Above is the curves I used to make the image above into the image directly below. The one on the left is the overall curve, then the red curve, with the green on the right. I didn't include the blue curve cause I didn't change it.



As you can see above, it's a lot more bold, with his face jumping out at you. In fact, perhaps it's a bit TOO bold. Every bit of grain and imperfection is highlighted. For the ending of the movie I always envisioned a softer feel, so I decided to pull out the oldest trick in the book.



All I did was take the color-corrected image, duplicate it, blur it, and give it a transparency of 50% (as seen above), and place it over the original image.




The result is what's seen directly above. It's a bit more evident in higher res, but this is close enough. You can see how everything has been softened, with much smoother skin tones, but that you don't really loose any needed detail. I personally like the technique, cause it smoothes out areas of low contrast. But, as eve thing else on this page is, it's only good in certain situations.

Now THIS is the cool part (IMO). It's where it gets a bit more tricky. I was thinkin... "This guy's face and coat are really the only bright things in the image... and they're also the subject!" I wanted a way to isolate Isaac. So I decided to see if I could blur everything but him, but automatically.



First, I duplicated the original color-corrected image and increased the brightness and contrast. I was only going to be working with the dark areas, so I made the bright areas brighter, and even more out of the way. Then I blurred the layer, as seen above.



Then, to that I keyed out (removed) all the bright areas. Everything that was brighter than a certain point was removed and made see through (seen above as the black blobby blur). This meant that the only stuff visible was the darker areas.

I took that image and placed it over everything else, and had the image you see below!




Above is the final image. I think it turned out rather sweet, personally. Especially for having to get the shot in about 30 seconds and no lighting except for a gray sky. Oh, how I love filming when it's cloudy. It makes everything look nice.

Haha! Hope you enjoyed.




(and, for easy comparison, here's the original image)