post-production

The workflow of a photographic novel varies completely from one project to the next, depending on crew and production size. Night Zero utilizes Adobe Bridge and Adobe Photoshop software, integrated with custom scripting for the specific needs of the project.

Camera RAW files are sorted and stacked by exposure clusters for HDR merging, and the resulting 32-bit image files are converted to non-destructive layers and processed by the tonemapping software Photomatix. After individual review and adjustment, each image is copied to an 8-bit TIF for compositing, cleanup, and additional effects (such as motion blur or speed lines).

These completed files are dynamically linked to the master page layout file (through the use of Smart Objects), which contains the cropping, framing, and positioning information for each frame on the page, as well as text, bubbles, and interframe elements. All of this work is done non-destructively, so Night Zero artists are able to return to the various stages of the workflow and tweak elements without impacting elsewhere in the chain.

The computer workload for the Night Zero process involves two rendering processes and requires cutting-edge hardware for an efficient workspace. First, the triple-exposure sets of images are rendered into a massive single High Dynamic Range image, containing 32 bits of color information per channel. Then, the data in each of these files is processed by the complex algorithms of the tonemapping software, which renders a new image based on dozens of configured options.

These two processes alone account for the bulk of processing time in the workflow, and are therefore heavily automated through a combination of built-in software functionality and scripts developed in-house to consolidate non-interactive processes and minimize downtime.

With the advent of Adobe Creative Suite 2 came the revolutionary concept of "Smart Objects", the ability to non-destructively scale, mask, update, and even replace layers in Photoshop by linking them to external files. The Night Zero pages are designed around this technology, where each complete comic page is a series of linked images with defined positions and frames. In this manner, adjustments (such as color correction, touch-up, and compositing) can be done directly on the master images and the assembled pages will automatically update their content.

Thanks to the consistency of the Night Zero workflow conventions, much of the website posting can be handled through automated scripts. The complete page layouts are flattened, resized, and compressed with a single action, ready for upload to the NZ servers. The website serves static pages, so the rotating elements are generated by scripts and swapped in over the previous week's content. The previously-tedious work of unique page htmls is now a single archive page that uses client-side scripting to deliver the various episodes and vignettes.

Writing a custom script in Adobe Bridge to automatically group bracketed exposures into stacks