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How to Enhance Highlights and Shadows

This technique can be used in combination with almost every other color correction process to give images extra depth.

1. Load the footage.
2. Create keys on the luminance channel for the shadow, mid-tone, and highlight areas.
3. Blur the shadow and highlight keys.

Figure 8.17

 Figure 8.18 A single frame without correction. © Entitled Productions .

Figure 8.19 The frame with enhanced highlights and shadows.

4. Use the keys to selectively adjust the color of each region.

Color Temperature

Figure 8.20 © Steve Johnson ( www.xhiking.com )

Light is rarely pure white. If you film a white sheet during sunset it will probably look slightly pink when you watch it later. The color the light gets recorded as has to do with the color temperature of the light. Higher temperatures tend to be slightly blue, whereas lower temperatures tend to be more red (this is the reverse of how we usually describe colors, that is, we refer to red as being warm and blue as cool).  Different lights (and in the case of sunlight, different times of the day as well) each have a color temperature. When something is photographed, the color temperature of the light source will affect the color of the recorded scene.  Most of the time the cinematographer will keep the color under control (for example, by using filters on the camera or selecting a particular type of color-balanced stock), but sometimes there is a resulting color cast on the final footage. For example, if you were to photograph an office interior using daylight-balanced film, you might find that the scene had a green color cast (or tint) to it, due to the color temperature of the fluorescent lights.

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Fix it in Post by Jack James

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