The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP043: Interpreting References

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

You hear a lot of talk about references when it comes to color grading - but what are references? How do you interpret them to get great results? And, how can references play a role in client communication?It's these topics and more we're discussing on this installment of The Offset PodcastSpecifics discussed int his episode include:What is a reference and what is it good for?References aren’t just good for color - good for all aspects of finishingReferences as a communication toolInterrogating the client about provided referencesInspirational references vs. practical referencesReference evaluation  - color, contrast, texture, mood and focusWorking with references in your color grading appThinking volumetrically with referencesIf you liked this episode, please subscribe, like and rate it wherever you found the show. We'd also love it if you'd consider supporting the show by 'buying us a cup of virtual coffee' https://buymeacoffee.com/theoffsetpodcast 

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Offset podcast, and today we're talking about interpreting references. Stay tuned. This podcast is sponsored by Flanders Scientific, leaders in color accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, an editor, a DIT, or a broadcast engineer, Flanders Scientific has a professional display solution to meet your needs. Learn more at flanderscientific.com. Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Offset Podcast. I'm one of your host, Robbie Carmen. And with me as always is Joey Deanna. Hey, Joey, how are you in?

Hey, everyone. So Joey, today, coincidentally, I had outlined an episode and then you had said before we got on air, hey, I think we had a viewer submission about the same subject. Indeed, we did. And that is talking about the idea of references, what they're good for, how to use. them, how to interpret them, where they fall down. And I thought, well, since I had already outlined this, that the user's the viewer's mission lined up perfectly. So that's what we want to explore today is a little bit about using references, how to use them, and all the various

bits about that. Just as a reminder, everybody, you can submit your own ideas for an episode by heading over to the offsetpodcast.com. And at the very top of the page, there's a little submit button that opens up a little form. You can pop in any questions, ideas, concepts, tell us what we're doing good, what we're doing bad, or anything else that you have on your mind. We'd love to hear from you and possibly incorporate those ideas into another episode. Also, we are on Instagram, Facebook, all those fun places, and you can find the show on Spotify, YouTube, and all major podcasting platforms.

And then lastly, if you like to show, we'd really would love it if you would consider supporting the show by heading over to this link right here on screen. to buy us a cup of virtual coffee. Every dollar that you support goes to supporting the show, paying our editor, et cetera, et cetera. So we really appreciate that support. So, Joey, I want to start out with a little bit of an anecdote before we get into the nuts and bolts here.

And that is years ago when I was, I don't know, young colorist, probably my early 30s, so this is, you know, a long time ago now. I had been working with a university to do student films, right? And student films, they can be fun. They can be a little bit of a drag, but they can be fun too. And I talked to this young college-age filmmaker, and it was like, all right, tell me about the film, right? And he's like, yeah, let me tell you about the film.

He's like, so we shot the whole film on five Gopros, and we didn't have any stabilization gear, didn't really have any lights, but we're happy with the way it turned down. I'm like, oh, okay, cool. Do you have any references? And at the time, this was a big film, he was like, yeah, I really, really want it to look like Skyfall, the James Bond, Roger Deacon shot film. And if you've ever seen any of the behind the scenes, you know, shots of the rigging and the gaffing that went on in that show or that film, you realize that it's like, it's no joke. It's unlimited budget with, you know, widely considered the best DP, you know, to ever live.

and those were the references. Those were the frames that they sent over based on something shot on a couple GoPro's without lights, etc. So I bring up this story to start our conversation about references by saying that you always have to do the very first thing I think of references when I ask for them is not that there's a bad reference, but references, the best references, are grounded in some sort of reality, for what was shot and what is in the can, right?

Because I think that a lot of people have very grandiose ideas about what their project should look like, and that that's often disconnected from the reality of what they recorded. And it can be as simple as something like, oh, we really want to have, this be super colorful with a lot of bold colors. Okay, cool. Well, you shot people in white t-shirts against, like, neutral color walls. like what do you want me to do, right?

So I think that's my biggest overarching thing before we jump into the nitty gritty here is that references are great until they're not, right? And that a lot of times that references need to be grounded in reality to get the most out of them for what we do and what we're going to discuss today. Yeah, and sometimes that kind of takes the form of talking with the client about the references and saying,

hey, you know, maybe diving a little. little bit deeper and saying, okay, we know you liked Skyfall, but let's talk about maybe some other things that you've liked and maybe just try to explore a little bit deeper than just, because if you just ask somebody who's especially newer filmmakers or even experienced filmmakers, hey, give me a reference. They might now be racking their brain trying to come up with something to give you, right? Yeah. And it might not really fully encompass what their creative vision is. And yes, there could be some parallels with the reference, but there could also be some perpendiculars, if you will.

