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Color Correction Savior
I shot a friends wedding last week and one of the unmanned cameras footage ended up getting a pretty blown out. Way too bright. I’ve played a bit with the contrast, but to no real avail. Thought of adding a little color… not working. Anybody have a fail-safe trick that might help?
Ah… wait! Have them redo the wedding Ha!
The footage is viewable, but some of the foreheads are blending into the sky.
Much obliged.
Jason
FCP 5.0.4
G5 Dual 2.7
3 GB -
6 Replies
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Unfortunately in digital footage, once that detail is gone, there’s no recovering it. So my suggestion would be to really tweak the footage out and call it “a thing.” Add a color tint or do the ol’ “old film” treatment on it.
Good luck!
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Brent Altomare
Groovy Like a Movie
(877) 3-GROOVY -
I’ve found that sometimes you can lower the level of the
mids with the 3-way CC in FCP. This pulls the top down a bit
and stretches the middle andsometimes helps with overexposed
footage, if that’s what you are dealing with.Dan
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Go with black and white… you can then force the gray scale a bit better than the color space.
Really — it’s your only hope.
CaptM
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[Brent Altomare] “Unfortunately in digital footage, once that detail is gone, there’s no recovering it.”
Yep, I’ll second that. Put the three way color corrector on it and pull down a mids just a bit and then the highlights just a bit to bring the video levels back to 100 so it’s not too bright for the viewer. But as far as getting the detail back, it’s gone.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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Next time find a man who can actually run the camera and set proper exposure.
No one can create a miracle out of a mess from the get go.
If you charged the client for that unmanned camera deduct it from the bill and all will be well when the client complain about the overexposure issues.
Or better yet do not use any of the footage and treat it like the camera was never on location. Tell them the tape self destructed due to the over exposure thereby melting as a result of the intense heat.
Tony Salgado
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It sounds like you want to at least separate the blown areas, as opposed to trying to magically restore detail that’s not there.
So what I’d do is add a matte to the sky portion and darken and/or tint that area only and do regular correction to the rest of the image. Try to make it look like that blown out forehead was for aesthetic effect (maybe a very subtle glow).
Just an idea…I’ve seen mattes do wonderful things in very flat overexposed images, though.
G5 Dual 2.7 GHz
2 GB RAM
OS 10.4.6
FCP 5.0.4
QT 7.0.4
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