Another preset question
 

Now that I have my first real wedding out of the way with 2 A1s and an HV20 I have a question about some of the details of the preset parameters.

I had created a custom preset for low light. I had tried many of the saturated preset for good light posted here and then tweaked them based on what I learned about low light settings in the parameters. I am by no means an expert. I played around here at home with some of these presets I had tweaked and when the light was marginal many of the images seemed "flat" and not very natural....and the colors were too saturated and didn't look normal.

I went back to the factory preset and made a small tweak to the reds to get the magenta bias out of the image and the colors looked like what my eyes were seeing which is what I wanted (granted my 45 year old eyes may not be the best but it was what I was seeing). I took this preset and did a few tweaks to enhance it in low light a little.

For the most part it worked pretty well. At 12db gain there was some grain but it wasn't terribly bad. Very usable so in that respect I have very happy with the results. The question I have is that some of the skin tones in shots with low light where the lighting was more marginal than sufficient some of the skin tones seemed to get muddy. My skin detail setting is turned off so it is not that. Which of the many parameters in the presets may or may not affect the "muddy" look of some skin details.

Just wondering if this is a hazard of HD in low light of if I tried to possibly soften the grain too much and created the problem.

I kinda know what some settings do but really don't know the details of many of them so help is appreciated.

Thanks,

I reduce the saturation from vivid presets in low light. 12 db gain kind of ruins it for me. I prefer 6db max, and I just take what I get with it for better or worse. You just have to experiment to find what works for you. I think the default setting (no preset) works pretty well indoors. Just my $0.02

+coring values can have the same effect as skin detail being on, but applies it to the whole image, but I've noticed on occasion that it's just more noticeable with skin. I either leave it at 0, or a slight - value, depending on the preset.

Bill