CHAPTER 7

Correcting Shots

Many colorists disapprove of the term “color correction” because so much of their talent extends well beyond simply “correcting” bad color. But the truth of the matter is that when working on an image, the first order of business usually is “correcting” the scene.

Also, an even larger part of the job of an aspiring colorist will be trying to correct bad video images. So this chapter will be devoted to making bad images look okay, making decent images look good, and taking good images “over the top.”

Four More Grades of the “Banker’s Light” Scene

Pete Jannotta, one of Chicago’s veteran and most respected names in postproduction, is a colorist at Filmworker’s Club. Pete chose to work on the same scene from Chasing Ghosts that Janet Falcon tackled in the last chapter. (Figure 7.1). He provides a detailed explanation of how he approaches this image mostly in primary, with forays into secondaries that are a nice transition from the previous chapter.

Jannotta evaluates the image, explaining, “My feeling would be that I’d want to make more out of this banker’s light being warm and then leave some green on the outside. I also feel like this is plain too much green, even if it is fluorescent-lit and we want to have that office feeling. So I know that’s in the mids—most of it.” Jannotta starts to push warmth into the banker’s light using the midtone trackball, also pushing towards magenta and away from green, explaining, “If anything interacts, like the black gets pulled up a little out of whack, then adjust it. I did not do what I said to do first, which is to get the brightness and contrast kind of set where I want it.” Jannotta completes the basic primary correction and continues. “This is starting to feel a little better already.”

But when he cuts back and forth between his current correction and the source, he sees something that he didn’t see before. “I went too magenta with it. I went overboard. I feel like my monitor and my vectorscope are telling me two different things.” Unlike most of the other colorists, Jannotta did his corrections with my standard 17" Panasonic LCD HD monitor instead of eCinema’s grading monitor. In my monitor, Jannotta is seeing magenta, but the vectorscope is not showing magenta. “But assuming that the monitoring is set up properly,” he explains, “no matter what the vectorscope says, this”—here he is pointing to the monitor—“is the end. But these”—pointing to the RGB parade and vectorscope—“always help me get there.”

Fig. 7.1 The “Banker’s Light” scene from Chasing Ghosts. Image courtesy of Wingman Productions, Inc.

Fig. 7.2 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left corner: RGB Parade. Upper right corner: composite waveform. Lower left corner: RGB Parade, expanded to show black level. Lower right corner: standard vectorscope image.

The fact that Jannotta’s correction was too magenta is common for an image with a strong green cast, as magenta is the opposite of green. This effect is a worthwhile thing to note: as you are correcting for a certain color cast, like green, you must beware of going too far in the exact opposite direction. So in this instance, you must consciously wary to not let the image become too heavily magenta. The same is true for other colors: guard against going too yellow for images that start too blue.

Jannotta continues to evaluate the image. “He’s got a really interesting face, and I think there’s too much distracting around him to be focusing on him, so I like less saturation because it would be more realistic, I think, for it not to be very saturated. It’s not a real super colorful situation, but rather than green … it’s more like drab office lighting. You can still feel some green, but I like that better.

“Now what I think I want to do is get him to be more the central focus.” I ask Jannotta if secondaries is the way to accomplish that. “Yeah. And it looks like my blacks are up too high. It looks milky in here.” Jannotta points to the pants under the banker light and the edges of the banker light. “When I look at the RGB Parade, it looks like it’s kind of high, and blue-black is kind of low, and that looks better when I fix that. It’s always when you see something there [on the RGB parade] and you balance it, then you look at the screen and you say ‘Yeah. That’s it. That did do it.’ Sometimes your eye helps and sometimes the scopes.” Jannotta also dials out some saturation and compresses the mids while stretching out the highlights. “Make more out of it. Make him a little more interesting. I feel like I’m seeing a little blue in the lowlights, so I’m taking that out” (Figures 7.3 and 7.4).

“Okay. So now I’m going to go and do a secondary,” Jannotta explains. “I’m going to vignette, and I’m going to draw a window.” Jannotta indicates the shape he wants with his hands on the monitor before using custom shapes in Color’s vignette tool to create the shape.

The shape is vaguely triangular, but is similar to a short, wide oval. I ask why an oval wouldn’t be acceptable, as it’s less effort. Jannotta responds, “I always prefer to draw them; even in DaVinci, I don’t use a fixed circle ever anymore. What I like to do is draw the shape and then move it around so I can see how the light is working. I don’t care what the shape is, but if it’s an oval, then it’s fixed and I can’t control it. I could do an oval, but what if I want to give his tie a little more light? If I make a user shape, then I can pull that section down, because I’ll have it set up. I’m always wanting to be able to move the shape around as if you were pointing a light.”

Fig. 7.3 Jannotta’s primary correction.

Fig. 7.4 Primary room data for Jannotta’s correction.

In the discussion of whether to soften vignettes before or affecting them, Jannotta falls far into the “soften first” camp. He explains, “If you get all done and you have it hard and then you feather it and you don’t have what you want then you have to go back and do it anyway. That’s why I soften it first, and then I decide if I want to add more softness or take some of the softness away. But I always like to see it start [with softness]” (Figures 7.5–7.7).

Fig. 7.5 Final correction with secondary vignette.

Fig. 7.6 Secondary room data for the inside of the vignette.

Fig. 7.7 Secondary room data for the outside of the vignette.

Neal Kassner of CBS also graded this image. “The first thing I want to do—as my background is in painting cameras—I want to balance the blacks the white and then the mids. So the first thing I want to do is look for something dark in the frame—in this case, it’s the pants over there on the left—and I’m going to move the primary color corrector around until I begin to null it out. Somewhere in there,” he explains, as he works with the shadow trackball.

“Now his shirt is supposed to be white. If it helps sell the story, I might leave it a bit greenish. In my normal work, we don’t want to see that green, because it’s news and the object is to enhance visual reality without distorting it. So what I’m going to do in that case is to take the green out of his shirt,” Kassner explains as he uses the highlight trackball to balance out the shirt.

