Fixing lighting in background
 

Here's what happened:

I got permission to film in an actual diner. We started in the afternoon, and did our last scene just as the sun was setting.

The action takes place in a booth right up against the windows. We had the curtains drawn, but obviously there's light from outside.

Except for the last scene we shot, were it is noticeably darker outside. This can't be explained in the story, it's an obvious continuity problem. I was thinking there might be a way in compositing to help this?

Hi Dennis,

Any chance you can post a couple of frame grabs to show what the two different lighting states are like? And, what compositing software do you have access to?

Cheers
Pat

I tried doing that, I keep getting 'Request Entity Too Large'. The files are .bmp, and 2.63 MB which seems under the legal limit.

Any ideas?

You can email them to me if you like. Although please note that I may be of absolutely no use to you whatsoever ;-)

pat(at)caliburnproductions.com

See if you can save the frame grabs as JPG or PNG, as BMP will alwyas be too large, but jpg or PNG are compressed and will be a lot smaller.

That seems to have worked!

Maybe those grabs aren't representative, but it doesn't look that off. What software are you using. Have you thought of selecting out the curtain area, and just adjusting levels so they will be closer ? In her shot, I notice it is a bit translucent, and I assume that is more what issue is ? Are the shots lock down or is there camera movement during shots. Is it possible to reshoot current and do background replacement.

Yeah, that's pretty representative. Basically it's only the 'darkerscene.jpg.' bit, which isn't very long, that's the problem.

Maybe I could even leave it as is, and suffer the slings and arrows of people who dig into stuff like that. But it would be nice to fix it, or make it less noticeable.

You are correct, it is the translucent light coming through the curtains.

I have Adobe Production Studio CS, so I have Premiere Pro CS, Adobe AE CS, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.

From the look of it you should be able to pull a luma mask off of the curtains; it will take some cleaning up, but if you feather it you can use it to just brighten these up.

You can also double up the footage in AE and play with the blending modes and layer opacity to brighten up the scene.

If the highlights are headlights (from cars) you could duplicate the footage and timeshift it a bit, then track the lights for a moving mask. Only if the curtains are not moving and you are locked down.

George/