Muddy and boring colors

[Scott Crawley]

Try raising the median luminance, for where there is no light there can be no saturation of color.

I'm going to guess that you began processing the image with the exposure established in camera and added contrast by stretching the top and bottom to fill the range. This will add contrast overall but the mid range values will remain largely unaffected so they will remain relatively flat and if they are clustered at lower luma values they will be less saturated.

If you want to add contrast to the middle you need to stretch those middle values as well. How you go about doing this will be dictated by many things but it will depend mostly upon the method you used to create the contrast in the first place. If you primarily relied upon the log lift and gain wheels, manipulate how far they reach into the middle using the low range and high range adjustments located at the bottom of the Log Color Wheels window. If you prefer to work with the curve, add middle contrast by making the middle of your curve more vertical.

If your image is under-exposed by more than a half stop I would suggest going back to the beginning and start with the ISO setting first, then moving to Offset to make your adjustments. Yours don't appear to be that far off though.

As you apparently understand, adding contrast adds to perceived sharpness. You have added contrast to the extremes but little to the vast range of middle values. Adding luma and contrast to those values will add a great deal of saturation and perhaps the sharpness you are looking for.

 

[David Battistella]

Nice! But is it more what you were looking for?

I've updated the grade somewhat with a few more power windows and such... maybe a little better now?

 

[Christoffer Glans]

Nice! But is it more what you were looking for?

Yeah, it's closer to that, but the thing is that for this short 2 min video it's fine for the amount of time it takes, but clients won't pay hourly for getting a grade with dussins of power windows and masks. With only two lights in the scene, how would you light it to enhance as much as possible before grading? I'm not a fan of doing too much grading, because there's a fine line between flat/boring and stylistic hell.


Before and after the "more

 

[David Battistella]

For a quick and dirty.

Small softbox with a tight egg crate overhead (flagged off Kino could work as well) or build some flags for your litepanel to kill all the wide spill and , lite panel mini in on the computer and control some of the spill from that window on the back wall to get the foreground a stop or more over the background.

But if you wanted a to have even more of a morning look then take the grade into the morning (gold tones) because the blue can tend to give a sense of evening.

 

[Nick Gardner]

I may be missing something, but I think your problem with theses images is the lack of tonal range in the shot. The only thing that isn't a light value in the whole shot is the guys shirt. Put the female in a primary colored sweater. Put some seriously dark lipstick on her. Replace the box of milk with a british racing green enameled tea pot. Move the brown bag on the counter so you can see the wine on the counter and put a lite pad under it.

Nick

 

[David Battistella]

Yup,

You can make these small and very intelligent choices to build up your shot. I didn't want to get into make up, production design and wardrobe but all certainly contributing factors!

I may be missing something, but I think your problem with theses images is the lack of tonal range in the shot. The only thing that isn't a light value in the whole shot is the guys shirt. Put the female in a primary colored sweater. Put some seriously dark lipstick on her. Replace the box of milk with a british racing green enameled tea pot. Move the brown bag on the counter so you can see the wine on the counter and put a lite pad under it.

Nick

 

[sander kamp]

Are you using CFL's or LED bulbs for practicals? Because that could definitely be the cause of the muddiness. I have seen that happen before and it is close to impossible to correct in Resolve, it is as if some colors are just missing and you won't get them back and you also get some weird color spikes in the green/yellow that mess things up.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I don't see any muddiness in the original -- most people define "muddy" as being soft and having poor blacks. To me, the shot looks sharp, it's just rather flatly-lit against a white background. And the blacks look correct too.

As for "boring" colors, I'm afraid that in the original -- color-correction isn't going to help much but I assume it was all intentional (pale blonde in light grey sweater against a white background.)

At best, you can increase the contrast and sharpening if you want more pop out of the image.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

Well, the shot, all shots in this production had to happen during daytime, because we didn't have the time or budget to do elaborate setups. Daytime light in Sweden this time a year is about 08:30 A.M - 03:30 P.M and we had about 30 setups and no wardrobe or makeup really. Had to ask the cast to do it themselves very slightly just to get some hot spots out. It was also raining and quite windy on the balcony outside so I had to put a lot of time into safely rig up the LED-panel outside just to get some enhanced light from the window. But some black wrap and filters would have worked wonders I think; as you said Battistella, flag off the top lights spill. Even if I didn't have the time or capacity to put a kino overhead in this shot, I could have flagged off the main light (practical) and filtered it's color a bit to reduce the mismatch in color between the outside and inside (even though I like to have some difference between lights).

Are you using CFL's or LED bulbs for practicals? Because that could definitely be the cause of the muddiness. I have seen that happen before and it is close to impossible to correct in Resolve, it is as if some colors are just missing and you won't get them back and you also get some weird color spikes in the green/yellow that mess things up.

Didn't have those, but I will sure get some until next time

I don't see any muddiness in the original -- most people define "muddy" as being soft and having poor blacks. To me, the shot looks sharp, it's just rather flatly-lit against a white background. And the blacks look correct too.
As for "boring" colors, I'm afraid that in the original -- color-correction isn't going to help much but I assume it was all intentional (pale blonde in light grey sweater against a white background.)
At best, you can increase the contrast and sharpening if you want more pop out of the image.

I think by "muddy" I mean that it feels dull both in sharpness and "punchiness". I've seen these types of bright images by others that feels "much brighter" after grading, whites feel more white, light feels like super bright etc. Maybe I'm just afraid of clipping areas of the image to do that kind of imagery, I dunno, but I never seem to "get there" with grading.

