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Shooting non-repeatable events: weddings, recitals, plays, performances...

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Old May 19th, 2003, 02:38 AM   #1
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Captures from my first wedding (60i mode)

Here are some captures made from footage I shot saturday at a wedding:

http://www.mazdamp3.com/members/LazerBlueP5/church.jpg

http://www.mazdamp3.com/members/LazerBlueP5/groom.jpg

http://www.mazdamp3.com/members/Laze...omadjusted.jpg

http://www.mazdamp3.com/members/Laze...ueadjusted.jpg

The file names with "ADJUSTED" after them have been adjusted in photoshop- all images were restored to normal ratio via the 720x"535" resize

Notice the black vertical bar at the far right of the pics....granted, it's overscan area but they should recalulate the total effective pixels minus that black row on the right. lol

Lastly regarding the "Groom.jpg", it was an unedited capture. The colors seem very weak- however it was shot on a cloudy day outside. Maybe that is the reason it looks so undersaturated. The footage from inside the church seemed pretty accurate. Guess I'll have to up the chroma level and drop the master ped. to get some better looking shots with less post.
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Old May 19th, 2003, 03:39 AM   #2
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Glad everything worked out!
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Old May 19th, 2003, 09:45 AM   #3
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Yeah, Glenn, you have a serious problem with black levels in all these pictures. Are you raising the pedastal for some reason?

Open the picture of the groom in Photoshop, then open the "levels" adjustment. Look at the histogram and you will see your black levels are way up. Grab the little diamond below the histogram for blacks. Now drag the diamond toward the histogram and watch the image improve.

You adjusted overall exposure in your groom fix, and introduced artifacts into the highlight areas of the face. Look at the bridge of the nose, the top of the forehead. See all these places where there is no color, where the skin suffers from "white-out?" That's loss of detail. No need for that.

Most photographers pray for the overcast day you had, because everything looks great. I think this is a case of too much fooling around with the camera settings. The good news is everything can be fixed with color correction tools.
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Old May 19th, 2003, 10:31 AM   #4
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Wayne, the pic of the groom your talking about (I think) WAS the one I tweak in photoshop it wasn't the original untouched capture. I duplicated the layer, ran two different interlace filters (one odd and one even), then lowered the opacity of the top layer 50%....which fixed interlace from the 60i source. I then ran levels and uped the contrast.
As far as having a "black level" problem- I think you might be referring to the pics I tweaked in post. The one you referred to having "white-outs" is "groomADJUSTED.jpg" right? The regular "groom.jpg" is the original....the one I felt needed a little life. The natural colors/contrast looked a bit flat.
I agree somewhat with you regarding the pics I tweaked in photoshop- though for all intensive purposes IE doesn't display them right oddly enough. Every time I upload a pic and view it in a browser the colors look darker. In Photoshop 7...they look how I wanted them too. Does that make any sense? Why do internet browsers display colors different than in Photoshop?
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Old May 19th, 2003, 11:14 AM   #5
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I don't understand all this interlace dance you are doing, Glenn. You should be able to take a frame grab, open it in Photoshop, open "deinterlace" filter, select odd or even, and apply duplicate or interpolation, and have good results. Where did you get this duplicate layers, 50% opacity thing? Oh, I know, that's one of the recipes for creating film look, right? Don't do it in Photoshop.

When you look at your uncorrected photo of the groom, there is plenty of exposure, as evidenced by the whites in the groom's collar peaking at 255. The problem, is the shadow areas. There are no good blacks. Your shadow areas are running around 35 as I recall. That's what you see in the histogram. Do not adjust Brigthness/Contrast. In levels, go to each individual color (rgb) and adjust the blacks by moving the slider to the histogram. See if this doesn't give you a much more appealing picture.

In regards to the camera, you said you fiddled with master ped. I am wondering what you did and why?
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Old May 19th, 2003, 04:31 PM   #6
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Hmm I think we are having mis-communication here...lol.

