two-strip technicolor effect

Graham Nattress has a [2Strip|http://www.nattress.com/Products/FinalTouch/FTG2strip.htm] effect in his Color plug ins.

Patrick Sheffield has a free [2Strip|http://pistolerapost.com/pluginz/index.html] FCP plugin that works very well.

Personally, I've not tried to do the 2Strip thing by hand yet, if I need it, Pat's plugin works great.

Zebulun wrote:

Personally, I've not tried to do the 2Strip thing by hand yet, if I need it, Pat's plugin works great.

The formula presented in the link above requires a trip to CMYK-land - which isn't a node in Color. I did send the idea to Nattress about doing several other colorspace conversions in addition to his RGB > YCbCr node.

I'll have to look up Alexis Van Hurkman's formula in his Color Correction book and see if we can replicate in Color.

- pi

The easiest way to get your basic 2 strip look is to map:

Red->Red
Luminance->Green
Green->Blue

It looks better if you 3 strip it first...

An alternate is:

Red->Red
Green->Green
Green->Blue

If you're not gonna 3 strip first, the latter method is probably better.

Patrick

Patrick,

Thanks for that.

I'm not quite sure how Method 1 can be implemented in Color. The only way to get out of RGB is with the Nattress RGB -> YCbCr node. Maybe build out the green channel and feed that into Cb? Tough to wrap my mind around.

I was playing with something similar today trying to punch up some drab looking National Forest greenery (more like brownery). It's working out pretty well but hit & miss.

- pi

Yah - I'm not sure how you'd do it in Color, but I'm far from a Color expert...

Easier in FCP or Motion or Shake.

Patrick

Doh! - Of course, I forgot this one (I'd figured it out once before) - to get the luminance, simply desaturate the image. SO - R->R, Desaturated->G, G->B...

make sense?

Patrick

Depends on what a stickler you are for authenticity. I think its probably a good bet that "black&white" is pretty close to a "Y" derived from YCbCr, even though in COLOR it has the feel of something that has been remapped twice.

Good solution,

jPo

Talking with Mr. Sheffield earlier, I tried this version of using a Saturation node with a value of zero to feed the green of the RGB Merge node. I also tried with the Black and White node. I don't think either are completely desaturated as both certainly added a blue cast to the image.

Perhaps the Color FX room needs to be populated with Shake's superior image processing nodes.

Doing a bit of late-night research...

Pulled from Wikipedia:

+Parts of The Aviator, the 2004 biopic of Howard Hughes, were digitally manipulated to imitate color processes that were available during the periods each scene takes place. The two-color look of the film is incorrectly cited as looking like Technicolor's two-color systems, and is in fact a facsimile of Hughes' own color system, Multicolor. The "three-strip" Technicolor look begins after the newsreel footage of Hughes making the first flight around the world.+

Both processes (2 strip and Multicolor) are subtractive and rely on getting into CMYK - which I guess is the real challenge in mimicking this in Color.

Yup - getting some more Shake nodes would be nice or someone like Nattress developing an array of color space conversion nodes.

- pi

FWIW, here's the original, and my Shake 3 strip, and 2 strip...

Original:



Three Strip:



Two Strip:



Patrick

Okay - as I mentioned, I'm no Color expert, but here's my efforts at re-creating my Shake Script in ColorFX:

Three Strip:


Two Strip:


And here's a picture of the Color FX room - a bit crowded...



The highlighted RGB Merge5 is 2 Strip...

Thoughts?

Patrick

This looks great. There are a few parameters that need adjustment after it's built so if anyone is curious, email me off list.

Saved to the Color FX Bin

Can't say I've ever been wild for the 2-strip, but the 3-strip is so "poppy" its pure eye-candy.

Nice.

jPo

Graeme once called it the "Sound of Music effect"...

Patrick

Zebulun how do we email you off-list to get those parameters? I can't find an email, or a way to contact you "off list"

Thanks