I tried doing some midtone contrasts to enhance the image, but then most colors get "patchy" and feels compressed, but I didn't try isolating the skin while doing it, so I'm gonna try and apply that kind of contrast separately between skin and environment.



Other than that, there's not much I could have done on location for this. It was a directing gig for which I had to do cinematography and also all the lighting. There were no wardrobe or makeup so it was more documentary in that sense, you get what you get. Because of that I arrived to another question really...

...what would be the best things to have with you in order to improve practicals? If there ain't any time to do elaborate or even basic light setups, is there a good way to enhance the practicals of a location to give a better result? Besides some blackwrap and filters, what would you bring?

 

[David Battistella]

Lots of great tips in this thread for enhancing production value, even when budgets are tight, there is a lot you can do for very little $ to take things up a notch. Just having a set of bulbs of your own to replace practicals, from higher to super low wattage, some black wrap and CTO and CTB gels with some paper clips can do wonders.

One trip to your local home center and you can proably spend about 100 bucks to test a bunch of different practicals that would enhance your images.

Work with what you have and you can do some amazing things. You'd be surprise how three little changes make a world of difference.

David

 

[Björn Benckert]

Well, the shot, all shots in this production had to happen during daytime, because we didn't have the time or budget to do elaborate setups. Daytime light in Sweden this time a year is about 08:30 A.M - 03:30 P.M and we had about 30 setups and no wardrobe or makeup really. Had to ask the cast to do it themselves very slightly just to get some hot spots out. It was also raining and quite windy on the balcony outside so I had to put a lot of time into safely rig up the LED-panel outside just to get some enhanced light from the window. But some black wrap and filters would have worked wonders I think; as you said Battistella, flag off the top lights spill. Even if I didn't have the time or capacity to put a kino overhead in this shot, I could have flagged off the main light (practical) and filtered it's color a bit to reduce the mismatch in color between the outside and inside (even though I like to have some difference between lights).



Didn't have those, but I will sure get some until next time






I think by "muddy" I mean that it feels dull both in sharpness and "punchiness". I've seen these types of bright images by others that feels "much brighter" after grading, whites feel more white, light feels like super bright etc. Maybe I'm just afraid of clipping areas of the image to do that kind of imagery, I dunno, but I never seem to "get there" with grading.

I tried doing some midtone contrasts to enhance the image, but then most colors get "patchy" and feels compressed, but I didn't try isolating the skin while doing it, so I'm gonna try and apply that kind of contrast separately between skin and environment.



Other than that, there's not much I could have done on location for this. It was a directing gig for which I had to do cinematography and also all the lighting. There were no wardrobe or makeup so it was more documentary in that sense, you get what you get. Because of that I arrived to another question really...

...what would be the best things to have with you in order to improve practicals? If there ain't any time to do elaborate or even basic light setups, is there a good way to enhance the practicals of a location to give a better result? Besides some blackwrap and filters, what would you bring?

Difficult to tell from looking at the result image.

If you (when looking at raw) got a fat histogram things will pop. But if the histogram is not so thick and dragging more towards left then right... then that will push things towards, mud or what ever you want to call it.

So what is your histogram looking like at 800 iso and no adjustments? Does it go from right under clip then skin hits at 80% and the blacks bottoms out at 25%. If so, it should render a clean pop no doubt.

 

[jussi rovanpera]

Try to find a set with darker walls, unless you want a very "light" scene. That is one of the main issues here. Its hard to build contrast in a white room...

 

[Ted Parkes]

I agree with David and may have used some negative fill and a couple flags to shape things a little more.

 

[Patrick Grossien]

Sorry to hear that you're unsatisfied with your results, Christoffer, but damn you started a nice thread. So much production wisdom that I need to subscribe to it
Thanks to everyone for your great input. This is a thread worth saving!

 

[Hrvoje Simic]

Question.

Does it still look "muddy" ?

 

[Bob Gundu]

Balancing the colours and lifting the black a bit is an option.

 

[Matt Ryan]

Balancing the colours and lifting the black a bit is an option.

Nice job Bob!

 

[Marcus Struzina]

Just a question, what monitor are you grading on and how is it calibrated?
Sorry if I missed it but is the difference visible between the same upgrade file viewed in Resolve and Redline X ?

 

[Les Hillis]

I'm taking the 'muddiness' to mean a lack of sharpness, contrast and colour saturation, resulting in a lack of separation between the focus point of the shot and the rest of the scene.

I agree avoiding that is mostly about the lighting and arrangement of objects and elements within the frame.

Here's an attempt at maintaining a light and naturalistic look while increasing contrast, sharpness and saturation to create more separation of the subject from the background. Not saying it's a good or appropriate grade, but I think it shows something of what can be done just by lightening up the background and contrasting the yellow and blue a bit more.

Original


Adjusted


Adjusted more extreme



Here's another example of a similar kind of softly-lit low-contrast shot with problematic highlights. In this case, highlight details were increasingly sacrificed for a more extreme effect.

Scarlet-X
5K
320ISO
5600K
RC5:1

As shot


Adjusted

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I probably would have staged it a little differently so that the camera was pointing more towards the white window, the cabinets at a diagonal to the frame, and then bring the people more into the foreground in semi-silhouette against the window and the reflections on the white cabinets.

If I needed that key light on the faces, then a hanging dish lamp with a bare bulb lighting the faces but low enough to be flattering. And the two people would be slightly less flat-on to the lens more of a raking angle.