Too tired to read, too awake to sleep. A bit of sketching was just the thing...

I'm doing color work on a couple of spec commercials today. This screenshot catches me attempting to match the color and luminance of two consecutive shots. Unfortunately the position of the lights was changed when the camera was repositioned closer to the actor, so the shot's intensity, direction, and the overall color balance changed between the medium-wide and the close-up. When these shots are edited together and played back, the transition doesn't feel optimally smooth due to the fact that the images don't match well enough for the viewer's brain to completely buy into the idea that the action is continuous from one shot to the next. In this screenshot,
 
I've captured a still of the wide shot and have overlaid it on the left side of the close-up shot as a split-screen view, to both guage the difference by eye and to see it in the variety of scopes provided by the application, the most useful guage to me for this matching work being the 'Parade' visualization at top right.
 
In this instance I've already dropped the highlights in the close-up quite a bit. They're still about 17% brighter than the highlights in the wide shot, but if I darken them further it really drains all the life from the shot. I'm inclined to not match the brightness of the actor's face exactly from shot to shot but instead to split the difference and just bring down the close-up to the point that it doesn't jolt the audience at the transition. It's a subjective art, and I'm enjoying the process; Muddling my way through using my photographic and editorial instincts.

Romeo, at the M.M. Market on Coldwater Canyon is making me a sandwich right now. He's behind a pretty cool looking meat counter, decorated with (among other things) photos of himself cutting meats at the same location back at least as far as 1972.
 
It's probably a sign of the times that I've lived walking distance from this place for over a year and never stopped by --Also a sign of the times that I finally decided to check it out after seeing someone post about it on Twitter.

Don't the unsafe pair on the right appear to be having a better time?

Or is that Minnie? Which one's the orange, saliva-drenched one again?

I'm doing a bit of freelance color work on a friend's spec commercials. One commercial in particular uses color and black & white to tell a story. I am very much enjoying how good the footage looks once converted to black & white. If you've ever shot black & white film through colored filters, you'll understand how much I enjoy selectively altering the contrast by changing the color mix used to create the black & white image. Fun stuff.

A 'Brushes' painting using a photo as a guide.

Just another 'Brush' doodling from my iPhone.