As he does this, I ask what he’s watching. Kassner responds, “I’m watching the vectorscope, primarily. Normally what I would do is I have my waveform monitor set to magnified, and it’s an overlaid display, so I can watch the colors null out. At this point, what I would want to do is cut between the graded image as it is now and the raw image and see where I am.”

Kassner continues, “So now, what I might want to do as well is—since there’s a lamp in the foreground, that’s going to motivate some light in his face, so I want to brighten things up just a little bit. And this is where Power Windows [a DaVinci trademarked tool] or a mask would come in handy.”

Kassner goes into secondaries and adds a small soft circle vignette over the lamp, explaining, “So I’m going to crank down the gain here, to counteract what I did to bring him up. And this obviously is a judgment call as to how much is too much. Then we go back and forth to the ‘before and after’ just to compare the luminance of the lamp.”

After switching back and forth between his current correction and the uncorrected source, Kassner determines that he needs to soften the vignette on the lamp even more. “I don’t want to go too far, because I don’t want it to affect his face particularly. Now I’m going to cut back and forth between them. It’s still there if you know what to look for, but if you’re not doing a side-by-side comparison, it looks better. I like that. There’s still a little bit of yellow left in his shirt … well, a little more green and yellow.”

Fig. 7.8 Kassner’s primary correction.

Fig. 7.9 Data from the Primary room.

Kassner chooses to fix the color on the outside of the “lamp vignette” instead of going back to primaries. “Looking mostly at the vectorscope in this case, I’m getting a little more of the green out,” he says, using the highlights trackball. “It doesn’t have to be pure white. And actually his skin tone is going a little bit reddish, which is not bad, but maybe a little bit too red. So what I want to do now is pick a red secondary” (Figures 7.10 and 7.11).

Fig. 7.10 This secondary brings down the light luminance inside the vignette and slightly pulls highlights away from green outside the vignette.

Fig. 7.11 This is just the data for the inside of the vignette. The outside data is just a slight highlight correction away from green.

Kassner qualifies the face with a red color pick and a vignette before he rolls the midtone trackball away from red. “I just want to make his face look a little tanner” (Figures 7.12 and 7.13).

Kassner continues with a helpful tip: “I do a lot of switching between graded and ungraded. It helps you just see where you’re at. Some people like to use a split screen. I find that that is not helpful to me. Because of my training as a video camera tech, you didn’t have a split screen capability. You had a switcher that allowed you to cut back and forth between cameras. The quicker you cut, the more you could see a difference between the two and that’s the way I grew up learning, so that’s what I do here.”

I ask Level 3 colorist Larry Field to take the same image in a different direction: more “straight sitcom.” “Well, to do that, I’d defer to the scopes,” begins Field. “Make sure the blacks are balanced. One reason I like at least one of my parade scopes expanded out is so I can really see that black balance coupled with the expanded vectorscope. Then the next thing is to neutralize the shirt and white balance and bring his shirt away from green.” As he pulls the scene towards a proper balance, he seems to be looking primarily at the zoomed-in vectorscope. “I’m kind of looking at everything simultaneously. One of the bad things that happened to this shot as I corrected it was that the background started going magenta, which is natural as I’m trying to bring his shirt from green. If we need to neutralize the shot, I can then affect that area separately if I need to. And everything’s interactive somewhat, so I’m looking at all my scopes at one time.”

Fig. 7.12 The final correction, with the addition of a secondary to pull some redness out of the skin tones.

Fig. 7.13 The data for the inside of the qualification, pulling midtones slightly more yellow.

I ask him about his use of the RGB Parade scopes in trying to achieve color balance. “I’m looking at RGB. I’m also looking at black in the middle of the vectorscope—as well as white—and also separation on the chroma side of the split waveform but again: all at one time” (Figures 7.14 and 7.15).

Fig. 7.14 This image was recreated by watching the videotaped session with Field and re-executing the grade. This is the primary correction.

Fig. 7.15 Rcreated data from the Primary room.

Field is not happy with his correction yet, as it’s veering toward magenta. Instead of continuing with the correction, I ask him to simply explain what he would do next. “I think it’s that window up there where you can see things are going magenta,” Field mentions as he points to the vectorscope. “That looks pretty hot up there, so I’d put a key on that,” he explains, pointing at the window over the talent’s left shoulder. “Then I’d bring it to neutral. Or I can use the Power Window with a soft edge. Or I could put a Power Window over his shirt and white balance the window out. A few different techniques, all of which would work” (Figures 7.16–7.19).

Encore’s Pankaj Bajpai demonstrates another approach. “With this image, I would probably use a preset curve that desaturates and gives me higher contrast very quickly. I do use a lot of presets. This is a cocktail of elements I created” (Figures 7.20 and 7.21).

Fig. 7.16 This is my grade following Field’s suggestion to pull a key on the window (and shirt), eliminating even more of the green, then adding a garbage matte to the HSL qualification to bring the windows down in master gain.

Fig. 7.17 Here’s the Secondary room data on the inside of the HSL qualification, plus a garbage matte on the windows.

I point out that Festa is also unapologetic about his use of presets. “Exactly, I designed them. There’s no sense doing that work over and over—and I wouldn’t be able to get through the volume of work I have without using them,” Bajpai continues, though he is quick to point out that he is working without the context of the story.

Bajpai narrates, “I can see that there is this nice mica feel to the picture and again I’m thinking of the light source now. And I’m looking at the window. With light coming in through the window, I’m going to enhance what they have already shot, I’m going to go in and use a mask [Figure 7.21], and it also allows me to go outside of that and create that three-dimensional depth. I don’t like losing texture.” He also adds a mask around the banker’s light to bring that element down (Figures 7.22–7.24).

Fig. 7.18 A secondary with a vignette to pop his face out of the background.

Fig. 7.19 The data from the second secondary.

Saving a Shot with Bad Color Cast

Neal Kassner, colorist for CBS’s 48 Hours was drawn to the challenge of the “flowerbench” scene (Figure 7.25).

“Obviously, it’s very washed out and it’s very green. There’s some whites there. There’s actually some blacks as well. So I’m going to crank down the black level and then bring the gammas down a little bit as well. There’s a lot of green in the blacks there, so I’m using the primary color corrector and watching the vectorscope to a certain extent, I’m just going to walk this in.”

