Avoid creating a look in camera
This post on ProLost made think about how far that approach on color correction can be stretch. The example given by Stu starts with a daylight balanced shot and turns it blue in post and then recovers the skin tones with additional tweaks. What if you have footage that is already blue and you want to recover the skin tones and leave the rest untouched?
Just for the heck of it I took a piece of footage that I shoot last year with a Sony XDCAM, using a couple of lights all gelled with CTB. This is a frame from the original, un-retouched clip:
So, can we re-create the skin tones from something that is so overpowered by blue? I loaded the clip in After Effects, added Magic Bullet Colorista, defined a mask for the whole face in this manner, the red area is a way of Colorista to show the mask and the amount of feather applied to it:
And here is the result:
Which is more pleasant to me than the original image. The face has still traces of blue to suggest the night time, the shirt and other parts of the frame are flooded with blue but we are definitely able to recover very natural skin tones with a simple correction. Here are the Colorista settings:
All this shows also a important lesson in camera calibration. The XDCAM was calibrated to be as neutral as possible, an approach that I use all the time when shooting HD. I documented this extensively in my JVC calibration articles. If I had implemented a “night look” in camera I would have removed a great portion of the reds and yellows, the building blocks of skin tones, making these adjustments in post impossible. For example see the camera-left side of the face. Although the correction is applied to the whole mask that part of the face if much bluer than the one exposed directly to the key light. This is because the limited amount of light didn’t have enough strength to bounce back the underlying skin tones. In a similar way, when you implement a look in camera you are discarding color information that you cannot recover in post, no matter what application or plugin you’re using. By keeping the camera setting neutral even the use of blue-gelled lights allows us to do extensive color correction in post.
