GH4 Are you liking the GH4 colors?

puredrifting

puredrifting

Major Contributor
I just edited an episode of a recurring show I shot for a pharma company that I have been shooting for the past few years on the Canon 5D MKIII. I love the sharpness of the GH4 footage better but I have to say, I am not liking the colors, especially the skin tones on the GH4 at all. I shot with the Cinelike D setting with the contrast dialed down for maximum DR and I tweaked the shadow detail. My camera is not handy so I cannot check the exact settings right now, but it is a slight modification from the settings the DP for the Budpest video used. The skintones are very orangey with blue overtones and highlights, very unnatural and unflattering looking. I was comparing this show to the last three I shot on the 5D MKIII and the skin tones on the Canon are so much more natural looking.

I have tried Vivid, Natural and Standard too and all seem to exhibit this same weird, unflattering look for people. Am I doing something wrong? I shot black, white and gray cards for interviews and color corrected using FCP's built in three way corrector so I know my colors are "correct". They show up perfect as far as the skin tones on the Vectorscope but man, they just look plasticky, orange and weird. Has anyone coming from the C100/300 and the 5D MKIII noticed this? Is there anything you have tweaked in your settings on the GH4 that gets rid of this look and results in smooth, natural looking skin tones? This could become a deal breaker for me. As much as I hate the aliasing and softness of the 5D MKIII, people look great when I shoot them with the 5D MKIII. WIth the GH4, not so much.
 
puredrifting said:
I just edited an episode of a recurring show I shot for a pharma company that I have been shooting for the past few years on the Canon 5D MKIII. I love the sharpness of the GH4 footage better but I have to say, I am not liking the colors, especially the skin tones on the GH4 at all. I shot with the Cinelike D setting with the contrast dialed down for maximum DR and I tweaked the shadow detail. My camera is not handy so I cannot check the exact settings right now, but it is a slight modification from the settings the DP for the Budpest video used. The skintones are very orangey with blue overtones and highlights, very unnatural and unflattering looking. I was comparing this show to the last three I shot on the 5D MKIII and the skin tones on the Canon are so much more natural looking.

I have tried Vivid, Natural and Standard too and all seem to exhibit this same weird, unflattering look for people. Am I doing something wrong? I shot black, white and gray cards for interviews and color corrected using FCP's built in three way corrector so I know my colors are "correct". They show up perfect as far as the skin tones on the Vectorscope but man, they just look plasticky, orange and weird. Has anyone coming from the C100/300 and the 5D MKIII noticed this? Is there anything you have tweaked in your settings on the GH4 that gets rid of this look and results in smooth, natural looking skin tones? This could become a deal breaker for me. As much as I hate the aliasing and softness of the 5D MKIII, people look great when I shoot them with the 5D MKIII. WIth the GH4, not so much.
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Check out this thread:
http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?327243-Best-settings-for-skin-tones

I personally found natural or portrait to be best when not grading too heavily and cineD to be good if I am, but with the caveat of not changing the picture profiles too much. I leave the curve and pedestal at default. I also leave NR on, but turn sharpness all the way down. If you A/B test the settings, you'll find a balance that works for you...
 
seems better than my old canon's dslr extra orange push to me. took some getting used to seeing what I think now are BETTER, more accurate colors
 
Yes, I am liking them.
I think the skin tones look great. I don't find them too orangey or with blue overtones.
Natural and Protrait give subtle differences compared to the Cinelike setting, but overall I find the skin tones to be great. There has been a tendency for Gh4 users to overexpose their images, which results in skin tones that don't look so good, but that's the case with any camera.

Do you have any images from either camera to compare?
 
Taking the contrast all the way to -5 in CINELIKE-D is flatter than Clog. Keep it simple. I'm finding the camera looks great if I just take the saturation and sharpening down around -2.

I like +1 hue. In tough lighting iDynamic helps and bringing the master pedestal up a couple clicks is fine. Remember every time you bring any of the settings up you also add noise so don't go crazy.

Highlight and Shadow do weird stuff to skin so I leave it at default

I just got back from Yosemite and shot a bunch of footage all in CINELIKE D with very subtle setting changes. I'm very pleased with the results.

