Art of Composting

A compositor is, first and foremost, an artist, so this chapter focuses on the art of compositing. There are two levels of artistic excellence. First is the achievement of competent photo-realism, the objective of every digital composite. But beyond replicating reality in a convincing manner, there is also artistic enhancement going beyond simply professionally assembling the elements provided and adding your own artistic panache to make the shot look cool. Good artistic design makes for good visual effects shots

Digital compositing can be defined as taking several disparate elements that were photographed separately and integrating them into a single shot such that the various elements appear to have been shot together at the same time under the same lighting with the same camera. This journey begins by color correcting the elements so that they appear to be together in the same “light space.” Then there are film and lens attributes that have to be made to match. Finally, the finished composite is sweetened by the addition of special operations designed to enhance realism and improve artistic appeal.

The single most important aspect of a convincing digital composite is color correcting the various layers to all appear to have been photographed together in the same light space. There are several aspects to color correcting and it is easy to chase your tail, so here we will walk through a methodical step-by-step procedure that teases the issues apart and tackles them one at a time. A methodical approach saves time and gives better results.

The first step in the color correction of a composite is for the background plate to be color corrected. This is often referred to as color grading and many visual effects facilities have a specific pipeline set up to ensure that the background plates for a related group of shots are all color graded similarly in order to maintain visual continuity. After the background is color graded the compositor adds