day for night few options

[Steve Roberts]

Can you post the original shot?

[Zander]

that is the original, thats what makes me sad.

like i said, any help, and i do mean any!

Aaron Zander-Student editor
If it’s out there and it does somethign to something,
teach me how to use it
Powerbook g4 1.5 GHz (it might not be big, but i can take it on set
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[Mike Clasby]

I see you referenced Andrew in your original post, so the solution below involves an Andrew technique, but maybe not the same Andrew or methods you tried, anyway…

I think A look at Andrew Kramer’s Tut on Blemish Removal could apply here. He uses a Luma Matte to just apply effects to the areas he wants (a bride’s face in the tut, but he mention’s changing the color of an apple). To see Andrew’s Tut, click on his head a scroll down.

Here’s a quickie on his Luma Matte that seems to work for your Picture example.

Making the Luma Matte:

Dup the layer,

Apply CC Threshold RGB, crank the Red and Green up to 255, now adjust the Blue (I used Blue threshold 56) until the layer is just Blue and Black (he’s working with the Red since the bride’s face is pink).

Apply Hue/Saturation – Crush the Saturation (Master) to 0.

Apply Levels and Boost the Whites by pulling the little White Triangle to the left (see Andrew’s Tut for demo) until you have only Black and White.
We’ll use this for the luma matte.

Make a new Adjustment layer, drag it down to between the two layer, below the black and white we’ve been working on., and change the Track Matte to Luma Matte.

Now any effects we apply to the Adjustment layer will only be applied to the parts of the Black/White layer (now with eyeball turned off) that are matting the bottom footage layer, in other words only effecting the once blue sky.

Apply Hue Saturation to the Adjustment layer, click on the Colorize Check Box, make it a dark Blue (-137 degrees for my test on your pic), adjust the Colorize Saturation (65 ?)and Colorize Lightness (-64 ?). If the matte is making grungy edges in the trees, where the sky is peeking through, add Fast Blur (I liked 2)to that Duplicate Layer, the first on we made Black and White. Slide that Fast Blur so it Sit below Hue/Saturation and Levels:

Dupped Layer Effects Order:

CC Threshold RGB
Hue/Saturation
Fast Blur
Levels

Anyway it seems to work, with lots of adjustment available, you could tweak with keyframes as conditions changed in the scene.

Oh, yeah, I Had to draw a little mask around the fire (and Invert it0 so the Adjsutment layer doesn’t adversly effect the fire.

Hope that works for you.

[Steve Roberts]

Looks like night to me, then.

Apply the levels effect to bring up the shadows. Observe the noise and lack of useful detail in the talent’s face. Bring in the DP and do it again so he sees that he should have lit the talent.

Tell the DP that your job, when creating the “day for night” effect, is not to brighten dark footage, but to darken bright footage. It’s actually more complicated, but your job certainly isn’t to brighten badly shot footage. Tell him you can’t create information that isn’t there, and direct him to the COW Cinematography forum and search for “day for night”.

But I’m being too harsh. For quick ‘n’ dirty, try duping the footage, then key out the sky on the upper copy. Run Levels on the lower copy to darken the sky that you can now see. Go back to the upper copy and run levels, dragging the sliders to bring up the talent a little. Stop when it gets too noisy. Run Simple Choker on the upper layer to kill the white fringe. Consider running Remove Grain.

Good luck,
Steve

[Chris Smith]

Reflecting what Steve said, the bigger issue is that you have severly underexposed subjects in the shot. So I think doing a day-for-night effect should be way down on your priorty list. If you succeed, then you have a picture of a campfire and the vague notion that there are trees or actors in the shot.

BUT, that being said, looking at the shot how I would pull the matte is using the color filters to isolate the blue channel. Then run this through levels to crush down the image so the trees and the guys head are decently black and the sky is white. Then throw in a garbage matte or 2 to block out the part of the image with the campfire. So in the end all of your image is black with just the areas around the trees and head white (Where the sky is).

Then use this as a luma matte on whatever techniques you are going to use to make it night (darkeing, tinting, a moon?).

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Chris Smith]

K, here is the best I could do:

https://sugarfilmproduction.com/dayfornightcomp.jpg

I didn’t do any special masking that would have been imposiible in motion.

However, Even if this was shot on film, transferred to 16 bit uncompressed files, It would only work marginally better because I wouldn’t get so much fringing in the trees and edges from the compression. (although I didn’t expand the matte like Steve suggested).

But Ideally, this would have been shot at full exposure with good strong lighting. There is just almost no data to work with.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Mike Clasby]

Chris’ first post can produce this (with Fast Blur sandwiched between CC Threshold RGB and Levels in that top layer seems to help a lot):

https://putfile.com/pic.php?pic=4/11413341562.jpg&s=x402

Details on numbers for filters are in my first post above, idea taken from Andrew’s Tut on Blemish removal.

I agree the subject is lit poorly but looks like you might be able to get away with it.

[Zander]

oh, you guys never stop to inspire me,

I go to brooks institute of photography, we run year round with 2 month long “sessions” this is acutally my second 8 min short this session. Fortunatly, the next six months are spent shooting 16mm on one project, 2 months for pre, 2 for production, and 2 for my specialty-post.

we showed a rough cut today in class and nobody commented on the sky, so ive been given the executive order to not care. though i may try later, (i mean how awsome would that be for reel footage, show before and after)

thanks again for all your input, im going to try my best, but i showed my director what you’ve come up with, and explained, you all have oh, i don’t know, a thousand times more experience than I (im on month 6 or so with after effects, and though i pick it up quick, im no Aharon, not yet atleast, I have to earn that extra ‘H’ between my two ‘A’s

well thanks for the help guys, i may go in with some other footage and clonestamp a bunch of the footage.

thanks again

Aaron Zander-Student editor
If it’s out there and it does somethign to something,
teach me how to use it
Powerbook g4 1.5 GHz (it might not be big, but i can take it on set
fcp 5, ae 6.5pro adobe cs2