Color grading Archives - Budget-stretching tips for filmmaking, animation, motion graphics & visual effects

Sharpening your footage in post — in a non-crummy way

This one’s quick and easy, and there’s a good chance you already know this if you’re a seasoned post professional. But I see poorly sharpened footage all the time, so it must not be totes common knowledge.

Maybe your old no-name lenses are a little soft, or your exterior establishing shot needs to look a little more detailed, or you’re matching different lenses, whatevs. Do dis:

Don’t use Sharpen. That’s like a race car driver using an automatic transmission.
Use Unsharp Mask.
Right off the bat, set it to 100% Amount, and 0.3 Radius.
If that doesn’t do the trick, then try upping Amount to 200% at the most, or Radius to 0.5 maximum. But generally, going beyond that will cause negative byproducts.
Lastly, adjust Threshold as needed… for video there are many factors involved in deciding whether to set it high or low (types of skin, lighting, how much geometric stuff is in a shot, how noisy your footage is, etc), so really just slide it around and eyeball it to taste.

So there ya go… Unsharp Mask, 100% / 0.3, or adjust to taste within ranges 50-200% / 0.3-0.5. And generally, this applies to still photos as well. The settings should be pretty universal whether you’re doing it in Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Sony Vegas, or whatever else.

Before & after color grading comparison of flat scanned 35mm on the Outpost DVD

The British independent low-budget (£200,000 according to wikipedia) feature Outpost directed by Steve Barker achieved something pretty extraordinary– it rose above the endless flood of made-for-straight-to-DVD movies that belong to what I call the “post-Alien subgenre” (a group of soldiers/technicians who don’t like each other are stuck somewhere isolated/dark/claustrophobic, waiting it out for a specified amount of time until rescue/safety, while being killed off one by one by a mysterious & obscured creature/entity)… by being bought up by Sony and given a limited theatrical release in the UK.

Ok cool story, brodawg. Yeah so on the DVD there are deleted scenes that appear to be from an assemblage edit of the flat transfer film scan footage. Which means you can directly compare that to the look of the color graded final feature, if you’re into that kinda thing. It was shot on (Fuji) 35mm, so the flat transfer holds 13-14 stops of dynamic range (good prosumer video cameras and DSLR/DSLRish cameras hold 7-10 usable stops). The color grade’s bleach bypass/ENRish look is kinda par for the course considering the genre, but it’s definitely well crafted. And if you wear an eye patch, have a parrot on your shoulder, and use the word “booty” in a non-hiphop way, you can even rip the deleted scenes and try mimicking the final result… which would be pretty useful for anyone who’s learning to color grade. BUT THAT WOULD BE ILLEGALZ.

Here be the Outpost DVD on Amazon.

Color-saturated fill light for a better composite

Here’s a useful technique that I came up with for shooting certain kinds of greenscreen stuff…

Make the fill light a saturated color (that’s different from the screen and the subject’s clothes etc, duh).
In post, isolate that particular color and then tweak it to match the hue of whatever the natural bounce light would be in whatever environment you’re compositing them into.
Though keep in mind that it’s always better to just use a colored fill light that matches your particular background plate. This technique is more for cases where you have to use one setup for several varied backgrounds.

For example, you can use a saturated magenta for the fill, and then use the secondary color correction in Color Finesse to tweak just the saturated magenta to appear bluish if they’re supposed to be standing on the belly of a giant, naked sleeping smurf or whatever. Another great thing about this technique is that you not only can control the hue and saturation of the fill color, but also the luminance of the fill, and quite easily at that. Of course, this technique will only be useful for certain shots, depending on the lighting and blocking.

Here’s a straight forward example of this technique from a shoot I was DP on. Because of last minute schedule changes, I had to shoot numerous bits of Snoop Dogg in just one setup, even though they took place in a multitude of settings. We could’ve shot him in neutral color and depended on conventional color correction to help color him into the background, but that usually looks pretty rookie & unsavory in my opinion, since any color adjustments to affect the “bounce/ambient” light will also affect the entire subject’s color, even the areas being illuminated by the key light. So with a magenta fill, we had some tweakable “ambient” light to match the backgrounds in post.

You can see from the original footage on the right that not only was I able to easily change the hue & saturation of the magenta fill, but also the luminance. More examples from the exact same lighting setup below…

Also, note that in these examples (which I composited & color graded myself) the tweaking of the magenta fill was done with just the “Hue and Saturation” effect in After Effects due to what was available on that particular workstation. Theoretically, Color Finesse’s secondary color correction would’ve given even better results.

Realism in night exterior lighting

Meek’s Cutoff, directed & edited by Kelly Reichardt, is a very well-crafted, interesting film with an ethereal contemplative tone, with many sequences that utilize unconventional framing and cadence. This is kinda a pretentious way of me saying “I liked it”.

Yeah so anyways, there are also some scenes that are lit unconventionally as well. The standard fare in lighting night exteriors is to have a bluish kicker that’s boorishly motivated by the moon, lots of soft fill, some sort of visible casted shadows, and hosed-down shiny wet asphalt if it’s in a city. But in Meek’s Cutoff there are shots that get pretty realio realness with night exterior lighting levels and ratios… like you can just barely make out the form of someone’s face– which is pretty accurate for what an 1800s western prairie would be like at night.

Above is a frame from the trailer, which may be a tent interior shot, I dunno, but it shows the kind of ratios/exposure stuff I’m talking about. Whether you agree with it as a creative decision or not, it’s interesting to see how it looks when executed by a DP who knows what they’re doing (Chris Blauvelt, who was a camera assistant & operator for Harris Savides). It also was released in 4:3 aspect ratio which is both ballsy and creatively appropriate since it helps depict the endless landscape in a different, non-cheesy “hey look at this widescreen vista of an endless landscape” way.