What is DaVinci Resolve’s “Aperture Correction”?

[Joseph Owens]

[Jonathan LaPointe] “the Colorist has referred to a tool he calls the “Aperture Correction” tool. “
From the article:
The aperture correction in the foreground makes you focus more on the objects in the foreground.

There are three options inside the detail enhancement tool; blur, sharpen, and mist, which all have +/- values, that will either sharpen or blur, depending on where the fulcrum is and whether you are working inside or outside of a qualification area. Aperture Correction is getting to be a bit of a legacy word, because we are starting to slide toward post-depth-of-field, rather than setting an aperture-defined circle of confusion, related to exposure and emulsion speed. In the case of Prometheus, as dark as it is as discussed, it would start becoming a challenge to control focal depth, compounded by going to higher and higher aspect ratios. Obviously it is easier to blur an image than it is to convincingly sharpen it — my own preference would have been to shoot a scene with as high a T-stop as possible to get the deepest focus, then z-depth qualify the scene (using whatever options there might be, given the camera, which might include some 3D solutions, but software like Mocha can also solve for camera positional data from 2-D) and then actually blur instead of sharpen — which would more closely resemble the old “coring” function in electronic imaging.

Back in the early ’80s we most often referred to “sharpening” or “detail enhancement” as phony-focus.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Marc Wielage]

And in addition to what Joe says above, in the old telecine days, “aperture correction” was used right out of the film scanner, and “image enhancement” was used at the end of the processing chain. I think Steven Nakamura is just referring to sharpening with that word.

Note there are 3rd-party OFX plug-ins, like Boris FX Continuum, that use a different method for sharpening that will provide different results than the enhancement built in to Resolve.

[Jonathan Lapointe]

Hey thanks to both of you for taking the time to respond. I love hearing about how things were in the “old” days of film, because that has guided so much of what we do today in the digital world. Being a “young upstart” I haven’t had the opportunity to work off of a telecine machine, or even much with film for that matter, so I feel I’m missing out on a huge wealth of knowledge, particularly regarding film stocks and processing techniques. So I really appreciate you guys taking the time to share your knowledge.

Thanks,
Jonathan