COLOUR SPECIAL
M oving a picture from lens to TV has often been described as going from glass to glass. The phrase has always involved a little idealism; no camera-display combination has ever tried to recreate the real world photon by photon. The way colour makes it through the system has always involved opinion, and the technology has recently made that process much more flexible. At the same time, creative inspiration most often arises from productions old enough to have become classics, made when colour control was – from the cinematographer’s perspective – just simpler. Nobody is second-guessing the colorimetry of Lawrence of Arabia just because it was made without a dozen different monitoring LUTs. Current technologies tend to have equivalents in history. Film stock changes now happen at the press of a button. The duties of a DIT overlap, broadly, with the traditional lab contact. Gaffers who might once have prepped correction filters for each HMI find themselves dialling in colour using a chart designed for physicists. All that flexibility has moved a lot of complexity from lab to set, where time is expensive. In the end, all of this arises from two huge changes in cinematography: digital acquisition and LED lighting, which took place against a backdrop of more general changes in display and post-production technology. Colour has changed in fundamental ways – and the pace of that change has been rapid for a decade or more. Now, though, the world seems almost relieved at signs of maturity, as product design has begun to involve something other than a race for competitive numbers. ON LIGHTING Until we have 18kW LEDs, there will continue to be a mountain to climb. Still, more conventional power levels matter to more people, and new releases often compete on features as much as anything else. The biggest issue, though, remains colour quality – and that’s not a new issue at all. New ideas are often pushed onto the market when the underlying technology
Colour control is more powerful – and complex – than ever before. Phil Rhodes explores the tools shaping how we see the image WORDS PHIL RHODES
is barely capable of doing what is asked of it. That, and a dubious public understanding of how colour works, was no great help to emergent LEDs. Perhaps people knew that combining red, green and blue light does not create white light; it just looks like white light – at least when it illuminates colourless objects. Illuminate a sunflower with an RGB disco light, and the dull, underwhelming result
makes it clear that there is no yellow in our putative white. What we want is the glow emitted by hot things. Candle flames, tungsten- halogen bulbs and stars are all bright because they are hot. LEDs are not, although they can often pretend fairly well. Having a blue LED illuminate a yellow-emitting phosphor – as has been common for years – is a mature
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