If you thought Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy was dark, you might have to take a second look at Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, only this time, in color.
See how the grim film is transformed into “a Superman movie that looks like Superman,” courtesy of a video produced by the YouTube channel VideoLab.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du-eYiD9OfM
According to the video’s description, the changes were made with Synthetic Aperture’s Color Finesse, with color exclusion adjustments doing “most of the heavy lifting.” Each shot was then fine-tuned with “a cocktail of secondary corrections.” The orange-tinted Metropolis sky and odd purple girders were in the original footage, which may suggest that the darker color palette was used in post-production.
“Turns out there was a beautiful Zack Snyder movie hiding underneath the bleak coloring. Would ‘Man of Steel’ have been more successful at the box office if it wasn’t colored like ‘Schindler’s List’?”
Snyder’s 2013 film, starring Henry Cavill as Clark Kent and his caped alter ego, was cast in a grim palette echoing the darker tones of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. But do the gritty shades that work for Batman work for Superman? VideoLab seem to be leaning more toward “no,” but insist they’re simply “asking questions.”
