Wildlifeless - Color Correction

[Joshua Provost]

Hey, these shots are from a short film I DP'd and edited, called Wildlifeless. It was shot on the DVX in 4:3 mode. Overall, I am very pleased, but there are a couple shots that were terribly underexposed. I think I accidentally engaged the ND, thus underexposing them by 3 full stops. Yikes! I wanted to post some stills and see if anyone had any better ideas for grading these shots to match. I have included two shots that cut with each other, one exposed properly, one underexposed, along with my cracks at color correction. There are links to the PSD's below, so you don't have to work with JPEG's.

My basic process for these shots is:

1. Rebel Deartifacting (Median Radius = 3, Color Blending)
2. Levels to set Black Level, if necessary
3. Curves to adjust gray, using the hunters shirt as a reference (the shirt is gray, but slightly blue-gray, so using that as a gray reference I end up with a slightly warm image, and I go further to take all the blue out of the shadows, which is important because of the next step...)
4. Hue/Saturation - Blue/Cyan -50 Saturation and +100 Lightness, to create oppressive skies. Also, a +10 Sat bump for Yellow and +20 Sat bumb for Green
5. MB Look Suite to mess with Gamma/Contrast, add a touch of Black Diffusion, add a little warmth, and a little saturation

Of course, my corrections had to be very extreme on the underexposed shots.

Anyone have any suggestions on the underexposed shots, they just look terrible to me.

Before

After

Before

After

http://www.727records.com/blog/wildlifeless01-before.psd
http://www.727records.com/blog/wildlifeless01-after.psd
http://www.727records.com/blog/wildlifeless02-before.psd
http://www.727records.com/blog/wildlifeless02-after.psd

 

[dory_breaux]

Nice!

 

[shaun1970]

I was enjoying the blue sky until,,,,,

 

[Amr Rahmy]

you didn't see the gray sky, you should let someone sit with you while you work, some people focus on one thing too much that they miss bigger things in the process.

when you mess up a shot, if your not going to redo it, you will have to compromise, change that clip to uncompressed or 16 bit tiffs, then try to reach a good spot between what you have and what you were going for.

try to balance what you want on one side, noise or pixel-ation on the other.

and you don't have to make the same changes to all the image you can apply different levels of a specific change to a specific part of the image.

 

[Joshua Provost]

I was enjoying the blue sky until,,,,,

Haha, the blue sky was pretty remarkable. We shot with a polarizer. It was actually so beautiful, it distracted attention from the characters in many of the shots. We wanted to convey unsettling danger, so we went with the gray skies. Immediately, the characters started to pop.

 

[Joshua Provost]

when you mess up a shot, if your not going to redo it, you will have to compromise, change that clip to uncompressed or 16 bit tiffs, then try to reach a good spot between what you have and what you were going for.

My post workflow is all uncompressed and processed at 16-bit in AE.

What do you think overall of the after results, are they are close enough match?

 

[Amr Rahmy]

let's see,
first thing even if you made the sky gray which is weird(next time change the sky instead, put in a sky with clouds from a real picture that looks normal), you didn't gray the sky in the second shot, even if you want to do something crazy, see it through the entire thing, that gray is weird dont do that.

the second scene already has noise, so we can leave it at that and not show pixel-ation, leave it at some noise, adjust the levels till you hit the guy and the boy, see what got clipped, and mask a percentage of the sky that got clipped, make a subtle feather, leave part of the leafs clipped, change the gray point to darker or closer to the white point, and you get close to no noise, very nice contrast that shows light going through an open area between the trees in the background to establish that the characters are in a shaded area compared to the less contrasted more doll scene, now depending on the scene and how long it is, you might think that you want to show the faces of the characters, you can at this point try to brighten the faces of the characters to a point that you see fit, but dont get carried away, a small improvement, is better than something filled with noise and pixel-ation, depending on the pace and the scene, the scene might get some mystic from not showing the faces too much, and the shaded part of the forest or whatever in the middle of the day. hope it helps, next time plan before you shoot.