you see the option "TVGamma", and enable it.
This will limit the balance of the dark colours in the scene,
removing some of the overblown blacks that can cause lost detail in dark areas.
This is also especially useful, because the next thing we need to do is darken the image
to reverse the overexposure caused by the overlay effect.
Go to your camera, and change "toneMapScale" to 0.02.
That will darken the image, remove most of the bloom, and because of the "TVGamma" option being enabled,
there are no areas of the image that clip the dark parts into absolute black.
We *could* render now, but there's one thing left to add.
When you render as a PNG image sequence - which is highly recommended, even for animations -
some compression happens, which causes visual artifacts known as colour banding.
This usually happens when using volumetrics, but it's equally annoying here,
because we will need as much flexibility as possible to apply proper colour correction to the image.
There are two ways to deal with this; one of the ways is to render as a PFM image.
I *don't* recommend this option, because even though .PFM is a format with a higher dynamic range than PNG,
because of this increased dynamic range, the file size is increased *dramatically* compared to PNG.
The other way to reduce the colour banding caused by PNG compression, while still using the PNG format,
is to add a very subtle noise layer, and by subtle, I mean barely noticeable at all.
If you have a smooth gradient, the PNG compression will create the aforementioned colour banding.
But if you introduce noise into it, the PNG compression has to include that noise as well, so it can't compress it nearly as much,
meaning you'll reduce the colour banding, only with a trade-off of a marginal file size increase.
There's a link in the description to a page on the SFM Steam Workshop,
with a noise texture deliberately made for this purpose,
you'll need to download that for this.
Once you've downloaded that, go back to Source Filmmaker and add another camera overlay,
this time selecting the "Material Overlay Effect" option from the pop-up menu, and then clicking "OK".
Once you've added this and stretched it to the working area, do the same as before to open it in the Element Viewer.
The section you're looking for in the Element Viewer is the "material" text box.
Go back to the Steam Workshop page for the noise texture, and scroll down until you find the list of VMT materials.
Find the one that corresponds to the resolution you're rendering at.
I'm rendering at 4K, so I'm selecting the last one, "...2160p.vmt"
Copy that to the clipboard, go back into SFM and paste it into the "material" text box.
You'll see the image get a little bit grainier and washed out, so
to limit the level of the texture, go to "overlaycolor", and on the alpha slider at the bottom,
move it to around between 20-30, or 35 or so.
With that, the image is ready to render, so we're going to do that now.
Go to "File" > "Export" > "Movie..." -
It's important to note that you can't use "Poster..." to render this with this method,
because rendering with "Poster..." doesn't render any of the overlay effects you put onto it,
so that makes everything we've done in this tutorial kinda pointless.
Name the output path whatever you want, select "Image Sequence",
disable the "Separate WAV file" option, and change the duration to render only one frame.
Select "Custom" from the drop-down menu, and type two adjacent numbers in the boxes.
I usually render at the 1-second mark,
so for this I'll type "30" and "31",
so that Source Filmmaker starts rendering on the 30th frame, and stops rendering when it hits frame 31.
Note that some models don't render properly with only one frame,
and this usually happens because of the way their flexes are set up.
For cases like this, render about 4 frames, so type "30" and "34".
Now click "Export Movie". I'll come back to you in a moment.
Alright, if you've rendered everything properly, you should have an image that's been rendered out with a flat colour profile.
I've also rendered out a version without the flat colour profile done to it,
so that we can compare it later on once we've colour corrected all this,
so let's get onto that.
I'm going to use Photoshop for the colour correction,
uh, but you could use any other editing software that allows you to change the colours and change the exposure and that sort of thing.
I'm just using Photoshop because I'm used to it, and it's honestly better at this sort of thing if you have it.
So if you have it, good for you. Use that.
Photoshop has this nifty feature; it obviously has all these adjustment options here that you can change:
the vibrance, hue, saturation, colour balance, black and white... all that sort of thing.
But what we're going to do first is...
If we try and do this right now, change the hue and saturation - I'm just going to change the saturation, to show you -
it's going to hard-bake that into the image, and if I want to change that later, I can't change it.
Well, I can reverse it, but it's affected the image on a pixel level.
I can't reverse that and get an exact copy of what I had before.
