I have used some of the color corrector techniques for faded film, but I'm not sure I'd use them on pristine video like this. The reason is that the Secondary Color Corrector doesn't always track the colors perfectly from frame to frame, and therefore you can get some troublesome artifacts that are much worse than what you started with.

The main issue with the initial video is suppressed highlights. If you look at the waveform display, the top 20% of the available luma scale is not used. My approach is to either use color curves, creating a standard "S" curve:



or else use the "gain" function (couple with "offset," if necessary) in the main Color Corrector. I also then add Saturation in the color corrector to increase the chroma. I used about +1.3 on your screen grab. Here is the result:



Anything you do, obviously, is highly subjective, and you have to please yourself. My two cents on the subjectivity subject (ha, ha) is that "less is more" unless you are wanting to make the end result look unreal or artificial. However, if you want it to look "authentic," then you want to stay away from colorization, which is what the Secondary Color Corrector is doing. After all, a cloudy sky is not bright blue ...

If you want to add more "punch," then you can play with the contrast function in the brightness and contrast fX. Finally, if you want to get closer to the harsh lighting of a cloudless day, try experimenting with the Glow fX. Set Glow to 0.0 and then play around with the other two controls. If you really want to add some drama, try playing around with the bump map fX. Here are the settings I used:



When I combine the Color Curves, followed by the Color Corrector (using only the Saturation increase, but this time turned up to 1.8), followed by the Glow fX (Glow=0.0; Intensity=11.11; Supression=0.805), followed by the bump map (with settings shown above), I get this:



This is obviously quite artificial, but it definitely has a lot more drama. I like the way it emphasized the clouds (rather than hiding them) directly above the Jefferson Memorial building.

Hope this helps!

John

[edit]Sorry about the aspect ratio change ... I got sloppy when I did my screen grabs.

I like that John, natural with some drama... makes my effort look too styalised (blue)!
Doesnt matter how many books i read, this is one subject i find difficuilt to control.

Paul.

Hey Jerry,
I would try to add some contrast in "contrast and brightness" and then some saturation in "color corrector"

Good ideas guys. This is the stuff I like about this forum - tapping into the wealth of knowledge here. I particularly like johnmeyer's second image. I came at this by thinking, "How can I make this look more like a sunshiney (is that a word?) day". However, the idea of make the image look more dramatic seems to work nicely here.

The sephia grading of the Jefferson Memorial looks particularly nice - which of the FX produced that? (maybe after I fiddle with the FX, it will become obvious). Edit: Looks like merely adding saturation is what's doing that.

...Jerry

Jerry, come down to DC today. That'll fix your footage. ;)

Steve
D.C.

"Jerry, come down to DC today. That'll fix your footage. ;)Ha! Yeah, what a beautiful day. It's evey worse than that... we left about 2:30pm yesterday to take the Metro to New Carrollton, where my car was parked. Just as we popped out to the daylight near RFK, and wouldn't you know the clouds were breaking up. Sigh!!

btw, vtxrocketeer, If you're ever driving up I95 and need a break near Wilmington, DE, drop me an email, I'll buy you a cup of coffee.

...Jerry (who was born in DC)

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13355290/jeffmemwarm.jpg

down and dirty

"Yeah, I know, the top answer will be, "Only shoot in good lighting""

That certainly isn't bad lighting. The Hollywood types can spend a lot of money to artificially create that kind of lighting by hanging massive scrims from cranes.

As you can see from what JM has done with curves you can then grade the image to look very good, better than you could if it'd been full sun. Look only at the distant buildings etc on the shoreline to see this. Of course the water is a problem, no blue sky to reflect off it and you don't have a point light source (the sun) to add specular highlights so it is going to look bleak.
Then there's the problem of the cherry blossoms. They're quite fragile things to capture and you need to shoot them with light bouncing off them not through them or they just fade away to grey. What makes that hard is they appear on the trees when there's no foliage to provide a backdrop so you've got to work at it to stage the shot to show them off to their best. Large masses of them down streets are generally going to give you a win. You really want them in the foreground in the shot you've taken then you need to get the sun behind you shining into them. Can't do that, then light them. A silver or gold refelector or two might do it. Failing that a couple a mid sized HMI lights and a generator would do the trick :)

Probably by now you're thinking I've lost the plot, you don't have reflectors or the means to rig them and a couple of 10K lights is absurd. The question I would ask or the lesson I would take on board is why did I waste precious time taking the shot. I'm in the city for a day, the weather isn't going to play nice with me but I still want to tell the story of the place. The answer is to go shoot the stuff that will look great with the available lighting. In the streets between the buildings, MCUs in the parks and gardens, the things that if you had full sun would look pretty bad. Make the most of what you've got and work with it. You've got to find the story with what you have.

For the material I've been shooting over the past month I have prayed for exactly that kind of lighting for all but one scene. So far I've only been lucky with that one scene. Nature turned on a spectacular sunrise at the beach and now just about everything else looks pretty bad by comparison because I couldn't convince the production that you have to schedule shots based on lighitng as we don't have the budget to control the sun.

Bob.

"Probably by now you're thinking I've lost the plot, you don't have reflectors or the means to rig them and a couple of 10K lights is absurd.You're not going to believe this, but I met my sister there. She's a still photog and actually had some reflectors (the kind that pop open to look like large frisbees) - I just wasn't quick witted enough to think to use them. [grin]

The cherry blossoms where actually quite spectacular. Here's a barely edited clip. I'm just not sure how to weave my footage into something coherent.



...Jerry

Ha! Yeah, what a beautiful day. It's evey worse than that... we left about 2:30pm yesterday to take the Metro to New Carrollton, where my car was parked. Just as we popped out to the daylight near RFK, and wouldn't you know the clouds were breaking up. Sigh!!
_______________________________________

That's big of you, Jerry. Much appreciated. I marinate in coffee.

