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Color Correcting Advice (Tell me what’s wrong with this photo)
Can Anybody take a look at the still frame I’ve uploaded above and tell me whats wrong with the color in it? I know there is something wrong but I don’t know exactly how to go about fixing. I am a bit new to more advanced coloring, but would this have anything to do with the gamma; or is it something that the three-way color correcter could fix? If you do know exactly whats wrong with it, could you tell me what I may have done wrong? I shot this on a HVR-Z1U with Cinematone on Level 1, Black Stretch on Level 1. Any help would be greatly appreciated
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24 Replies
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The image is too flat. You gotta make things POP. I used Colorista, I crushed the blacks a little, bumped up the mids and the brights. I made the lows a little blue, then pushed the mids into the red, and added a little blue in the lights. Then bumped the saturation. I got this:
And my settings look like this:
Bear in mind that Colorista allows you to push things a little more than the three-way CC.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
For one.. it looks pretty much underexposed. No.2, the red saturation is too high.
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Ask three colorists or prepress techs about what’s right and you’ll get three answers.
Here’s mine: it’s under exposed. I would set the black and white points to get a neutral tone in highlights and shadows. Then bring the white point up.
Open the upper quarter tone a bit. Then lighten the eyes.
I work with Color and might consider a vignette just to lighten the shadowy eyes.
Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing
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“Ask three colorists or prepress techs about what’s right and you’ll get three answers. ”
ROFL
Shows how subjective things are :p
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Yeah…after looking at Dean’s, mine is still a little dark, and a tad red. This is what I get for coloring on my laptop using the CANVAS. Next time I’ll look at it on the external.
Ooof…mine is VERY red. I think I need to go back to the drawing board.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
I’ve been al day long without being able to copy&paste so unable to send my little test, but here he go:
Lows down a bit, Highligts up a lot. Midrange up a little.
Lows to the blues and middles and highs to the flesh tone.
I have only the 3w-CC available otherwise I would had tried Colorista.
Rafael -
I think Dean wins!
But nobody even mentioned “vingettes”. We use them all the time to “focus” the eye on the important part of the frame (usually the face). On a shot like this where there was no specific lighting, a vignette
goes a long way to making the face “pop”.Just my thoughts.
And, yes, color correction is totally subjective. One man’s “too red” is another’s “too blue”. If you want to move a session along, kick everyone out of the room.
Mark
Ps. Maybe there should be a forum: “Color this shot”.
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Dean gets my vote too! Shane, you’ve got a new episode for your podcast right there. Heeee 🙂
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When I was developing a prepress system for the newspaper I was with, I used to go to every MacWorld seminar on color. This was when desktop color was in its infancy and very few knew anything about it. The best advice was doing things by the numbers to establish a starting point. I still do that for video.
I just made this photo neutral.
As Mark suggested, it can go anywhere from that starting point. A colorist can go warm, cold, drive the blacks further down, blow the highlights for effect, put in a vignette or gradients. And then after that the editor decides to cut the entire scene for the sake of story flow 🙂
With Color, after the basic shots are neutralized. Then secondaries and output modules can be added to achieve the final look. And because it’s modular, that final look can be modified and kept consistent throughout. There are some very cool tools for this stuff!
Dean Sensui — Hawaii Goes Fishing
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I decided to go at this with my Look Sweet plugin package and see what I could do using just that.
That’s with MrFixit, Vibrance+ in Enhance Mode, and Glamour.
Patrick
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