LUTious Color: Grading for Games

[Music] so today i am going to talk to you about luscious colors which is totally pun because i love puns um so i'm this is about uh color grading in games um and i know hdr is a thing and lookup tables are being updated but um i'm hoping to explain some of the theory behind a lot of color grading so hi my name is izzy graham and i'm a photographer and games developer and i unshapely love color but i particularly love color grading because of its subtleties this talk today is to run you through my personal color grading process and show how research can help inform color grading decisions there's an overwhelming there's an overwhelming amount of tools for color grading which is why for this talk i've tried to aim more in a theory direction however if you do want to geek out about

photoshop lightroom or even unity post stack stuff please please add me on twitter i've tried to give more some a couple of tool tips throughout this talk but it is very much a one-on-one and how to understand color grading and helping you trying to define a look so the second thing to know is there's a huge difference between color grading and color editing color editing is often balancing the colors so you're making the image look decent but then there's also color grading which is more of a look for a set of scenes or images and it tends to be more creative and can very much focus on the storytelling so i really love telling stories the first time i realized this difference was in 2014 i was quite depressed and i happened to be doing a two-week course on photography the lecturer told us you could take any photo you wanted but it had to be with a purpose as part of the course we went to go to

dalesford which was supposed to be happy place full of happy people which is cool great but when we got there it was dark and foggy like really dark and foggy and honestly i had the best time making the photos look as depressing as possible so that's when i realized that you could grade things how you feel for this look i called it sad wes anderson because who knew so who knew how much fun it was to revel in your misery so since then i've had a grand old time grading things on how i want them to feel i love coming up with different grading styles for different moments in my life and taking on colors to remember them by i'm also an indie games developer and i'm working on a game called intergalactic space princess it's a narrative adventure game and when i started making games i came from a programming background i joked a lot that my art was kind of glorified programmer art and i was too lazy to use

anything but a touchpad however i kind of hid behind color to make my assets look maybe semi-decent even though i was very bad at drawing so i'm going to talk to you a little bit about the game later on but for first let's go into tools so color grading in games sadly isn't spoken about all that often it's my first time speaking here so i hope that i give you a broad overview of what color grading is and it and turns out the games industry is really good at producing tools but when you're faced with too many it's easy to get overwhelmed by them so i decided to focus my talk today isn't about explaining every single one of these sliders but it's about coming up with your own ideas breaking them down what you want and then diving into these tools to give you exactly what you want think of it's like picking out candy in a candy store it's chaotic and it's so much fun to try all these things

but if you try too much you kind of get sick and lost and lost sick and then you're stuck in some kind of slide of hell so it's good to go in with a purpose it's the way i do this for myself is to make my own rule set think of it this way when you create a lookup table you're creating the rule sets telling house the colors how to behave why not use the same logic and create some rules for yourself so let's go into color history so before these nice tools and sliders were a thing color grading was actually called color timing what timers used to do was a chemical process that tried to predict the film and grade it all the same this meant that they had to knew exactly what they wanted before they went in this film here is a is a road to position while sam medes did spend a lot of time and effort with cinematographer and lighter conrad hall he considered using a bleach bypass on the film however he opted instead to keep the lighting in

and to instead subtly remove the pinks and desaturate the film overall colour timing was never a replacement for good lighting weather conditions and mood they simply used it to enhance what was already there once tools especially color timing versus grading started developing color could start to give films a lot more distinctive looks gian pereirae like very bad at pronouncing names spent two years come coming up and experimenting with a look for emily so the other thing about color grading is you can use it to quote different things so this is the movie stalker by andrei tawaskowski and this is the film annihilation so films often quote other films rest uh referencing the things before them takashi said he hated color however i think stalker has some of the prettiest colors and he used a film called ectochrome which is like a three-step technicolor process it's quite easy to see how alex garland

tried to do a similar process in achieving a three strip color look giving off similar green tones and powerful reds despite not existing specified red's not existing much in the source material which i think that's the thing i love about most about grading it's so easy to quote things and give off similar vibes and color grading is really really powerful because it's all subconscious so this is an experiment i tried um so all my learning in photography has been through films the way i started photography was getting through inspired through cinema and then through other mediums and then eventually more abstract things because who says grading has to be realistic so one thing about grading is you can't polish a turd but you can absolutely roll it in glitter um so these two shots were taken about 20 seconds apart but i have graded them two completely different ways

