Colour Is Complicated: How I got a bit better at it by learning what I could leave out

Color Science &

Digital Imaging. An Essential Guide for Visual Effects Artists, Filmmakers, and Photographers by Steve Wright

I've had senior ops tell me they are leaving the industry over it. It was nowhere for a whole career, then bam!…what you see is NOT what you get. There’s no winners. Brilliant colour management sometimes goes almost unnoticed. It just had to be done. But you only have to get it wrong once to see how devastating it can be. I know. We've all been through it.

I've known Steve Wright for several years. I took his Nuke course, and we stayed in touch. He loves teaching, I’m out in the field, so we kept on chatting. I loved the general back and forth, then this one turned into absolute gold. Steve’s book gives you the complete story, the pipeline of the pixel. From Daylight → camera → file → comp → to how it looks on screen. Exactly what I was looking for. The best thing I learned is that I don't need to know it all. That would be a waste. Instead, I grasped the important concepts. I figured out what is needed in a commercials pipeline; just enough for my name to be here - on the back of this book.

Let’s talk it through. No one needs to have colour all figured out. We'll follow battle-tested protocol and we’ll make the well-informed call. We'll take a look at every curved ball and, if we don’t know, make our best guess. Even a minor gamble is OK, these days it almost always turns out just fine.