Fig. 7.20 A preset curve adds contrast and lowers saturation.

Fig. 7.21 Organic-shaped mask shapes the light coming in from window.

By using the phrase “walk this in,” I assumed he was using the vectorscope to get the blacks into the middle. Kassner responds, “Well, kind of. That’s what I started to do, but the foliage in the shadow areas is not really, truly black. There’s still supposed to be a green cast to it, so now I’m going to go by eye until it looks a little bit better. Then maybe bring down the master blacks again. Now I can attack the whites. There’s a nice, big, fat, white post there that I can use to get a white balance on, essentially.” Kassner looks at the standard composite waveform monitor and watches as the trace that represents that white area “compresses,” indicating that it is getting more neutral. Check out the “Kassner’s Balancing Tricks” sidebar for more on this technique.

Fig. 7.22 Mask on banker’s light.

Fig. 7.23 Starting point. (taken from Bajpai’s computer monitor with a DSLR).

Fig. 7.24 Finished grade. (taken from Bajpai’s computer monitor with a DSLR).

Fig. 7.25

Fig. 7.26 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: RGB Parade. Upper right: vectorscope. Lower left: RGB Parade expanded to show black level. Lower right: composite waveform.

Fig. 7.27 Kassner’s final correction.

Fig. 7.28 Data from the Primary room.

“Now I’m going to bring up the gain in there because that’s the hottest thing in the picture. This has also altered the color cast of everything else. It’s actually made things a little more yellow. So, I’m going to back that off in the blacks. I’m going to do this by eye instead of by the scope, because this is one of those places where you could do it via the scope, but you’re going to end up with an uninteresting looking picture. So I’m just going to play around with it until I see something that looks good. Now I’m playing with the gammas just to kind of even out the midtones a little bit because they were still a little bit yellow-looking. Now I want to increase the overall saturation. The magenta really pops. And maybe just bring down the overall gamma a little bit to make it pop a little bit more. Now, of course, it’s all interactive; whatever you do in one area may affect the others, so I’m going to go back and tighten up the whites. So this is where a magnified H display would really help me dial that in nice and tight. But that’s close enough for here” (Figures 7.27 and 7.28).

Four Trips Down the “Alley”

I call this scene the “Chasing Ghosts alleyway” shot (Figure 7.30). What follows on the next few pages are four different colorists’ takes on this same shot. Actually, almost all of the colorists who took part in the book took a shot at this image, but the four who were the most descriptive about what they were doing as they corrected it were Chris Pepperman, Neal Kassner, Greg Creaser, and Mike Most.

Fig. 7.30

Fig. 7.31 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: YRGB Parade. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower left: vectorscope expanded 5x. Lower right: standard zoom on vectorscope.

We’ll start out with Kassner’s grade. As usual, the colorists want some kind of storyline or reference about how they should be grading. But I asked them to grade it the way they saw fit. “The hair in the lower left edge of the frame is blue, so I’m going to eliminate some of that blue. This is by looking at the vectorscope and the picture monitor. If I go too far, it starts to turn a little bit reddish, and if I start to go too far the other way, it starts going magenta. What I would do here, then, even though he’s in shade, I’d bring him up a little bit, just so he reads a little better on the screen. And then with the gammas—gammas are your friend, I have found—you can do a lot of things in gammas where you might contaminate the picture too much using highlights and lowlights. Gammas are good for skin tones, I find. I’m trying to get it natural here. I’m not going for a ‘look.’ So, maybe I went too far there, because now it doesn’t look so shady, so I’m going to back off the red in the gamma. Cool it off just a little bit. Somewhere between where it was originally and where I went. Some place, kind of a compromise, because he is in shade.”

As you can see, the idea that you need to take a correction past where it should go to see where it really wants to end up is a common thread among all of the colorists (Figures 7.32 and 7.33).

Fig. 7.32 Kassner’s primary correction

Fig. 7.33 Data from Primary room

Kassner reinforces my common analogy of focusing a camera to making grading adjustments. You would never look in a manual-focus camera viewfinder and just leave the focus where it was, even if it looked in focus. You would move the focus ring a bit in each direction in order to find the sweet spot for the focus. This is exactly the approach to take when grading: go too far in each direction to help establish where the correction really wants to “sit.” As I sat in with Bob Festa at New Hat, he put his own unique spin on this concept, providing the adage: “You don’t know if you don’t go.” I loved the simplicity and memorable rhyme of this. Put another way: you can’t tell if you’ve gone far enough until you’ve gone too far.

NFL Films’ Chris “Pep” Pepperman takes the next shot at the scene. “When I look at something like this, what comes to my mind is that it’s definitely a flat light. There’s some clipped areas in the building that regardless of what we do we’re not going to bring back, simply because that’s the way it is on tape. I’ll explain that to the client. But I won’t necessarily say that right away because I don’t want to start right off the bat by saying, ‘Well, I can’t do this.’ Mostly I try to say ‘I can, I can, I can.’ And if I can’t do it, I’ll say ‘I can’ … slowly,” Pep jokes.

“Right now, I’m bringing the blacks down to 0 and I want to bring the video level completely out of clip.” Pepperman uses the term “video” or “video level” throughout his session, referring to gain or highlights. He points at the RGB waveform monitor as he lowers the gain. Then he continues, “I’m assuming I’m out of the clip now. What I’m saying is that I’m not electronically clipping it. And once I establish that I’m not, I’m going to come back up a little bit. Now, I’m a little flatter than what I want to be. But I don’t want to clip anything now because I want to be sure my reds, greens, and blues are balanced. Now—just by looking at the picture—take the overall video and peds and start to swing that on the warmer side. And as I do that, I’m liking what I see.”

As Pepperman sets the levels, he’s careful to keep the video levels just under 100IRE. “We clip at 100 percent here,” he explains. “At Manhattan Transfer, we used to clip at 103 or 104 percent. Some colorists like to see all of the detail that’s in the film element. I like to see what’s important, what’s relative in the film. Meaning, if something looks good to me and the background’s clipped out, then I don’t care about the background clipping out. I care about somebody saying, ‘That’s visually pleasing to me.’ And that’s what film is about. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the beauty of film, being able to do those things. And that’s where the art of color correction is different. I always try to look at the picture, interpret what’s the most important part of the picture in that image—especially when it’s commercial work and I want your eye to go there.

