re: Just rewatched GOTG2...

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I don't know... do you do any editing of digital photos?


Yeah...I do actually.

I'm not arguing at all about that stuff...even if I know it'll trigger FewerKilometers and get him into this... The difference between a Snyder nightmare colored movie and what James Gunn put on screen (I actually think the best example of the colors was them arriving at Ego's planets and watching the bubbles fly by. Just incredible) is night and day...pun intended.

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Hey, based on your response, it sounds like you took my question as being snarky. Sorry if you did, I didn't mean it that way

I used to really get into photoshopping stuff years ago, I found Gimp back in the extremaly early versions (.15 I think, it was before 2000 for sure). I think I had PSP 5 back then, too. played around with some 3d software a lot too, and having to integrate the workflow to get a good render took some work.

Having done that, you pick up an eye for what looks like hue and burn layers, overlays, etc.
Snyder pushes things to a pretty wide range, but then pulls it all down to a real dark zero. His baseline is basically indoor shadow without any light, and seems to go heavily into increased sharpness and contrast. His approach to color is to drop it all under 20%, basically a monochrome approach, but with a slight overlay of tint. It can look very cool (all of this can), but can also look bleak and drab too.

Gunn went the entirely opposite direction- he's got HDR across the board, and layers upon layers of vivid oversaturation in this. The gunblasts and surrounding smoke are neon green, purple, red and blue. The character lighting (look at baby groot) are that way too. He pulled it off beautifully, and avoided overdoing it to the point that it was TOO psychedelic to follow.

I remember talking to some CGI guys over a decade ago, they said that color was a tough issue to deal with at the time to match live action, they basically set diffuse saturation levels to around 10% over a grayscale base, and then brightened it up with specular levels adding more "color" to the highlight areas. That way, it didn't look like it was glowing or a cell overlay. In other words your "blue" jeans aren't really blue, they are extremely gray, with a slight level of blue specular in the non-shadowed areas.

I imagine most movies are still using some variant of Cinepaint (a Gimp fork that works with frames) tweaked in-house to do their work, and some version of Maya or similar to do the actual CGI modelling, Lightwave or similar for renders, and tweaking shite to get the renders to match into the live scene.