Today we will be creating the Mad Max look!

As we always do, let’s start out by analyzing our reference still. First, we are going to drop in the color palette effect which will tell the color story on this.

What I am noticing is there is a salmon color coming through. There is no pure white. Switching to the midtones, you can see that they pushed the color on the ground as far as it could go before breaking the image. However, my favorite part of the image is the shadows. There is this undertone teal that compliments perfectly to our orange. Almost a teal and orange look. Now quickly looking at the scopes we can see how red bias this image is. But what balances it out is the teal that is sitting here. Because there is still blue in the midtones, the orange is not straight red. The blue is what gives it that warm, orange look. And opposite from that, in the highlights, the blue channel is lifted, which gives off that salmon (almost red, pink) color in the highlights.

Now switching to our shot, you can tell it is not a bad deal. The time of day is similar, the shot scenery is similar, but the colors will place nice once we start in on this image.

Okay, it is time to get down to business. First, start by creating a node tree structure.

Once we’ve created our node tree, let’s select our primaries node and start with our contrast, just to get it into the ballpark. Then we can use our gain just to bring it down a little bit. Let’s bring up the saturation to about 65 and move our gain wheel towards the warmer side.

Now, before we get into our layer mixer, I want to give a brief note:

The node underneath always takes precedent over the node above. Meaning, if you qualify something in the bottom node, the top node will not make changes to the bottom node’s qualification.

Now select the ground node. We need to qualify the ground and the best way to do that is to go up to color -> presets -> yellow.

It did a great job, but sometimes it will need a bit more work. Once we have our ground selected, we need to get the ground to match as fast and accurate as we can. We are going to use the offset wheel to do this.

Looking at the reference still, we can tell that there is some more detail in the ground than in our shot. To match that we are going to add some contrast and bring down the pivot to show the detail. Now the orange is looking a bit too much, so bring the offset back a bit. That is the dance. From there, let us bring down the highlights to match the exposure of the reference still. With that good, now I want to go into hue vs luminance and pull down the red and yellow, to pull some of the luminance out of those colors.

Now we are getting somewhere. I am noticing that I need to pull some blue out and add some yellow. To do this, I am going to pop open my curves and select the blue channel. I am pulling down on the highlight knuckle to add that yellow into the ground. Next, I want to pull down on the green, adding magenta.

To get more into the zone, I am going to use my lift, gamma, gain siders to get it closer, along with adding more saturation. With all that done, I am noticing that the saturation in the top end needs work. I am going to use the sat vs sat section of the curves to pull down the highlights. But bring back the midtones.

Finally, I am going to go to the normal curves and select the Y channel and add default anchors to bring down the shadows a bit to add grunge into the ground.

Switching to the background node I want to get these colors closer before we start to affect them individually. In the gain wheel, I want to add some of that salmon color into the highlights and add some of that teal by bringing the gamma wheel down. Switching over to the LOG wheels, I am going to add more salmon color by bringing up the highlights wheel towards red and magenta.

Moving on from our layer mixer look, we are going into the look adjustment node to move the offset wheel around to see if there is a position where everything comes together a little bit better. I ended up landing on a bit redder/magenta, which helps her skin and the overall image.

Moving into our sky left, create a window, and soften it.

Starting with our gain, let us bring up the exposure to match the reference. Moving to our sky right node, we are going to create another power window.

For this, I am going to pull down my gamma and gain wheels to get close to the teal look of the sky in our reference image. Once that is done, I am going to add contrast and pull my pivot down to bring some darker contrast to the image. The key with power windows is to blend them to help sell the look. Continuing with the sky right node, add another power window and stretch it the size of the mountain. We want to stop the colors from seeping into the mountain.

Before we do anything else, we are going to add some noise reduction.

Okay, back to the teal sky. I am going to pull the window up, so it blends better. For now, we can move on. Add sharpening and grain to the image. For film grain I like to use 35mm 400T and bring up the grain strength a lot.

Now we can go into our global adjustment node and do a few things. First thing I want to do is this, raise my lift, bring gain down, and crank the contrast. That helps add the “filmic” contrast we want. Next, I want to go to my LOG wheels and bring my low range down, somewhere around 2. I am going to pull my shadows down to match the reference still. Now we have that deep color coming in, bringing in the grunge we needed.

Moving back to our ground node, I want to pull out some saturation as it is a bit more powerful than the reference still, and add a bit more red. Now I want to adjust the gamma, bringing more yellow into the image. Then, I am going to the LOG wheels and adding red into the highlight and my midtones towards yellow. Moving back to the global adjustment node, I am going to create a parallel node to bring out the subject.

The reason you want to use a parallel node is because they are great for blending. Layer mixer is perfect for isolating.

In the new parallel node, I am going to qualify the blacks. I am going to use the gamma to lift the blacks a bit, and then in my LOG wheels I will bring the low range down to about .15ish. Once that is done I will bring the shadows down to match our reference still. We are going to create one more parallel node to grab her skin. Qualify her skin and blur out the qualification. Go into the curves and lift it on the low end just a little and pull down on the saturation to give it a nice little film look.

Going back once again to our ground node, we need to pull up the saturation a bit, as it is lacking some pop. Going into our curves -> luminance vs saturation, bring up the saturation on the high areas and pull-out saturation in the darker areas.

Now we need to bring down the blue channel a little bit more to add some more yellow into the ground. We will do that by going to our printer lights section and pulling down the blue offset channel.

Now, even though this look is close, the sky still is not sitting right. We need to bring up the exposure to match the reference. I am going to go into my curves and bring up the highlights. This is spilling into the mountains (like sky right did), so we are going to copy the window from sky right and paste it into the sky left node.

The last change is to add some more color into the sky left.

And there we have it! We created the Mad Max look!

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