And part of that might also be that there has been a lot of discourse in like the general filmmaking community as of the past few years relating to references and essentially whole hog copying a reference, right? Because it is an interesting intellectual exercise to look at a frame from a feature film and see if you can beat an existing still image

into really looking like that frame from a feature film. That kind of interaction with a reference, really, one, doesn't have any creative relevance to an actual project, and two, doesn't ever actually work in terms of making the whole project look like that. So while references are incredibly useful and incredibly important,

Part of what we want to talk about through this episode is how to actually make them actionable in terms of a project, not just in terms of, hey, I saw this cool YouTube video of someone exactly copying this frame by brute force. That's what we never want to use references for, an exact copy, right? We want to use them as a driver of the creative process. I agree. Very well said. So we're going to dive into that, of course, too. But let's start way back at the beginning. what is a reference and why is it important?

Okay. And specifically why is it important for finishing operators? And I also, by the way, I think, you know, obviously we talked a lot about color, but I want to be clear that I think references are useful for a lot of parts of the finishing process, right? They're, you know, hey, here's a mix. Here's a score for the audio team. You know, here's some type treatment, some topography or some motion graphic design that I really love for lower thirds or whatever, right?

So it's not, yeah, we're going to talk about it today in the context of color, but like, you know, references are useful in all parts of the finishing process and they largely serve the same purpose. So I want to give kind of a definition of what I think of a reference, what a reference is and why it's important, right? So, you know, in any given project, any film, television show, or even a commercial, right?

Like, there's been a lot of times spent thinking about the, all aspects of it, the technical aspects, the emotive aspects, the look aspects, well before you are probably ever even involved in the process. Now, you might be one of the lucky few who's involved at the front end of a project doing camera tests and, you know, maybe doing some in-camera luts or whatever. Like, you have a little bit more gravitas in that situation. But for a lot of us, you know, we're coming into a project and a lot of that thinking has already gone through the machinations of, hey, let's try this, let's try that. Oh, it's orange, it's green, it's whatever, right? And so to me, what a reference does is it attempts to be a communication tool

between the principles of the project, and that's oftentimes a director or a DP or somebody who's really into the nitty-gritty about the look of the film or the sound of the film or whatever, trying to communicate to others down the pipeline from them, this is what we are going for, right? This is what we like. And to me, that serves as the colorist or the creative operator's first opportunity to get inside of the head of the principles that are involved for things that they like and dislike and want to bring or not bring to the project. In my opinion, it doesn't mean what you had said at the intro for the show. It doesn't necessarily mean here's a reference, I want you to copy this whole hog and make it look exactly like that.

Very rarely in the 25 years that I've been doing, has anybody ever asked for that very thing, right? They've talked about parts of it. A lot of times it's more of like, I love this feel, I love this, some other emotive aspect of it that they can't really explain, but they want it. right? So, you know, it's, I think part of our job is to take that initial peek into their psyche and kind of interpret it. We joke all the time that we're post-production psychologists, and this is one avenue working with references, where 100% that psychology part of it does that play is trying to figure out what, why did you give this to me? Okay. What is it about this thing that you like or dislike or wanted to show me about it? And sometimes, sometimes they can't,

They can't describe it. We'll get into that in a little bit how to break it down, right? But oftentimes, you know, those references are being put in front of you are your first peak. And when I said at the top of the show where sometimes it's like disconnected from reality, that's also your first peek into what potentially kind of clients these folks are going to be, right? If they have these unbelievable, grandiose references that don't line up at all, you know, like they shot a talking head in, you know, a hotel room or something. and they're like, hey, we want this to look like, you know, the matrix or something.

You're like, uh, okay, right? And then related to that, I think that references are the client's first attempt to, whether they realize it or not, the first attempt to also learn how you communicate, how you talk about things, right? And I have found over the years that at that reference stage, that's my first opportunity to also educate the client a little bit about the things that we take for granted. Contrast ratios, black point, white point, color temperature, texture, whatever, right? I don't know.

Do you agree with any of that? What's your feeling? What is a reference to you? Yeah. I mean, a reference can be anything from a movie, a still from a show, a painting. I've actually had numerous references of paintings. a photograph, an ad, anything. And hopefully, hopefully this was thought of before it was, I need references for just the color grade, right?

Like you said, you know, the principal creatives of the project have been with the project long before we have. So hopefully they've been thinking about this a little bit. And what they're going to give us as references also informed their photography decisions, their set design decisions, their wardrobe decisions, etc. not always the case, but we love when that is the case because it gives us not just a grounding in what was actually shot, but it gives us direct reference points between the reference and the footage. If they say, you know, we were always looking at this photograph thinking this is kind of how the palette is going to be. That's why we chose this wardrobe. That's why we chose this paint color and the set, et cetera. Now we can start to draw lines, right? The reference

point is here, the on-screen point is here, we know these two are connected. Now we can have to think about how to creatively bring that together in the color grade to make the whole feel like that. And I do think, you know, obviously we early on cautioned about having over-grandios references, but that doesn't mean you can't kind of shoot for the fences a little bit. And wouldn't be dismissive, right? Because we get into like the hype and the hype A pathetic example of we want our Verite GoPro film to look like Skyfall, they might come back after a little bit of back and forth and be like, well, we're really talking about kind of where the Black Point was sitting and the overall saturation.

Right. And those are parts of that reference that we can apply. Yeah, yeah. So like you said, it's the first, like even before we do, we talked about a few episodes back, a look setting session, for example, it's the first initial communication about creative goalposts between you and the client. So always I want to look at it as an exploration. I don't want to knee-jerk react to anything. I don't want to be like, are you crazy or that sounds dumb? You know, I want to explore all these ideas because my initial

reaction might be completely disconnected to what they were actually thinking and using that reference. And I want to start looking for those direct lines between what was shot and what is in the reference of, okay, is it texture? Is it color balance? Is it this particular color that we're building something around? Anything that we can kind of anchor the actual footage we're dealing with and this reference image and kind of draw a line? You draw enough of those lines. You get kind of a mental 3D picture of where the client's head is at look wise before the grade has ever even started. Totally. And there's a lot to unpack and some of it we're going to do a little bit later in this episode. But I,

I agree with everything that you just said. And I think that, you know, the, it can be, I think, as a creative, you know, finishing person, it can be a little intimidating to something. Like, both sides of that coin, both ends of the field, whatever analogy you want to use, can be intimidating, right? When you have people show up with zero reference and just go, show me something cool and amazing, that's intimidating and pressure filled. Yep.

But at the same time, clients who show up and go, you know, here, my lookbook of images that I've created, you know, are captured for or curated for this project for the past seven years and it's this thick and, you know, going through it, it's like, oh, you've thought about this way harder than I thought about it, you know, and that can be also intimidating. And I find, I find that this next thing I'm going to say is integral to the more intimidated by too much part of it. But before I, Before I get in that, I just want to also say that reference that you had mentioned, paintings, or whatever, in my opinion, references can take a lot of forms, right? They can obviously take the forms of actual motion picture, you know, moving, here's a video file, whatever.

Stills, of course. You know, I recently have had a lot of people using, what's that website, Shot Deck, which is, I don't really understand legally how they work, but they somehow curate, you know, frames from famous movies and projects and music videos. I've had a client bring in fashion and design magazines filled with little post- it's on various pages. I've even had people, you know, same thing. Like, I remember years ago I had somebody, I was like, it was like a IKEA or a Pure One ad or something like that. And there was like this yellow sandy color pillow.

And they were like, that's the color, right? That's it right there. So they can take all forms. But what I was going to say is that, you know, okay, client has some form of reference. And they, you know, maybe they push a huge pile over to. Maybe it's just a few things. But the first thing I think of, and given the current state of world affairs, I don't use this in the police sense, but I say, I like to use the word interrogating the clients about the reference, right?

And you could use the word interview. There's a lot of other words for it. But I like to have the client. So if a client pushes over, let's say it's five images. Tell me the story of these five images, right? Why did you choose them? What is it about them that you chose? And why is it germane to the project that we're about to work on?

And that's a kind of a key thing to me is that like I think that the reference point can kind of come and it naturally kind of comes at a few different stages. Pre-production prior to you starting the grade is the obvious one, right? We talked about a little bit of that in our episode on look setting. But it can also happen during the process, right? Like you start developing the film and start working on it and then it hits somebody like, ah, you know, you're on to something cool. I went home last night and I watched, you know, whatever, some film and I really like it and they're doing something similar.

Let's get a little more of that. So it can happen at that stage, at that stage too. But I like to really kind of ask them a lot of very probing questions about it. Okay. So like, just for example, I really want the theme of this to be warm. Super generic comment, right? What, like, warm could mean anything to anybody, right? Does that mean like yellow, red desert?

Does it mean like mahogany and like kind of deep and like woody? Like what does that mean, right? And so like oftentimes you'll find that people describe things in very high level relatively generic terms. And what I mean by interrogation is trying to get more out of them about that. Right. So. Because we've talked a lot about client communication and decoding. non-technical language in terms of creative input, right?

Like, what is warm, what is cold, what is desolate, what is, you know, what are these words describing? Well, when you take those words and what they're describing what they want verbally, and then you look at their references, now you're kind of giving yourself a, again, you're drawing those lines that I was talking about, you're giving yourself a mental translation guide of what the client means visually. Totally. And I think related to this in that interrogation process of trying to dive a couple levels deeper about the words that the clients are using and what they're showing you, I also like to separate the concepts of practical references versus inspirational references, right? And I think there's a very big difference between the two, right? Like, so, you know, you might be working on a, you know, a corporate video, right? And, you know, you're like, well, Here's my, you know, couture fashion, you know, the frames that I love, right? And you're like, man, there's so, like, the makeup artist alone is more than your entire budget of this project, right?

Like, you know, things of that. So I think there are things that, like, we love how this makes us feel, but we realize this is not what we have. Versus, oh, no, I just love, love, love the grain on this frame. and I want to copy it wholesale over to our project, right? It's very important. So just like you get to know, when we talked about look setting, you know, getting to know clients' likes and dislikes, this is another opportunity to do that. And I would just separate it out to things that are practical, things that are actually going to be to port over to the project you're working on versus things that are inspirational. It makes, it's in that vibe.

It's related. Like, I worked on a film recently where, um, the, there was a lot of references to Terrence Malick, you know, very famous director, you know, one of the things that came up was Tree of Life all time. And it wasn't about a direct copy of that look and feel. It was, we want to be tangential to this, right? And that's a very big difference in what you said at the very top, right? And why I want to come back to what you said about kind of the idea of like, you know, not doing it wholesale copy. Because I think when somebody says, yeah, this is in the family that we want to be in. That's a much different story. That's

inspirational reference to me versus something of like you need to copy this person, you know, verbatim, which would be a much more practical reference, if that makes sense. Yeah. And I don't know a lot of filmmakers who are in the business of trying to whole hog copy somebody else's work, right? You might run into that ad client that is just trying to, you know, send in the sausage through the meat grinder and you know, it's just, it's very much common. It's not more. Right. Yeah, yeah. You know, this is what it's supposed to be.

And sometimes those references for that kind of product, most of the time, those references are internal stuff they've already done, where you are copying it Whole Hog for continuity purposes, right? And that's totally fine as well. But what we're talking about here is much different

than that, right? We're not talking about executing a very specific brand look for an ad, right? That's a very technical equation. We're talking about how do we do for a more creative project, how do we get the best version of the client's image that they have in their head onto the screen using their references? And I think, you know, the next step for that, after we've kind of had that general conversation, right, we've started drawing some of those lines, we've started figuring out the parallels, we've started decoding the language, is now we need to kind of break those

references down into their constituent components. What I mean by that is we need to figure out where the client wants things like black point, white point, and overall contrast, right? We got to nail that down, right? That's kind of the most basic thing. And then from there, we dive down deeper and deeper and deeper. And we can look at each one of these as we talk about the references with the client in kind of that overall conversation. But it's kind of important, I think, to separate them, right? So first, let's talk about overall contrast. Blackpoint, white point, point, do you want a heavy, heavy contrast where you don't need to see all of the detail of the shadows? If there's something kind of in the back of the image that fades into complete black,

that's totally fine. Or are all of your references super detailed in the shadows, maybe some lifted blacks, right? What's their opinion on near clipping highlights or just under clipping highest. Most of the time you don't want clipped highlights unless it's for something really stylistic, like you're trying to emulate a specific 1990s music video, right? But, you know, the distance between where your peak white most of the time sits and clipping, I think, is another taste thing that needs to be generally consistent throughout a film or a project. And that's one of those places where we start looking at these references and saying, okay, where are you throwing away detail? where are you insisting we keep detail

and how can we use that to figure out where you want your overall contrast? That's kind of the first stage, I think, when we dive deep into these references. Yeah, and I mean, I'll take it further. I mean, I think that it's, you know, the same equation can be done with, as you said, color balance and temperature, warm, colds,

you know, things like that, skin tone, texture, that kind of thing. You know, unfortunately, some of the things that you might have reactions to might be a little out of your control at that point. Like, so, for example, not a whole lot you're going to really be able to do. I mean, there is, of course, but like you're not going to be able to reframe and recompose the shot, right?

You know, things of that nature. There's limitations there. But, you know, things like, the other one that I think that's big besides the contrast, black point, white point, color, bell, and shirt, texture. I also, I'm always curious about focus and mood, right? I think that helps tell a lot of the story, too. because like I think it's very easy for a colorist to look at pictures in in videos and not really gronk what the mood of the particular thing is going to be that scene or that you know that part of

the film or whatever and I think that's also important to be like I'm showing this to you mr. colorist because it's not I'm not trying to take any particular part of this I just like the mood of this scene right you know here are my five references for, you know, dark cold sci-fi, right? Here are my, you know, five references for, you know, romantic comedy. Like, whatever. Like, it's more about the way that, the way that these characters, like, this helps the character come out.

