Reducing high contrast pics for video

paulrb wrote on 7/20/2008, 6:43 AM

I am doing a picture montage for my mother's 80th birthday and there are several hundred pictures which I have included in the video. Most of the pictures were scanned at 300dpi .

I'm now at the point of color correcting them for video. Many of the non-digital ones are over exposed and others are very bright with dark sections also. But they are too important to leave out.

I'm wondering if there is an EASY way (copy & paste an effect) to bring blacks up and white levels down with vegas so it is easier on the eyes when viewing via a DVD player on a NTSC projector.

This is the first major project I have done on Vegas. So any thoughts are appreciated.

Paul

Comments

GlennChan wrote on 7/20/2008, 7:00 AM

You could try mike crash's auto levels plug-in and apply it as a... eventFX or media FX to all your clips. I believe that might work. Try it and let us know?

Select all your clips, and then drag the plug-in onto your clips. The auto levels plugin can be downloaded here:
http://www.mikecrash.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=6

it will only automatically set the white and black level.

2- Another way of doing things is to use an image editing program to color correct your photos... e.g. Photoshop Elements, Picasa, etc. etc.

It seems like it would be easier to turn the brightness of your projector down, or simply turn the lights on in that room??

rs170a wrote on 7/20/2008, 7:14 AM

You can also try the Secondary Color Corrector FX (use the Computer RGB to Studio RGB template).
This drops the brightness range from 0-255 down to 16-235.
Adding this at the Track or Video Output position will affect all images simultaneously.

Mike

alltheseworlds wrote on 7/20/2008, 7:35 AM

Maybe I misunderstand your preferred process here, but wouldn't it be a lot easier to batch process all the pics in an image editing app and -then- bring them into Vegas ? I use a lot of still pics on the timeline, but I never do any pic editing or correcting in Vegas.

johnmeyer wrote on 7/20/2008, 8:03 AM

I have scanned and restored over 80,000 photos in the past eight years. It is generally best to do the correction in your photo editor. If there is nothing in the highlights, there is nothing you can do that will help. If these are scans from prints, then often the shadows don't have much detail and there isn't much you can do there. However, if there IS some shadow detail, you can use the gamma controls in either your photo editor or in the Color Corrector or Levels controls in Vegas to bring these up. The "ultimate" tool in Vegas for adjusting these things is the Color Curves. You can increase or decrease the brightness of each level of the photo independently, e.g., increase the brightness of everything that is 80% black without touching the level of anything that is 90% black or beyond.