I've lived here 12 years and still haven't shot the cherry blossoms. For that matter, I've shot very little in DC (you're never a tourist...). Every day I ride my motorcycle across the Roosevelt Bridge and, at one point, I see the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, and Capitol all lined up. The day that view doesn't make me proud is the day I move from here.

-Steve

"You're not going to believe this,"

Oh yes I am, been there and still doing that. A lot of people think Hollywood shoots great footage because of the money but that's only part of it. Having enough people so each is only focussed on one task makes a huge difference to the outcomes.


Anyway that footage inside the park looks very good and I'd wager if the weather had been full sun it would have been impossible to get such a shot.

Bob.

OK, did this in Corel PSP, so I could see if I could do anything prior to reaching for Vagueness.



It's a start to viewing to see what could be done. I've nicked too many pixels for the swap-outs, but I like the Yellow stone work on the building and the hint of blue in the sky. And now it has that touch of Sunshine wanted.

It's a start . . . . Really enjoyed applying some of the stuff I've picked up over the years.

Grazie

One real problem with grey day images are that they are "flat" compared to sunshine. The sun casts (sometimes minute) shadows in the texture and shape of objects that can't really be reproduced properly afterwards. The other thing as that the objects in full sun have a slight yellowish cast whereas the shadows have a slight blue cast (from the blue sky).

The things I have found to help are

1. increase contrast
2. increase saturation (the increased contrast will also do this to some extent, so don't overdo it.
3. Give a warmer colour cast, particularly to the subject matter if you feel like selective masking.

Note that the image is significantly under exposed, so details in the shadows or dark objects such as the trees will be seriously diminished, and won't be properly recovered after the whole image is lightened to what it should be.

Maybe it's just my monitor, but I'm seeing all sorts of purple splotches on the water in the photo retourched in Corel PSP. The clouds have a strange purple cast as well.

>Maybe it's just my monitor, but I'm seeing all sorts of purple splotches on the water in the photo retourched in Corel PSP. The clouds have a strange purple cast as well.

Same here John. My monitored is profiled with xrite i1.

/jerry

Yeah, my monitor is profiled as well, using a Spyder 2. In addition to the splotches, the sky looks turquoise rather than blue.

I see the same thing too. My monitor is calibrated with the "JJK Eyeball software"
(OK, I'm just funnin but it's true)
JJK

The clouds are posterised as well.
Overall to my eyeballs on my office PC's uncalibrated monitor it reminds me of a 1960s postcard.
I can see what Grazie is talking about when he said "I've nicked too many pixels".
The fine detail in the branches has suffered badly and would probably be a very distracting mess at speed.
The reason such an image cannot be pushed around much and when you try and it goes wrong was something that puzzled me for years. If that had been the same image from a high end camera recorded at 10 bits uncompressed it'd look the same on our monitors but it can be pushed much further.
Jerry's camera original doesn't look that far removed from something recorded with S-Log. Where the difference lies is in the difference in the amount of image data available for FXs to work with.

Bob.

One of the key things i am getting from this thread is - leave the colours alone if you want to keep it true. Except maybe a white balance. Otherwise you get into special effect / styalised looks. A guess a trained eye would spot this straight away like seeing night and day... Maybe its a case of training ones eyes to really examine the image for what it really is. Its too easy to look at a high contrast or saturated image and just go - wow.. I am guilty of that.
So I was just playing with old footage and just applying contrast and some saturation only to get from 'the grey look' to something much better. Very happy so far, and pretty simple.
This is one subject i really want to nail... My books are rubbish..
Also, because a lot of us are using 8 bit recordings, i think this is a sensible way to go and not push smooth colour gradients into artifacts. Like banding. I believe that was what Bob was saying, makes a lot of sense to me.

Paul.

"Jerry's camera original doesn't look that far removed from something recorded with S-Log. Where the difference lies is in the difference in the amount of image data available for FXs to work with.Heh, the footage was taken with my Panasonic TM700. I was scared to bring my Big Honkin' AC130 as I'd heard horror stories about the DC tripod police (turns out there were lots of tripods & not a worry). In any case, both cameras are AVCHD, 4:2:0

I'll repeat something I alluded to earlier. I posted this as a learning experience. I'm not sure I will ever use this footage for anything. And... all these posts have been a good education for me.

If anyone would like to play with the source footage it's here: 00179.zip I hereby declare it to be public domain.

...Jerry

I had two minutes extra time, and since I only put in 30 seconds on my last attempts (well, longer than that to write the post and upload the images), I decided to spend a bit more time on this.

In this case I used a much more aggressive color curve, because I sensed that people here really wanted to "punch up" the video.

I then used two separate Secondary Color Correctors. I created a mask on the first one for the cherry blossoms and then really hit hard the saturation. Next, I created a mask for the sky and then tinted it blue. Despite what I said in my previous post, this works fine for this clip because nothing changes much. If I had more time, I would have found another clip containing blue sky and sampled that to get the proper hue.

Here is a link to the VEG file:

Cherry Blossom.veg

You should be able to open this and then point to the video file you uploaded, and go from there.

Here is a still shot of the result:



Just for reference, here is the split screen showing the after and before next to each other:



John

Here's my quick 'n dirty shot at it using my favorite color correction plugin: the free AAV Colorlab.:



Actually, there's a little more to it. A while back, I found a white balance chart online and sampled all the variations of white in order on the chart and made AAV presets with the names WB01 through WB30 (white balance 1 through 30). Now what I do if there is nothing pure white to sample is to step through these white balance presets until I find the one that looks best, then adjust the color from there using the Vegas scopes and my eyes on the preview window as my guides.