I was also taking noise reduction down to -5 but I think -2 is also fine especially if you shoot around ISO 80 or 1600. Again a side effect of NR is that it smooths the skin.
 
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I've noticed this topic being highly subjective. The color science differs from camera to camera, and becomes personal preference once you get used to one and proclaim it "accurate".
 
I use natural for people and skin. Contrast -2 and if I want flatter image I use iDynamic and/or master ped.

For nature videos CINELIKE-D is best for me. Great greens, vivid colors and still good dyn range. CINELIKE-D creates too yellow and sometimes weird skintones.
 
puredrifting said:
Has anyone coming from the C100/300 and the 5D MKIII noticed this?
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I recently did a shoot with the C100. The owner was the operator. And due to time pressure, I didn't have enough time to use my GH-1 to take some comparison shots...

But... for me, Canons (the C100 owner also has a 5DMKIII...) have a yellow cast that I don't care for... I've also seen some Canon examples that have 'white people' tending to 'violet/scarlet' edging...

To me the GH-1 has a more 'neutral'... at least neither yellow cast nor the strange edging... of 'white' people.

And the Canon owner did white balance to a 'neutral' target.

What I have never gotten into is the color adjustments that one can perhaps dial out/in colors in the camera. I usually just set a K value for my own work, rather than taking a target or using a preset.
 
Jim Simon said:
That's why I use this.

http://filmconvert.com/

Despite the camera used, the colors come out as if it was actually shot on film. And to my eye, they look a whole lot better than the native colors of the camera.
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Interesting suggestion- I'm under the impression all filmconvert does is adjust colors based on some camera-specific profiles to match their reference colors. In other words, if they have your specific camera on file, they know that it would render X color in a specific yCbCr value, whereas exposed film would be scanned and rendered in another. Technically, the same thing could be achieved at home if you shot color palettes with both your camera and film, and created a LUT to simulate the other.
The bottom line is, since we aren't recording RAW images, if the color being recorded by one camera is closer to what you want in the end, you won't have to push it as far in post and your image will hold up better. Filmconvert is a neat tool, but unless I am mistaken, I'm not sure it performs any kind of magic beyond normal color correction tools.

I've never used it personally, so I'm speculating here. But it would be interesting if someone shot the same thing with multiple cameras using different color science (say, a 5D, GH4 and A7S) and apply filmconvert to each. I'll bet the color will come out slightly different on each one because you are starting with something different.
 
M. Gilden said:
But it would be interesting if someone shot the same thing with multiple cameras using different color science (say, a 5D, GH4 and A7S) and apply filmconvert to each. I'll bet the color will come out slightly different on each one because you are starting with something different.
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I can confirm your hunch. I've shot the same thing with a Gh2, Gh3 and Gh4 and applied the corresponding Filmconvert LUT on each. They are slightly different. Not only that, certain "film stock" presets do really unnatural things to skin tones. Human faces that have slight variation to their skin tone in untreated footage suddenly have rosacea or jaundice when filconvert is applied. And it tends to turn green foliage brown.

I'm not sure it does this with other camera models, but on the Panasonic line, I can't say it does good things.
 
M. Gilden said:
Interesting suggestion- I'm under the impression all filmconvert does is adjust colors based on some camera-specific profiles to match their reference colors.
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Close. It's an algorithm that adjusts the luminance and chrominance values to match the exposure and colors of real film scans. I've performed some tests using the different profiles on the GH2, and when using the same film stock, the exposure and colors turn out the same, despite being very different out of the camera. There's every reason to assume that would hold true for different cameras as well as different profiles.

I mean, the whole point of the software is to turn what comes out of the digital camera into what would have come out had you actually shot on that particular film stock.
 
certain "film stock" presets do really unnatural things to skin tones. And it tends to turn green foliage brown.
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So use a different stock. I'm partial to the Vision 3 myself. I find that colors, including skin tones, are more pleasing than what comes off the GH2 on its own.

One of the nice things about those stocks is that they automatically take out the greenish cast of the GH2's default colors. No need to correct that separately.
 
Jim Simon said:
So use a different stock. I'm partial to the Vision 3 myself. I find that colors, including skin tones, are more pleasing than what comes off the GH2 on its own.

