Having reviewed with a critical eye my latest entry to the UWOL Challenge, I realized how flat and bland it all was. I took a few clips and fooled around with the contrast, brightness, gamma curves, etc, and made some huge improvements...but it was all guess work. Are there some books out there that deal with image alteration in post, in detail, with plenty of illustrations?

More than you can shake a stick at! Try any Photoshop book; the principles are the same, and they spend most of their time on color correction. Specifically for film I found Color and Mastering for Digital Cinema but I have not read it.

Lynda.com has a DVD on that: "Photoshop CS3 Color Correction Training"
It tells you the principles and basics of color correction/adjustment, how to evaluate a picture and what to do to make it better/the way you want it to look.

check http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?ID=344

Specifically for film I found Color and Mastering for Digital Cinema but I have not read it.

I checked out the contents of that title and although it is a very interesting book, I don't think it is very useful for learning color correction.

Read the excerpt on http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0240808746/ref=sib_dp_pop_toc/104-4555454-4796730?ie=UTF8&p=S008#reader-link

"The book presents a survey of the development of color encoding en decoding standards for digital cinema distribution and exhibition. It describes the key issues and provides background on decisions that where made in the standardization process."

Regards, Andre.

Andre, Emre:
Thanks for the advice. I'm off to the bookstore and Lynda.

Steve,

I found this course by VASST by accident and thought of this thread.

http://www.vasst.com/product.aspx?id=2212ad20-81a5-4415-a37a-fa0c83fa1dcd

It may not be your NLE of choice but I think the principles are the same in any NLE (only the buttons are different ;))

After some days of looking, I found a useful reference. "Adobe Photoshop CS for Photographers" by Martin Evening has a section on image adjustment and color correction which explains a lot of the concepts I was looking for
(levels, gamma, tonal width, etc.) with color pictures. 60 pages out of a 500 page book may not be a lot, but I found it all I needed.

After some days of looking, I found a useful reference. "Adobe Photoshop CS for Photographers" by Martin Evening

Excellent, thanks for that.
Focal Press publications are usually very good.

Here's a free video lesson on the basic principles of color correction.

http://www.digitaljuice.com/djtv/segment_detail.asp?sid=190&sortby=&page=1&kwid=0&show=all_videos

Here's a free video lesson on the basic principles of color correction.

http://www.digitaljuice.com/djtv/segment_detail.asp?sid=190&sortby=&page=1&kwid=0&show=all_videos

Thanks Nathan! There are a lot of useful videos on there. I didn't realize they offered free instruction in addition to paid stock footage and audio libraries.. Very cool :)

There is an absolute wealth of free information there. Each episode is a lesson that covers everything from planning to post. They're all achieved as well, and accessible on the site. If anyone likes, I have high res version of all the older episodes when they used to be downloadable. Just PM me if you're interested.

For those of you who missed the link earlier, it's:

http://www.digitaljuice.com/djtv/default.asp

Very cool, thanks :)

PM'ing is disabled here and your settings are set to not receive email except from admins. :(

Problem solved (I think). Thanks.

You'll have to excuse me, as this is my first day here. lol

And my apologies to the owner of this thread, as we've gotten off topic here.