BlacksMatch Tutorial and Demo

Heres a full tutorial on The BlacksMatch Workflow, how to match blacks, what to look for, what your goals are, the different operations used to match blackpoint and blend with the midtones and highlights of your image.

If you want to skip the tutorial and just go straight to the demo of the BlacksMatch Tool, please go to the Tool Demo timestamp:
00:00 - Introduction
01:43 - BlacksMatch Goal
02:06 - Depth and atmospheric perspective
05:20 - Light contamination
08:21 - Statues Example
12:33 - Order of Operations
15:30 - Ways to Apply Black Color
20:07 - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
28:32 - Recreating a Toe Operation
35:46 - Tool Demo

- - -

BlacksMatch recreates a Toe operation with merge nodes, meaning you can now plug in an external image are your black color and it will perform the operation taking each pixel's value into account as the blackpoint.

You can control the Multiply, which is how far above the blackpoint the blacks match with stop affecting your midtones and highlights. For example, if you plugged in 0.15 and had the multiply set to 2, then values above 0.3 remain unaffected.

The "falloff" or Gamma control just controls the falloff of the curve into your blackpoint color. if it's really high, it will act more like a screen or plus (still ending at the blackpoint color times your multiply control), and if it's really low, it will act more like a clamp. Your blackpoint will not ever fall below your input color while you manipulate the curves.

There is a preview plotscan button that helps you visualize how your curve is behaving with your settings. Just move the plotscan picker around and it will sample your blackpoint color at that area and give you an overlay of your curve. (Don't forget to turn it off when you are done)

I personally think this is a tool every comper should have in their toolkit, as it's by far the most controlable way to match your blacks properly!

For those who like to read more than watch a video, and for in depth descriptions, then you can visit my blog page about BlacksMatch where I will have a full write-up.

Links:
If you'd like to view this on vimeo instead, link here:
https://vimeo.com/348273615

Here is an in depth write-up of the tool, the workflow and lots of cool gifs that you see in the video:
https://compositingmentor.com/2019/06...

Here is the nukepedia link for the BlacksMatch tool:
http://www.nukepedia.com/gizmos/colou...

If interested, download the tool from my github, where you can find a repository with all my tools in one place:

https://github.com/CreativeLyons/Lyon...


For those of you asking for the project files, here is a link to dropbox with some of the project files, including a statue render exr, with beauty, depth, World_Position, and Normals passes. A folder with various reference images of cool complex fog/hazy lights. And a script with the statues over the temples mini-comp, the part of the script where I recreate the toe, and a couple of the complex blackpoint examples.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/p47aquatmp...