Chapter 8. Memory Colors: Skin Tone, Skies, and Foliage

This chapter addresses the far-reaching topic of viewer preferences. One of our many tasks as colorists is to be aware of what the audience is expecting to see. If we’re attempting to convey the most naturalistic rendering of a scene, it’s tempting to think that our goal would be to photometrically reproduce the colors of that scene as they existed in reality.

More often, audience expectations reflect what each viewer would like to see. Apparently, we all view the world through rose-tinted glasses, or at least we expect to see the world depicted on the screen that way. This should be a comfort to the ambitious colorist. After all, if viewers want reality, they can get up off their couches ...

Get Color Correction Handbook: Professional Techniques for Video and Cinema, Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.