“For me, what is this picture all about? It’s all about him talking. So visually, as you’re watching this, you’re not going to be watching the background. You’re not going to be looking at the building. You’re going to be looking at him. So let’s make him the subject. Let’s make him the priority. Let’s make him look good. Whatever happens in the background happens. Now with the tools we have, I balance him, make him look good, then I work on the things that surround him. So I start with the primary subject and then I work my way around the picture and decide what else is important to me. So right now, all I’m concerned about is him. Right now, I want to make him look good. So now I’m going to start to brighten him up again and I’m going to start adding some warmth, because I still feel that it’s cooler.”

“Now I feel like the warmth in the midrange would help. As I’m looking at this, I’m starting to see red in the blacks, so I don’t want to bleed too much, but I like the skin tone in him.” At this point, Pepperman cuts back and forth between the current correction and the original source footage.

Pleased with his progress, he continues, “Now, I’m taking into consideration the fact that he’s in a shadowed area. So you’re not going to want it to be real bright. I typically don’t use high and low sat. Only when I’m dealing with very rough film. What I mean is very underexposed or overexposed, cause sometimes I feel like I have to add warmth overall to the picture, but sometimes it affects the peds. So then I have to clean the peds up, so that’s when I use that tool. But primarily, I wouldn’t use that (Figures 7.34 and 7.35).

“So, here’s where it becomes subjective. If a DP wants it on the cooler side, I’d add more coolness. If he wanted it warmer, I’d add some warmth. But I would like this a little bit on the warm/neutral side (Figure 7.34). The second thing that I would do is isolate about three-quarters of the picture. I would build a window around him and her and knock the background down. Because what I want to do is bring that clip down and I also want to add some depth, some midrange to the building in the back, and try to give it a little more guts. The background I would consider as thin and I want to try to help that out. The way I would do that … well, there are a couple of ways, but the easiest way for me quickly is just to build a window around him, grab the outside of that window, and start coming down see what would happen. So I’m going to position the circle around him and her and soften it. Now I want to affect the outside of the window” (Figure 7.35).

Fig. 7.34 Pepperman’s primary correction.

Fig. 7.35 Secondary correction outside the window.

Fig. 7.36 Secondary to lower highlights on bricks in upper left of picture.

Fig. 7.37 Data from secondary correction.

In the continuing saga of correcting with sharp or softened edges on vignettes, Pepperman lands in the “keep it sharp so I can see it” camp. “All I’m doing right now is going down as far as I can to see what the background looks like (Figures 7.36 and 7.37). I’m liking what I see, because it’s bringing those subtle details. I like the coolness temperature on the building. I like the fact that the midrange is really helping it out. I like the fact that I’m seeing the areas of the picture that were clipped before. I would typically build a circle just about where it is right now. I tend to go a little deeper with my shapes as far as overall correction, and as I soften it, I’ll make the decision of whether I need to add something or take something out. So what I’m going to do now is I’m going to go back inside the circle. I just want to clean up the black areas a little bit.”

Pepperman lowers the low saturation setting inside the window as he explains his change from his earlier stance, “I typically wouldn’t use low sat or high sat here, because you can build yourself into a corner. Because what happens with a DaVinci is that the color correction that you apply to the scene will go to the next scene. I just don’t like painting myself in a corner that way.”

Finally, he softens the edge of the vignette and moves it up a bit from where it had been. “Now I want to go inside the circle and increase the video (highlights) a little bit. And I want to come up on the peds (blacks) a tad. I want to go to the point where I don’t see emulsion anymore, what we consider emulsion in the blacks, but I still see detail.”

Next, industry veteran Mike Most of Miami’s Cineworks Digital Studios, takes on the “alley” scene: “The whole thing is timed a little cool for my tastes, so once again I’ll go through my usual. And I’ll look and see if there’s anything that warrants being white, and in this case it probably does. In this case, I wouldn’t be afraid to let some of the white areas clip. Normally, you try to hold those in check if you can. But in point of fact, the grayscale of this—if I start pulling it up, the picture just looks flat, so I probably want it down where it was and yet I want his face to look right. So I can do that either with a window, or more likely, I’ll do it by just clipping the white areas and then fixing the flesh tone a little bit. The reason I prefer to do it that way is simply because it gives me a little more kick. I mean, he’s clearly in a shadow anyway, so you don’t want him too bright. But there’s nothing up there that you need to see, so I would just kind of let it go,” Most states as he points to the sky in the top left of the picture.

Now Most leaves the Primary room to hone in on the flesh tones.

Joining me at the session with Most was Roland Wood, founder of FinalTouch, which later became Apple’s Color. Chasing Ghosts was the first feature graded on FinalTouch, and Wood used the footage to do demos and training with hundreds of colorists around the world. He was impressed by Most’s correction (Figure 7.38), saying, “That’s the best correction I’ve ever seen on that shot. And I’ve seen this shot done a lot.”

Most takes the compliment with typical modesty, “Well, you notice that I haven’t used any windows. I tend to use windows for two reasons: I have a real problem. I have a blown-out sky or a blown-out window. Something very specific. Or creatively, like I did in the other shot, where it was clear that to emphasize where the key was hitting and to emphasize the shadows would improve the shot. But on something like this, I know guys who would try to do a window around the hot area.”

Greg Creaser, an LA freelance colorist who specializes in grading DIs, shows his take on the “alley” scene as well.

Fig. 7.38 Most’s final correction.

Fig. 7.39 Source scene from Chasing Ghosts courtesy Wingman Productions, Inc.