- The reason why you have to run two interlace filters is because 1 usually isn't enough...you still have areas that exibit interlace artifacts. If you duplicate the layer and run one even deinterlace filter on one and odd on the other you can blend them perfectly by lowering the top level's opacity to 50%.

- I agree about the black point not being as dark as it should be in the unedited footage. I "should have" tweaked the master pedistal...which I did not. All the adjustments were done in post to the grabs only. However using the levels command in Photoshop to determine the exact darkness of shadow areas is very inaccurate. The difference between RGB color space and YUV of NTSC monitors make it difficult. The problem being our computer monitors can display way more colors. The darkest dark on YUV NTSC is 16, and the lightest light is 235. So when it's brought into photoshop it's not totaly accurate.....THOUGH...like I said I agree about the black point being dark grey and not black....and that I "should have" adjusted the master ped. Which I didn't...I shot without any tweaks in the f1 mode.

- I believe photoshop is great for making enhancements on still captures. Especially bringing back some of the color and tonality lost in the conversion from YUV. Also it's important to retrieve the original 4:3 aspect ratio which is lost capturing .9 ratio (rectangular pixel) footage into a 1.0 (square pixel) monitor. 720x480 must be resized to 720x535 to retrieve it's original ratio....otherwise your still captures will look squashed.
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Old May 19th, 2003, 04:40 PM   #7
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Thanks for posting the pics, but not to be offensive or anything, but why do resolution from those caps look soo bad? It's reminisce of footage shot with the XL1 or GL1. Totally oposite from other screen caps I've seen from the DVX100.

These caps were from the DVX100 and even in extremely low light, it looks better than those exterior shots.

50i
http://www.informotion.co.uk/graphics/Still030.jpg

25p
http://www.informotion.co.uk/graphics/Still025.jpg

Any ideas why?
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Old May 19th, 2003, 05:30 PM   #8
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Many reasons:

(1) First, Glenn is shooting NTSC, the other is PAL.
(2) Second, Glenns files were deinterlaced in Photoshop which cuts resolution 25%-50% depending on motion artifacts.
(3) Glenn compressed his images heavily for web-posting to 72dpi, the others is 96dpi
(4) Finally, Glenn is shooting full frame (more pixels, more compression loss) and the others are letterbox (all black pixels compress well, leaving less compression loss for image area).

That's why I was warning you not to make judgements on the ACS article on DV100 vs. 16mm film. Screen grabs posted on the web are an extremely limited way to judge quality, not to mention the vastly differing monitor and viewing setups each of us is using.

This pics show more variation than the film/video pics on ASC, yet it's the same cam. That should tell you about the hazards of drawing conclusions off web jpg screen grabs.

What you need is uncompressed PSD files created directly from timeline at full resolution with embedded ICC or ICM profiles and view them on a quality, calibrated monitor. Then you begin to make some basic judgements about quality.

But I don't anyone who has posted such files.
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Old May 19th, 2003, 05:32 PM   #9
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<<<-- Originally posted by Yang Wen :

These caps were from the DVX100 and even in extremely low light, it looks better than those exterior shots.



Any ideas why? -->>>

Yes, as you should have read in the above posts...I shot in 60i (f1) mode with NO adjustments I kept all the chroma level, master ped., etc etc...bone stock. Hence the reason the pics came out a bit flat. The ones that look softer were because of deinterlacing. The more movement in the footage at the point of still capture the more interlacing you get.
I didn't want to tweak the visual settings too much because I was shooting along side of my friend with his XL-1S and we wanted the footage to match. Next time I might try 30p and have him do Canons Frame-mode.
Also in those shots, though low light.....it's decieving. It looks like carefull steps were taken into the lighting and adjustment of image settings (in camera). The wedding I shot was the first with the camera and I had no major amount of footage to benchmark against. Next time I'll be sure to work the master ped to get more richness in my shadows and bump up the chroma level.

