http://users.eastlink.ca/~jtomchuk/cc01.html

I just wrote an article on how it can make your video stand out. It may not be so much a problem with you guys on DVI, because most of you are pros, but a lot of videos, skits etc, released on the internet and even in low profile film festivals have little to no colour correction!

The article speaks more on the importance of it and some visual theory rather than actually doing it step by step. It also talks about how colour correction alone won’t be sufficient. It's not so much a tutorial as an initiation guide.

Please take a look at it, even if you do colour correct. If you have any suggestions to improve it please let me know.

A very good, solid introductory article. I always punch up my stuff with some curves, but it took some experimenting to figure it out. I wish I had this when I first started out. Just wanted to give you some well-deserved kudos.

Very good examples, especially the black and white one. My only suggestion would be to add an explanation of exactly what a Curve is. You have the screenshot of the curve's in the photos which help a lot, but perhaps you could explain what that is actually doing?

In other words, you show that when you adjust a curve like this, it looks like that. But why does it do that? (I hope I'm making sense)

Either way, very good samples and good job :)

Excellent start, good teaser. Continue on to the real stuff - make some tutorials, the community would appreciate that!

Good stuff. Now tell me how to lose weight.

Good stuff. Now tell me how to lose weight.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html

Excellent article. I found that the correction took out a little too much of the mids for my taste though...almost exaggerating the limited contrast ratio of the DV. Love the old film look though! Fangtabulous! Nice to see how the different curves affect the color without having to take all the gazillion hours to figure it out myself.

Nice to see how the different curves affect the color without having to take all the gazillion hours to figure it out myself.

Cole, don't misunderstand my reply...

Please, understand there is no such thing as a predetermined setting for situation "A". The subtle ranges among light, dark, chroma, hue, and tone are, for all intents and purposes, infinite. You will have to take as many hours as it takes to find the right settings (pre, intra, and post) that allow you to achieve the look you want your images to have.

Finding and using the "right" settings (beyond the basics) takes time and experience. No two situations are alike. Each is unique. Therefore, each requires a unique setting.

For example, the quality of exterior light in Sauk Rapids, MN, is different from that in Miami, FL. The settings I use down here would not work/look the same up where you are.

The only situation in which one may encounter anything close to a constant is in the studio. Even then, lamps age, color temperature shifts, the colors of surrounding surfaces can "tint" the subject--all have an effect on the image which has to be accounted for and corrected. What applied yesterday may not apply today. It provides a starting place, but that's about it.

Each situation is different. With that understanding you can begin to create consistency in your work.

I'm aware of the physics of light. I don't fully understand the reasons for the response. I was specifically referring to being able to see how, say, the darks in the blue curve would affect the shadows in the given images. It was nice to see some example rather than just having descriptions of what you can do...I'm a visual learner, and text on a page takes 10 times longer to process to complete understanding than a single picture like the ones presented here. The pictures here have allowed me to make the necessary leaps in logic that would have been hit and miss before. They were a bridge, as it were, between the pictures I capture in my camera and the resulting pictures I see in my head.

Yes, there are an infinite seeming possible combinations of lighting, although given that it's being digitized, it becomes finite in being converted to a specific colorspace.