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Color correction for theatrical lighting
I’m having trouble color correcting some concert footage that was shot with some uneven lighting. In one area of the frame, one subject was lit and exposed properly, with nice clean white light, while in another part of the frame, another subject is lit with very strong color, which makes her face look distorted. I’ve been able to bring the skin tones of the first subject into a normal range, but I can’t seem to do anything to improve the second subject. Any tools out there I can use to at least tone down the hot color on the subject? I’m attaching a still frame for reference.
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6 Replies
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You’ll need to mask her out and do a separate correction. And it’s not just 1 strong color – there’s 2. A very blue backlight and a purplish key light.
time to learn Color. do a secondary (with vignette) that desaturates that crazy blue. then do another secondary that pushes the hue curve for that purple towards skintone.
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Color!
My personal opinion, leave it as is. Stage lighting is not very video friendly. If a blue, yellow red, green, etc. lands on the face, it is what it is.
Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Board of Directors
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group -
Or Colorista if Color is daunting, and you aren’t up for prepping the footage for it (speed changes and whatnot). Color and Colorista allow you to have what are called POWER WINDOWS, where you can isolate areas and darken or brighten them.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
I have to agree completely with Mr. Eisen on this subject; don’t do anything save fix any “illegal” highlights, maybe some minor enhancement or some selective blurring of skin contours – stage lighting can appear very harsh in video.
Theatrical lighting designers do not design for video or film they design for the human eye. If you knew ahead of time and had access to the lighting designer, you would have wanted to consult with them to design the lighting cues to be much more video friendly. If you start messing around you’ll very soon find yourself painting yourself into a hole with no way out.
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Check Rich Harrington’s excellent tutorial on using the limit effect function of FCP’s 3 Way CC as it will help if you want to desaturate just the blues.
There isn’t much chance of getting ‘normal’ skin and hair tone although Color will be a much better tool if you want to try. I agree with others than it is better to try to work on minimising the over saturation of the blue.
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I’m with Steve also, if you balance out all the light you no longer have a theatrical performance. While it is true that a lot of the time LDs don’t light for video, we must also come to grips with the fact that they are creating a look, they want the blue and purple washes to certain people on the stage.
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