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DSMC 1 Is low light OLPF Worth messing with?

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Timothy Jones

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Greetings from dark and dreary Portland Oregon.

For what i can gather, it seems like the skin Tone OLPF has become the goto OLPF for most situations .

Does anyone use the Low Light ? Is it worth messing with ? Does it really help much?

Is the color worse than the skin tone ?

Thanks,
Tim

www.tjphoto.net
 
Timothy Jones said:
Greetings from dark and dreary Portland Oregon.

For what i can gather, it seems like the skin Tone OLPF has become the goto OLPF for most situations .

Does anyone use the Low Light ? Is it worth messing with ? Does it really help much?

Is the color worse than the skin tone ?

Thanks,
Tim

www.tjphoto.net
Click to expand...


I really hate the LLO, sspecially because people think they need to use it if they shoot low light. It should really be called the "Version 1 OLPF".

It is inferior to the skin tone and standard OLPFs.

The ONLY benefit you get is a bit more light. The trade offs in image / color fidelity vs. either the Standard or the Skin Tone are not worth it IMO. If your back is really to a wall with available light - you are much better off - with a Standard OLPF and slower shutter speed than that LLO.

My 2 cents. (shoot a comparison test - and it tells you everything you need to know)
 
As an alternate opinion, most people I know live with the LLO on their cameras. I shot some pretty lovely low light stuff on the STHL, but once the camea and post are dialed in on the LLO, I've never had any issues. Oh, and the STHL is really green compared to the LLO. I really think it's just a matter of taste.

Nick
 
Another alternate opinion. Earlier this year I was shooting on a green screen with a really diffused sunny look. Logic told me to use the Skin Tone OLPF on my Dragon. Yea in the monitors it all looked fine but my background is in VFX so I needed to zoom in and look at the image per channel once off loaded on a laptop in Nuke. The image was isanely noisey in a way that would have screwed me in Post with Keying. Fast forward an hour+ later. I used the only other OLPF I had, the low light, against my intuition. I had exhausted all other logical setting changes like ISO and whatever else. Once I popped it in the noise in the green and blue channels was butter smooth.

I've only come across one other DP that had complained about the insane noise like I encountered. I won't pretend to know why without having another camera and olpf to test against, but just wanted to share incase it informs anybody.
 
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LLO lives on my camera. I also have STH but I don't use it. I've never used STD.
I've said my reasons in detail in lots of older posts, but basically LLO and STH both need to be corrected in post for accurate color. LLO is a little orange and STH is a little green. I've never come across the problems associated with the LLO, so I'll take that little bit of extra light and not deal with the hassle of those tiny screws while swapping!
 
Maciek S said:
Another alternate opinion. Earlier this year I was shooting on a green screen with a really diffused sunny look. Logic told me to use the Skin Tone OLPF on my Dragon. Yea in the monitors it all looked fine but my background is in VFX so I needed to zoom in and look at the image per channel once off loaded on a laptop in Nuke. The image was isanely noisey in a way that would have screwed me in Post with Keying. Fast forward an hour+ later. I used the only other OLPF I had, the low light, against my intuition. I had exhausted all other logical setting changes like ISO and whatever else. Once I popped it in the noise in the green and blue channels was butter smooth.

I've only come across one other DP that had complained about the insane noise like I encountered. I won't pretend to know why without having another camera and olpf to test against, but just wanted to share incase it informs anybody.
Click to expand...

Under exposure cause noise, Depending on filtering the channels get different amount of light. LLO filters the least of all the options OLPF options. If you shoot tungsten your blue is suffering a lot, green also and red the least so you need to CTB filter your lights to get better balance in between RG and especially B. Tungsten temperature light does not let you expose blue screen in an efficient way, your red will clip while your blue is still starved.

I don't know the actual balance of the different olpf's but possibly the skin tone filters out the most blue of the three and then compensate in color science and LLO filters out the least. But the main thing is that the LLO filters the least / it gives camera more light.

Lowering ISO and increase exposure gives less noise for all OLPF's but LLO is about a stop less noisy than standard, again as it's filtering less.
 
I've used all three extensively, plus some of the kippertie OLPF'S as well. And they definitely all have their place.

If I know I'm going to have all the light in the world, I generally use the STH.

If I have zero light, I generally use the LLO.

For everything else, I generally use STD.

HOWEVER, I have found that the STH tends to feel ever so slightly more "organic" and the LLO tends to feel ever so slightly more "digital". So sometime I break the dynamic listed above for the sake of look. (My apologies for the use of vague adjectives like organic!! I normally don't like when people use words like "organic" but I haven't done enough deep research to have the proper words to explain what I'm seeing.)

P.S. For those who are still confused about OLPF'S, below, I've listed out my OLPF choices, plus the genre and the location settings, for the five features that I've DP'ed. Hopefully this can help show people that they are all useable!

1. Slasher Horror film in seculded forest - 85% forest EXT's + 15% INT's - STH for day and LLO for night. (Shot this one before the Standard was out, but I probably would have kept the same choices regardless.)

2. Crime drama - 50/50 day and night - 75% INT + 25% EXT - used Standard for everything.

3. Coming of age drama - 50/50 day and night - 50/50 INT/EXT - used Kippertie Gold 2 for 90% the second lead character's screen time, then used Standard for the rest. I think I may have used LLO for one or two scenes that were shot at night with available light.

4. Crime Drama - 50/50 day and night - 75% INT + 25% EXT - used Standard for everything.

5. Psychological Horror - 75% night + 25% day - 75% INT + 25% EXT- I would have normally used Standard for everything, but the director wanted a very clean look so I went with the LLO for everything instead.

Hope this helps!!
 
I also suspect what lenses you are using have something to do with it as some lenses are warmer than others, sharper than others, etc. I tend to favor funkier softer glass - lomo anamorphics, wide open Illuminas, etc, so i'm sure that shooting on snappier glass may benefit more from the STH olpf. Again, it's one variable out of many, it just comes down to what makes images that you are happy with.

Nick
 
I would only use the LLO for very low-light situations, or high-speed work that requires a lot of light, or special situations that call for very deep stops. That's when the extra (ISO) stop that you can get with the LLO shines. The color fidelity and overexposure range of the STH is much better IMHO and I haven't found issues even with 1000-1280 ISO as long as you don't underexpose.
 
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