Can anyone help me rescue this footage?

Chris H wrote on 10/26/2006, 4:41 PM
Hello,

Is any willing to share some settings to correct this dark footage.? After searching the forum, I have played with levels, secondary color correction, color curves, etc... and am having trouble getting it to look much better without looking very artificial.

I am not relying on my computer monitor but am using a standard television connected to my Canopus ADVC-1000 to view the footage.

Help Me Fix This

Thanks,

Chris

Comments

Jim H wrote on 10/26/2006, 5:08 PM
... I better not comment.
Serena wrote on 10/26/2006, 5:30 PM
Depends how critical you are, but just using levels, curves and colour correction brought out a credible image that most people would accept as 'fine'.

I'll email you my result if you wish.

the steps I used:
1) use levels to bring whites to 100% and blacks to 0
2) use curves (a) insert a point near black to anchor black end and bend to a "bottom of S". (b) take hold of the 'lever' on the white end and belly the curve vigorously untill you have satisfactory brightness range in the image.
3) correct mid-range colour towards blue-green to get skin tones satisfactory.

I thought it would take more than that.
Dan Sherman wrote on 10/26/2006, 5:48 PM
Dropped colour curves on the image and applied hilight shadows.
With some tweeking it looks acceptable.
rmack350 wrote on 10/26/2006, 6:06 PM
Something I just learned in photoshiop that looks pretty good to me.It'll require a render though.

Copy your footage to a new track. Now you've got a stack. Change the compositing mode of the top layer to "Screen". Now adjust that layer's opacity to taste.

From that point you need to consider if you want to tweak the whites and blacks. The whites are definitely too hot and would make my TV pump when there's a cut to something less hot.

Rob Mack
Serena wrote on 10/26/2006, 6:56 PM
Rob, that is a good way to rescue clips (images) where part of the image is well exposed (so you don't want to touch that) and part needs severe treatment. I expected the Rhonda image to need that approach, and was surprised that the normal corrections were sufficient. However if bringing down the over-blown white windows is necessary (they are distracting) then can be done by the method you suggest or (in this case) putting a graded mask on the upper track to cut the windows down.
birdcat wrote on 10/27/2006, 5:36 AM
Hi Chris -

If you are willing to put up with some tedium, you could save the clip as images, process them using photo retouching software and re-import them back in.

I took your jpeg, ran it through Paint Shop Pro's (version 9) One Step Photo Fix and got the results which can be seen here.

Good luck.

Bruce
Chris H wrote on 10/27/2006, 9:26 AM
Thanks for the suggestions, everyone. I was able to correct to an acceptable level use color curves.

Chris
rmack350 wrote on 10/27/2006, 10:19 AM
I was moticing on a PSA I recently edited that if I cut from a very bright, overdriven scene to something more subdued that my NTSC monitor a well as the home TV would "pump", or go extra bright or dark following the cut and then settle where it was supposed to be.

Just getting the whites down to 235 seemed to solve that.

This screen technique is something I was using on stills of a glossy black product that had nothing reflected in the gloss. Truely black and underexposed for our instructional purposes. You can stack several layers and set all the top layers to screen mode, then adjust the opacity on the topmost layer to dial in the final exposure.

These stills were really down in the murky blacks and I was able to pull something usable out. I also converted the image to 16bit color before I started in an attempt to keep the noise down in the final output.

What I ended up doing on the stills was progressively cutting out the areas that were "bright enough" as I made more screen layers.

This method is probably a bit unwieldy for video unless you want to render a new clip to use, but I thought I'd share it and maybe troll for a better idea. It's easy to do, but hard to work with later without a render.

Rob Mack