COMPOSITION
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Composition – 5 tips for creating perfect cinematic lighting and making your work look stunningRead more: Composition – 5 tips for creating perfect cinematic lighting and making your work look stunninghttp://www.diyphotography.net/5-tips-creating-perfect-cinematic-lighting-making-work-look-stunning/ 1. Learn the rules of lighting 2. Learn when to break the rules 3. Make your key light larger 4. Reverse keying 5. Always be backlighting 
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Photography basics: Camera Aspect Ratio, Sensor Size and Depth of Field – resolutionsRead more: Photography basics: Camera Aspect Ratio, Sensor Size and Depth of Field – resolutionshttp://www.shutterangle.com/2012/cinematic-look-aspect-ratio-sensor-size-depth-of-field/ http://www.shutterangle.com/2012/film-video-aspect-ratio-artistic-choice/ 
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Cinematographers Blueprint 300dpi posterRead more: Cinematographers Blueprint 300dpi posterThe 300dpi digital poster is now available to all PixelSham.com subscribers. If you have already subscribed and wish a copy, please send me a note through the contact page. 
DESIGN
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Arminas Valunas – “Coca-Cola: Wherever you are.”Read more: Arminas Valunas – “Coca-Cola: Wherever you are.”Arminas created this using Juggernaut Xl model and QR Code Monster SDXL ControlNet. 
 His pipeline:
 Static Images – Forge UI.
 Upscaled with Leonardo AI universal upscaler.
 Animated with Runway ML and Minimax.
 Video upscale – Topaz Video AI.
 Composited in Adobe Premiere.
 Juggernaut Xl download here:
 https://civitai.com/models/133005/juggernaut-xl
 QR Code Monster SDXL:
 https://civitai.com/models/197247?modelVersionId=221829
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AI MidJourney – creating images with AIRead more: AI MidJourney – creating images with AIhttps://www.deviantart.com/tag/midjourney https://boingboing.net/2022/03/24/midjourney-sharpens-style-of-ai-art.html https://www.resetera.com/threads/midjourney-is-lighting-up-the-ai-generated-art-community.586463/ https://www.artstation.com/artwork/G8Lead Images courtesy of Midjourney’s users                                
COLOR
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Capturing the world in HDR for real time projects – Call of Duty: Advanced WarfareRead more: Capturing the world in HDR for real time projects – Call of Duty: Advanced WarfareReal-World Measurements for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare www.activision.com/cdn/research/Real_World_Measurements_for_Call_of_Duty_Advanced_Warfare.pdf Local version Real_World_Measurements_for_Call_of_Duty_Advanced_Warfare.pdf 
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What light is best to illuminate gems for resaleRead more: What light is best to illuminate gems for resalewww.palagems.com/gem-lighting2 Artificial light sources, not unlike the diverse phases of natural light, vary considerably in their properties. As a result, some lamps render an object’s color better than others do. The most important criterion for assessing the color-rendering ability of any lamp is its spectral power distribution curve. Natural daylight varies too much in strength and spectral composition to be taken seriously as a lighting standard for grading and dealing colored stones. For anything to be a standard, it must be constant in its properties, which natural light is not. For dealers in particular to make the transition from natural light to an artificial light source, that source must offer: 
 1- A degree of illuminance at least as strong as the common phases of natural daylight.
 2- Spectral properties identical or comparable to a phase of natural daylight.A source combining these two things makes gems appear much the same as when viewed under a given phase of natural light. From the viewpoint of many dealers, this corresponds to a naturalappearance. The 6000° Kelvin xenon short-arc lamp appears closest to meeting the criteria for a standard light source. Besides the strong illuminance this lamp affords, its spectrum is very similar to CIE standard illuminants of similar color temperature.   
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FXGuide – ACES 2.0 with ILM’s Alex FryRead more: FXGuide – ACES 2.0 with ILM’s Alex Fryhttps://draftdocs.acescentral.com/background/whats-new/ ACES 2.0 is the second major release of the components that make up the ACES system. The most significant change is a new suite of rendering transforms whose design was informed by collected feedback and requests from users of ACES 1. The changes aim to improve the appearance of perceived artifacts and to complete previously unfinished components of the system, resulting in a more complete, robust, and consistent product. Highlights of the key changes in ACES 2.0 are as follows: - New output transforms, including:
- A less aggressive tone scale
- More intuitive controls to create custom outputs to non-standard displays
- Robust gamut mapping to improve perceptual uniformity
- Improved performance of the inverse transforms
 
- Enhanced AMF specification
- An updated specification for ACES Transform IDs
- OpenEXR compression recommendations
- Enhanced tools for generating Input Transforms and recommended procedures for characterizing prosumer cameras
- Look Transform Library
- Expanded documentation
 Rendering TransformThe most substantial change in ACES 2.0 is a complete redesign of the rendering transform. ACES 2.0 was built as a unified system, rather than through piecemeal additions. Different deliverable outputs “match” better and making outputs to display setups other than the provided presets is intended to be user-driven. The rendering transforms are less likely to produce undesirable artifacts “out of the box”, which means less time can be spent fixing problematic images and more time making pictures look the way you want. Key design goals- Improve consistency of tone scale and provide an easy to use parameter to allow for outputs between preset dynamic ranges
- Minimize hue skews across exposure range in a region of same hue
- Unify for structural consistency across transform type
- Easy to use parameters to create outputs other than the presets
- Robust gamut mapping to improve harsh clipping artifacts
- Fill extents of output code value cube (where appropriate and expected)
- Invertible – not necessarily reversible, but Output > ACES > Output round-trip should be possible
- Accomplish all of the above while maintaining an acceptable “out-of-the box” rendering
 