so you can really define a look just by like tweaking tweaking tweaking the colors and if that's all you do you end up having a really easy way to get a look so for this one i was kind of like trying to go for like those like late 80s like posters i have like the cool sci-fi stuff um and then for this one i kind of went for like the full trash kind of 80s and galaxy leggings because just because so for grading it's important to know what exactly it is you want before you go in i once got told my work was a little bit too postcardy to ever do well in photo competitions and like an absolute normal human being i was like whatever i like postcards and then completely leaned in one day when i was in la i felt like taking some nice postcards for myself like you know the super old vintage ones that you find in the back of your drawer like oh cheryl there's a reason why i

haven't talked to you in 10 years so i kind of decided to grade it like that so the first step i usually do is to put together a mood board i did a little bit of research and i had a look at the old 60s postcards i was particularly interested in how postcard fail faded rather than whatever film stock was used i noticed particularly that the deeper blues had increased in saturation and the lighter blues would fade out this is because of the printed technology and the dyes and the ways the dye is stuck so i started developing a rule set for myself the dark blues would become deep and saturated however the light blues would be faded and murky the greens would be more desaturated and more towards mint reds lean in so that means that if it's a standard red it would either become very pink if it had any kind of pink hues or it become orange if it had any kind of orange hues and the rest of it kind of just faded away so with the example image that i showed

before um this is what a grading process might look like if i put in those rule sets and then this is the uh process that i came up with for make the little postcards i definitely tried to uh i did actually tweak a lot of the colors to make them look a little bit more refined than some of the dyes but i still tried to keep the minty green tones and the deep blues as well as the faded lighter blues so it's important to know exactly what it is you want before you go in there still want a photocop so the other thing about uh color grading is it's good to understand colors so and especially how to get there so when i was driving in a road trip with a couple of friends i was staring out the window i really love my friend emmy spicer's work who uses a lot of disposable cameras and i kind of felt like it was just this disposable fleeting moment so i put together a bit of a mood board

and had a look at some of her work and i found that disposable google cameras are generally made from plastic they have a low an incredibly low dynamic range that means that the blacks get crushed and the highlights get blown out incredibly easily on a really bad curved chart which i had really fun making it would kind of look like that so everything kind of would exist in the middle and the there would be no highlights and no shadows and if you just wanted a quick way to do it you just kind of draw like a weird s and that way you can just like clip your highlights and crush your shadows and be right to go so for the research i started breaking down by what exactly disposable cameras are it's easy to kind of like slap on a filter and be like yeah nostalgia but for this i was like well i kind of want to work out how disposable cameras work because a lot of the scans that you get of disposable cameras are incredibly unreliable and incredibly inconsistent

so i did some research and broke down exactly what i was trying to quote and i did some research on the properties of the cameras for example how often disposables have wacky light meters and used cheap films that meant that i could deduce that what film stocks are used but also that they're likely to be either underexposed or overexposed so once i figured out what kind of film they used i know that there's a lot of like film stock online that can teach you exactly how the colors behave i find this research really interesting and if you're say doing like a 80s film you can look at what kind of films they were using or if you're doing like a 60s film or even like a 1920s film you can really break down the research and find out exactly how they achieved the colors they did and then if you can't find reference material you're able to look at color charts to be able to work out exactly how they

behave um the other thing that i was looking at was how plastic versus glass lenses so what are the uh how does that affect the image so i know how cheaply disposable cameras are made but my research suggests that the cameras and holgers are quite similar so then i looked at colors behaving on plastic lens and finger smearings once i have done the research in this i begin to create a rule set and understanding of what colors i want to use there's a lot of different tools for the job and while this is in the tool talks maybe hopefully the next few like process slides might be useful so the broad overview is like sunset creates very pink tones for a lot of the cheap films so that's pink overlay the blacks and shadows get crushed to green um so you can have green shadows you want murky colors so you add a black brown overlay um grays come to purple blues go to gray which you can just use using a hue and

saturation meter um and it's really about like experimenting and working out these rule sets and then working how to get the colors and then going through your own personal slider hell so this is like a quick step by step of like that process so first i had a pink overlay um if you're using something like unity you can add like a color tint over the top that works really well um i then crushed the curves um that's creating that little s shape i then created green shadows you can either do this through uh like curves or um like those three will uh things i've just had a mental blank and then you can add browns desaturate the blues and usually add like a dsa dehaze and reduce the clarity um and you thought color grading was based on feel so the other thing about color grading is it doesn't have to be realistic

