I have a shoot coming up in a room lined with RGB panels. I’ll mostly be shooting white, but plan to have a few shots with all red or all blue or all green. I did a quick location scout and even though none of my traffic lights clipped, it feels like the footage is over saturated, like it’s losing some sharpness. I’m wondering if there are any tips for exposing / monitoring RGB?
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Shooting with RGB lights
- Thread starter SamRoden
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Alex Lubensky
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The thing is - when you're shooting in either red, green or blue - pure colors tend to oversaturate and really lack details on Bayer-pattern sensors. Actually, it's like dividing your resolution by a number of 3. It's OK for any camera, except for maybe film ones, to do so.
Shooting in clean colors is easier in dark scenes, where you can try not to totally clip a channel. Bright ones can be tricky to expose properly.
Shooting in clean colors is easier in dark scenes, where you can try not to totally clip a channel. Bright ones can be tricky to expose properly.
Alex Zeder
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For the resolution part, but depending on whether the other colors/reflections in the scene allow it, you could shift the pure R, G and B LED colors 60 degree along the color wheel in one direction for the shoot, and back in the other direction in post. For example, set the LEDs that should be red to yellow instead, the green ones to cyan, and blue to magenta.
That doubles the effective resolution compared to the pure RGB colors but be careful how light is reflected on surfaces because reflections often color-shift into another direction and then it might take a while to reverse that in post.
That doubles the effective resolution compared to the pure RGB colors but be careful how light is reflected on surfaces because reflections often color-shift into another direction and then it might take a while to reverse that in post.
Aaron Lochert
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On a bayer-pattern sensor, if you shoot with monochromatic red or blue LEDs, you're only capturing data on 1/4 of the pixels on the sensor. Green will lose less resolution as there's two green pixels for every red and blue, but you'll still cut your resolution in half when shooting with monochromatic green light.
If the lights don't need to change during the shot or don't need to be mixed with other colors, then I would look into actually gelling your full spectrum white lights so that you capture some data on the other two channels. Or if they do need to change during the shot, perhaps do some tests by blending in a tiny amount of white light with the color so that you're exposing at least something onto the other two channels. i.e., don't set the panel to 100% saturated red, try 90% or something like that.
If the lights don't need to change during the shot or don't need to be mixed with other colors, then I would look into actually gelling your full spectrum white lights so that you capture some data on the other two channels. Or if they do need to change during the shot, perhaps do some tests by blending in a tiny amount of white light with the color so that you're exposing at least something onto the other two channels. i.e., don't set the panel to 100% saturated red, try 90% or something like that.
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