Editing: Colour Correction

Colour Finesse Image Correction

HSL Hue Offset

Without Hue Correction

With Hue Correction

The first thing I did with this was use the Hue Offsets to increase the dark blue highlights, then slightly increase pale blue midtones and the even out the colour within the shadows by increasing the shadows in the direction of a very pale yellow/orange colour. Doing this helped to give a cooler and slightly blue effect, which is often associated with night time film. It also helped to greatly reduce the yellowish tint that was being given off by the natural lighting on set. But even with all of this, the footage was still quite bright and didn't look like it was in a darker room or shot at night time.

CMY Colour Correction

Without Levels Correction

With Levels Correction

This colour correction helped to reduce the yellow tones further and slightly enhance the whites and paler tones shown in the footage, to help improve the quality of the image when the brightness is reduced, as the white tones can be darkened easier and with a lot smaller loss of quality than yellow tones being darkened.

Master Levels

Without Levels Correction

Without Levels Correction

The levels correction helped adjust the ratio of dark:light within my footage. I did this by bringing in the white and black sliders, to reduce the spectrum, then I moved the central slider towards the lighter side, so the ratio of dark:light is more in favor of the darker images, which reduced the amount of light areas, such as where the lighting was shining more brightly and more intensely and increases the amount of dark areas, such as shadows being enhanced more greatly.

Effects All Together

The effects layered all together, are what turned some quite bright and unrealistic lighting levels adjust the scenes to look more like I originally intended them too, which is as if it was shot at night time, but due to restrictions presented by the cameras ability, I was unable to do this through natural lighting levels, and resorted to doing it with the post-production colour correction, as shown above. This technique has helped me to achieve what I originally intended to achieve, but also for me to have had to improvise and teach my self a new skill, which is learning to do and use a completely unfamiliar and new style of colour correction and for me to use and learn new methodology to achieve the night time/low lighting level through this.

Grain Removal/Reduction

Grain Removal Tool

After doing the colour correction, it meant that because I had reduced certain aspects and elements of the shots, such as brightness and increasing settings such as the shadows, I had also increased the grainy effect in the background of the shots, but I found an easily solution to help fix, or at least reduce this, which was to use the grain reduction tool. This meant that I could easily remove a lot of the grain that was present in the video, and I could control how much I wanted the grain to be removed by, which is down to each individual shot. The grain removed is down by controlling a slight level of blurring within the selected area to you wish to be effected by the tool, and this is how you also increase the intensity of the blurring.

Evaluation

Learning to do this for my film was an important skill that I needed to develop to help make my film look as best as I could. The importance of this stage of post-production was very great as the raw versions of each piece of footage looked quite poor due to uneven colour levels, making the footage appear quite bland, overly bright and unnatural, bring the quality level of the film down greatly. By learning the steps required to make footage look balanced in terms of colours and adjusting lighting intensity, I was able to best bring out a look very typically used within Action/Adventure and Thriller films.