GH2 How do I get that "Canon" look?

M

mustangranch99

Active member
I want my colors (JUST COLORS) to be more like a Canon's using my GH2 and Adobe Premeire.

How do I do that?

Some examples of what I want to recreate.

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MnGBVCs.jpg
 
The GH2 has the ability to produce a beautiful film like look, but if the op was talking about stills, my 7D is better than my gh1 and 3.
 
I think he's looking for a warm saturated look, the canon is much softer than the gh2, and that alone is a look that some folks like. I would say do a side by side and tweak till you get close to what it is your looking for.
 
We can all sit here and bash the Canon image. It isn't as pristine as the images out of our GH1, 2, and 3s, for sure. But the fact is that Apple doesn't make the best most useful phone, and yet they are the most popular for a reason. People like them. Same goes for image. A customer came to me with a local commercial that had hideously shallow DOF, was very soft, and very warm and saturated. It almost sort of fit the piece as it was an arts and crafts store, but the fact is that he saw that and liked the look. To me it doesn't look good at all, but when they're paying the bills, you do what they want. I shot with my Nikon 50mm wide open at F1.8. It wasn't as shallow as the canon, and still was a little soft fr my taste, but the client was very pleased.

Moral of the story, everybody has different tastes and some people like that Canon look.
 
adjust your wb to be warmer in camera and jack up saturation in post. i find it harder to match in post rather than getting it looking similar in cam
 
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It's mostly about greater DR and colors. One way to do it is playing around with RGB curves. Also it's about getting rid of the "baked-in" look, that has a lot to do with color. High bitrate footage = more room for making magic happen in post.

I've mixed GH1 footage with 5dm2 and that camera has even more of a baked-in look than GH2. Calibrate your monitor and learn some color correction basics. Or buy a Canon.
 
"Panasonic’s colour science is very technically correct but not as emotionally satisfying as Canon’s, here’s how to change that. I’ve always preferred the more cinematic colour on Canon DSLRs. The 5D Mark II pleased me with it’s vivid rich tones, the 7D gives a beautifully warm image, very cinematic and the 600D also does a better job with colour overall than the GH2."



Part 1: Choose the right film mode I have chosen Nostalgic because it lifts the characteristic gloom of Panasonic’s colour profiles, lifts shadow detail and gives you a much brighter exposure. It doesn’t help highlights but the GH2 is never going to have as much latitude as the 5D Mark II and you won’t notice the difference to usual. The other picture profiles protect the highlights too much at the expense of the overall image.

Part 2: Compensate for Nostalgic’s weirdness Nostalgic is a weird picture profile, it’s low contrast and colour is a bit bleached out. So to compensate for this customise it with +2 contrast and +2 colour to get a punchier image and maximise saturation. It’s much easier to de-saturate in post if desired rather than to compromise on colour data in an already highly compressed codec which lacks colour data. Don’t turn saturation down in-camera!

Part 3: Tweak the GH2′s white balance The Lumix sensors are also all a bit predisposed to green at the expense of warm reds, yellows and oranges. Energy saving lightbulbs especially don’t help, since these have a green cast and the GH2 exaggerates it.
On any white balance preset (even auto) that you intend to use, customise them so that the notch in the colour chart is two steps toward yellow (on the left) and 1 step down toward Magenta. Don’t go any further than this because it will give whites a pink cast. This compensates for the green cast, and warms the auto white balance preset slightly to remove the grey and neutral colour tones. This will give you much stronger results indoors, in studios and render sunsets and evening skies in a much more lifelike way with deep scarlets and oranges rather than pathetic yellowy greens!

Part 4: Save it You can now select the ‘memory’ option in the Nostalgic picture profile to save it to a My Film mode – you can have two of these. I have this profile as My Film 1 and a softer less contrasty version in My Film 2 based on Cinema Gamma when I desperately need to protect highlights or get a murkier looking low-fi image.

Summary Film mode: Nostalgic
Contrast: +2
Sharpness: User preference
Colour: +2
Noise reduction: User preference
White balance: User preference of preset, 2 notches toward Yellow and 1 notch toward Magenta
 
I filmed this Blog update for a company mixing my GH2 and my 7D, i dont think they are too different. And I have no idea about color correction and such:
 
Tolin said:
Add some gaussian blur and shift the hue to anything but correct values.
Click to expand...

:2vrolijk_08:Made me LOL!

But really Stewart hit the nail on the head. Canon seems to have a bit more saturation, and a slight magenta hue, shifting the white balance helped me out tremendously.
 
The downside of EOSHD's "Canon Look" recipe DPStewart recommends is having to shoot in Nostalgic, which is the godawful noisiest of all available scene settings... works great if you don't have to hike the ISO, though.
 
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