COMPOSITION
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9 Best Hacks to Make a Cinematic Video with Any CameraRead more: 9 Best Hacks to Make a Cinematic Video with Any Camerahttps://www.flexclip.com/learn/cinematic-video.html - Frame Your Shots to Create Depth
- Create Shallow Depth of Field
- Avoid Shaky Footage and Use Flexible Camera Movements
- Properly Use Slow Motion
- Use Cinematic Lighting Techniques
- Apply Color Grading
- Use Cinematic Music and SFX
- Add Cinematic Fonts and Text Effects
- Create the Cinematic Bar at the Top and the Bottom
  
DESIGN
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A.I. Algorithm art fetches US$432,500 at Christie auctionRead more: A.I. Algorithm art fetches US$432,500 at Christie auctionwww.ctvnews.ca/entertainment/algorithm-art-fetches-us-432-500-at-christie-s-auction-1.4150620 www.christies.com/features/A-collaboration-between-two-artists-one-human-one-a-machine-9332-1.aspx  
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Interactive Maps of Earthquakes around the worldRead more: Interactive Maps of Earthquakes around the worldhttps://ralucanicola.github.io/JSAPI_demos/earthquakes https://ralucanicola.github.io/JSAPI_demos/earthquakes-depth https://ralucanicola.github.io/JSAPI_demos/ridgecrest-earthquake https://ralucanicola.github.io/JSAPI_demos/last-earthquakes  
COLOR
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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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Types of Film Lights and their efficiency – CRI, Color Temperature and Luminous EfficacyRead more: Types of Film Lights and their efficiency – CRI, Color Temperature and Luminous Efficacynofilmschool.com/types-of-film-lights “Not every light performs the same way. Lights and lighting are tricky to handle. You have to plan for every circumstance. But the good news is, lighting can be adjusted. Let’s look at different factors that affect lighting in every scene you shoot. “ 
 Use CRI, Luminous Efficacy and color temperature controls to match your needs.Color Temperature 
 Color temperature describes the “color” of white light by a light source radiated by a perfect black body at a given temperature measured in degrees Kelvinhttps://www.pixelsham.com/2019/10/18/color-temperature/ CRI 
 “The Color Rendering Index is a measurement of how faithfully a light source reveals the colors of whatever it illuminates, it describes the ability of a light source to reveal the color of an object, as compared to the color a natural light source would provide. The highest possible CRI is 100. A CRI of 100 generally refers to a perfect black body, like a tungsten light source or the sun. “https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-color-rendering-index (more…)
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Rec-2020 – TVs new color gamut standard used by Dolby Vision?Read more: Rec-2020 – TVs new color gamut standard used by Dolby Vision?https://www.hdrsoft.com/resources/dri.html#bit-depth  The dynamic range is a ratio between the maximum and minimum values of a physical measurement. Its definition depends on what the dynamic range refers to. For a scene: Dynamic range is the ratio between the brightest and darkest parts of the scene. For a camera: Dynamic range is the ratio of saturation to noise. More specifically, the ratio of the intensity that just saturates the camera to the intensity that just lifts the camera response one standard deviation above camera noise. For a display: Dynamic range is the ratio between the maximum and minimum intensities emitted from the screen. The Dynamic Range of real-world scenes can be quite high — ratios of 100,000:1 are common in the natural world. An HDR (High Dynamic Range) image stores pixel values that span the whole tonal range of real-world scenes. Therefore, an HDR image is encoded in a format that allows the largest range of values, e.g. floating-point values stored with 32 bits per color channel. Another characteristics of an HDR image is that it stores linear values. This means that the value of a pixel from an HDR image is proportional to the amount of light measured by the camera. For TVs HDR is great, but it’s not the only new TV feature worth discussing. (more…)
LIGHTING
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3D Lighting Tutorial by Amaan KramRead more: 3D Lighting Tutorial by Amaan Kramhttp://www.amaanakram.com/lightingT/part1.htm The goals of lighting in 3D computer graphics are more or less the same as those of real world lighting. Lighting serves a basic function of bringing out, or pushing back the shapes of objects visible from the camera’s view. 