what is what if you want to just pick out something out of the blue you don't have like how do you do the data set from what if you uh have a very limited data set to be inspired from and trying to work out how the colors work so if you are using um a reference image and you don't know what colors exist uh it's it's really uh you can pick it out and isolate the colors using a grayscale overlay so the first thing i do is easily isolate the colors with a gray overlay i tend to do this a lot and break down the properties of something i want to quote i definitely know there's there's a lot of purple and orange in there but i'm trying to uncover what the other properties are by doing a saturation map it's super fast and hopefully like i don't have time to explain it um how to actually do it but it is very google um you can work out exactly what

color colors are used in an image this is very useful when you're trying to break down exactly how something looks the way it does so when you're doing reference boards for color grading you can really see what colors are used so essentially you basically create a map of where the most saturated bits of the image are which i was white and the least saturated pitch images and then you have a overlay of the original image over the top so it makes it really easy to read this gives me a color scheme to work from and i love using data like this because occasionally your eyes will lie to you so like sorry so it's worked out that the colors must be purple blue or orange when you are color grading it's important to make sure that you have at least three colors otherwise an image can start to look monochromatic for example this image here looks a little

bit nicer than this image here where i took out the orange i also wanted to i spent a lot of time tweaking the temperatures of these image um and you can really work out how color grades behave with each uh when you have a rule set and then you adjust the temperature it's interesting to watch how the all the other colors uh relate to that i completely underexposed it because that gives it its flat and moody look so if you look at the histogram it's like all in the um left part of the histogram and it gives a very uh underexposed tint feel so with this in mind i used those same rule sets to create a simplistic color scheme for the next three images and then the three after that seeing how a rule set can behave in different light and applying subtle changes is always incredibly interesting you don't have to base your grading on something that already exists all you need to do is create a consistent rule set at to work out how

your colors behave um honestly there is so much more degrading than this some of the things that i haven't googled are secondary grading masking transitional grading consistency um there is so much to talk about but for now i'm gonna get onto video games so one of those cool things about even though this is not a video game it's steven universe which is great but uh one thing that i love looking at animation is how they get inspired by other things so steven universe and being puppy cat clearly uh took a lot of inspiration from sailor moon there's been a lot of really fantastic color great like color grading examples and games already so like livermar by florian is an amazing example of how you can do an incredibly awesome color scheme um dead static drive by mike blackney is also a really good example of how a

how he uses a lookup table throughout the game to create inconsistent look mirror's edge was one of the first [Music] aaa games that really did do a very expressive color grade and had a very like clean looking city and firewatch is another game that is very good at color grading so i'm going to show you my dang game um so this is my game intergalactic space princess so the protagonist is moline who's a 14 year old girl with opinions on things the colors reflect said opinions and communicate to the player how she feels about the environment her hometown is beigey and dusty and she finds it incredibly boring but when she does find something's interesting like the fridge or falling down the intestines of an interdimensional world worm it's colorful so when i was making assets for this game i ran into a problem i had done an asset pass in the milk bar and i wanted the milk bar to be

filled clinical kind of like that gross plastic top that you have on those barbecue tables outside mmm chemicals so i chose the color scheme of uh mint red and beige to convey that look however it really didn't go with the rest of the game maleen had the same opinion of the milk bar as she did with the house in the street but luckily as a my experience with photography i knew a little bit about color grading so i decided to tackle solving this so the color scheme from lane's house was beige yellow and blue the color scheme for the street was just like 50 stages of beige which is awful and i like to think that color grading is the bow and all of this all the presents in front of the christmas tree you know which presents you got from auntie sandra because she uses the same bow and despite them all having different wrappings you can tell that they're from andre sandra because she uses the same ribbon so i wanted to give the whole town a

feeling of past nostalgia kind of like those bad phone apps that make your phone look like those toy pictures i also wanted to make sure that the accent colors didn't get lost especially maleen so i started developing a rule set for myself i wanted there to be an overwhelming amount of brown but not the realistic gritty video game brown but a cute kind of animated fun sepia brown and a lot of so i did a lot of tweaking to the saturations i also wanted the game to be desaturated without looking as desaturated as a lot of other games um i also wanted the accent colors not to get affected so much by the brown but still stand out as accent colors so the image on the left is the one that is the new grade and the image on the right is the old grade where basically a lot of the characters are kind of getting lost um so the milk bar is still standing out i'm using unity for this but honestly

