getting colors to 'pop'

P

Paunch

Well-known member
I have some surf footage that looks just bland. i've adjusted the whites, blacks, luma etc. color graded and then added a little saturation....but it still looks really plain. I bumped the saturation in the proc amp effect up about to 110 from 100 (default) and it still looks kinda flat. A lot of this footage was shot from the beach quite a distance away from the surfer, so the bg occupies most of the fram with the surfer sometimes being a small figure in the frame. Also these particular days were pretty overcast creating a grey sky and a dull
looking sea. With that said, is there anything else that I can do to improve the color without ruining the image?
 
A lot of this may depend on what time of the day you shot. Was it nasty high noon ?

Also, try adjusting the contrast

Give us a grab ?
 
Yeah I agree with Mr. Hudson. Try increasing the contrast. That typically makes the colors pop a bit and gets rid of that washed over look. A grab would definitely help!
 
k, will post a grab shortly. the problem with increasing the contrast is that the surfers are very dark skinned, and it is a battle between having black levels that are too dark vs too washed out. i'll play with it a bit and see what i can come up with.
 
here's another thing, the levels have been tweaked to fall within the ntsc limits. 0-100, increasing contrast pushes the blacks and pulls the whites above there respective limits...no?
 
Paunch said:
here's another thing, the levels have been tweaked to fall within the ntsc limits. 0-100, increasing contrast pushes the blacks and pulls the whites above there respective limits...no?
Click to expand...

Are you reviewing your footage on the Computer... or a 'real live NTSC Monitor'... if the former, then the footage may, most likely will look 'flat', and 'soft' if not outright blurry... on a 'real live NTSC Monitor', many of the complaints about what the footage looks like, are cleared up... because 1) a computer has a different color space/gamma etc. than a computer monitor... 2) the NTSC has non-square pixels, which leads to 'soft' interpolations on 'square' pixel devices like computers.

In HD land, there may be square pixels... but then for some codecs, in order to be compatible with oldre compression/storage formats, these square pixels are converted to rectangular, then back again... unless you have a direct video out on the camera to bypass the 'tape/disk' and have a card on you computer that accepts the camera output, and encodes directly...

But if you are dealing with Standard Def NTSC/PAL DV... then the issues are different color space, different pixel aspect ratio.
 
yes of course i'm using an ntsc monitor. a little increase to the saturation & contrast and the colors are 10 fold better. there's nothing worse than a bland looking surf video. if only i'd shot on hd and the color issue wouldn't be much of a worry. I now understand the limits of the dvx100's, like many others in it's price range, and it will never look as good as hd or 16mm no matter what.
 
yes, i did that too, but it washed it out a bit and ended up killing the color and contrast. So i countered with a contrast filter and saturation which did wonders. its fun but tedious. I think I'm on the right path, if I (the #1 critic) am satisfied with it then i know it will be good....i've learnt that color grading is really about getting the most out of your image, no matter how good or poorly it was shot in the first place. now if i could only figure out that buzz in the audio which i hear when the video is paused...
 
You could try powermasking in After Effects if you have it. Also, if you apply the Broadcast Colors filter, you blacks and whites will clip at legal levels but not exceed them. So increasing contrast will be ok.
 
it's basically drawing a shape around a certain part of the image that you want to color correction and making an adjustment to it. An example would be that if after color correction, you're subject's face is too dark, you can draw a shape around the actor's face, feather the edges of the shape, and bring the exposure up INSIDE that area only. This will brighten up the actor's face and leave the rest of the image the way it was.

You can do it in After Effects through Adjustment Layers and masks.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top