Bleach Bypass look
 

Hey Folks,

So I've been playing with my A1 custom presets and I came up with a Bleach Bypass look that I'm pretty happy with, so I thought I would share. There's no one single definitive bleach bypass look, so I'll just say this one was inspired by Letters From Iwo Jima. You can always tweak it to get variations.

Oh yeah, a note: This preset works best if you have plenty of light so it looks great in outdoor daylight shots or indoors if you light.

Anyway, here are the settings:

Gamma: Cine 1
Knee: Middle
Black: Press
Master Pedestal: -9
Setup Level: 0
Sharpness: -3
H DTL Frequency: Middle
DTL HV Balance: 0
Coring: 0
NR1: Off
NR2: Off
Color Matrix: Cine 1
Color Gain: -38
Color Phase: 0
R Gain: -20
G Gain: -5
B Gain: 0
RG Matrix: 0
RB Matrix: 0
GR Matrix: 0
GB Matrix: 0
BR Matrix: 0
BG Matrix: 0

thanks for the info man,
can you please post some frame grabs form that preset !!!
Amr

I have dialed it in, looks - hmm... interesting, certainly different. Will try to shoot later, when there is more light. Just a question, Juan: why do you call the look "Bleach Bypass" - bleach I get, but my English is not good enough to follow "bypass" in this context?

The bleach bypass process is a photographic technique whereby the bleaching stage in the film processing is skipped (or reduced) thus retaining more silver in the image reducing the uptake of the colour dye. It results in a contrasty image with lower saturation. Saving Private Ryan brought the technique back into vogue.

Hope that helps

TT

Thanks, Tony!

Hey there. Ok, Here are a few pics. The first is the default canon look (no custom presets applied). The second is my default Cine look, and the third is the Bleach Bypass preset. I included the first two simply for comparisons sake.

Juan, I'll never believe the first one doesn't use any pre or postprocessing, it's definitely not the A1 out-of-the-box look! This deep blue sky... Tell me, did you use a filter? Or deliberately underexposed?

I like your cine look juan. I'm a sucker for colour!

I second that, Juan what was the custom setup for your cine still.

Hey Thanks! I appreciate that. So here are the settings for my default Cine look:

Gamma: Cine 2
Knee: Low
Black: Stretch
Master Pedestal: 0
Setup Level: 0
Sharpness: -3
H DTL Frequency: Middle
DTL HV Balance: 0
Coring: 0
NR1: Off
NR2: Off
Color Matrix: Cine 2
Color Gain: 30
Color Phase: 0
R Gain: -8
G Gain: 0
B Gain: 0
RG Matrix: 0
RB Matrix: 0
GR Matrix: 0
GB Matrix: 0
BR Matrix: 0
BG Matrix: 0

The Cine looks very very nice!

simply ............ smart ......fantastic :)
thanks for the grabs man :)

p.s. was it the compression that took away the sharpness !!!

Juan,

I see you have a -8 on the reds- any magic to this or just experimentation? I shot some gactory footage last week with a custom preset that used a +25 on the color gain, but the reds were at 0. The footage looked good except for one spot where I shot some clamps that had a red/orange handle and they were way too saturated.

Juan, sorry for that...I had a long Friday evening and forgot I had changed the gamma of my monitor. Now it's back to normal (calibrated), and you pictures look like you intented.

Hey Bill,

As you said, it was mostly just experimentation. It had started out with me plugging in the A1 and the HVX to some scopes to compare their color reproduction and the A1 showed a consistent bias towards the reds. So I dialed the reds back a bit to move everything towards the center of the vectorscope. And just from observation of the footage I shot. You can tell, when you look at the "Canon Default" pic that I posted, that it's got an overall warmish cast to it.

Then when I started trying to dial in a Bleach Bypass look, I noticed that the reds still came out noticeably more saturated than other colors despite the fact that I had overall saturation turned way down. So everything looked correct until a red car or someone wearing a red t-shirt walked into frame and all of a sudden it was it was like, "woah, why is that so red?" So that's why my bleach bypass preset has Red Gain set to -20 even though overall color gain is set to -38.

This camera really likes red! Though I suppose if you wanted to do a Schindler's List/Girl in the Red Coat effect in camera, you probably could, which is kinda cool.