Timo Vepsäläinen

My grades and studies in digital colour

What is a colourist?

A digital colourist combines technical knowledge of motion image manipulation with visual storytelling. We are here to enhance cinematographer's images and director's vision with our technical expertise and excellent collaborative skills.

The following segments are a peek at my past projects and studies.

Short Film "Innoittava Elämä"

Stills from a forty-minute indie short I'm currently grading.

Keywords I gathered for the grade: ill, maddening, contradictory, agonizing, documentary, lingering.

Production house Satiirikohtaus

Dir: Pete Leino
AD: Mika Karppinen
DoP: Timo Vepsäläinen
Camera operator: Niko Peipsalo
Editor: Niko Peipsalo
Colorist: Timo Vepsäläinen

Short film "Rebels"

The still pictures below are from soon to be released micro-budget short film called "Rebels". The piece tells of a love story in the 70s.

Produced and directed: Anna Andersson
Starring: Petriikka Pohjanheimo, Laura Ala-Ruona
DP: Khánh Ngô
Camara Assistant: Sam Boateng
sound recordist Teresa Siltanen
Editor: Khánh Ngô
Colourist: Timo Vepsäläinen
Driver: Jukka Andersson
Gear support: Jacob Nguyen

Location, Radisson Blu Plaza Hotel Helsinki

Colour space studies

Technical information warning!

Below is some technical jazz. Feel free to skip to more fun stuff if you are not interested.

For me working under a self-made look is what makes my grading faster and a fun experience. To make my looks work for the entire project, I seek to "mold" them as smoothly as possible. Below is an example of how I might evaluate the look in 3x3 matrices.

1st is from camera to 709.
2nd is from camera to custom density control to 2383 D65.
3rd is from camera to 709/cineon to 2383 D65.
The last one is a very common professional workflow. As we can see from the 3x3 matrice, the yellows break easily. Sadly we need 3rd party plugins like Nobe Omniscope, or Lattice to monitor 3x3 matrices.

The contrast ratio boosts colours. Sometimes that is desirable but often we have to readjust saturation to the desired level when we don't want that. I tested out four types of adjustments to have different flavours or contrast adjustments in hand as power grades. One of the four pictures is your regular contrast and pivot from resolve, rest are customized contrast and pivot adjustments. Can you tell which one? The answer is ǝɹnʇɔᴉd puoɔǝs. First one is starting point with no contrast/pivot adjustment.

BRAW 12K test grade

Grading breakdown of some basic tools like scaling algorithm, colour space transform, grain, halation and gamut limiting. Tested scaling algorithms and fixed gamut issues with the red channel.

Blackmagic test footage for Ursa Mini pro

Salvaging footage

Delivered as display referred Rec709 10bit footage that had bad magenta cast. Lighting fixtures made a green tint to the highlights and a simple temp or tint adjustment was not enough to fix.

After balancing, I introduced generic film esthetics with simple film density average transform to Resolve's own film conversion look-up table for Kodak 2832 with color space transform at the end for Rec709 with BT1882 gamma.