Digital color correction of isolated objects or layers without manual masking — tracking and rotoscoping merged. Saves hours in complex compositing.
You know the situation: A scene's color is almost perfect, but a single object — a car's paint job, a shirt, a wall in the background — doesn't fit the overall image. Instead of painstakingly creating a pixel-perfect mask, you use the Dunning Process. This allows you to track the object through the entire sequence and correct its color directly, without cutting traditional rotoscoping masks. The advantage: faster, more iterative, less frame-by-frame work.
In a practical workflow, it works like this: In your compositing tool (Nuke, After Effects, DaVinci Resolve in the VFX suite), you focus on a moving object. The tracker follows image points or edge contrast features across the timeline. In parallel, you feed a color operator (Curves, Levels, Hue-Sat) — not with a geometric mask, but with a tracking-based correction node. Does the object move through the frame? The correction follows. This saves you from having to redraw a hand-drawn mask in 150 frames. It saves significant time, especially with fast camera movements or complex parallax.
Limitations are real: For deforming or rotating objects — a fluttering flag, a spinning propeller — tracking alone isn't enough. Here, you resort to a hybrid method: rough tracking + minimally complex rotoscoping for critical frames. Objects with inhomogeneous color distribution (textures, patterns) are also difficult — the tracker quickly loses its grip. In such cases, the classic masking setup is still the safer choice. The Dunning Process excels with simple, hard-edged, and homogeneous objects — metal parts, solid-colored surfaces, smooth paint jobs.
Practically, you use it when time constraints and non-critical areas of interest coincide. A car in the background that needs color grading? Perfect. An actress whose shirt color doesn't match? You'd rather work with precise masks there, otherwise, you'll see halo effects around the hair. In a professional workflow, the Dunning Process is an efficiency trick, not a miracle cure — it saves you hours of manual labor when the scene and the object allow it.