Wedding...Low Light Scene Files?

R

ravencr

Well-known member
Hey guys,

I'm headed up to Delaware for a buddy's wedding, and I was just curious if anyone has found a good low light wedding style scene setup that works well for you with the HMC40? If so, if you wouldn't mind sharing the settings, that would be great. Thanks,

Chris
 
You can't work magic here, because if the light gets too low, the camera will have problems. IF you can use a video light, that will help.

Assuming you have to push the gain past +12dB (some settings are personal taste):

Detail Level: -1 --> -4 (Use care with this one, you can lower the noise some, but the image becomes soft.)

Detail Coring: 7 (Helps keep the noise down, but can make the image soft)

Chroma Level: -1 --> -5 (By reducing the chroma level, the color noise is reduced, BUT the colors go flat.)

You can select Black Press for Gamma, this crushes the blacks where a lot of noise can occur, but it also appears to lower the sensitivity of the camera.

As for the other adjustments, just leave them at default.


Bob Diaz
 
Thanks for the quick response Bob. Can you explain what each one is doing, so I can understand what I'm adjusting exactly? I try not to push the gain above 12db of gain usually, though. I have a light, but it's way too intrusive. If lighting is okay, does this change any of the settings you mentioned above?

Chris
 
The problem with low light is that we must increase the gain to get an image, BUT increased gain results in increased noise in the image.

Detail Level: By lowering the detail we soften the image and reduce the high frequency noise. This also makes the image appear soft and loses the sharpness to the image.

Detail Coring: This is a special function in the camera designed to help reduce the high frequency noise. It's not perfect, but does help to reduce the general noise level. Like detail level, it can reduce the sharpness some.

Chroma Level: There is an overall color noise level in the image noise. This lowers the gain for the color level, which reduces the color noise, but also reduces the color saturation level for all the colors.

Black Press for Gamma: Much of the noise comes in the darker areas of the image. By setting the gamma to force the darker areas of the image to black, we avoid this problem, BUT we loose detail in the darker areas.


There's no magic setting here, every thing you try will degrade the image in some way, so once you reach 18dB+ of gain, there's little you can do to fix it in the settings. A slight improvement may be possible, but you won't get something for nothing here.



Bob Diaz
 
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