One of the nice things about those stocks is that they automatically take out the greenish cast of the GH2's default colors. No need to correct that separately.
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Unfortunately, Vision 3 is one of the stocks that gives me problems. I agree that it can help the Gh2's greenish cast, but the GH3 and GH4 have a different sensor and different colorimetry than the Gh2, and they don't produce the same look when you apply the preset designed for them.

I read somewhere that the Filmconvert folks had difficulty creating the LUTs for the GH4. My guess is that creating their algorithms is complex business and not all camera sensors react the same. My problem with it is that it's unpredictable. Certain shots look fine but more often than not one color in the frame looks completely weird. Perhaps it works better with RAW workflows like RED, for which I think it was originally designed. But it does unpredictable things to 8-bit, 4:2:0 footage.
It's an emulation. It's not perfect and it's not magic.

I have had more consistent luck with the film stock presets that come with Adobe Speedgrade. They are actually quite good. So I have rendered out a Quicktime of Filmconvert's grain over 50% gray, and I lay that clip over my Speedgrade LUT footage with the Blending Mode set to Overlay. It's working rather well.
 
The GH4 has slightly tricky color characteristics, and Cine-D (and other settings EG specific WB) does exacerbate them.

Remember back in April when Matt Uhry, Macgregor and I posted those pics of fruit and DVXuser spent the rest of the month mocking us?

I remember just getting pages and pages of people who were so angry that we had filmed these fruit.

Of course the fruit showed the color problems back then - that's why we posted it.

But people were just so ANGRY... ANGRY!!!

Later, I did a bunch more tests with Stouffer wedges and colored etc that validated what I saw, plus helped me find a workflow I liked.

The reactions here on DVXuser were so damn nasty that I decided to just keep them private though.

No, FilmConvert can't fix all of them. Just as an Instagram filter can't bring back color info your cellphone didn't capture or captured wrong (eg color filters aren't perfect, color science isn't perfect, etc). It the information is there, but subtle... great. You can bring out the detail. But what if the information has already been lost or distorted? Not much you can do then as a blanket filter without secondary grading and masks. Eg you have to put the information back there yourself because the info has gotten lost.

I encourage folks to do their own tests and try settings for themselves, changing only one variable at a time. I certainly learned a thing or two about the GH4 that way, and discovered settings that I personally like and feel get better colors.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
 
I'm embarrassed to post this, but this is a video I shot with the GH4 on Cine-D. It needed a fast turnaround of roughly 12 hours, so I was under pressure to not worry about colors. It was my first time to go out and actually shoot something real with the GH4, and I think the colors look like s*%t. I mean AWFUL colors. I used FilmConvert Vision 3 to grade, which made the entire video look like it had an awful vintage style filter slapped on it. I tried tweaking settings to bring back color, contrast, etc., but every time I made an adjustment it just looked worse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqq_T15JK54

I'm going out this afternoon to see if I can get colors that match closely to this which was shot on a C100. Maybe Erik Naso can give some input since he has been in pursuit of matching the GH4 to the C100 for a while now.
 
I feel that placing a film emulation LUT onto footage is a trend. It is useful and looks good when applied wisely, but just about every single GH4 video online has a disclaimer that it was graded using Filmconvert or the OSIRIS Luts or some Impulz Lut. Gee, before these products existed we just made sure our exposure, white balance and lighting were correct and then did necessary basic color correction.

It's kind of funny that we're trying to make a profile that's already called Cinelike look more like film. The fact is, I have gotten really good results with the GH4 using Cinelike-D by just adding a contrast curve and desaturating the highlights a bit. None of the GH4's profiles are heinous out of the box. Especially if you take care of controlling highlights when you shoot.

There's a "support the home team" mentality I see online where it's Canon vs. Sony vs. Panasonic vs. Blackmagic. Fans of one camera feel the need to trash fans of other cameras. There are rational civil folks for sure, but the nasty ones tend to vocalize their opinions on forums.

If you Google "GH4 skin tones", you will find posts that say they are "great and much better than Canon" and "shitty, much worse than Canon" in equal number.
 

Out of the camera they are close but a simple grade makes the images match good enough that the viewer wont be distracted. No such thing as perfect but just as long it's not distracting it works.
 
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