This is how I want people to feel about this color. And some of those things are, they're old stereotypes, right? You know, okay, fine, like, you know, a spy movie is supposed to be desaturated and kind of cool, right? in a, you know, romantic comedy as bold colors and bright and high key. Like, you know, some of that is just kind of inferred. But I also, when I'm working with a client trying to understand their references, that is a big part of the interpretation to me as well.

It's like, why did you emotively relate to this? What is it about it that you like from a mood and kind of a focus point of view as well? Yeah, when you get into those kind of mood or feeling description of a reference, That's when I think the lines you're drawing to the actual footage become what was done on set in lighting that we want to accentuate versus what we want to de-accentuate, right? Because no, no, basically, no capture will be 100,000 million percent perfect, right? Because just like our work, eventually you run out of time and money. So there might be, okay, we didn't quite be able to light this area. of the set as much as we would have liked to,

but we can enhance that by bringing it up a little bit in color. If you feel that, you know, if that kind of decision pushes it towards the mood that the references are giving, then I think that's a good direction. Whereas those references could also push you in a mood where like, oh, it's almost obvious on set, they were trying to de-emphasize this. So I can help them with that and de-emphasize this part of the image to bring us into the feeling,

the rest of the lighting was doing. So it's just another way, you know, I don't think there is, when you talk about the overall mood, you might not even find any direct parallels to, okay, well, that mood is 50% desaturated and slightly cool in the shadows. No, no, no, no, no.

That's not what you're finding out here. What you're finding out here is what parts of the image are you going to focus on because that's what their reference also focused on. on that type of thing. You know, I never really thought, I guess sort of innately I do this,

but never really thought about it. And what you just said kind of rang some bells for me is that like, you know, we often talk, we often quote our friend Walter Volpato when he's like, you know, this thing that he says goes on about respecting the photography, right? And I kind of think that sometimes dealing with references is less about how you're going to engineer the images to add.

And sometimes it's, It's more about what you're doing to cover and subtract from the things, the things that were there. Because, you know, you might work really, really hard to develop this look that's spot on to whatever the inspirational, the inspirational look. And it might be near perfect. And the client still goes, dude, I hate that corner over there, man. Like, because they know when they were on set, right, that they worked really hard. They got in a fight with the, with the gaffer about it. And there wasn't enough time.

and the assistant director was yelling them about moving to the next setup or whatever, right? And it's always bothered them, right? So sometimes part of the reference process is also, as you pointed out, figuring out those pain points and not adding to, but obscuring, taking away from, et cetera, those things that bother or irk the client.

Yeah, if our goal, our stated goal, which I think in almost all cases it is, is to respect the photography in the context of giving the creatives what they want, right? We can use references, especially those more mood, less specific references, as our way of interpreting the photography so we can understand it better. You know, along with all those other technical things about blackpoint, waypoint, etc., I think one of the, well, not one of, two of the hardest things to nail down from reference. references and porting that over to the work that you do. One is temporal stuff. And what I mean by that is that like,

uh, obviously frame rate's an obvious one. But that could be also things like shutter speed and kind of like that flow of motion. That can be really, really difficult to interpret and get right. I think that's, you know, I think that the obvious is, okay, well, we want it to look hyper real. Okay, well, let's shoot 60 or 120 or whatever, right? Um, but I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,

I find this problem all the time with 2398 and 2997, right? People are like, oh, well, we shot everything 2997, but we wanted to feel like more filmic. Well, okay, shoot 2398, you know, like, or whatever, those kind of things. And then the other one is the texture part of it. I think texture is a really hard thing to pull, especially from stills, because you're looking at a one frame at a time, it moves, right? You don't really understand how that works. But also, you know, going part, you know, connecting this to where.

I always said about being careful about where references come from, is that by the time you see something, it could have gone through 27 different compressions and noise reduction passes, et cetera, and now it's that grain structure and that texture is nothing like it was in the original. So like that's also something that's hard, I think, to pull from still references, but references in general, and you just got to be wary of that. Now, I want to get into a couple of technical things here because I think that they're important for this discussion. So, you know, I think it's always, you know, we don't always get this, right? You know, best case scenarios, higher-end productions, there's, you know, a DIT with logs and that flows through to, you know, other parts downstream. But, you know, sometimes you have to ask