- New output transforms, including:
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Victor Perez – The Color Management Handbook for Visual Effects ArtistsRead more: Victor Perez – The Color Management Handbook for Visual Effects ArtistsDigital Color Principles, Color Management Fundamentals & ACES Workflows 
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HDR and ColorRead more: HDR and Colorhttps://www.soundandvision.com/content/nits-and-bits-hdr-and-color In HD we often refer to the range of available colors as a color gamut. Such a color gamut is typically plotted on a two-dimensional diagram, called a CIE chart, as shown in at the top of this blog. Each color is characterized by its x/y coordinates. Good enough for government work, perhaps. But for HDR, with its higher luminance levels and wider color, the gamut becomes three-dimensional. For HDR the color gamut therefore becomes a characteristic we now call the color volume. It isn’t easy to show color volume on a two-dimensional medium like the printed page or a computer screen, but one method is shown below. As the luminance becomes higher, the picture eventually turns to white. As it becomes darker, it fades to black. The traditional color gamut shown on the CIE chart is simply a slice through this color volume at a selected luminance level, such as 50%. Three different color volumes—we still refer to them as color gamuts though their third dimension is important—are currently the most significant. The first is BT.709 (sometimes referred to as Rec.709), the color gamut used for pre-UHD/HDR formats, including standard HD. The largest is known as BT.2020; it encompasses (roughly) the range of colors visible to the human eye (though ET might find it insufficient!). Between these two is the color gamut used in digital cinema, known as DCI-P3. sRGB 
  D65 
  
LIGHTING
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Composition and The Expressive Nature Of LightRead more: Composition and The Expressive Nature Of Lighthttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-danskin/post_12457_b_10777222.html George Sand once said “ The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.” 
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GretagMacbeth Color Checker Numeric Values and Middle GrayRead more: GretagMacbeth Color Checker Numeric Values and Middle GrayThe human eye perceives half scene brightness not as the linear 50% of the present energy (linear nature values) but as 18% of the overall brightness. We are biased to perceive more information in the dark and contrast areas. A Macbeth chart helps with calibrating back into a photographic capture into this “human perspective” of the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_gray In photography, painting, and other visual arts, middle gray or middle grey is a tone that is perceptually about halfway between black and white on a lightness scale in photography and printing, it is typically defined as 18% reflectance in visible light  Light meters, cameras, and pictures are often calibrated using an 18% gray card[4][5][6] or a color reference card such as a ColorChecker. On the assumption that 18% is similar to the average reflectance of a scene, a grey card can be used to estimate the required exposure of the film. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorChecker (more…)
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RawTherapee – a free, open source, cross-platform raw image and HDRi processing programRead more: RawTherapee – a free, open source, cross-platform raw image and HDRi processing program5.10 of this tool includes excellent tools to clean up cr2 and cr3 used on set to support HDRI processing. 
 Converting raw to AcesCG 32 bit tiffs with metadata.
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Photography basics: Why Use a (MacBeth) Color Chart?Read more: Photography basics: Why Use a (MacBeth) Color Chart?Start here: https://www.pixelsham.com/2013/05/09/gretagmacbeth-color-checker-numeric-values/ https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-a-color-checker-tool/ In LightRoom in Final Cut in Nuke Note: In Foundry’s Nuke, the software will map 18% gray to whatever your center f/stop is set to in the viewer settings (f/8 by default… change that to EV by following the instructions below). 
 You can experiment with this by attaching an Exposure node to a Constant set to 0.18, setting your viewer read-out to Spotmeter, and adjusting the stops in the node up and down. You will see that a full stop up or down will give you the respective next value on the aperture scale (f8, f11, f16 etc.).One stop doubles or halves the amount or light that hits the filmback/ccd, so everything works in powers of 2. 
 So starting with 0.18 in your constant, you will see that raising it by a stop will give you .36 as a floating point number (in linear space), while your f/stop will be f/11 and so on.If you set your center stop to 0 (see below) you will get a relative readout in EVs, where EV 0 again equals 18% constant gray. In other words. Setting the center f-stop to 0 means that in a neutral plate, the middle gray in the macbeth chart will equal to exposure value 0. EV 0 corresponds to an exposure time of 1 sec and an aperture of f/1.0. This will set the sun usually around EV12-17 and the sky EV1-4 , depending on cloud coverage. To switch Foundry’s Nuke’s SpotMeter to return the EV of an image, click on the main viewport, and then press s, this opens the viewer’s properties. Now set the center f-stop to 0 in there. And the SpotMeter in the viewport will change from aperture and fstops to EV. 
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Magnific.ai Relight – change the entire lighting of a sceneRead more: Magnific.ai Relight – change the entire lighting of a sceneIt’s a new Magnific spell that allows you to change the entire lighting of a scene and, optionally, the background with just: 1/ A prompt OR 
 2/ A reference image OR
 3/ A light map (drawing your own lights)https://x.com/javilopen/status/1805274155065176489 
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