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Making dark footage lighter.
Hi guys,
I’m just about to start editing a wedding video that was filmed on Super 8mm film way back in the day, and after looking through it I’ve realised that most of the inside shots are going to need lightening a lot, as you can hardly see a thing.
I was just wondering if there’s any way in After Effects of making dark shots lighter without altering the quality too much? As it’s very old footage, the quality isn’t that great to begin with, so I really want to avoid losing any more.If anyone could help or knows of any tutorials, that’d be great! I use Final Cut and Color too, if either of those are going to be better to use than After Effects.
Cheers!
Sarah
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9 Replies
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Hi Sarah,
For a fast and effective way to lift impenetrable blacks in FCP, I’d really recommend Lyric’s free ‘Shadow Highlight’ plugin. It’s certainly great for over-crushed DV footage. You just need to be careful about how much to lift (and where the ‘knee’ is), and ensure that the chroma setting is at zero, or everything gets a little too rosy. I imagine the 8mm will be pretty well saturated anyway! But the plug-in controls are easy to get to grips with.https://www.lyric.com/fcp-plugins/
Good luck!
Rodney
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In very general terms:
The Levels and Curves effects are good general-purpose effects for correcting tonal issues with images. There are links to some resources about these effects here (including in the comments):
“Color correction, color grading, and color adjustment”If you just need to lift the shadows, the Shadow/Highlight effect may be a better choice.
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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
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Thanks guys! I’ll give both suggestions a go and see how I do! Will let you know how I get on 🙂
SarahSarah Broadbent
Creative Director
Orillo Productions
http://www.orilloproductions.com -
sounds like a perfect job for my free auto white balance, auto flicker remover, and shadow restorer all-in-one. just set the gamma clamp so that the top text layer(its off default) shows 25. then the flicker gets removed plus the shadows repaired. I’ve used it on some destroyed 8, 16mm stuff, and it works perfect.
ae cs3 aep
https://www.mediafire.com/?fz0s3i85a45ou58Is that super 8mmm color? If it is, your capturing process might introduce artifacts and color bleeding, don’t worry, I got that covered too.
chroma smoother – smart blurs only the saturation channel, so there’s zero blurring on the actual rgb(compared to remove grain plugins). It fixes minor DCT blockyness and grainy footage. set black mask at 99.99.
AE cs3 aep
https://www.mediafire.com/?ghrzqg4j0rjdvqgnow, you can do this stuff manually in AE with shadow effect,color finesse, or remove grain plugins. but auto is my cup of tea.
https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/
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Hi Chris, thanks for your help!
There’s just a few things I need running by about your downloads. I’m using a mac – will that affect anything? When I’ve opened the projects up, I can’t seem to see what your talking about, so I might need a more detailed guide of how to use them – for example, with the auto white balance programme, there doesn’t appear to be a top text layer to change? Not sure if it’s changed because I’m using a mac, or if I’m just being silly! Also, the placeholder’s file path is “” – I assume I’m supposed to double click this and add my own footage instead?
Thanks very much,
SarahSarah Broadbent
Creative Director
Orillo Productions
http://www.orilloproductions.com -
ae projects work in mac/pc crossplatform. there’s a top text layer over a solid hidden with the shy button. and you simple right click the footage replace with your own.
https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/
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Hello Chris ,
1.is it possible to upload your
“all-in-one auto white balance, auto flicker remover,shadow restorer”
and “chroma smoother” ?2.also do you know how to extract a saturation channel only ? and then be able to have hue channel and lightness as separate?
I know how to extract a color channel (image minus its own lightness) but color channel is hue and also saturation. I want saturation but to get that I need to get the hue channel first I think and I don’t know how.
ocmtime -
auto white balance, shadow, color, contrast, deflicker,
set gamma clamp text box at 25
https://f1.creativecow.net/6154/auto-white-balance-cs3-and-up
set gamma clamp text box at 25remove wavy banding lines
https://f1.creativecow.net/6749/remove-strobing-blurchroma repair smooth
https://f1.creativecow.net/7877/chroma-repair-Shift effect set alpha to saturation might be what you want.
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thank you 🙂
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