Color correction - too many options

DWhitevidman wrote on 10/30/2009, 10:20 AM
I don't need to do a lot of contrast / brightness or color corrections for most of my videos. Recently however I shot a weding where the lighting was mixed incandescent and flourescent in a hotel meeting room.

Using a Sony VX2100 to shoot closeups, the colors came out fine and look good. Using a much lesser Cannon consumer grade camera however, for the wide fixed shot, (it's all I had), produced a not so great green cast result.

I've searched this forum and the web, read and watched several tutorials. There seem to be such a variety of ways to correct color, I thought I would ask here which method is the most straight forward approach to my problem.

I was going to include two snapshots for comparison between the two cameras but couldn't determine how to do that here. Thanks for any suggestions.

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 10/30/2009, 10:33 AM
Last question first -- you just need to upload your photos somewhere and post a link to them here.

The most basic color matching approach is to correct for the "memory" colors -- whites, grays, and flesh tones.

Start by matching the color of the bride's gown and skin tone to approximate the "good" take -- that will get you close, then a little additional tweaking of deeper neutrals will get you the rest of the way.

If you will go ahead and link to some good comparison shots from the Vegas preview, the gurus here will likely try their hand and offer you some specific starting points.
DWhitevidman wrote on 10/30/2009, 12:36 PM
Thanks musicvid for the info, your suggested approach makes sense. I didn't specify this in my org question but, which video FX is best to use for this. Color Corrector, color balance, color curves, etc.

I'm going to try to post the two samples, then post another reply.
rs170a wrote on 10/30/2009, 12:43 PM
See if Vol. 6 Issue #2 of Edward Troxel's (aka jetdv) newsletters is of any help.
The first part of it is a basic color balance tutorial.

Mike
musicvid10 wrote on 10/30/2009, 1:04 PM
Edward's tutorial is excellent, and I refer to it often.

If you are just beginning, I would use the Color Balance plugin to get a basic feel. It will help if you get online and learn the relationships between CMYRGB and their combinations. Again, get your clues from whites (bride's gown), neutrals, and flesh tones.

I prefer to use Color Corrector for most of my work, because it is kind of like Photoshop on steroids. I use Curves, which are much more difficult to master (IMO), when I have a really wicked lighting situation that needs more than simple balance / gamma correction.

Download a stepwedge image, such as the one in my test patterns kit and experiment, noting the changes in highlights, mids, and lows with various combinations of corrections. You may have to rotate and change the format of Wedge2.psd to .png for it to work well in Vegas.

[Make new post if you want the file]
DWhitevidman wrote on 10/30/2009, 1:08 PM
Here are the two snapshots just to see if it works.

http://i774.photobucket.com/albums/yy23/dwhitevidman/Closeup.jpg

http://i774.photobucket.com/albums/yy23/dwhitevidman/Wide.jpg
musicvid10 wrote on 10/30/2009, 1:32 PM
Using only Color Balance, applying a correction of +0.0080 Red and -0.0195 Green to the Midtones of the "Wide" shot will give you an acceptable starting point. Use your L / R arrow keys to get precise numeric values.

As long as you're correcting (meaning long render times), you may want to bump the contrast and brightness too on the Wide footage, which of course will also affect the amount of color correction needed.
TimTyler wrote on 10/30/2009, 2:17 PM
Your wide shot is very underexposed.

I think your best bet is to add a little red and remove some green from the wide shot, and adjust the Levels to brighten it up.



GlennChan wrote on 10/30/2009, 9:03 PM
Here's an old tutorial I wrote on matching cameras:
http://www.glennchan.info/matching/matching.htm

The easy solution of course would be to shoot with the same model cameras.