360 The Digital Filmmaking Handbook, 4E

Color Plate 28 shows that although the video in Figure 16.14 can be greatly improved, the overexposure is impossible to fix. The blown-out area of the white picket fence has not improved. However, it was possible to correct the exposure in the areas that are not so severely overexposed, such as the woman’s hair. And because we humans tend to be drawn to the faces and heads of other humans, having her hair properly exposed helps a lot to mask the problems in the rest of the frame. On the other hand, the image in Figure 16.15 is also overexposed but not so severely. You can see the corrected color in Color Plate 29.

Figure 16.15

This image is overexposed but still correctable. (See Color Plate 29.)

Try It Yourself

We’ve provided short clips of the video files shown in this chapter so that you can try your hand at correcting the color yourself. They can be found at www.thedigitalfilmmakinghandbook.com/ chapter16.

Correcting Bad White Balance

As we discussed in Chapter 7, “Using the Camera,” properly white balancing your camera before shooting is essential to getting good color. However, there’s no guarantee that your camera’s white-balance function will always work properly. A bad auto-white-balance function can often perform inaccurate—or outright bad—white balancing, and can sometimes change white balance in the middle of a shot. Even if you’re manually white balancing, mixed lighting situations—tungsten lights in a sun-filled room, for example—can yield troublesome results.

Bad white balance can lead to everything from a simple green tinge in highlight areas to an extreme blue cast throughout the entire image. Color Plate 30 shows a very poorly whitebalanced shot of a woman sitting on a couch. Before we shot this scene, we had been shoot-

ing outside on a very cloudy day. Although we had white balanced the camera outside, after quickly moving inside, we forgot to adjust the white-balance settings for the new lighting conditions. As you can see, the bad white balance resulted in an extreme blue cast throughout the image. Color Plate 31 shows the image after it was corrected.

Most editing apps and many effects packages include filters for the white balance of an image. Filters such as the 3-Way Color Corrector in Apple Final Cut Pro let you use an Eyedropper tool to select an area that should be white and correct the rest of the image accordingly. If that doesn’t work, making subtle hue adjustments can also go a long way toward correcting bad white balance.

Check Out the Tutorials on the Web Site

The companion Web site to this book contains several great tutorials that will help you understand the basics of color correction, compositing, and other postproduction effects. Also, we’ve provided the video footage that is shown in this chapter so that you can try your own hand at color correcting some problematic shots. All can be found at www.thedigitalfilmmakinghandbook.com/chapter16.

Matching Footage from Different

Cameras and Shoots

Even if you have set the white balance, exposure (or f-stop), and other variables, if you are using different cameras, odds are high that your footage won’t match perfectly. For example, some manufacturers consistently produce cameras that shoot “warmer” images than cameras from other manufacturers. If you end up shooting with multiple cameras—either simultaneously, or at different times during your shoot—you could very easily end up with different shots in the same scene that don’t have quite the same color quality or sharpness.

Low-budget filmmakers who are borrowing equipment are especially susceptible to this problem, as they might not always be able to borrow the same gear. If your principal shoot is over and you’re now trying to get some “pickup” shots, you might find yourself shooting with a different brand or model of camera, or with the same camera but during a different time of year when the light is slightly different.

Matching footage from different cameras can be difficult because it’s often a combination of factors that make footage from one camera look different from another camera. When performing such adjustments, consider the following:

nUse the same approach that we used earlier. Identify the main problem, correct it with a filter, and then use additional filters to remove lingering color troubles.

nNote that some cameras have different levels of sharpness and detail. Differences in detail can often be perceived as slight differences in tone or color. Just as a pattern of black-and-white dots in a newspaper photo can appear gray to the eye, more or less detail in an image can make color appear different. Higher sharpness can also increase the level of contrast in an image. Experiment with subtly using image-sharpening filters to sharpen details from softer cameras. Be very careful, though! When sharpening, you run the risk of increasing aliasing and other artifacts in your image.