Shadow Detail versus Color Trade-off

MH_Stevens wrote on 12/8/2007, 6:08 AM
I often find with Vegas that I have to make a choice between the level of detail in the shadows and the color balance. Often when bringing up the bottom end to see the shadow detail colors become oversaturated and unnatural to an extent that I can not correct with the Color Corrector. What's good practice here?

Mike

Comments

GlennChan wrote on 12/8/2007, 12:17 PM
What settings are you using in the Color Corrector? I tend to find the opposite effect. Bringing "up" (making them brighter) will make colors less saturated.

What I see happening is that the gain, gamma, and offset controls affect the Y' channel (internally the CC filter converts the values to Rec. 601 Y'CbCr, does its thing, and then converts back to R'G'B'). Operations on the Y' channel tend to be unintuitive and cause shifts in saturation (which I won't get into). For offset and gain, those operations can be better done with Levels or curves. And doing gamma-like operations with levels and curves will also cause shifts in hue and saturation, but they tend to look better.
MH_Stevens wrote on 12/8/2007, 1:03 PM
Glenn:

Our apparent contradiction is just that my over-saturation is caused by the leveling of (droping) the middle which is required after you bring up the bottom to show shadow detail. I try to use curves for all things first and generally only use color corector for white balance type adjustmants.

Specifically my problem is sometimes after I get the top and bottom right, IE maximum detail in both shadow and highlight, I end up with artificial oversaturated color I can't get rid of.

Mke