TLJ has a very warm and very soft light appearance. Which I personally like, but I still completely agree that the film is visually too dark for the same reasons you’ve pointed out. My own suggestion is that the new grade ups the contrast too much - it’s making the bright parts stand out even more from the scenery, while also washing out the lighting gradient on people’s faces like they’re standing under fluro tubes. In my opinion, the lighter areas don’t really need to get much lighter at all, it’s just the mids that need to be brightened a bit. You’ll also be fighting against the theatrical lighting by going for a blue tint, which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t do it (it would certainly be an interesting change), but it’ll be a lot more difficult.
I feel like that sounds overly negative, which isn’t my intention; I always like seeing your colour grading process.
No problem, Cap. I wouldn’t be posting a lot of screencaps if there wasn’t room for improvement somewhere.
I suppose you make a fair point on the contrast. I think I’ll try moving the brightest areas down from “as far as broadcast safe will allow” to “somewhere in the 75% range” instead, then raise up the gamma some more for the mids. I’ll see how that goes.
Anyway, Github blocked the second half of the comparisons on the previous post (probably because they exceeded the size limits), so I had to go back and re-upload the second half. I’m not sure if any new insights will be found, but if you want to see a few more warmer-looking scenes (Yoda’s scene, for example), or you want to see what Crait looks like, you can find those shots in the spoiler tag below:
