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/LazerBlueP5/groomadjusted.jpg

http://www.mazdamp3.com/members/LazerBlueP5/church_statueadjusted.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.

Glad everything worked out!

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.

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?

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?

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.

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?

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.

<<<-- 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/LazerBlueP5/wedding_couple.jpg

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

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

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.

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

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

Nice job. :)

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?

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?

http://www.mazdamp3.com/members/LazerBlueP5/groom3.jpg


I dunno though guys it looked good in Photoshop but much darker in Internet Explorer. We may never be able to show an accurate color correction on a medium as such. Stephen is right....we would have to send a flattened PSD file with an embedded ICC profile to retain the accuracy of what "WE" see on our screens.

Alex,

Could you please explain what you did in Vegas to that photo.

Zac

Sure, Not too much at all. First I applied color curves, usually I would use one of my favorite custom presets, but I had to adjust it especially just for that one, because it appeared to have lots of greenish shadows...you want to make that famous slight "S curve"...then I just applied the HSL Adjust, with saturation all the way at 2.0 (Note: Sometimes it comes out crappy with the saturation cranked up, it all depends on the shot, especially if theres lots of red in it)...

This one was also done in nothing but Vegas, incase you want that "dreamy soft" look...heh:

http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-5/169091/groom2.jpg

HAHAH alex,

that looks like a soapy! or even worse a b-grade porno.

Poor guy, i would hate to have my photo plastered around the internet with such a bad haircut, but i guess good info is coming out of it.

Alex to create the famous s-curve did you apply a a single anchor point in the middle and adjust the handles, or 2 points around 1/3 of the way from the bottom and stop, and move the top one up slight and the bottom one down slightly?

zac

Alex, in your dreamy version, did you have some sort of vignette mask, because the outer edges seem darker than the middle? I was curious if you masked it somehow to create that vignette look.

Russell

Kudos, Alex!

I'm impressed, to say the least. Would you mind posting a screenshot of your "S" curve settings and the HSL.

Glenn, I think you may need to change your "color settings" for RGB work. Again, you really need a professional video monitor to see the real colors for this kind of work. Obviously, young Alex has no problem with posting his work on the web, and neither do I. I truly believe you are being led astray by your computer monitor.

nah, I'd say screw the color correction, and tweak your cam as much as you can. CC is a waste of time if you can get away without using it. I've shot beautiful outdoor scenes with the inferior Panasonic EZ30U (will post pics soon). I didn't need any sort of color correction. The sharpness, color rendition all seems to be much better than the above DVX100 pics.

Well, Wen, you are correct that many video projects go to air straight from the camera, with no tweaking done to the tapes. Sometimes that's a good thing, and sometimes not. But as a matter of fact, all motion pictures go through color correction, or "timing" as a way to improve the image and create a consistent "look" throughout a film. I'm sure they don't consider it a "waste of time." And more video projects are getting serious color correction before they hit the air, as evidenced by many narrative projects seen on cable television. (Think, "The New Detectives," "Histories Mysteries," etc.)

I think what we are commenting on, is Glenn's frame grabs from his first wedding shoot, and what ways he might be able to improve his future shoots with his DVX100, based on an analysis of those stills. I would be happy to look at stills from your project, but I would like to see them in your thread. I don't really think they belong here, but that's just my opinion.

John, Here's some screenshots...

This one is the particular S curve deal I used in the wedding photo in this post, it needed to be "custom" because of the weird green shadows...and it wasn't too extreme either...

http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-5/169091/colorcurvesgroom.jpg

And here's a screenshot of my standard S color curve preset in Vegas, that I usually use for everything...it's a little more "extreme"...if you take away some of the blue, especially at the high end, it gets more of a yellow overcast, which I also like...

http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-5/169091/colorcurves.jpg


Russell, Yeah, I applied a "bump map" to it, with the settings set to give it that look -- it kind of darkens the edges, but it's more feathered then anything, you can make it as extreme as you want or not apply it at all. I made it as soft as I could...

Incase your curious on how to do the "dreamy" one, here's the steps, in Vegas:

1. Apply color curves to the video, along with the "max saturation" preset, under HSL adjust (you may need to take the saturation down, a little bit, if it looks crappy, it really depends on the footage..)...

2. Make a new video track, and copy the original video stream, and paste it in the new video track, and set the optacity to 50% to the video in the new track (or the upper track)...you have to make sure it's perfectly synced up too...

3. Then, to the bottom track only, add a Guassian Blur, adjust as you like, but I find that both horizontal and verticle set at 0.050, works the best.

4. I usually apply a special bump map setting to BOTH of the tracks, to give it that blurred edge deal look...


Oh yeah, be prepared to give it some mad rendering time, depending on the speed of your computer -- with all these filters and crap, it takes many seconds per frame, atleast on my sluggish computer...

<<<-- Originally posted by Wayne Orr : Glenn, I think you may need to change your "color settings" for RGB work. Again, you really need a professional video monitor to see the real colors for this kind of work. Obviously, young Alex has no problem with posting his work on the web, and neither do I. I truly believe you are being led astray by your computer monitor. -->>>

To be honest with you I don't know what you mean by "Alex and yourself having no problem with posting work on the web". I don't think my work looks any less. In fact Alex was right about the tweaks you made regarding the shadow areas having a green cast, and Alex's renditions were highly over saturated and far from accurate. Granted that may have been his intention, however I wouldn't venture to believe it's an inferior monitor with bad color calibration. Before videography I was strictly an illustrator and graphic designer....thus those are actually my strong points. It would be pure stupitity to run on a monitor that is not calibrated correctly. It may be your monitor that isn't calibrated correctly. My Sony Trinitron E540 has been painstakingly calibrated in both Adobe Gamma and Display Mate.
If you don't see the green cast on the shadow areas of your rendition, I'd go back and check your settings. lol

Yes I see the green. As I said, it was a quick fix. You seem to be the only one who is not seeing his work on the web the way it looks on his monitor. I had the outrageous notion I might be able to help you. Sorry if I offended you. Nice talking to you Glenn.

http://www.ywenzstudios.com/PanaEZ30cap.jpg

Here is an unmodifed snapshot of a video shot with the PanaEZ30 that I was talking about earlier. Just to show how far an image can go with some in-camera adjust ment. This setting would look much much nicer on the DVX100. The girl came out a little bit dark because she was sitting in the shadow.

<<<-- Originally posted by Wayne Orr : You seem to be the only one who is not seeing his work on the web the way it looks on his monitor. -->>>

HUH?

Nevermind...I got it. duh

Yeah I wonder why that is? Have to check and see if Netscape does the same thing or if it's IE specific.

No problem, Glen. Sometimes I get so wrapped up cranking this stuff out that I don't realize what it sounds like. Yeah, check out Netscape. I use IE, and as I said, I have not had any major problems with what I put up looking different from the computer. But you said you were a graphics professional, and I have to believe you set up your computer monitor different than I do for video. I mean, I would hate to see something I output go to a printer, because I'm sure it would be a disaster, and look nothing like it did on my screen.

But the major link in the chain is a professional video monitor, and since you haven't mentioned it, I get the feeling you haven't purchased one yet. I know its tough to bite that bullet for about a grand, but that will make a major difference in your video work. But of course, that also has to be set up properly using reliable color bars. And beware; there are a lot of bogus color bars floating around the web. If you are a Mac person, and I am betting you are, then you can go to the Synthetic Aperture site and download a FREE app called "Test Pattern Maker." That will enable you to create all sorts of test patterns, along with bars and tone. Then, with the monitor set up properly, you can view some footage from the camera, and be certain of what it looks like. Then you can tell if there is some messin' going on when you digitize. And with a program like Echo Fire, you can output your graphics to the monitor and see what they will look like in the world of video. Then, when you are comfortable with the whole arrangement, tweak the computer monitor a bit more to get it to look as close as possible to the video monitor. Then you be stylin'. Of course the computer monitor will always look better. If you know all this, just ignore me, and we'll hope someone is getting something of value out of this.

Unfortunately, the book I relied on heavily when I did my major monitor tweaks a couple of years ago, is out on loan. But hopefully I will get it back and be able to give you a couple of good suggestions for video on a computer monitor that you may not be aware of.

Here is a link to a Photoshop version of the groom that I knocked out that is similar to what Alex did in Vegas. http://www.digitalprods.com/groom4.jpg
As a graphic designer, I am sure you know how powerful the "curves" command is, and it takes it good deal of skill to master it. I am strictly an intermediate, but the clouds are parting slowly.

Good luck editing the wedding video. You will probably want to spend some time color correcting the final version, but the good news is; nothing is really seriously screwed up. Just look at it as a great learning opportunity.

Alex,

Arrigato gozaimas for the screenshots! This thread has been really helpful to me...and the timing couldn't have been more perfect.

so many great avenues in this thread, hope more people read/contribute/help

Personally, this whole light/dark image thing, has been a recent pain here, and this thread completely relates to my situation of the same pain.
some factors are:
1)Brightness/contrast levels of the user's monitor from the exterior monitor control
2)if photoshop installed, the adobe gamma control panel
3)going into the properties of your video card and adjusting the many properties there if you have them including: brightness/contrast/gamma, and going into the VIDEO OVERLAY options, again if provided, will all drastically affect what you see on your monitor, and how u edit

Had some b/w headshots, looked great on the monitor, but when printed, were way to dark, went through all the adjustments, now what i see is what i get from the printer, exactly

COLOR BALANCE/LIGHTING ONLY>>>

Analytically approached this here, and on my monitors settings, glen's pictures, all of them look better than the other ones, ALL of them.
The color balance looks natural, not saturated, and they appear correct tone, not dark, including the non-edited pic.

Then put SVHS out to TV set, with the same results.

Have 3 different monitors, 3 different brands and sizes, all CRC, and they all yield the same results, the other 2 aren't even used/calibrated for graphics at all.. just regular default settings.


Do NOT wish to offend anyone here, am brand new, and am about to post some ?s on DOF(yes that subject),,, along with many others... but this same situation JUST happened to me, and fresh in the mind wanted to shared my situation, so we can all help each other.... i just went with what works for me here..thank you

Welcome Alturo. I think I have everything you said correct in my understanding. A couple comments.
If you feel looking at the original pictures on your monitor, they are correct, I would ask you to view the historgram and the info regarding them in Photoshop. There you will notice that the "groom" photo is heavily weighted toward the shadow area of the still, and there is no real "black." That is, what should be the black area of the photo is up about 30%, which is way too high. If this looks good on your monitor (and I am assuming you are speaking of a computer monitor) then you are being deceived by your monitor set-up. This is very common. You need to have a professional video monitor to judge video work, that is properly calibrated using good split field color bars. (in NTSC world)

Print and video are not the same thing. What looks good in one, will not necessarily look good in the other. If your computer monitor is set-up so what you see is what you get on your printer, that's great. For print. For video, you should be outputting to a video monitor.

Finally, Alturo, remember that the object is not to re-create reality. Reality is often harsh and unforgiving. So very frequently, we like things to appear more "romanticised" than the cold reality. This is what film people have been doing since they discovered they could twist some knobs and make things look better. "Heightened reality." I think the group's reaction to Alex's "corrections" speaks volumes for this aesthetic approach.