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Shooting for Color on the 5D
I’m going to be shooting something on a 5D that will be gettin a lot of color treatment in post- The final result will be a mix where a certain section is masked to maintain some shades of brown while the rest is a very lush black and white, then the full frame transitioning into all black and white.
I don’t know a lot about the way 5D deals with color information. Can anyone recommend the best shooting settings, or anything related to workflow or even lighting the give me the most room to push the look in Color?
Any general advice for how to get the best black and white on the 5D could also be helpful…
Thanks for the help!
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4 Replies
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Shoot flat. No profile changes. Neutral
I prefer to do back and white with photoshop extenders bw adjustment layers. Great control.
Richard M. Harrington, PMP
Author: From Still to Motion, Video Made on a Mac, Photoshop for Video, Understanding Adobe Photoshop, Final Cut Studio On the Spot and Motion Graphics with Adobe Creative Suite 5 Studio Techniques
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Thanks for the response!
I’m a bit confused though, this is for video, how do I use photoshop to make color changes?
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[Austin Conroy] “I’m a bit confused though, this is for video, how do I use photoshop to make color changes?”
You can use Photoshop for video as well. Richard made series of fantastic tutorials called “Photoshop for video” here on the cow in the tutorials section.
[Austin Conroy] “I don’t know a lot about the way 5D deals with color information”
The 5DMkII like all Canon VDSLRs uses 4:2:0 colour sampling, so not much colour information left. Plus very heavy H.264 compression. Plus a lot of aliasing due to line skipping.
This can give you a hard time in postproduction when colour-grading. So, like Richard wrote, shoot flat to preserve the most information.A general – often followed – advice is using “neutral” settings with sharpness and contrast dialled all down and saturation reduced two ticks. This will give you a very soft and flat picture, which has a greater dynamic range and less artifacts. Sharpness and contrast can be tweaked in post with more precision.
Some guys (myself included) use the Technicolor Cinestyle, which is even flatter and – at least that’s my personal experience – cleaner than the built-in styles and will give you even more room in post to grade.Edit: What’s crucial, when aiming for more extreme colour-changes in post, is to get shure that the colour-channels don’t clip. A clipped colour-channel will give you a hard time in post, when dealing with colour.
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“Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot.” – Buster Keaton -
I always shoot flat and am very happy with the results on my d7000, but am curious is the increase in dynamic range “real”?
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