What’s going on everyone. Welcome back to another tutorial. Today we are going to be recreating the Dune look. The look we will be recreating is one of the dream sequence looks. It’s one of the more pushed looks, but I want to make note that it is important to shoot this footage in camera as it was shot in the movie.

        Let’s get into it! We’ve got a couple reference images for this one.

The reason for this is that not every shot will be the perfect representation of what your shot can be, so having a few from the same scene can be more beneficial. So analyzing this first shot (as that will be our main example), it was shot at sunset, with backlighting on the subject. We have a little bit of fill on the face, which softens up the contrast. Now moving onto the second shot, you can tell it's basically the same, except that we can see the sun in frame. However you can see the gradient and rolloff best in the second shot.

        Now, let’s look at our shot.

As we see, we have a similar lighting scenario. All we really need to do is manipulate colors and hues, and add some temperature and tint to get everything lined up with the reference.

        Let’s get our node tree built out.

        Now starting in our second node, we are going to add some contrast to the image. Then we will use our pivot to try and bring up some of those shadows.

        Now moving to our first node, we are going to take our temperature slider and drag it up.

        Now we want to really get into the nuances of the middle and the hues specifically. Moving to our shadows node, you can see we got it close, but there is still work to be done.

We are going to use our lift wheel and bring it down towards green/teal. What we are trying to do is neutralize the shadows and get them a bit closer to matching our reference. Then we are also going to drop the shadows a bit with our lift.

You can see that’s making a huge difference.

        Now, moving to our curves node, we are going to work on the hue in her skin and the sky. We are going to start in our hue vs hue and select the yellow and red presets. Then we are going to make the yellows a bit more orange, and then drop the red a slight bit.

Then moving into hue vs luminance, we will pull down the red a touch.

Now we are going to move onto our sky. I am going to go into the rgb curves and drop our luminance mix to 0 because it gives me a little bit more control. Then I am going to select the red channel because we need to get a bit of red out of the sky. I am going to take my red point on the highlights down a touch.

Then we are going to go into the blue channel and do the same.

Then we need to come up with the green channel a bit.

Now I am noticing that we are affecting the skin a bit, so we are going to create a point on the curves down near the shadows and bring the red point back up, and on the green as well.

        Now we are going to add another node for a slight vignette. To do that, we are going to use a power window and make it wide, and feathered a lot, then invert it.

Then moving back to the curves, we are going to take a point near the middle and pull down a little bit. And then we will also isolate the red channel to pull that down a bit more too. That way it’s also adjusting the tint.

        Then moving back to the sky node, we are going to drop the red channel a bit more.

Now to finish it off, I am going to add two more nodes. One for sharpening and one for grain.

        In our sharpening node we will take our blur to 0.47, to add some sharpening.

        Then moving to our grain node, we are going to select the preset 35mm 400T and then increase the strength of the grain.

        Just like that, we are done! Let’s look at it in full screen.

        Thanks for tuning into this one. With that, we will see you in the next one!

MORE LIKE THIS