the questions about, okay, what, you know, what camera systems, that's an obvious one, but what lenses were used, what lights were used, whatever, right? And I also find sometimes, to be honest with you, this sounds like cliche, but some behind the scenes, like just still imagery, photography of like the setups can also be super helpful be like oh i had no idea that that was a huge hMI out that window i thought that was real sunlight now it makes sense of why i was struggling with it or whatever right like having some of that technical information i think about the production itself well also and i love i'm going to steal your phrase and use it from now on draw lines from reality to what those references are right like oh now i get what you were going

for because you use this kind of instrument and this kind of set up, you know, whether maybe, hey, maybe it was spherical versus anamorphic. Oh, it makes total sense now. Like, I get it why you use that because you're trying to match, you know, whatever, Lawrence of Arabia. So you know what I'm saying? Like. And those things, right, those are the situations where you can kind of help yourself to judge

if you might be going down a rabbit hole to fix or modify something that was intentional. Absolutely. And that's the worst thing of color. can do, right? The worst mistake we can make is look at how cool I am. I fixed all your problems when all the problems were actually creative input. Oh my God. Imagine how I felt the couple, like two or three months ago, it was the middle of summer and I did this project and I had this like, oh my God, I'm the worst feeling. Like it just snuck up in me and slapped me in the face. So there was these interview with these these like kind of panning track shots going like left to right, right?

And every time the camera went to the right, this gigantic lens flare would come in and like, you know, take a pretty healthy contrast and just flatten the hell out of it and get everything kind of washed out, right? So what did I do being the smart colorist? I'm like, oh, I'll keyframe that exposure so it's not as drastic and it's not as heavy as when it's all you go. Sit down with the client and they just look at it like, where did the lens flare go? what do you mean? Well, it's still there. You see the ring right there? No, no, no, no.

Like, it was supposed to, like, it was supposed to get real flat and kind of washed out looking. Really? Yeah. Why do you think we shot it that way? Oh. And that's one of those times where, like you said,

we might not, like, okay, there's not a color space transform input per lens, right? Obviously, the lens does not drastically affect what we're doing on the technical level. But if you get in that conversation with them, Yeah.

Hey, oh, we shot on lenses from 1935 to have a little bit of haze in them because we kind of wanted this low contrast look. You can kind of start putting your detective hat on of what parts of the image were intentional and what parts of the image you need to enhance versus de-enhance. And some of that sometimes it takes that interrogation process that I was talking about, right? So like if you're lucky enough to see, you know, on a higher end production, you might be able lucky enough to see some test footage of some test shoots, do different lens, different camera systems. You know, you might say to yourself, or ask the question to the client to interrogate them about this, why is this side of the frame so soft? Oh, you know, yeah, it's a good question. We were using these, you know, 1960s, you know, Russian lenses or something.

And that's just what they do on the edge of the frame, right? They just get super soft. Oh, okay, do you like that? Yeah, love it. Okay, note to self. Don't sharpen that. Don't enhance it. Like, you know, those kind of things.

But from another point, technical thing I want to talk about is, so if you get this pile of references handed off, how do you actually technically work with those as a colorist, right? And I think this is a little bit of a can of worm, so I want to be careful about going too far on this. But, you know, I think you have to take references and how they arrive to you. Oftentimes, if you can't trace the chain of custody, if you will, on them, right? You have to take them a little bit with a grain of salt, right? Like, if somebody's like, oh, I pulled this down from a website that's now defunct, but, like, there was a GIF of it or whatever, right? Or Jeff or whatever, I don't want to get into that argument.

Maybe that's not like, you can't trust that 100% for tone and tonality and color and all that kind of stuff. It's kind of the same way I feel about like the shot deck stuff, right? Like, I'm sure some of it's better than others. But it's like, okay, did this screenshot come from a DVD pull, you know, in 1990? Like probably Yeah and then you kind of need to make a judgment call of Are they looking at the reference in the context of

The file they're looking at? Or are they taking the reference in the context of I saw this in the theater and I really liked it? Yeah. So when I bring those references You know I first of all just look at them you know But if I decide that I need they're important enough To bring into resolve or whatever I just need to be careful about a few things right

I need to be careful that I'm maintaining the image integrity of that. Like, you know, that if I, let's say I'm in a project-wide Aces project, right? And all of a sudden, a transform is applied to that reference that makes a particular color go wacky or whatever. Like, that's not reality. That's a mistake in how I was treating the reference, right? So we have to be careful, careful of those kind of things as well. We need to sanitize our inputs to a certain level, right? And that's also really helpful when you're having live sessions with the client to be able.

to pull up those references, show them on your reference monitor, having converted them to whatever your working color space is so they don't look extremely weird. And maybe having adjusted the sizing or cropped out any distracting screen grab-y problems, kind of sanitizing those inputs so you're really only thinking about the image can save you a lot of heartache and trouble down the road. Yeah. And I think the other thing that's useful to set up is that, you know, if it's going to be a project where you know you're relying heavily on the references and you're still trying to figure it out with the client, you know, setting up a timeline where you can, whether it's, you know, through split screens, whether it's wipes, whether, whatever technical

way you want to do it, setting up a timeline that you can easily recall and pull those up specifically in that look setting session or like that initial discussion with the client before you're, you know, trying to get to know them, that kind of stuff can be really, really, really, really useful. Like, I, a couple weeks ago when I was doing this, you know, I brought up a whole bunch of references, brought them up in selected clips split screen so we could look at everything out at once. And then they're like, oh, you're right.

