Importing Stills, They look Terrible

[John Rofrano]

> I am trying to match how they look in Lightroom as close as possible.

That’s the wrong way to match. My guess is that Lightroom is matching them to the color space of a printer and video is not a printer. What you need to do is turn off any color management in Lightroom (i.e., you must match Lightroom to video, not the other way around). Also video uses RGB space, Lightroom is probably using CMYK space (again that’s for printers). You must use RGB space.

The first thing any video editor needs to do in programs like Lightroom or Photoshop is turn off any color management that is trying to match colors to printer inks.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Carl Battreall]

Thanks John,
Makes sense, being a photographer and a printmaker, the thought of turning off the color management is a little scary 🙂

[John Rofrano]

Well… to make it less scary you might want to calibrate your displays and set the color management to your calibration profile. I have a Spyder 3 Elite that I use to calibrate my displays. In Photoshop, I set my color management settings to use my display profile.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Bob Peterson]

I’m curious. What color space are you using in Lightroom? Are you using CMYK?

You don’t really need to turn off color management in Photoshop, but you should convert your images to sRGB before sending them to Vegas. It seems that most video people do not understand color management and color profiles. It was reflected here with the assertion that color management is print technology, and that you would routinely work with a printer color profile and/or CMYK.

My usual problem is that my monitor IS calibrated for still photos. That makes it a LOT easier to work with stills, but video always looks dark on my monitor. However, after the video is rendered and viewed on a television, it brightens up quite a bit. The trick is figuring out when dark is not too dark.

BTW, I do not send full size tifs, or any other still format, to Vegas. I crop stills to an appropriate size for video, and save them as PNGs. I do not expect Vegas to be terribly good at resizing photos, and large photos slow it down immediately.

[Carl Battreall]

Of course my monitors are calibrated!

I read that Vegas has trouble with stills using the 32bit spaces verse 8bit. So I imported them(using srgb jpegs)into a 8bit timeline and they look much better.

Bob,
I also crop to 16×9 in Lightroom, but I leave them large so I can do some pans and zooms. Well, I do resize to fit on a 4k timeline (even though they probably will only be outputed at 1080p). I will try the PNG export option. Have you ever considered a broadcast monitor or the MXO mini for grading the footage in Vegas instead of your monitor that you use for stills, obviously you would need two then, one for video and one for stills.
Thanks for the advice, Cows rule!

[Bob Peterson]

I have not yet tried a studio monitor or multiple displays. For the moment, I can limp along because I have an older ATI video card with a TV tuner built in. It does have a composite output to a TV. When I’m ready to adjust for TV display, I connect an old portable TV to that composite cable. I can then judge what the video will look like on a TV. The ultimate test is to burn a DVD, and play the result on one of several TVs available to me. Fortunately, I have not seen color accuracy problems between computer monitor and TVs. The problem is mainly one of luminance. I am now toying with the idea of adjusting gamma on my video card to shift back and forth between stills and video.

Unfortunately, the video world does not seem to have anything like color management. Thus, the display accuracy of the video image varies a lot from one device to another. I always cringe when I see my video displayed by an overhead projector and looking VERY overexposed.