Digital Stained Glass Test

 For a while I've been debating how to create a stained glass effect for my final film. The first attempt was actually painting glass, and while that approach showed some potential I still had two more I wanted to try. The first being doing this digitally, and the second being painting a mirror and trying to bounce the light off of that. I decided to try to do it digitally now, the results are below. 

While I have heard of people doing this kind of thing using Relight on Davici Resolve, I haven't yet learned how to use that software, so I thought I'd try and see what happens using quite simple blending options on premier pro, and deciding what looks best. First I made a simple freeform gradient in Adobe Illustrator, to then use as an overlay to try and emulate the colors and irregularity of light coming from stained glass. 

In the video above I used 4 examples of blending / movement. (in order)

1. Color Burn - while I really liked how this looked at first, with quite good saturation and shadow; I found this to look overall just a bit too dark and fake. I had to turn up the exposure and reduce contrast quite a bit to get it to this point, and as you can see the colors on her face don't look quite right, with red and yellow splotches that were not in the original video. While the footage I was working with was not shot in very good light so it is quite noisy and the light levels are very off, this bending mode only seemed to highlight that.

2. Vivid Light - the effect of this one was softer, and the skin tones looked better, but it still wasn't quite right. As you can see, I did not colorgrade the original video I was overlaying on to to be as light and washed out as I did with the first overlay, and it still didn't have the same issues with being so dark and the colors separating. 

3. Divide - while I know it doesn't look very natural, this just looked quite dreamy to me and is the closest I've gotten to the kind of look I'm going for. When I actually shoot this in better light, I think this may look quite good, I am however interested in how it would look when I use an adjustment layer to colorgrade them both together. I'm also interested in the way that I've seen davinci resolve users be able to follow shadows, and make the light look more like its bouncing off surfaces. Again, I feel like improving the original lighting used would also do wonders for this, but for the purpose of this small test this will do. 

4. Divide + Rotation Keyframes - I honestly just wanted to see what this would look like. Since the borders of the PNG are very irregular it doesn't look the way it should, but it is interesting to see how the colors interact with the surroundings. This actually pointed out exactly the flaw that was bit less obvious in the last clip, color spilling over onto the shadows. While it was definitely a problem in the first version with this blending, now it is very obvious that it takes over the shadows with color. 

Then halfway through writing its blog post it occurred to me to actually try the lighting effects that premier has built in, in hopes that they would have some sort of effect that would combat this. This is what the final result looked like. I didn't line up the spotlights to be out of bounds for this test. It does roughly what I expected it to do. It does produce quite a bit less grain than any other of the blending options I've used, and the color saturation is quite good, but the shadows still just look way off. However, I do quite like how overlapping the lights creates a more natural gradient than the gradient I was already using, and I might implement something like this into my next gradient design, overlapping and decreasing saturation during that stage rather than during the editing. 

Overall I quite like how some of these tests turned out, but same as with the kaleidoscope experiments I've been doing, I'm still leaning more towards trying to get this perfect as a practical effect rather than digitally. I will be doing more research on ways to approach this and hopefully have a whole new list by next semester.