Color Matching

4110 wrote on 3/12/2005, 11:39 AM
I took some video and some still pictures of my daughter's basketball game. The light in the gym was pretty bad and both the video and still pictures needed a great deal of color correction. Interestingly, the weren't the same; the stills looked yellow and the video looked red. I worked on the color for the stills and got them looking ok. Then I worked on the video and it seemed fine too. Then I put them together in Vegas and reaized that the corrected colors don't match.

Is there a way to select an object, like a white wall, that is the common to both the stills and the video and do an automatch? If there is no tool to do it automatically, are there some steps and tools that can achieve the same result?

Thanks,

David

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 3/12/2005, 11:56 AM
You didn't say, I'll assume your stills were taken with one camera and the video with another or that you attempted to color correct the stills in a application like Photoshop and the video in Vegas. Such practices will likely compound the problem becuase of differences in color space.

If you plan on viewing the final results off a computer, then all color correction should be made while viewing off a computer, however if you plan to view the video which may include embedded pictures in the video say from a DVD then you need to adjust both using some connected external monitor, again to overcome the differences in color space.

Click on my name to go to my tutorial site which has several tutorials on this topic or click below.

www.bb-video.net
4110 wrote on 3/12/2005, 12:47 PM
Hi Billy Boy. Thanks for your help.

To clarify, I used an Olympus digial still camera and a Panasonic digital video camera. I did the initial color correction for both in Vegas. I looked at your site again (I found it months ago when I started with Vegas but didn't remember the color matching chapter). I found that, like with the piano examples you used, it is as much trial and error as precise sampling. It is better, but still not as good as I would like. I'll keep chipping away at it.

Thanks again,

David
BillyBoy wrote on 3/12/2005, 3:20 PM
What I think might be a nice addition to a future version of Vegas is incorporating the sampler eyedropper that's now part of some FX filters to be able to report the RGB values (similar to what Photoshop can do*) in the preview window from within Color Corrector and other filters that could benefit from it. At least that way you'd know what the color you're trying to match to was and have some starting point instead of all the trial and error.

* for those not familar with Photoshop, you can move a eyedropper tool over any image and in real time get a readout pixel by pixel of the RGB makeup.
4110 wrote on 3/14/2005, 3:33 PM
I think Pinnacle pro can do it too.
dand9959 wrote on 3/14/2005, 3:50 PM
A nice workflow would be to have two stills/clips: Clip A is what you want to color correct, Cip B is what you want to get to, colorwise.

1) Use eyedropper to select "source" colors or areas in Clip B.
2) Use eyedropper to select "target" areas in Clip A
2) Press a button to apply color correction on Clip A so that the target areas in Clip A match the source areas in Clip B...and apply the correction uniformly over clip A.

(Some NLE's work in a very similar way...but I can't remember which. Pinnacle? Avid?)