Colour Correction Exploration

I've wanted to test this out for a while as the scene has been feeling a bit dull or bland for my liking, i would personally like to get a more cinematic / stylized lighting into the game so that we can further control it's look and make it our own.

I discovered that you can use photoshop to edit the colours and values as you would with any painting or image, which is amazing as i've been using photoshop for concept art for a while and am fairly confident with it's colour correction tools. The process is simple, you download a LUT (colour look up table) image from the UDK website and then you take a screenshot of your level that you can then correct in photoshop using adjustment layers. When you are happy you can apply these layers to the LUT and save it. When imported to UDK you must turn off 'Compression_NoAlpha' and and also make sure the LODgroup is set to ColourLookUpTable so that it knows what the image is for. Apply this in world settings and it's automatically applied to your scene, though it does vary slightly from photoshop, mostly in the darks.

Here are 4 quick experimentations, i'll need to discuss with the team about which direction we would like to take but hopefully these examples show what can be done.

D is obviously not going to be used, but shows the extremes of how you can change things.

I am actually quite fond of C - perhaps not exaclt how it is, but its very stlized and gives of an interesting feeling that might be an area to experiment with further.

All of these tests are done on my monitor which will display colours different to both Alex and Dani and also at University. So it would be best to do the final colour corrections whilst at University where the final game will be displayed.