The Batman - Recreating The Grade
TLDR: I went after The Batman and tried to recreate the look…
Prerequisite Downloads?
Purchase the lut: The Batman Lut V1
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About the Look
The Batman was a fascinating take on creating a filmic look. If you listen to any BTS discussion on how the look was developed, you’ll know it was pretty complex… Dave Cole, the lead colorist on the project, hand waves a bit and the magic of what he did with the color red but does detail in interviews what they did to the picture formation. It began with capturing digital photography using the very sharp lens and trying to maintain as much crispy resolution as possible.
Next, they color-graded that footage to an inch of its life while also checking it against a projected film emulation. Once they had a digital grade in place. This is similar to being the final step in onset capture. Where on set they, they had the ability to adjust exposure with lighting or aperture changes. This first step of color grading was to get the image to look pristine…
After that, they filmed the digital capture onto a negative capture stock and did a bleach bypass move. It was then printed onto an IP or an intermediate print that was then scanned, allowing Dave Cole to make any tweaks to the image before printing it for delivery. The end result was a gritty, low-saturated neo-noir movie that had a lot of random chaos introduced by the photochemical process.
Our Goal
While being able to do what Dave Cole and Matt Reeves did would be wonderful… to some degree, we can work the tools we have to mimic the hue rotations and other key elements to create a look that can be applied to footage, not necessarily shot for that look.
If you watch the video above, I work in two stages. Shot level adjustments to conform each shot to and the look level to create the final picture formation. In a future video, I might detail how to add in other things like Bloom, Halation, Gate Weave, Dust and more that were in the final look of The Batman.
I also took the time to export a look-level lut since not everybody has access to the tools I used. This lut slots in the right before the DRT that I used, which was OpenDRT. You can see from the image below what my settings for OpenDRT were. It is critical for recreating the look.
Set up the Node Tree
Node Stack 1 is where I am doing my shot-level work to conform the image to fit under the look that was developed in Node Stack 2. Nodes 3 and 4 are set to Gamma Linear and the footage is brought into Davinci Wide Gamut/Intermediate with Node 2. I’m mainly working Exposure, Contrast, and Color Balance.
In the video, I do an initial bit of exposure to get a feel for it before developing the look. I then came back and made tweaks.
Feel free to download the test stills… The footage I used was picked because it had sodium vapor lights just like the initial shot I was matching. It was in S.Gamut3.Cine Slog 3.
In Node Stack 3 I developed the look using an OFX tool called Contour and feed the footage into Open DRT. If you don’t have access to Contour. Feel free to purchase the lut to see what I did or practice to get the footage into shape.
The goal was the get a good lift off of saturation that then bent and rolled off in purity. The vectorscope shows a bent carrot look as colors adjacent to red take off. Red tends to stay pretty pure however.
The look was built underneath these settings using OpenDRT. So also, the lut will also be expecting these settings. I used the lut/look and open DRT on the other test shots of footage
Only working the exposure and color balance to match the reference footage from the finished movie.
The shots finished with the look and with the shot level balance turned off. The one nighttime rain shot without sodium vapor lights required a bit of a color balance push in the linear Gain with a slight offset adjustment to get it to look right.
This lut was made as part of a video detailing how to shape an image to look like The Batman which was orginally graded at Fotokem by Dave Cole. This Lut expects DW/I and gives back DW/I. It’s place in the node tree is at the look level right before your DRT. To maximize the effect I used OpenDRT with a specific set of settings. You can learn more about that here:
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