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Don’t forget: Blend modes are awesome.
I’m working on some simple interviews, where we washed colored gels across a white paper backdrop, then did 3-point lighting on the interview subjects posed in front of that. Very simple, garden variety stuff. But adjusting the brightness/contrast ratio between subject and background, while improving the color, was giving “just okay” results in post.
This is not a “power user” tip, by any means, but next time you are in this situation, I discovered a great instant improvement, without LUTS or any of that jazz, was to add a layer of pastel white (pulled from the FCPX title generator’s “solids” group) in a video track below the shot, and I changed the shot’s blend mode to “multiply”. Bam, instant improvement, and it left room to make additional adjustments in the grading tools, but immediately it improved the skin tones and the contrast ratio and chroma of the overall shot, in one step.
I follow this up by adding in the FCPX “spot” light effect and adjusting the feather, radius, and other features of that. The final result, I thought, looked really good, and took seconds to do.
If instead of a white, you use another shade, you get other, interesting effects, too.
Give it a try sometime.
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2 Replies
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Why not post a before/after screenshot or a short video clip?
It might inspire.
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Too much hassle getting permissions. Too busy to re-create the shot privately.
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