“I’m attacking the midtones again right away because it’s an openedup image. I mean there’s a lot of range in there. Midtones are going to be fine for the brunt of it. He’s looking a little cool to me. Let’s give him a little more flesh tone back somewhere in there. The highlights may be a little bit hot. There’s a couple ways to attack that. We could pull them down here,” he says, referring to the highlights in primaries. “Then pull the mids back up. Not much we can do with that hotspot. That would be another key situation. Or you maybe wanna throw a shape in there to knock it down if your eye is getting drawn to it. If we wanna little more bite in there, we can dip the blacks a little bit more. I think this image can handle it. Bring the mids back up just a little bit.

“Now let’s check out before and after. It’s just kind of normalized. I’d like to see a little more bite to the image, but I’d be a little afraid of the hair going away. Sometimes, if I’m grading a film [for DI], I’d use a pixel picker to see where we were in our 10-bit data. Since we’re working in HD, I would leave it where it is or we’ll get ghosting in the blacks, which is what would happen if you force it too far. I like it.”

Creaser cuts back and forth between the source and his correction. “We lessened the contrast just a little bit and gave it a normal look. They’re in the shadow, so they wouldn’t have a lot of contrast here” (Figures 7.40 and 7.41).

I ask Creaser what clues or hints that he’s seeing in the picture to decide what an image should look like. He responds. “He’s in the shadow, even though he’s lit, of course. It’d be flat light because he’s not getting any kick from highlight of the sun. So the first place to attack this would be lessening the contrast, because I felt it to be a little bit too much in the original. It doesn’t look correct that way. I mean, if you were standing there looking at this guy, would it be that contrasty? I don’t think so. So you back it out just a little bit and it looks a little more natural. And we didn’t kill it and we took the blue out. When you’re working on film, you can be a little more bold on things. But if you’re working in 8-bit video, you have to watch it.”

Fig. 7.40 Creaser’s final correction.

Fig. 7.41 FinalTouch UI data for correction.

Three Passes Over the Barn

Three colorists approach Randy Riesen’s documentary scene of an ultralight flying over a barn (Figure 7.42).

First up on this video-originated scene is Mike Matusek of Nolo Digital Film. “I guess there’s two approaches to this shot. What I would do here, because I like the highlights on the barn, is to warm it up and give it a golden hour kind of look (Figures 7.44 and 7.45). Again, since golden hour is more about the highlights being golden, I’m going to go to the gain controls because right now they’re kind of bluish-white. At golden hour, there’s much more contrast between the shadows and the highlights, so I might crush the blacks a little bit. When you crush the blacks, you’re saturating the blacks. When you increase the gain, you’re saturating the highlights, which is good for this image because it’s washed out.” However, with most images, this increased saturation is something that you would need to counteract, especially when dealing with footage that requires extreme changes of blacks or gain.

Fig. 7.42 Image courtesy Randy Riesen.

Fig. 7.43 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: RGB Parade. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower left: expanded RGB Parade to see black balance. Lower right: standard vectorscope.

Fig. 7.44 Primary color correction, imparting a “golden hour” look.

Fig. 7.45 Primary room data.

“So now what I would try to do is grab these highlights individually, because I’m trying to push more warmth into the highlights, and what I’m doing is whacking out the midtones a little bit, and they’re getting a little too yellow and ugly, so I’d probably grab those [the whites of the buildings], blur them, and get that magenta out of there” (Figures 7.46 and 7.47).

Fig. 7.46 Secondary correction to move highlights away from pink.

Fig. 7.47 Secondary room data.

At this point, Matusek enables a secondary and pulls an HSL key on the building façades. “So instead of pushing artificial warmth into it, I’ll desaturate it a little bit and warm it up like that. So it goes from that pink to a little more white, but there’s still some warmth in the highlights. It looks a lot more lush than it was,” he concludes.

Mike Most takes the next shot at the “barn” scene. He explains his approach: “Usually when I’m tackling a shot that I know to have all kinds of problems, I try to give myself something to latch on to. I mean, I’m seeing dark shadows in the trees that I can probably boost the contrast of a little bit. I’m seeing white on a barn that I can try and grab, and it’s also on the parachute a little bit. So I’m going to try to use that for a rough white balance. I’m seeing green on the bottom that I probably can’t get through primaries alone, so I’ll try to get that through secondaries. And once again, boosting contrast will help me separation-wise. You don’t want to go too far on your whites, because you’re just throwing away detail and ultimately you’re going to need some of that detail. Crushing the gammas a little bit would not be a bad thing. There’s going to be a little bit of green in the blacks. If you look at the Parade display, that’s exactly what I have.”

I notice that although he’d pulled the blacks down quite a bit to increase contrast, he brought them back up a bit after looking at the RGB parade. Most explains his change of heart, “Yeah. You play. You don’t always know exactly where you’re going to go. Sometimes you do, but sometimes you don’t. You see what you’ve got and then you figure out what you want to do. So in terms of my starting point, I’m pretty much there” (Figures 7.48 and 7.49).

With his primary correction complete, he moves to secondaries, explaining, “I’ll try to pull something that’s green here. What you see as green isn’t always green. I mean, it’s more yellow than green, but what I’m going to try to do is find the center of most of the grass and trees.” Most qualifies a green area that mostly selects the trees behind the barn, then adds a little key blur before starting his adjustment of the qualified area. “I’ll try boosting the saturation to the keyed area then I’ll try swinging the hue around. See what it gets me, if anything. Swinging it away from yellow. At that point, you can go back to the primaries because you’ve got the secondary on. If you increase that towards yellow, you’re going to get more green because you’ve got a secondary working on top of it. Like I say, it’s all about separation and contrast, so now I’ve got something that may not be the kickiest-looking picture in the world, but it’s a lot better than what I started with” (Figures 7.50 and 7.51).

Fig. 7.48 Most’s primary correction.

Fig. 7.49 Data from primary room. Original FinalTouch grades brought in to Color for screengrabs.

