Creating Looks - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 413

Greg Creaser expounds on the look of bleach bypass as he drops a
bleach bypass effect on the Artbeats Marines scene ( Figures 10.26 - 10.28 ).
“Typically, bleach bypass has more saturation than that, depending on
how it was done or how long it was let out of the bleach.” To correct it to a
more classic bleach bypass look, he goes back to primary, adds saturation,
pulls blacks down and pumps up highlights. “It would be a little edgier,
like that,” he says.
Greg Creaser
Greg Creaser is a freelance DI colorist in Los Angeles with an impressive list of more than
60 feature films to his credit as either digital color timing supervisor or digital intermedi-
ate colorist: The Ring Two, Seabiscuit, Terminator 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse
of the Black Pearl, xXx, Spider-Man, The Fast and the Furious, The Mummy Returns, Han-
nibal, Mission Impossible II, and Gladiator.
Greg has been working in the industry since 1977, starting in the laboratory as a
technician/color timer and moving into upper management by 1985. Greg also studied
photography at Art Center in Pasadena, and his father was a cinematographer.
I ask Creaser to define the look of bleach bypass. “That's an interesting
question,” he says. “There's multiple ways to do skip bleach. You can skip
the whole bleach or half of the bleach. What usually happens with skip
bleach is that you end up with a saturated/grainy/gritty image. It changes
the contrast of the film. It really depends on what kind of film stock it is
and how it was bypassed and whether it was overdeveloped or underde-
veloped on top of that.”
Fig. 10.26 Source image courtesy Artbeats.