Just doing some basic match grades in rec709 and curious what people prefer for this these days?
Thanks
Claude….
Seriously though. Put two screenshots of the grades into claude and will give a pretty good list of adjustments to make, well beyond the basics.
If the material is sensitive, LM Studio + Qwen 3.6 27B as local model does well too.
Bonus: this process trains you in matching, rather than a black box matchbox. Might be counterintuitive, but AI is a good path.
If you mean for compositing, not grading per se, I use simple trick from Photoshop I used in all other apps and works in most cases. Super simple. You extract and average color of the image you want to match the colors to. And you put it on top of the image you are matching. And you just use one of the blend modes. Multiply, Hard Light, Soft Light etc. If you are matching something for compositing its super useful to get blacks and whites and everything. You just apply mask of the foreground clip. Easy, fast, does the job in most situations. If you need a little bit of extra contrast or something for some situations you just add another adjustment and tweak it.
I’ve tried all sorts of fancy color machining methods over the years and this one is up there with most of them for very little effort and no fancy stuff. Just works. I used it a lot during Photoshop days than in video later. You just need some method to extract average or at least heavily blurred version of the clip you are matching to. Obviously it won’t do direct lighting as well as flatter lighting, but its quite flexible. And in compositing terms if you are making the source for original clip smaller you can match the moving elements to whatever is in the background.
For example bird flaying across blue sky and than in front of some trees. As the blue is behind it will match it to blue and as the trees are behind it will match ti to trees. Or if you want average you source the colors of the entire frame. This breaks when there is something behind the subject and subject is supposed to be lit from the front, but it works in most other cases.
Ah, good point. Are you looking for color general matching - or matching plates in a comp?
For the latter AFX_ReverseGrade, the Flame equivalent of the tried and true Nuke technique is a go-to. It matches white and black levles/points between two plates easily.
Victor Perez has a full long class on fxphd on this topic, showing it on Nuke. And with AFX_ReverseGrade you can replicate in Flame.
Just for visual reference of matching colors using method I described earlier. This was in fusion, but its simple set up so any app will work. Just sample average color from background and merge on top with the blend mode and a mask. from original shape. Depending on the bland mode its matching black and white points and distributing tones between.
Color Match Test In Fusion Resolve
Yet Another Automatic Color Matching Test In Fusion Resolve (crappy green screen extraction and some BG with flickering lights for matching color test)
Another Automatic Color Matching Test In Fusion Resolve (same method as before but source tragat is made smaller and attached to the traged center you want to grade, so where target goes, the background behind it is sampled)
Thanks very much, gents. To clarify, this isn’t a comp – it’s just balancing some BG walls from one spot to another, no comping. Hoping to just use a little MX in Batch…
Great info for comps though!
Ended up just going old school and using Batch CC node to match. All good..
CC node, a vertical wipe reference and some scopes are hard to beat. That’s the craft.
30 or so years in this business doing VFX and grading and look dev in Flame, and I’ve somehow still never used scopes… Don’t tell my clients.