Color correction help

[Andy Tejral]

I'm having difficulty correcting this problem. However I set up the camera when shooting, overexposed areas are discolored and my muddling with the color corrector hasn't fixed it. Can someone help me?

[Adam Stanislav]

The solution is not to overexpose. Once you overexpose, you throw out essential color information and software cannot fix what is not there in the first place. Use an ND filter if you cannot set the proper exposure in the camera.

[Brian Karr]

The sky is overexposed, you cant recover it in the respect that Adam mentioned, but you can try coloring it. Try using the secondary color corrector, click the mask checkbox to verify what area your effecting, and see how that works.

For that particular shot, maybe a graduated ND filter in a rotating matte box. That way you wont loose the light on the rest of the scene.

[Craig Longman]

If you are completely unable to reshoot, the only thing I can think to do would be to mask and darken just the sky.

If you're using Vegas Pro, you can duplicate the video track, and on the upper track, mask out everything except the portion of the the image that you want to darken (the sky) then apply an FX to that track like Brightness & Contrast to darken it up a bit, or colour correct that one layer. This will let you adjust it completely independently of the rest of the image.

Hopefully, your camera is either stationary, or moving very little (and not handheld) so you don't have to animate your mask too much.

[Peter Manojlovic]

Hey Andy.....

Go to you colour correction, simply play with your white input, black input values....Bring the gamma to taste..
The sky definitely needs secondary correction.....This was a quick 5 second Photoshop result..

[Andy Tejral]

Yes, I'm mostly concerned with the color of the sky. Its a pan shot so the beginning is properly exposed and a few seconds after this still, I irised down (probably should have just left it alone though).

Railroads are not big on reshoots at the whim of railfans. I've got a big issue with this but I don't think its gonna change. And this was part of a three month train watching extravaganza so going back ain't gonna happen either. Gotta make the best of what I got.

Hmm. I'm not sure why but on my earlier attempts, I wasn't able to view the mask in Secondary Color Corrector. But now, I think I'm on the right track--pun intended.

To even out the sky, I was thinking I should use Levels to reign in the blown out sky and blow out the properly exposed sky? I was messin' with Bright and Contrast but that really wasn't doing what I wanted. Should this go before or after the 2CC?

Thanks for your help!

[David Seguin]

Wow..I'm surprised no one suggested this. It may not be the best if you're trying to show reality, but then again, judging by the pic you posted, neither is the footage you've got.
If you're able to do it, I think the best way to salvage this footage is to just do a basic sky replacement. You can use stock footage of something that has a lot of sky in it, with similar weather conditions to make it match the lighting, or you can even just use a photo. All you've got to do is mask out the sky in your footage and line up the other clip/photo on another track, maybe adding a slight track motion to it. Of course it'll be harder if your pan was very long, but I'm sure it's still "do-able". Add a little bit of CC to match it up even more, and there you go! Brand new sky!

[Ian Planchon]

wouldn't that telephone pole look odd being cut in half though?

[Andy Tejral]

I need to apply the 'telephone pole' filter. Where is it?

[David Seguin]

Originally Posted by Ian Planchon

wouldn't that telephone pole look odd being cut in half though?

Lol! Good point. Hadn't really thought about that one. Well, with a bit (meaning A LOT) of patience, you could mask around that as well. Takes a lot of practice to make THAT look good though.

I know it CAN be done because I once worked on a video that was about 4-5 minutes long and just about 80% of the shots had this one character that was a ghost in them. I had to make her transparent and give her a bluish hue, but I didn't have the proper resources to do it (i.e. greenscreen and proper lighting) so I had to use this masking technique for the whole video. The worst part is that in every shot she was moving, meaning I had to go frame by frame for the entire video. It took me about 75+ hours of post-production over a week and a half, mostly because of that. And this is back when I was a full time student on top of it all! In fact, this was a school project. I spent all of my "free" time editing that week, staying up late most nights and even trying to get some done in my other classes while the teacher wasn't looking lol (and that's when I didn't skip class so I could do more editing). Sometimes I'd even forget to eat! (yeah...I get a little obsessive).
The irony of it all though is that on the night before it was due (which was Friday morning), I stayed up until 5:30 AM trying to finish it all. At which point I decided to take a 45 minute nap until I had to leave to catch my bus.....I slept right through my alarm clock's ringing and woke up when my class was already halfway through, giving me the rest of the weekend to fix it up and submit it to my teacher on Monday, resulting in minus 10% from my final grade.


If you want to see the final results:

YouTube - ‪Basement Ghost Singing [cut to sound]‬‎