Here are some more captures (all UNedited...this time):

http://www.mazdamp3.com/members/Laze...ing_couple.jpg

http://www.mazdamp3.com/members/Laze...esusstatue.jpg

http://www.mazdamp3.com/members/Laze...ng_speaker.jpg
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Old May 19th, 2003, 08:13 PM   #10
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Great discussion

Hey Glenn, good discussion. Color correction and Photoshop is a very very deep subject, and certainly there is room for disagreement.

In regards to your sheme for de-interlacing, I am just going to skip over that because I am still flumoxed by what you are doing, but that's not unusual for me. I am more interested in the color correction techniques.

Here are a couple of your pictures that I took the liberty to fool with:
http://www.digitalprods.com/2speakers.jpg
http://www.digitalprods.com/2 grooms.jpg

You can easily work in either YUV or RGB with your stills, but eventually to save your settings to use in After Effects (or, maybe FCP) you will have to get to RGB. Additionally, there are schemes for setting up your computer monitor to get closer to what your NTSC monitor sees. Not exactly, but close. Certainly, any correction that is going to be applied to video should be checked on an NTSC professional monitor. I use Echo Fire to output my Photoshop images to my professional video monitor.

You can set your default whites, or, highlights to 236, and your blacks or shadow areas to 16 if you desire. This makes it easy to apply the correct correction to those areas of the image. Locating those areas is another matter. Using the "thresehold" you can locate the areas of "whitest white" and "blackest black." For instance, on the speaker photo, I determinded that the brightest area of the image is one of the white pattern speckles on the camera left side of her dress. Then I determinded, using "thresehold" that the darkest area is the shadow on the camera right side, behind the mic stand, on her dress, just below her hair. This is where most of the correction was needed in the picture to get this to a good black.

By selecting each channel individually in Levels, I chose the "black eyedropper" and clicked it on that area of the dress. The results are rather dramatic, I think you will agree. There really is no need to increase chroma, or make any other adjustments to the picture. You nailed the exposure spot on. But for some reason, your ped levels seem out there.

The picture of the groom is more problematic. You got the exposure right again, but the pedestal is too high. When we even out the blacks, the picture could still use a bit more punch, and you could add "saturation" or, better still, do the corrections using curves for more control.

Forgive me if you know all this, but hopefully there is someone out there who does not, and to whom this will be of some value. And again, I hope you don't mind me messing with your pictures. The great thing is you have plenty of information in your video of the wedding, and it looks like nothing overexposed or buried in black, so you can do some real serious color correction on these images to make them look great. If you don't mind spending the time. This makes a great tutorial, and I hope it has peaked some peoples' interest in the art of color correction.
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Old May 19th, 2003, 08:47 PM   #11
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Wayne, no offense, but in the groom examples, the "after" doesn't look very good at all. The shadows are green and the front of his face is wayy to dark...

Let me do some of my magic to it. :D
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Old May 19th, 2003, 09:03 PM   #12
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Here's my shot, I think it looks good. Not to toot my own horn, but I am "1337" at this.... :D

NOTE: This was done JUST in Vegas 4.0 alone, I put the images side by side in photoshop, but nothing else was done in photoshop.

http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-5/169091/groom.jpg
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Old May 19th, 2003, 09:09 PM   #13
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Nice job. :)
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Old May 19th, 2003, 09:35 PM   #14
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Very nice, Alex. But if you read my post, I said it was only a beginning, to show what was wrong with the shot, which is that the blacks were too high. Your corrections are very nice, but you have gone beyond correcting the image to interpreting the image in a fashion that you would like to see, which is fine, but may not be where Glenn wants to go. He may wish to retain the softer look of the overcast day. Then again, he may come up with something entirely different. But why don't you tell us what corrections you applied, in case someone wants to follow your lead?
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Old May 20th, 2003, 12:12 AM   #15
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Alex,

I'd like to see your version...but looks like you've passed your bandwidth limits. Got another place you can post it to?
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