VR Color Grading using Key Views

Abstract

Color grading is a crucial step in film post-production for defining the creative intent and giving a particular look and feel to the content. In the context of VR, no adapted solutions exist yet for color grading 360° imagery, leading to cumbersome work-arounds and costing precious production time. To enable colorists to work on 360° content without modifying their existing workflows, we introduce the concept of key views---representative rectilinear views extracted from the 360° scene through a visual attention analysis. Key views can be edited independently using traditional color grading approaches. Our solution then seamlessly propagates the edits to the rest of the sphere, allowing for localized grading to be applied but without requiring the use of masks or windows.