Adobe 12040118 Tutorial - Page 243

Glow effect and Gaussian Blur effect applied to image in 32-bpc project (left) and 16-bpc project (right) Set the project color depth to 32 bpc to work with HDR footage or to work with over-range values-values above 1.0 (white) that aren't supported in 8- or 16-bpc mode. Over-range values preserve the intensity of highlights, which is as useful for synthetic effects such as lights, blurs, and glows as it is for working with HDR footage. The headroom provided by working in 32 bpc prevents many kinds of data loss during operations such as color correction and color profile conversion. Even if you're using 8-bpc footage and are creating movies in 8-bpc formats, you can obtain better results by having the project color depth set to 16 bpc or 32 bpc. Working in a higher bit depth provides higher precision for calculations and greatly reduces quantization artifacts, such as banding in gradients. Note: Merely increasing the color depth within a project won't eliminate gradients if the output format has a low bit depth. To mitigate banding, After Effects introduces dithering of colors when the colors are converted to 8-bpc colors, including when rendering and exporting to an 8-bpc format. This dithering is not introduced for previews. To force dithering for previews, apply an 8-bpc effect that does nothing-such as the Arithmetic effect with the default values-to an adjustment layer. Because 16-bpc frames use half the memory of 32-bpc frames, rendering previews in a 16-bpc project is faster, and RAM previews can be longer than in a 32-bpc project. 8-bpc frames use even less memory, but the tradeoff between quality and performance can be obvious in some images at a project color depth of 8 bpc. Special considerations for working with high dynamic range color You can use the HDR Compander effect to compress the dynamic range of a layer with an HDR footage item as its source. In this way, you can use tools that don't support HDR color, such as 8-bpc and 16-bit effects. When you're done, use the HDR Compander to undo the dynamic range compression. The HDR Highlight Compression effect lets you compress the highlight values in an HDR image so that they fall within the value range of a low dynamic range image. Because we can see only a subset of the luminance values in a real-world scene in an HDR image on a monitor, it is sometimes necessary to adjust the exposure-the amount of light captured in an image-when working with an HDR image. Adjusting the exposure of an HDR image is like adjusting the exposure when photographing a scene in the real world, allowing you to bring detail out of very dark areas or very bright areas. You can use the Exposure effect to change the color values of a layer for final output, or you can just adjust the exposure in a specific viewer for preview purposes. Important: Because some operations-including glows, blurs, and some blending modes-behave differently in 32-bpc mode as compared with 8-bpc or 16-bpc mode, your composition may look significantly different when you switch between high dynamic range and low dynamic range project settings. Additional resources about high dynamic range color Jonas Hummelstrand provides a collection of resources for understanding and using HDR color in After Effects on his General Specialist website. Chris Meyer explains what floating-point, 32-bpc, HDR color is good for in a video overview on the Lynda.com website. Kert Gartner provides some visual examples and a brief explanation on his VFX Haiku website that demonstrate the benefits of working with 32bpc color. Andrew Kramer provides a video tutorial on his Video Copilot website in which he demonstrates the advantages of using 32-bpc color with motion blur. On his fnord website, Brendan Bolles explains how to use the Color Profile Converter effect and film color profiles to adjust colors and perform tone mapping to make an HDR image appear as if it were shot on motion picture film. Select a color or edit a gradient To the top In many contexts, you can click an eyedropper button to activate the eyedropper tool, or you can click a color swatch to open a color picker. If you use the Adobe Color Picker, you can also activate the eyedropper from the Adobe Color Picker dialog box. If you click a gradient swatch for a stroke or fill in a shape layer, or click Edit Gradient in the Timeline panel, the Adobe Color Picker opens as the Gradient Editor, with additional controls for editing gradients included at the top of the dialog box. Andrew Devis shows how to modify gradient fills and strokes for shape layers, plus other options, in a video on the Creative COW website.