Most talks through his other options. “The other thing I might do is go into another secondary—I hate using multiple secondaries. I honestly do, because I think it’s a crutch. I think you’ve got to get things separated by balance before you start going into secondaries, but when you’ve got something like this that had so little contrast on the original and so many colors as a result that are overlapping each other, that’s about the only excuse I can think of for using multiple secondaries. And so what I would probably do here is try to go in and grab another secondary and maybe start with a cyan grab on the parachute and see what happens. Try and separate out the parachute completely, so that I’m only working on the parachute.” Most qualifies a beautiful secondary, isolating the parachute. “Right in there seems to get it. Blur the key a little bit. Then what I can do is try and swing that away from the greenish/cyan back towards a blue. It just makes it stand out more. Not sure I can do much with the saturation, but I probably can in the primaries, now that I have it separated. Once again swinging it more towards a pure blue than the cyanish-blue that we were getting before. That creates separation” (Figure 7.52).

Fig. 7.50 Secondary correction of the foliage.

Fig. 7.51 Data from the Secondary room.

Fig. 7.52 Secondary correction of the parachute.

Fig. 7.53 Data from the Secondary room.

Bob Sliga also takes a pass at this image. Before Sliga starts to balance out the image, I ask if he likes to use the expanded, or zoomed, RGB Parade waveform display that so many of the other colorists liked to use when balancing blacks. “No. I use the vectorscope for that. I mean, you can. Every person does it a little differently. But it gives me the ability to see what I need to see here,” he explains, pointing at the center of the vectorscope, which has been zoomed in four times. “I’m looking for a nice tight ball there. That gets me where black is black, but we’re still so far blue balanced,” he says, looking at the shadows of trees above the farm.

“Now I’m going to richen this up something like that,” he says as he lowers the gamma and then warms it up. Then he pulls blue out of highlights and touches on the shadows briefly. “I time more on the richer side—little heftier blacks, heavier gammas, just to give you more pop through it. Letting the highlights blow out. It’s just the theory that if you don’t like that, it’s very easy to time back” (Figures 7.54 and 7.55).

At this point, Sliga goes to Sat Curve in Color’s Secondary room and cranks up the green point. “You’ll see that the green and yellow secondary color correction will blend together.”

Fig. 7.54 Primary correction only.

Fig. 7.55 Data from Primary room.

Because not everyone has access to Color’s Sat Curve tool, I ask Sliga to walk me through doing the correction with it. In response to the challenge, Sliga creates a qualification based on green that picks the grass and trees. “Once we have that qualification, we aren’t limited to anything. We can change the gain, the gamma. Very powerful.” Sliga makes the grass a nice green color before adding, “And now let’s go outside and if we want to make it more contrasty.” Sliga brings the gain up outside of his green qualification before showing us the difference his secondary correction makes (Figures 7.56 and 7.57).

Fig. 7.56 Secondary correction on foliage.

Fig. 7.57 Data from Secondary room.

Sliga’s original Sat Curve alteration essentially selected a green color along a color bar with the entire range of hues, then allowed him to raise or lower the saturation of just that “vector” or hue. The other curves in Color’s Secondary room work similarly, but instead of raising or lowering saturation, the Hue curve allows a specific hue to be “swung” to a different hue, and the Luma curve allows you to raise or lower the luminance of a specific hue.

Sliga also pulls a qualification on the parachute wing for a final tweak (Figures 7.58 and 7.59).

Fig. 7.58 Secondary correction on parachute.

Fig. 7.59 Data from Secondary room.

Building Up a Weak Piece of Video

Figure 7.60 is an image that I should be embarrassed to have shot. It was done as a “one-man-band” interview for a documentary I produced about my family’s 1977 bicycle trip across the United States. The subject is my brother Brian. It was shot around 1995 on BetaSP.

We will be returning to this shot in Chapter 9, because this interview started in bright daylight and went into twilight. So in that chapter, we’ll discuss how to match the interview footage from earlier in the day to the footage shot near dusk.

Fig. 7.60 Original image from naturally lit BetaSP footage.

Fig. 7.61 Tektronix WVR7100. Upper left: RGB Parade zoomed 5x to show blacks. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower left: vectorscope zoomed 5x. Lower left: vectorscope.

For this chapter, though, Chris Pepperman tries to turn the washed out footage into something broadcastable. “The first thing I’m going to do is take the blacks and the mids and start crushing at the same time. So the midrange is going to give you all the facial tones.”

I tried to gauge how low Pep would take the blacks and mids, asking him, “So you’re taking it down until you see some noise that you don’t like, then you stop?”

“Exactly,” he confirmed. “When it gets too crushed. Right there, it’s too crushed. So now I’m going to bring the midrange up a little bit to where I like it. Right there. And I’m going to bring the black levels back up to where I like it … right there.”

As Pep takes the blacks and mids from one extreme past the proper point and back into a comfortable range, he follows the same “focusing” analogy that I’ve espoused in previous chapters. “Now I’ve got to balance. I’m going to overall balance the image. And what I’m doing is looking at the vector and the waveform and I’m touching the peds, the gammas, and the video and I’m just balancing everything.” As he gets closer to what he wants, his eyes move from the scopes back to the picture monitor as he tries to find a pleasing skin tone. “I’m seeing that it’s still a little blocked up now, so I’m going to come up on the peds.” He confirms that by “blocked up,” he mean that the blacks are too dark. “So now I’m coming up so I can see all of his hair.” Pep’s visual clue that the blacks were blocking up came when the hair above Brian’s forehead started to lose detail. “I’m looking at the front lock of hair. I’m not looking at his eyes, because his eyes are going to be darker. He’s not getting fill light into his eyes, so if I were to bring up his eyes, everything else is going to go. Like his eyes are good there, but it’s too flat. So I’m looking at his hair, his eyebrows, and that tree in the back. So I’m kind of liking where that is right now. I’m also liking overall balance. I might warm it up a tad in the skin tone.” He cuts back and forth between the original and his current correction. “So we’re seeing a significant difference (Figure 7.62). Now let’s get into the nitty gritty.”

Fig. 7.62 a) Pepperman’s Primary correction.
               b) Data from Primary room.

Leaving the Primary room, Pep creates a secondary and enables a vignette, creating a tall oval shape around the subject’s face. “Now I’m going to go outside and I want to crush just the midrange and the blacks, leaving the highlights alone right now. And now bringing the highlights down a little bit to where I can see detail in everything. Now I’m going to bring the midrange down, down, down. Now I’m going to bring the black levels up. I’m just seeing … it’s a feel, you know?”

