Creating Looks - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 399

I ask him to be specific about how he knows where his boundaries are.
“Those are the hard things to even verbalize. I think if the lighting I've
set feels like it's actually motivated by something outside and I feel like
that's not going to be able to go anywhere past that. If I like their flesh
tones; if I like the details in the image. I'm always scanning the image all
over the place to see if something is standing out to me or bothering me
or drawing my attention and I'm usually trying to consider all things at
once, so in a shot, if I'm really trying to be critical, I'm saying to myself 'Is
anything distracting me? Is anything bothering me? Is anything pulling
my eye away from what I should be looking at?' When I can answer all
of those questions and say, 'I'm not being distracted. I feel I'm looking at
what I'm supposed to be looking at. I've achieved the goal that I've set
out to do.' If I can answer all those questions, then I'm usually feeling like
I'm pretty done.”

Preset Looks

Bob Festa was one of the few people that I spoke to who described some
of the looks that he starts to show clients. Festa is clearly talented enough
to develop these looks from scratch on every shot, but he's also a big
proponent of reusing selected elements of these looks as easy-to-apply
presets.

I'd rather show them 25 things that I can do with a single keystroke
than 4 things that I've had to build from scratch.

- Bob Festa, New Hat

“I've been doing this for a long time and I've been the architect of a
couple of features in the DaVinci, and one of those is something called
PowerGrade. PowerGrade is a browser that lets me keep 20-25 of my top
techniques in there, and once I get an image balanced and into a place
that I like, then I can ripple those PowerGrade effects back on top of it.
Those might be everything from a four-corner pin to a bleach bypass to a
cross-process look. These are things that might take five or ten minutes to
build up from scratch; I can quickly double-click it and dial it in on top of
my base, well-balanced image.”
Festa continues, “That PowerGrade library is very influential. And I
had a lot of arguments about that with people about 'Should we be able
to dial things on top—with just a single keystroke—of images, or should
they be rebuilt from scratch?' My feeling is, if you want to give your cli-
ents a choice, I'd rather show them 25 things that I can do with a single
keystroke than 4 things that I've had to build from scratch.”

D e f i n i t i o n
cross-process look:
The look of film when it
is processed chemically in
a “bath” or “soup” that
is supposed to be used to
process a different kind of
film—for example, using
a C41 development bath
on a piece of film that
should be developed in an
E6 bath, or vice versa. This
cross-processing alters the
characteristics of the film.