Shooting black and white with the scarlet

[Harry Ayiotis]

Hello,

Has anyone shot a black and white project with the scarlet? And if so, how did it turn out? What was your workflow?

Thank you!

 

[David Farr]

I have. The important thing that many don't think about when it comes to black and white is color correction. Desaturating and pushing the contrast will never give me satisfactory results. You may be able to find a LUT that you like, but I will always throw it in Resolve and play with hue shifts on each channel (with a desaturated node later in the tree) to get a satisfactory look. That is just me though. You will want to adjust your workflow to meet your requirements.

 

[Ryan Sims]

Here's a link on Vimeo to an all B&W short I shot on my Scarlet. We just turned the saturation all the way down on the camera to monitor on set.
I wasn't really involved in the post so I don't have all the details. It was finished all in FCPX.

 

[Ben Scott]

Nope but this is a still I was messing about with from a recent film shoot on Scarlet and it's got me thinking about having some of it in B&W

 

[Drew Baird]

I tried altering some footage by shifting the hues and this is what I came up with:

#1 This is the original shot
#2 This is the original shot + desaturation and contrast
#3 This is the shot after altering hues + desaturation
#4 This is the shot after altering hues with saturation at 1 to show how the colors were altered

Cool test. I did it all in RCX. I would imagine resolve would open up a world of B&W corrections, but I wanted to keep this under 10min. I definitely prefer the look of hue shifting. It looks more filmic to me. Just adding desaturation looks digital and flat IMO.

 

[Domenic Barbero]

Shot this with scarlet and red pro primes

 

[Drew Baird]

Nope but this is a still I was messing about with from a recent film shoot on Scarlet and it's got me thinking about having some of it in B&W

This looks great Ben! What was your process in getting such a rich range?

 

[Jesper Sichlau]

I have. The important thing that many don't think about when it comes to black and white is color correction. Desaturating and pushing the contrast will never give me satisfactory results. You may be able to find a LUT that you like, but I will always throw it in Resolve and play with hue shifts on each channel (with a desaturated node later in the tree) to get a satisfactory look. That is just me though. You will want to adjust your workflow to meet your requirements.

I strongly recommend Film Convert. And also I love the black and white images from the Scarlet, usually it's best if you know it when you shoot it i.e. cranking up the contrast and removing all the desaturating it in camera.

 

[Les Hillis]

Some Scarlet-X black and white tones -








Black and white photography/cinematography is a pretty big subject...wish I knew enough about it to be able to give advice.

Check out this thread though, from someone who's mastered the old black and white studio look, if that's the kind of B&W you're interested in, or just to see what can be done - http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?108567-Going-VERY-old-school!-Black-and-white-high-key-with-nets-fun-stuff



Edit- I do agree though with what's been said about having to get in there and tweak/tune the tones after desaturating.

 

[Ben Scott]

This looks great Ben! What was your process in getting such a rich range?

Thanks Drew. I shot with a 3-stop soft edge grad filter so everything was exposed well in between the goal posts then in Recine-X in the 'curve settings' I adjusted the range sliders for shadows, darks and midtones so the shadows was a smaller range so I could get deep blacks with bringing everything else down too much - likewise I did the same for the midsto dial in the ranges I wanted lifted or brought down (top slider of each section). Saturation down in the post controls.