That we really didn't shoot this how we thought we did compared to these references. I get what you're like they, the client to me, we get what you're saying now. It is very different. Hold the phone. We don't want it wholesale. We just want this sky or we just want this contrast. or whatever, those kind of things. So that can be super useful.

So the next thing I want to talk about, because I think is very related to this kind of technical idea of, okay, now that we've had the discussion with the client, we kind of have a much better idea of what the purpose of these references are, how do we get into the technical nitty-gritty of actually using them in a session? And we talked about black point, white point in contrast. That's probably the most important, but also the most simply easy thing visually to look at.

You can see it on your scopes. You can see it on the screen, right? But where I think a lot of colorists fall down, while I've fallen down in the past, is focusing too much on your kind of basic color balance, lift, gamma, gain style of white balance adjustments, right? Whereas the client might want a perfectly white balanced scene, and you do that, and it looks still nowhere near the ecosystem of their reference,

right? even though if you got the exposure and the white balance to be dead nuts perfect. So where do we go from there? You can't, okay, if it's feeling less blue, you can't just white balance the whole thing blue because we already looked at it. The white balance is good, right? So my go-to and what I've talked a lot about this recently, and I keep thinking more and more about it.

I think it's just so important is thinking volumetrically about the colors of the image. And what I mean by that is the combination. the three-dimensional combination of hue saturation and level or luminance or luminosity, whatever you want to, density, whatever you want to call it, right? So you can have two images perfectly white-balanced matched

where all the whites are kind of the same point, contrast is the same, but they look drastically different, and that's when you need to start looking at, okay, are the blues more magenta? How much magenta is there? Does the magenta push towards a pink or a blue? Does the yellow push towards a red,

or a more pure yellow? Where's the green sitting, right? If I'm looking at grass, is it more kind of reddish yellow? And I think you'll find, I think you'll agree with me here, most digital imaging of all of our life, greens have much more yellow in them than you might initially think, right, when you first visually see it. So all of these things, again,

this is where I'm drawing my spider web of lines from the reference to the image. Okay, here is two comparable blues. Guess what? They're totally different. I can use my volumetric controls like the color warper or the color slicer or just basic hue versus curves to shape the three-dimensionality of the color of the image into the world of the reference. That is completely separate from your basic lift, gamma, gain, color balance, and your exposure adjustments. Listen, I mean, I think that one of the things I tend to do, and I would suggest to our audience, too, is to be, you know, again, not urging to copy this,

but from like a sort of knowledge, forensic kind of point of view, right, is that if you get those references, run those references through image analysis, just like you would do any other shot that you're working on from scratch, right? So load the reference up, look at the waveform, okay, here's the black point, here's the white point, here's the contrast, here's the color bounce, and make some notes about trends that you see in those references, right? And that will, I agree with you about extending that volumetrically. And some of it, to be honest with you, you're never going to get perfect, right?

Right. Like, you know, you don't know what, whatever. You don't know how it was set up to begin with. But I think that making some notes about some of those trends can be helpful as well. And again, I want to get back to something. Because perfect is never the goal, right? A perfect copy is the exact opposite of what we want. I get really frustrated.

It's not the right word. I just really kind of get, every time I see. videos or articles about like techniques to matching, you know, well-known, bold looks and established things. All I can really think about is just sort of like, that's really, really kind of dangerous, right? And the reason I mean it's dangerous is not because, like, whatever, somebody's going to come after you and, you know, sue you for copyright or

whatever. It's more of just like there is so much. more that goes into kind of the look and feel and the mood and the design of a show than this one feeling about it or this one shot about it. And you had mentioned this earlier, and I think this is a really, really important point about following references too far, right? Is that you might find the perfect shot in the film that just happens to jive with that reference really, really, really, really similarly, really, really well, right? And so you spend