So what we're going to do is to convert this into a Smart Object,
which allows us to do whatever we want to this, and at a click of a button,
we can set it back to what this looks like right now.
And also, instead of using these options here,
"Vibrance" and "Hue/Saturation", all this, because those are all separated options,
There's an option over here in "Filter", called "Camera Raw Filter", which is very useful for this sort of thing,
because it's meant for this sort of thing, but with photography.
So what we can do is open up this, and this gives us all these options we can play with.
We're going to have a look at the histogram as well to make sure we're not clipping at any points either.
I usually turn up the Vibrance to bring out the colour a lot more.
I don't use "Saturation" as much, because "Saturation" and "Vibrance",
they do similar things, but the "Saturation" control, as you can see, is a *lot* more powerful. It brings out the colour a lot more.
So I only do it a little bit, at most.
Going to re-centre this.
And I'm going to have a look close-up at the colours.
We're seeing it's sort of getting a little bit too yellow there.
See, it's mainly "Saturation" that's doing that, so I'm going to back off that a bit.
I'm going to bring up "Vibrance", though.
So now we can also adjust these.
I'm going to bring down this, because there's some room I can bring the dark areas down a bit.
Going to adjust "Shadows" as well.
I'm also going to turn up "Exposure" a bit so that we can see a bit more clearly, and turn up "Dehaze".
The main power of this comes from over here, the HSL adjustment (Hue/Saturation/Luminance adjustment).
This is where I spend a lot of the time colour correcting.
It has this sort of yellow tinge to it, which...
...might be what you're going for, but I'm not exactly going for that.
I'm wanting it to be a little bit, well, less yellow-coloured
So what I can do is, I can, especially with Sunset's skin colour here,
I can make that a bit less yellow and a bit more orange, as you'll see here. I'm going to pull that over there.
I can also make her hair stand out a bit more,
so I'm going to turn up the red a little bit in saturation, and make that a bit darker.
So now if I scroll out and compare with just this section,
it's making her stand out a lot more from the background. That's the main thing I want to have happen here.
Let's give it a little bit extra green. Make the orange a little bit more saturated, just a little bit.
Make the yellow slightly less saturated.
In the event that we can't get everything we want out of this - as powerful as this is, all these options -
It is possible to mask this out and make it only affect that certain part, but I'm not going to get into that.
So what we can do, let's have a look at how this is looking. I think this is looking pretty good as it is.
Yeah, I'm gonna settle with that.
So now, because we've set that as a Smart Object, that's applied that as an effect that's on top of that layer,
but we can turn that off whenever we want, and we can even go back in there, and edit the actual settings -
there's the same settings we set before, we can adjust it to whatever we want. So I'm just going to cancel that.
Down here, I want to get rid of a little bit of this blue,
so I'm going to add an Adjustment Layer, and now we can use these other separate effects here.
"Vibrance." By default this will adjust the entire thing, you'll see the entire thing being affected,
but what we can do is, we can use this mask,
which will allow us to select only certain parts we want affected by this effect.
I'm going to bring down the vibrance in total first,
but then I'm going to invert the mask, so nothing takes effect.
I'm going to draw in the mask, and you'll see down there some little spots appearing.
This is allowing me to select exactly where I want this effect to be put onto the artwork at.
I think that's making it look a bit better.
Up here, we're going to make the eyes stand out a bit more,
so we're going to add another "Vibrance" effect,
but we're going to turn up the vibrance here, and then do the same thing here, mask out this section only.
So now if we compare, the eyes just stand out a little bit more.
I think we can leave it at that for now, for this tutorial at least.
With the colour correction done, if we compare to a normal render just straight from Source Filmmaker,
but without any of the flat colour filtering we applied,
there's a night and day difference.
The normal render looks alright, but the one with the colour correction in post just stands out in my opinion,
it looks more balanced and appealing than the other one.
This is the process I've used for all my recent artworks, and as I stated earlier, it isn't limited to just artworks;
you can use it in animations as well to give more freedom in post for colour grading and colour correction.
Thanks for watching, I hope you learned something, and stay tuned for the next tutorial,
where I go over how I render larger resolutions in Source Filmmaker, while still using Image Sequence.
Have a good one.