As I watch Pep dial in his correction, I assume that one of the signposts he’s using is the amount of “grit” and noise that begins to appear in the trees. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to do. I don’t want to see any noise yet, but I want to see detail. And I want your eye to go toward him, obviously. I’m just playing around with the background right now so I don’t get any noise. And now I’m just cranking down the video levels, and I’m cranking down the blacks too. I really like that. So what I want to do is now is just open my window [vignette] a tad, move it down, and soften it.” His vignette almost perfectly describes the subject’s face, hair, and neck. “Now I love it (Figure 7.63). The only thing that’s bothering me is the sky. The sky looks like it was clipped and brought down. It doesn’t look natural to me. So all I’m going to do is stay on the outside and brighten up the gain a little bit until it starts to look natural. Just about there, so it looks like a bright day and it doesn’t look like it’s clipped and brought down. It’s bright back there, so it’s going to clip. Let it clip! Take it up to 100. Maybe even a tad bit more. Now the last thing I’m going to do is go back inside and just bring up the blacks, because I want to see where I have them. Then I want to bring them back down to right about here.”

Pep and I discuss the boundaries he was reaching as he tried to determine the black level. On the low side, the blacks were creating “grittiness” and noise, but when he brought them up, the blacks became muddy. “That’s when I brought it back down,” he explains. “Always going past the sweet point and then coming back. It’s like rack focusing. You have to go past, so you know to come back. Same thing here applies. Once again, if I was to do anything else here, I might go back to primary and try overall saturation and add just a tiny bit.”

Fig. 7.63 Pepperman’s Secondary correction, bringing out the face.

Fig. 7.64 Data from the outside of the Secondary vignette.

Using Many Tools to Fix a Shot

Using another of Randy Riesen’s ultralight documentary images (Figure 7.65), Bob Sliga uses just about every tool in the shed to tweak a shot that isn’t bad to begin with. Before taking too many clues from this experienced Color operator and veteran colorist, you may want to take another look at the sidebar “Thinking about the Budget” from the end of Chapter 2.

Fig. 7.65 Source image courtesy Randy Riesen.

Fig. 7.66 Tecktronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: RGB Parade. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower right: vectorscope. Lower left: RGB Parade expanded to see black balance.

To begin his correction, Sliga checks the highlights to see if there’s anything that he can “unclip.” He decides that there’s not much that can be done to rescue detail in the highlights, so he starts balancing the blacks in the image using the shadow trackball on the Tangent Devices control panel. After balancing them, he takes the blacks down to around 0IRE before he warms up the gammas using the red channel gamma level adjustment in the Primary Room Advanced tab. Then he brings the reds in the blacks down again using the red channel lift slider to compensate for the interaction with the gamma adjustment (Figure 7.67).

With the image in the ballpark, Sliga moves to secondary corrections. But for Sliga, his use of secondaries at this point is more closely akin to another layer of primary correction, because he doesn’t qualify anything before he starts tweaking. “This jacket has a nice little highlight of blue on it, so I want to keep that. We’re going to use that to our advantage a little later.”

Fig. 7.67 Sliga’s primary correction is minimal due to his workflow of using secondaries as additional layers of primaries.

Fig. 7.68 Data from Primary room. Note the information under the wheels and that he did some corrections in the Advanced tab with individual color channels.

“We’re gonna richen this up,” Sliga states as he pulls down the gammas, “and warm this up a little” (Figures 7.69 and 7.70).

Sliga attempts to “green” the grass a little bit using the Hue curve, but undoes the correction. Then he pulls a luminance matte on the sky and pushes the highlight wheel towards blue. “Then let’s go outside of it and warm it up a touch.” Sliga selects outside of the qualification and pulls the gamma wheel to red (Figures 7.71–7.73).

The grass is quite reddish/yellow/green at this point. “So we’ve gone from there to there,” he says, checking the original shot against his correction. “Feels like it’s nice and warm and the sun is low.”

Fig. 7.69 Secondary correction.

Fig. 7.70 Data from Secondary room.

Fig. 7.71 Second Secondary correction, cooling the sky and warming everything else.

Fig. 7.72 Data on the correction from inside of the sky qualification, cooling the highlights.

Fig. 7.73 Data on the correction from the outside of the sky qualification, warming the rest of the image in the midtones.

At this point, Sliga leaves Color’s Secondary room for a foray into the Color FX room. “Let’s do a highlight blur. So we’re going to need an alpha blend, we’re going to need a blur, and we’ll need a key. So I generally drag black and white into scale and just adjust the scale creating a highlight key.” Sliga drags a Blur to the output of the scale node and blurs it, adjusts the blur, then connects that to the key channel of the alpha blend node.

“Now we have another blur here, and we’ll take this blur up big time. If I drag the blurry image into the light section of the alpha blend, which is source 2, then press alpha blend, it’s going to blur the highlights. But if we drag it to the other input of the alpha blend node, it’ll blur the shadows” (Figure 7.74).

Fig. 7.74 Apple Color’s ColorFX Room node tree.

Grading with Curves in Primary

As I mentioned earlier in the book, Terry Curren was one of the few proponents of using curves, which are now available in Color’s Primary In room. But when I was interviewing colorists for the book, I was using Color’s predecessor, FinalTouch, which did not have Primary curves.

For this correction, Curren worked out of his suite at Burbank-based Alpha Dogs on an Avid Symphony Nitris, but you can follow along with his work method in any application that has curves.

Curren begins by explaining his working setup. “I generally work with two scopes up. I use a vectorscope laid over a luminance waveform and then I also have the RGB parade waveform. I go for the black and white level first out of the two. And since I don’t have four scopes to look at, I tend to watch the RGB Parade to see if my blacks are in balance instead of the center dot on the vector.”

Fig. 7.75 Boat on the Chicago River in Chicago.

Fig. 7.76 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: YRGB Parade. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower right: vectorscope. Lower left: vectorscope expanded 5x.