so much time dialing that in getting, oh, yeah, look, this is exactly like this movie, you know, it's exactly like this, exactly like that. Great. You get to the next scene and it all falls apart, right? So my point about it, my point about interpreting references is that one of the major things that I always try to do, and we talked about this in our look setting the session when we said, hey, it's a good idea to, you know, get, you know, two or three seconds from various scenes spread throughout the movie or whatever. And it's for this very reason, right? If I'm trying to emulate something exactly, if I do it on that one shot that happens to take that look pretty close, and I think I'm all high on myself, like, this is great, you're setting

yourself up really for a dangerous potentiality of that just not working on the rest of the shots in the film, right? And so when I'm testing out and evaluating references, I'm also comparing that to various parts of the film that might seem desperate, right? Like an indoor shot versus an outdoor shot, a sunset shot versus a night shot, right? Because there is no film in the world that has a one size all fit approach to the entire movie. It just, it doesn't, it doesn't happen, right? There are changes to make a scene work. And again, you might be in the family of that look and that feel. But copying it per se, you know, is a dangerous thing as far as I'm concerned.

And that's why, you know, just like we talked about trying out your look setting on a variety of parts of a scene or a variety of parts of a film. This is one of those times where it's good to have a variety of references, right? Just like we want to make sure our grade that we're doing is going to work across the film. We want to make sure we're kind of incorporating the feel of everything the creative team has brought to us, not just focusing on, well, here's a frame from this movie. I'm going to copy it to this frame. And kind of the end of it for me is, I know I've been kind of talking about this silly line connecting diagram in my head thing. The way I kind of look at it is it is almost a mathematical curve-fitting exercise at a great scale, right? One set of inputs is all of the footage of the actual film, right?

The other set of inputs is these references from the client. Then the third set of inputs is the conversations with the client, right? You find the commonalities between those three things, and you kind of mold this shape in your mind of what that means for the look. And then what's important is as you're applying that to the grade, to know how strongly you want to apply kind of the gain of that curve fitting, right? So if you're making a three-dimensional spider web of reference points of knowledge, right, how tightly do you adhere to it? you can tighten it too much and pull too hard on that and then you start breaking shots

and doing nasty things to the image. Yeah. So not to like overly nerd algorithm it out. Those are the things I'm seeing when I'm both looking at references and talking to clients and looking at my actual image. I want to see how those three things come together,

the commonalities between all of them and then how strongly to use that to mold my look. All right, man. I think there's a lot of good stuff. I mean, this is like everything else that we do, this is one part scientist, one part, you know, magician and one part, you know, creative interpretation, right? It's, it is, you're never going to get it right. And I also, one last point I want to say about this that I think is important is that I have found over the years, the more that I insist on this process of references, the next time that I work with that client, it's better. And then the third time I work with that client, it's better, right?

So clients, like, they need just like other aspects of the finishing process need to be educated. This is one where I just don't think it's necessarily sort of innate to a lot of people about what this means, what this process is, right? And so the more that you can educate your clients, I think you'll find them getting better at this. The more that you work through the process with them and say, no, see, this is why I wanted this shot, because now I understand that. that you like, you know, you don't like any grain in skies. Got it. Cool. Like, we'll never make that mistake again.

Like that kind of thing, right? And they'll, and they'll get better at it. And I find now, you know, with clients that I've worked with a lot, you know, some of that stuff just becomes secondhand, right? Like, I know you love flat contrast because the past six projects we've done, Blackpoint has been at 30% or something, you know? Like, I get it now, right? I don't need a reference to that.

But you'll find that the more you work with clients, the references start getting more nuanced and more specific to that project. At a certain point in time, you can forego all the general contrast, black point, white point, you know, kind of stuff and really get into the very, you know, the minutia of what it is I like about this, right? That kind of thing. And that in its own way is a challenge, but also more fun sometimes too. Yeah, I mean it's again, it's one of those things where it's just like the more familiar you get with your client, the better it is for everyone. And, you know, this is a great way. References in general are a great way, a great low risk way of really feeling out your client's creative inclinations as well. That's always a good thing.

Awesome. Well, this was a fun one. I always like talking about references. If you guys have any opinions on the matter, please drop a comment. if you're watching this on YouTube, you can also, depending on the podcast platform, comment there. And of course, you can always head over to the offsetpodcast.com, check out our whole library.

We're near in 50 episodes at this point. Our whole library of other episodes, including some of the ones that we mentioned here, like the look-setting episode. And if you do have some ideas for an episode, feel free to drop us a line over the Offset podcast. We have a little submission button at the top. You can follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Of course, we're on YouTube and all those other major platforms. So, Joe, real, real fun one here. I think hopefully people get a little bit out of kind of the best way to evaluate these things and how to how to move forward with references. And so we'll be back in another two weeks for another fun episode. Until then, I'm Robbie Carman. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for listening.