 It gives a two-dimensional image on the monitor an illusion of the third dimension-depth.But it does not just stop there. It gives an image its personality, its character. A scene lit in different ways can give a feeling of happiness, of sorrow, of fear etc., and it can do so in dramatic or subtle ways. Along with personality and character, lighting fills a scene with emotion that is directly transmitted to the viewer. Trying to simulate a real environment in an artificial one can be a daunting task. But even if you make your 3D rendering look absolutely photo-realistic, it doesn’t guarantee that the image carries enough emotion to elicit a “wow” from the people viewing it. Making 3D renderings photo-realistic can be hard. Putting deep emotions in them can be even harder. However, if you plan out your lighting strategy for the mood and emotion that you want your rendering to express, you make the process easier for yourself. Each light source can be broken down in to 4 distinct components and analyzed accordingly. · Intensity 
 · Direction
 · Color
 · SizeThe overall thrust of this writing is to produce photo-realistic images by applying good lighting techniques. 
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DiffusionLight: HDRI Light Probes for Free by Painting a Chrome BallRead more: DiffusionLight: HDRI Light Probes for Free by Painting a Chrome Ballhttps://diffusionlight.github.io/ https://github.com/DiffusionLight/DiffusionLight https://github.com/DiffusionLight/DiffusionLight?tab=MIT-1-ov-file#readme https://colab.research.google.com/drive/15pC4qb9mEtRYsW3utXkk-jnaeVxUy-0S “a simple yet effective technique to estimate lighting in a single input image. Current techniques rely heavily on HDR panorama datasets to train neural networks to regress an input with limited field-of-view to a full environment map. However, these approaches often struggle with real-world, uncontrolled settings due to the limited diversity and size of their datasets. To address this problem, we leverage diffusion models trained on billions of standard images to render a chrome ball into the input image. Despite its simplicity, this task remains challenging: the diffusion models often insert incorrect or inconsistent objects and cannot readily generate images in HDR format. Our research uncovers a surprising relationship between the appearance of chrome balls and the initial diffusion noise map, which we utilize to consistently generate high-quality chrome balls. We further fine-tune an LDR difusion model (Stable Diffusion XL) with LoRA, enabling it to perform exposure bracketing for HDR light estimation. Our method produces convincing light estimates across diverse settings and demonstrates superior generalization to in-the-wild scenarios.”  
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Free HDRI librariesRead more: Free HDRI librariesnoahwitchell.com 
 http://www.noahwitchell.com/freebieslocationtextures.com 
 https://locationtextures.com/panoramas/maxroz.com 
 https://www.maxroz.com/hdri/listHDRI Haven 
 https://hdrihaven.com/Poly Haven 
 https://polyhaven.com/hdrisDomeble 
 https://www.domeble.com/IHDRI 
 https://www.ihdri.com/HDRMaps 
 https://hdrmaps.com/NoEmotionHdrs.net 
 http://noemotionhdrs.net/hdrday.htmlOpenFootage.net 
 https://www.openfootage.net/hdri-panorama/HDRI-hub 
 https://www.hdri-hub.com/hdrishop/hdri.zwischendrin 
 https://www.zwischendrin.com/en/browse/hdriLonger list here: https://cgtricks.com/list-sites-free-hdri/ 
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Black Body color aka the Planckian Locus curve for white point eye perceptionRead more: Black Body color aka the Planckian Locus curve for white point eye perceptionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation  Black-body radiation is the type of electromagnetic radiation within or surrounding a body in thermodynamic equilibrium with its environment, or emitted by a black body (an opaque and non-reflective body) held at constant, uniform temperature. The radiation has a specific spectrum and intensity that depends only on the temperature of the body. A black-body at room temperature appears black, as most of the energy it radiates is infra-red and cannot be perceived by the human eye. At higher temperatures, black bodies glow with increasing intensity and colors that range from dull red to blindingly brilliant blue-white as the temperature increases. (more…)
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ICLight – Krea and ComfyUI light editingRead more: ICLight – Krea and ComfyUI light editinghttps://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16Aq1mqZKP-h8vApaN4FX5at3acidqPUv https://github.com/lllyasviel/IC-Light https://generativematte.blogspot.com/2025/03/comfyui-ic-light-relighting-exploration.html  Workflow Local copy  
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7 Easy Portrait Lighting SetupsRead more: 7 Easy Portrait Lighting SetupsButterfly Loop Rembrandt Split Rim Broad Short 
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