Shadows & Highlights alternative?

rawfa

rawfa

Veteran
I´ve tried a bunch of different alternatives and so far I´m yet to discover an effect that allows me to achieve a better latitude balance than Shadows & Highlights. I do stills 99,9% of the time but I´ve been shooting more video lately and I´d like to be able to use this effect on video, but when I boost the shadows and clip the highlights with it I get horrible horrible grain. Is there any other effect that will allow me the same flexibility? I´ve tried curves, gamma, layers, balance, etc and no luck.

P.S - I´ve tested footage from the hacked GH1 and the NEX-5N.
 
rafael,

If you are seeing grain, it probably means that you are boosting the shadows way too much. There is a shadow-highlights filter in Premiere, but it defaults to automatic, with shadows at 50%. I find that turning off auto and setting something more like 10-15% is much better for both shadows and for highlights. If that is not enough, then use two instances of the filter.

As an alternative, you may want to try a 'reverse s-curve' with the curves adjustment filter. There are also some third-party shadow-highlight filters available for after-effects, not sure if they will work for PPro.

Jim
 
Using the curve tools seems to net the best results for me, as you set the knee and get a much smoother, more natural looking roll off from shadows into mid tones and mid tones into highlights. for a quicker solution, use the 3 way color correcter and use the 'define tonal range' setting to precisely set what you want to be defined as a shadow, highlight and midtone, then simply adjust the input and output levels for each category until you get the look you want. also remember video isn't photography, video codecs don't allow for as much room for image manipulation as a high quality photo formats, so you will always get noise / artifacts if you push things to far.
 
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