Color grading your level

Color correction is a post processing effect that takes a frame rendered by the engine and changes its output of colors in various ways.

This effect is typically used in film to enhance scenes with effects such as Hue and Saturation, Contrast and Brightness, Luminance and Color Curves, and so on.

Getting ready

Take a reference image that hasn't been color corrected yet and shows a wide range of colors from an open level. Avoid using high resolution image captures though, as they won't improve color correction quality, but rather only increase the processing time when saved later. In this example, I captured a 1280x720 TGA image.

Copy/paste THE COLOR CORRECTION LOOKUP REFERENCE CHART into this reference image using Photoshop. It is important to use the color chart supplied by Crytek, as the resource compiler will need this file later on, to detect and extract the chart.

Flatten all layers, and save the file before beginning this tutorial.

How to do it...

Let's learn how...