Can this shadow/light prob be fixed in FCP?

M

mrWr0ng

Well-known member
I did a shoot yesterday, my first commercial to DP, but I ran into a big problem:

They wanted us outside filming at noon (and this place gets BRIGHT), with a lead actress who can't go in the sun because of a recent operation.

Well, I did what I could... we stuck the kids in the background, put her in a shadow and ran a few hundred feet of extension cord to throw as much light on her as we could.

Here is one of my stills:
fuelers_01a.jpg


Is it possible to even her out w/ the background so it doesn't look so bad? She'll be on screen for maybe 3 - 5 seconds and the client is very happy w/ everything overall but I'm still not happy w/ the contrast. I did tell the editor I'd be willing to pull each frame into photoshop and adjust them individually, but it would be nice if this could be fixed in FCP.

Thanks you guys, for any help
 
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I can't see the image either but if it's blown out white- not much you can do. If it's overall contrast within the shot, Color can do wonders.

Noah
 
oh, crap. i changed over the nameservers this morning so it's not connecting.

i changed it to photobucket, let me know if that one works
 
This looks weird almost like you blue screened it. If that were my shot I would try bringing down the highlights (in FCP>3 way color correct), and try to de-saturate the background maybe?
 
Yeah, even the product shots at the end looked weird because of the sun and the shadow. The sun was just overpowering (both ND filters on and the lens still stopped down to stop the bg from blowing out, kept it under 100%)

I will give the colour correction a shot. i don't know anything about it myself, but the editor's done a fair amount of colour correction
 
Personally I think it looks ok- you see shots like that all the time on TV. But it is totally fixable with color correction. Ideally if you have Color in FCS 2 you would do a User
Shape around the girl and then correct the BG separately.

-Noah
 
It definitely looks a lot better in motion, I'd just hate to upset the client on our first project - they were overall very happy and it looks like they're gonna want to call on us again, it would just suck to have the one shot I made a bad call on to ruin it.

hopefully i'll get some input next time, though... like not shooting at noon in the middle of summer

we'll see how it turns out! thanks for the responses
 
Looks like a green (or blue because of the blonde hair) screen job...but a GREAT one because of the hair detail. But poor because of the difference in lighting.

Well, Colorista allows you to target certain areas and lighten only those, I'd look at that. And COLOR has a lot of secondaries that you can use to again, target only the lady and brighten her. OR...target the background nd lower it...or both for a happy medium.

But this will take patience and time.
 
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