there's a lot of stuff doing the same you can use photoshop to grade a lot of your things and then import them as a lookup table into unity and i really recommend doing this because it's really easy and really cheap and i really like grading in photoshop but i'm really biased so um so this is where a lookup table can come in really handy so instead of defining um so it yeah so first off i wanted to make it look like late afternoon i had a go at putting the initial lights in that i wanted to give it a yellow ambient light and a very subtle blue filter for the character once i did that i started to work on the post-processing stack it was still very yellow and it still really didn't go with the rest of the game so one thing about grading is it's generally good to grade neutral my game is small enough that i know that i can do a lot of bespoke grading through lighting and then tweak it to get it exactly how i want

however if you wanna if you want your game to be faster and consistent it's incredibly important to have a neutral base to work on when color grading this is where lookup tables come in really handy because they have a low dynamic range it means any kind of overblown highlights or shadows will get lost because they are a low dimension words um it's important to keep the scenes quite desaturated as well well not too dazed saturated but make sure your saturations don't get crushed either um so yeah just grade neutral bloxy so i wanted to make it look like late afternoon so i put in the initial lights and then after that i really started to work on the color grading so that's where i put in um like a lookup table that was a fuji based film filter i edited the curves to make it like give that contrast that the rest of the town had and i really started overlaying and

uh tweaking the color balance to make it go with the rest of the game but still being able to keep the uh colors of the characters the same so this is the before and this is the after so the final steps for uh so the summary for color grading is so the step one is to figure out exactly what you want to achieve do you want to make it look like the 80s do you want to have a clinical look do you want to go for a sad indie band cover it's up to you but it's important to decide what exactly it is you want the second step is to put some research together as to why you want the thing for your game do you want to make it look like it's from the 80s research the film stock they use do you want to make it look like blade runner start researching how tungsten film behaves you don't have to go by research but research helps a lot when you're trying to be consistent and the step three is to establish an internal rule set for yourself so this is coming up with rules to be

consistent and it's okay to be inconsistently consistent as long as you just have to decide that's what you want oops and just ah there we go um so research makes things easier in the long run long run which is one of the tips grading doesn't have to be realistic just consistent and grading neutral so let's talk thank you any questions you have to go up to the mic hi i had a question uh thanks for the talk um so you covered a lot about 2d game games it looked like um but if you have any thoughts on doing 3d if you plan to do a lot of color grading and a

lot of color post-processing would you recommend maybe doing less color in the lights that you're placing in the scene i guess what are your thoughts on that yeah so the question was uh if you're doing 3d color grading what do you do about uh a lot of the lights and that yeah so when i was ho uh i was recently helping out a friend uh grade his game and uh he had a lot of overblown stuff in unreal and it was really hard to kind of come back down from that so when he made these things a lot more neutral that's when it was like a lot easier um and the lookup tables that we were kind of creating really started to stick for the rest of the scene so i definitely go neutral cool thank you so much thanks for the talk um i have a question how would you do how would you deal with hdr as you talked about a lot of look up tables low dimming range but now i want to do

an hdr what do you do for color grading um so i don't have that much experience in hdr because i am using a lot of like my the game is for mobile so but it i guess it's similar to the way you use raw colors in photography um yeah i'm so sorry i'm so flustered at the moment sorry oh great talk i was curious if you have any hardware calibration that you do and any process to like check your colors across different platforms different monitors yeah so what i always do for this is i tend to uh color space is incredibly important um so what i tend to do is in photoshop i tend to have like a big canvas and like make screenshots and paste all of the different color spaces and i know it's not the most accurate but it does it is kind of

like a way to see like oh no is anything's getting crushed like you're any of the tones getting like dead the other way that i always do it as well is to view things on my phone and i have this really crappy monitor at home and that's great to tell if something is like really bad because you can just tell straight away so i don't ever try and get true color but i do try and get uh try and get uh what's the word i try and get edge cases to make sure that all the colors look okay cool thanks hi my name is danny that was beautiful talk thank you my question is i work on a vr game and especially when working on mobile devices i can't actually do any post processing so i'm wondering if you have tools to do color grading without using post processing a lot the ones i could think of is doing color grading on my baked lighting or directly adjusting the textures is

there anything else out there awesome yeah it's oh man so i was actually having this conversation like like two days ago um so ted dinola he works for oculus he's a great person to contact because i'm having like a lot of mental planks at the moment um but he was he had some really great advice about that because yeah i think he was saying like bacon lighting and everything like that i'm so sorry for like just having a biggest brain freeze but he's a really good person to contact ted dinola and he works at oculus i think that is it thank you i'm so sorry