Colour Correcting

 Colour Correcting

The colour correction for this footage was a big job, as two of the three narratives were shot in darker lighting and the third, set in the woods, was shot in daylight, it took  lot of adjusting to make the shots taken in the woods darker and bluer, making them look as though they were shot later in the day, while also preserving the greens and oranges of the trees and leaves.

It took a few attempts to achieve the look we wanted without going overboard. We did the colour correcting on a 4K monitor, but constantly tested the images on a 2K monitor to see how the colours translated on a lower resolution screen. This proved to be a vital step in our process as at times, what appeared to look good in 4K actually resulted in a loss of detail in the low lit areas, such as the tree trunks, so we needed to adjust the shadows and contrast to ensure as little detail was lost as possible.

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We used a colour pre-set called SL GOLD RUSH at a medium intensity to make the oranges pop. We added the blue to the shadow and highlight tints.

We then did some basic corrections to the exposure, colour temperature, shadow and highlight levels as well as the blacks and whites

After that we used curves to tweak the red, blue and green levels

The final image:

We were then able to copy the colour settings from one clip and paste them onto the others, adjusting the basic corrections and the curves and comparing the clips to each other to ensure consistency. We repeated this process for the rest of the shots filmed in the woods.

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For the dark room shots we didn't need to change too much as the lighting was already how we intended it to look. All we did was increase the saturation and slightly adjust the highlights and shadows.

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For the party shots all we did was use the curves to adjust down the red levels. We plan to increase the red level on just the glowing face by duplicating the footage and masking out the glowing face and increasing the red curve on the masked clip. We can then control when the red levels increase by chopping up the top clip and deleting the parts we want dulled down. We will do this while editing.

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