Way To Increase DR in Post?

H

Homunculus

Carbonite Member
Hi everyone. I have a question, is there any way to increase dynamic range slightly in post production with an editing program? And if so, can someone give me tips on how to maximize this process?
I ask because I shot some footage outdoors today under an overhead super bright afternoon sun. The person I was shooting was naturally blown out/overexposed. However when I went into Adobe Premiere to color correct the footage, after playing around with it I noticed that messing around with the settings and colors seemed to at times 1. give a higher dynamic range (not dramatically but a little bit, noticeable at least) and 2. lessened the clipping/blow out area to look a little more natural and filmic.

Now my question is, was this just an apparent increase in DR and not a real one, i.e. a trick of the eye due to brighting or highlighting certain colors? Or is it really possible by playing with luminosity, gamma, brightness, contrast, 3 point colors, etc to actually increase the dynamic range and make shadows have a little more evident detail and blown out highlights have a little more detail rather than being 100% clipped.

What's the word on this?
 
It's possible because the highlight you referred to weren't blown out. 100 IRE is complete wasteland, zero information present. However 95 IRE or 90 IRE will "look" blown out but there's just a bit of information there that can be recovered in post by bringing down the highlight value. Try setting zebra to detect 100 IRE and expose there, there will be no information to recover in post.
 
Homunculus said:
Hi everyone. I have a question, is there any way to increase dynamic range slightly in post production with an editing program? And if so, can someone give me tips on how to maximize this process?
Click to expand...

What ever the digitization and compression parameters are, that fixes the 'dynamic' range of the resulting captured data.

What you can do in post is 'spread', via math operations, values that are 'close', and for a given output device, or human eye, may 'look' identical values.

If you think about the 'curves' of the RGB data, and change them so that high values are more 'separated', (or low values...).

This does not 'expand' the dynamic range, just gives more separation in selected regions of the data. However, too much expansion will result in 'banding', because
the intermediate values are 'missing'...

If the capture 'clips' the visual information, in the case of high values, or does not register a value above 0 in the low values, there is 'no recovery'...
 
Huy Vu and J1Clark are right. However, I have found that many cameras can record upto 109% IRE. Bringing down the highlight value sometimes adds detail back into the whites and increases the dynamic image of the scene. As J1 states, you will need to bring up the mid point to adjust for the white point changes.


Jason
 
thanks alot. excellent explanations and advice from all of you. but the next question now is, so what is the best way to bring down this highlight information as awakenedfilms said? if I have something that looks blown out but technically is not 100% clipped, what is the best most efficient way to bring that down (especially in adobe premiere)?
 
Homunculus said:
thanks alot. excellent explanations and advice from all of you. but the next question now is, so what is the best way to bring down this highlight information as awakenedfilms said? if I have something that looks blown out but technically is not 100% clipped, what is the best most efficient way to bring that down (especially in adobe premiere)?
Click to expand...

In Premiere the adjustments would be under "Video Effects->Color Correction" or "Video Effects->Adjust". I'd suggest looking at those, and using such filters as the RGB or Luma would be the corrections you want to 'play' with.

These things take time to figure how, if at all, they are useful...
 
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