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Professional Opinions Wanted
This is really just out of curiosity so answer at your leisure. Two questions.
I read all the time, in fact just now from Shane Hurlbut, about using the scopes to get precise color correction. Yet, almost every time I watch a video tutorial, the instructor will tweak his picture using the scopes, but then go like “I’m just going to bring down the blacks a little more. Ok, great. That kind of over saturated the image so let me tone down the color. Great. Highlights look a bit brassy so I’ll just…”
You get the idea. What’s the point of adjusting your image using scopes, and then re-tweaking your image, which totally throws off the scopes?
Second Question.
When dealing with h264 compressed video is it out of the question that you can adjust highlights, midtones and shadows separately? Whenever I adjust one of them, the entire image is affected. Like, if I wanted to add a strong blue tint to skin tones (as an over the top example) my entire image will get a blue hue to it, not just the midtones. Is that just the curse of dealing with h264?Remember, I’m just curious. Answer at your leisure.
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5 Replies
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[Duke Sweden] “You get the idea. What’s the point of adjusting your image using scopes, and then re-tweaking your image, which totally throws off the scopes?
“Scopes let you know what’s technically going on with your image, but not necessary what’s aesthetically going on with your image. Scopes can also help to ‘keep you honest’ because the human eye adapts to to color shifts very quickly (in something like 20-30 seconds) so if you push something a bit blue and stare at it for 20 seconds or so it will no longer look like it has a blue tint to it, but if you glance at your scopes you’ll be able to see that the image is pushed towards blue.
[Duke Sweden] “When dealing with h264 compressed video is it out of the question that you can adjust highlights, midtones and shadows separately? “
I can’t say I’ve ever run into that before. What filters/effects are you using? To a degree changes made to one portion of the image will impact the other two (ex. if you keep pushing the highlights red eventually the mids and the blacks will start to go reddish too). This constant push/pull balancing act is what makes having a hardware control surface so handy because you can manipulate multiple values at the same time.
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[Duke Sweden] “When dealing with h264 compressed video is it out of the question that you can adjust highlights, midtones and shadows separately? Whenever I adjust one of them, the entire image is affected.”
Your basic lift, gamma, gain balls are overlapped to a point and how they work depends on how the shot was exposed. If you have a flat image then the gamma/midtone setting will affect the whole picture. I don’t know if Premiere has log-grading but with that one can isolate the ranges where the correction is being done. You can try to do corrections on a grayscale ramp and you’ll see where they are affecting.
[Duke Sweden] “Like, if I wanted to add a strong blue tint to skin tones”
Then you’d want to try to mask or key out the skin tone and use the correction only on that.
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Thanks, guys. I really should express myself more clearly. For example the bit about turning skin blue. I know I’d have to mask it and all but I just meant adding a cool tint to skin tones, which live in the mid-tones, not making someone look like an Avatar reject. Anyway, again, I appreciate pros like yourselves taking the time to answer my questions. Cheers!
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[Duke Sweden] “I know I’d have to mask it and all but I just meant adding a cool tint to skin tones, which live in the mid-tones, not making someone look like an Avatar reject. “
Yep. That’s why you need to isolate the part you’re making the correction in by keying or masking. The correction doesn’t have to be a colorization but the software needs to know where to put it. Try googling secondary color correction.
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Thanks. I appreciate you guys taking the time. Cheers!
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