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darken highlights in a dark scene
Hi group, I’m in a directing workshop at UCLA and I shot a bedroom scene at night and the shot is under exposed 1 stop shot on the 5d and XF100.
Wondered what the best way to darken the bedsheets might be.
I’m having a hard time figuring ways to do the corrections as I would being a still photographer, not used to gamma, lift, and creating masks.
Is creating a duplicate layer with a mask and some blur the correct method?
Thanks David
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6 Replies
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Hi David,
You could do it in Premiere, but After Effects is so much better at it.
The main advantage is you can add feathering to a mask, making you correction a lot less obvious.
It’s also a lot easier to keyframe if there is motion in the shot.
As for the method, as you said, duplicate layer, mask area, and use the levels filter.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Hi, thanks for the reply I have zero experience in AE, I guess I’ll give it a try but will need to look at some tutorials – my new life!!!
Thanks DF
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It’ll be worth it.
You’ll see the mask tool as a pen icon.
Draw over your duplicated layer of footage, and look for feathering under mask in your top layer.
Then drag the level filter in your top layer and you should get what you need.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Hi Vince, I tried it last night and it worked! A little odd on inverting the mask and I was trying to complicate matters by adding a denoise on outside the mask and blur desaturate inside the mask.
However, my big problem is the rendering time and not being able to edit the clip.
This was an overhead shot and I let the camera roll so the entire clip was longer than what I needed “ten seconds”, I saw a youtube clip on editing in AE but I couldn’t get that to work, I didn’t see the tools.
On my MacBook Pro i7 it took 7 hours to render and I have an SSD internal and 16gb of ram.
I’ll ask another question but I need to figure out a workflow for AE…
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You can actually mark in and out point just like Premiere before you bring the clips to your comp.
The easiest however is to do the edit in Premiere, right click on the clip and choose replace with After Effect Comp. That will create an After Effects Comp with the right settings and the length of the clip in your timeline.
The best part is that it becomes a dynamic clip, so you don’t have to render in After Effect to see the changes in Premiere. (although you will probably have to render in Premere to see real time).
If you are doing a lot of these, I would actually advise rendering a file out of After Effects, since many dynamic links can really slow things down.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
I’ll try that, but I created some masks and refined them but I can see the edges, not understanding how to feather correctly, I have to say being a photoshop guy, AE is really similar and I could get into this app. but I can’t figure out how to watch my project as it renders one frame at a time to play.
Driving me crazy, having to learn to play a project sucks…
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