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Captured by the camera and merged with live action, a distant galaxy, a lost empire or an impossible landscape can look undeniably real. And yet, among all the masters of filmic art’s smoke and mirrors, matte painters remain some of the least appreciated artisans considering what the bring to the table.
Goals for a Successful Matte Painting • Realistic Lighting and Exposure Common Pipeline
Image Manipulation Tips Use HSL/Curve Adjustments Layers & Layer Masks instead of directly manipulating pixels – always maintain as much non-destructive pixel control as possible. Every color correction adjustment applied to plates or images causes a degree of destruction to the original pixels. Keep in mind that all images found online (Google Images Search) are 8-bit – very limiting in color depth and highly susceptible to banding when color correcting. Investing is 16 or 32-bit libraries of photos are highly valued for matte painters.
Use photos that fit the same lighting environment as the final painting – ambient lighting and direct lighting. Hard shadows baked into a photo can prove difficult to remove. Use photos that have the same perspective as the final painting. Keep in mind lens distortion and focal length used in source images. Remember rules and reference of atmospheric perspective/haze/participating media. Don’t just guess at how light reacts in environments – get reference whenever possible. Observe nature! Don’t forget about finishing touches like grain, lens distortion, chromatic aberration and other lens defects. Resolution and Hero Element Tips Never work at a low color depth (ie: 8-bit) or in CMYK mode. CMYK (printers color-gamut) will change your colors when converted back to RGB (especially highly saturated colors). Work at a minimum of 16-bit color depth. Always work at a higher resolution than the final filmed image needs to be (at least 150%). This allows for camera moves, as well as resampling down that may hide minor edge defects.
Tracking-in camera moves going past hero elements that are simply placed on cards may give away the “flatness” of an element (akin to the Disney Mulit-Plane Camera effect – as in the image above from 1991 Beauty and the Beast). Proper closeup rotation of elements moving in foreground parallax may be needed. To read the history of matte paintings, including extensive before-and-after green screen shots from the latest movies and television, please visit the VFX Lecture Series! Ciao! |