Pure white

[Vladimir Kucherov]

Wouldn’t you want to go by scopes for this one? Look at channel convergence in the waveform?

[Margus Voll]

scopes. very accurate.

looking at white plate will in some point also fail as your eyes will tire.

—

Margus

https://iconstudios.eu

DaVinci 8.2.1 OSX 10.7.3
MacPro 5.1 2×2,93 24GB
GTX 470 / Quadro 4000
Multibridge 2 Pro

[Stig Olsen]

I understand that if the entire picture is “white”, but in this case the colored product fill most of the frame so that the scope reads different, How do you deal with that?

[Vladimir Kucherov]

You could throw a window on the white area and hit highlight – scopes will show only the visible area.

[Dan Moran]

Using Hilite is a great option. Also you can zoom the image in too!

D

Dan Moran
DaVinci Application Specialist
Blackmagic Design EMEA

[Mark Sanford]

“What do you guys rely on to decide what is pure white?”

Having come from the acquisition side of image making I think it’s very important to continually cross-reference what you see on the monitor with what you see on the scope. We all know how easy it is for the eye to alter it’s perception of the white point as the surrounding content changes.

For this reason I am sold on the the two proprietary displays that Tektronix scopes are capable of, both gamut related: The diamond display and the spearhead display. You can go to their website for an explanation and tutorial but, briefly, the diamond is a very precise way of measuring the RGB component of a picture and the spearhead measures Hue, Saturation and Lightness. Put them together and it’s very hard to make an error regarding grayscale. Once you get your head around them (it takes a while) you’ll find your trusty RGB parade to be sadly lacking.

Mark Sanford
Los Angeles

[Michael Griggs]

I just did that exact thing yesterday… it seemed to work quite well to dial the color to the look I wanted for the subject, then just append one more node with a desaturate highlights lum vs. sat curve.

I certainly felt like I had plenty of control with this method, and it mixed perfectly with “pure white” background composite shots.

[Chris Jones]

Stig, I know exactly what you are talking about. I find the same thing frustrating, especially when you have white car in freeway shot where it’s the only white thing in the image and is very small.

In a tutorial once I saw that there is a tool that I think actually comes with the Mac Operating System where you can hold the cursor over the white area (or any colored area) and it lets you know its balance.

But I can’t remember what it’s called. It might be called “color picker”.

The problem with it would be that it would only work on your UI and not your grading monitor. So your UI monitor would have to perfectly calibrated.

[Stig Olsen]

Thank you guys!