“My first step would be to get down to black with at least one of the colors, whichever is the lowest,” Curren explains as he uses the Master Curve to drop blacks down overall. “Then bring the others down. In this case, the blacks are a little green. I can instantly look and see the bulk of the image is here,” he says, as he points to the bottom of the RGB Parade. “I can see that in the picture too,” he says, pointing on the monitor to the dark water.

“The gamma needs to be bumped, so I can grab that and I’m bringing up the gamma and not the blacks or the top (highlights) any. I can see that the overall picture has a blue tint to it. For most scenes, in the gamma on the RGB parade it goes like that,” he says placing a pen across the RGB Parade shapes in the gammas, showing a slight downward angle from the red to the blue side of about 10 to 15 degrees. “In other words, it’s not equal red, green, and blue in the middle. But the RGB here is straight across the gammas. So I can see that the blue gamma is high and reds are a little low. That warms the image up a bit. If I wanted to, I could go into the secondaries and pull out some of the green in the water or make it really green” (Figures 7.77 and 7.78).

Fig. 7.77 Curren’s screenshot of his curves correction shows his primary correction in the center and the source image on either side. The master saturation has been increased, but all other color correction was done with the four curves. This correction took less than 30 seconds.

Fig. 7.78 The scopes for the corrected footage. Composite low pass waveform in the upper left, RGB Parade at the upper right, 5x zoomed vectorscope in the lower right and a standard vectorscope in the lower left.

Curren continues exploring the scene called “Blue Sky Tree” (Figures 7.79 and 7.80) using the curves in his Symphony Nitris.

Fig. 7.79

Fig. 7.80 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: RGB Parade. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower right: vectorscope. Lower left: RGB Parade expanded to show black balance.

“So this is why I’m in curves so much. For me, I want to bring out the gamma in this to get more life in the picture—make it pop more. Now, there is a lot of blue in this. Of course, it’s a blue sky, but there’s also a lot of blue in the blacks, too,” he demonstrates, pointing to the bottom of the RGB parade. “The red black is down there, the green is a little higher, and the blue is up here. Generally, I see the gammas weighted the opposite way,” he says, demonstrating the angle again. “But right now it’s weighted this way,” he comments, showing that the angle is the opposite of the way he wants it.

“You can tell by looking at it that it’s a very blue picture. So basically, what I’ve done is this: I’ve brought up the gamma, I pulled some blue out, and I’ve added a little red,” moving the high/mid blues down on the curve and the high/mid reds up barely. “Then, if this was a commercial, they’d probably want the sky to pop more, so this is where the secondaries would come in for me, in the skies, to bring them out more. Just drive the sky more blue while holding blue out of the clouds. That’s where I really find myself using the secondaries the most—on skies. Sky looks great like this as a dark blue, but usually it’s much brighter. So if you can grab it and bring the luminance down on it without affecting the rest of the picture, that’s really nice” (Figures 7.81 and 7.82).

Curren does another correction of some Randy Riesen footage with curves in Symphony (Figures 7.83 and 7.84).

“Again, I’m going in to pull up gamma,” he says as he uses the master curve about one-third up from the bottom. “I’m going to bring the highs down lower because they’re clipped anyway. I find when they’re already clipped, I like to get them down below 100IRE. It seems to not be as offensive. Obviously, the picture is blue, but I can see, looking at the bottom of the RGB Parade, that both the green and blue are much higher. So in the reds I can bring up the gamma and I can bring both the blue and the green down in the blacks. Basically, I’ve pulled all the blue cast out of it. But you might not want that, because this is a downtown city, which is always kind of blue in the middle of the day, because you never see the sun until it’s directly overhead. Again, this all depends on what was wrapped around it. Left to my own devices, this is where I would go, because it’s the closest to normal,” Curren concludes (Figures 7.85 and 7.86).

Fig. 7.81 Symphony color correction UI. Center image is the final.

Fig. 7.82 Scopes on final correction.

Fig. 7.83

Fig. 7.84 Tecktronix WVR7100 screengrab,. Upper left: RGB Parade. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower right: vectorscope. Lower left: RGB Parade expanded to see black balance.

Fig. 7.85

Fig. 7.86

Broadening the Color Palette

Mike Most uses the “Chasing Ghosts—Diner” scene (Figure 7.87) to explain how a colorist can add interest to a shot by broadening the color palette of the shot. Once again, Most is working without the direction of the cameraman, so he must guess about the intent of the shot (Figure 7.88).

“On shots like this, I find that most cameramen are going for mixed light. And if you find the mixed light, you bring a lot of life to it, and here it seems a little more of a blue cast. But if I start throwing a little more warmth in the mid range and the highs and keep the coolness in the blacks, it takes on a little more life. If I looked at where it started, it looked a little bit monochromatic, but in most situations like this, the key on the people is usually warm to counteract the bluer daylight that’s coming through the windows. Once you throw in a little bit of warmth, and I probably went a little too far here, it tends to separate things better. And it’s not a matter of bright and dark; it’s a matter of color, because you need to widen the color palette to get rid of the monochromatic thing. Now, it happens that he may have been going for an intentional monochromatic look for mood, but this makes it more visually interesting, at least to me. By adding a little bit of warmth, I separate the curtains by the window. I separate the foreground biscuit tray or croissants or whatever they are and I make the faces come out a little bit more. I also put a little bit of color into the back window and wall, which may or may not be appropriate. In this case, it’s more a sense of set lighting and aesthetics that’s guiding me, because I have no idea what’s going on in the story. The reason they put that foreground in there is to make a more interesting frame. It has no other reason to be there. In this case, there’s some color to it, so filling out the color is a good thing” (Figures 7.89 and 7.90).

Fig. 7.87 Source image from Chasing Ghosts, image courtesy Wingman Productions, Inc.

Fig. 7.88 Tektronix WVR7100 screengrab. Upper left: YRGB Parade. Upper right: composite waveform. Lower right: vectorscope. Lower left: vectorscope expanded 5x.

Fig. 7.89 Most’s primary correction. The subtlety of this correction may be difficult to discern in print.

Fig. 7.90 Data from the Primary room of Color. The original correction was done in FinalTouch2K on the actual film scan and was later saved and copied to the HD image in Color.