Exposure/processing–grading strategies for bad light shoots.

[Bill Stengel]

I've had the misfortune of having to shoot in relatively bad light for my past two jobs. We didn't have the ability to move the schedule or add light. Now that I'm in editing and beginning to get my head around color; I'm realizing I don't have any hard and fast strategies, exposure or otherwise, for making the most of super-flat (sometimes downright muddy) light. Part of me wants to just roll with it an own what we had to work with, but another part of me wants to try to lean on the image to put some tonal contrast into it and make it more but in doing some playing around, it winds up looking and feeling like DSLR footage. Ultimately, I want to be able to be more proactive in such a situation and less reactive.
Any thoughts or input on approaches that work for you will be huge.
Thanks!

 

[Steve Sherrick]

I've had the misfortune of having to shoot in relatively bad light for my past two jobs. We didn't have the ability to move the schedule or add light. Now that I'm in editing and beginning to get my head around color; I'm realizing I don't have any hard and fast strategies, exposure or otherwise, for making the most of super-flat (sometimes downright muddy) light. Part of me wants to just roll with it an own what we had to work with, but another part of me wants to try to lean on the image to put some tonal contrast into it and make it more but in doing some playing around, it winds up looking and feeling like DSLR footage. Ultimately, I want to be able to be more proactive in such a situation and less reactive.
Any thoughts or input on approaches that work for you will be huge.
Thanks!

Are you able to post some images? Depending on how muddy it is, you may be able to create some lighting using power windows.

 

[Bill Stengel]

Are you able to post some images? Depending on how muddy it is, you may be able to create some lighting using power windows.

Thanks for chiming in, Steve.
The piece that I was referencing, which just went live, is below. I did my best to clean it up, but ultimately, the light was directionless except at the very end of the shoot when we got a few pops of sunlight. Otherwise, it was dead flat. For the client's marketing purposes, it worked in their favor where there was a fairly large disparity between what light was available and what the photographer was able to do using their new lighting technology.

The hopeful teachable moment for me would be how to best expose and process to make the most of bad light. There was almost no discernible texture in the sky. When there was, I tried to reel it in so it wasn't 100% white. I can easily deal with it on still shoots by putting up a strobe and creating some direction on the subject, but with video shoots it's less easy to hammer a square peg into a round hole.

 

[Marc Wielage]

The piece that I was referencing, which just went live, is below. I did my best to clean it up, but ultimately, the light was directionless except at the very end of the shoot when we got a few pops of sunlight. Otherwise, it was dead flat.

I don't think it looks that bad at all. My personal preference would be to make the whole thing pop more, and for that you'd need a skosh more contrast, maybe some carefully-tracked power windows, a little bit of enhancement in spots, and more saturation. I totally concede this is a creative call.

I would also worry more about making the skies consistent, and if you were confronted with kind of a gray/grim-looking kind of sky, you could juice it up a bit by pulling a key and throwing a blue grad in there just to give the sky a little more saturation. Pulling the foreground actors/interview subjects away from the background is one of the basic things about color correction that pieces like this really need.

But again, what you have is not that bad. You can always nit-pick this stuff to death, but a lot of it boils down to available time, available budget, and creative intent.

 

[jussi rovanpera]

Nowadays a lot of people are trying to "overprotect" the highlights and shadows, using a very soft s-curve.
Sometimes you just need to lose some of the highlight/shadow data to get the overall contrast and saturation you want....

 

[Marc Wielage]

Nowadays a lot of people are trying to "overprotect" the highlights and shadows, using a very soft s-curve.
Sometimes you just need to lose some of the highlight/shadow data to get the overall contrast and saturation you want....

The key for this is to find a way to get the guy to pop and not the background. And this is not a very involved color correction technique. You just can't do it with simple tools like RedCine-X; you need full-fledged color-correction software like Baselight, Lustre, Mistika, Nucoda, Pablo, or Resolve. It's very common nowadays to look at one shot and break it down into a half-dozen (or more) different pieces, and use different color corrections on each piece. It's not just a single shot any more -- it's a bunch of elements that make up the shot.