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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Skin Tone Highlight OLPF with DEB and/or Neat video good enough for low light?

I love the grey/blacks on the LLO. I noticed the skin is purple/pinskish with the LLO especially in a tungsten dark room with a daylight LED on camera light. I love STH for skin tones, and colors. The darks just don't roll off as nicely. In a dark room that can be a problem.
 
There's a lot of back-and-forth here, but having tested the two OLPFs side-by-side, here are my conclusions:

You can push the LLO up a stop in ISO over the STH before you get the same noise you have on the STH. You have to starve the sensor of light to make the difference noticeable. A difference of 1.3 stops isn't huge.
When pushed to 2000+ ISO in an environment with no light, the STH will exhibit larger noise blotches, and more chroma noise.
The OLPFs look different by default, even when set to the same tint and white balance. If you use the white balance eye-dropper on a card or an object in your scene, the images will be nearly identical.
This is key for anyone doing tests: Just setting the WB and tint to be the same does not produce the same image. You must eye-drop a white card to get the same white point.
 We noticed slight differences in saturation on brighter, vibrant colors, with the STH showing more saturation. Emphasis on slight.
If you find yourself shooting a lot of slo-mo, that extra stop will make a difference if you are pushing your light.
If you are shooting outdoors a lot, the STH can share the burden with your NDs to bring things back in range.
If you apply LUTs or stylization to your footage, the color differences are not great enough to make themselves apparent.
Both the LLO and STH OLPFs still provide you world-class images. You will not break your camera by getting the "wrong one".

The LLO lives in our camera, but I would swap it out if I was going to do an outdoor shoot in sunlight.
At $195 each, you should probably plan on getting both eventually.

Different tools, tailored to different jobs, but with a lot of cross-over. Make the call on what you need for your work. You know better than we do.
 
Hans von Sonntag said:
There are many alternatives out there which do "low light" much better than the Dragon. The LLO OLPF is a crutch to help when you might get into "low-light" environments, you will gain some headroom regarding noise. However, the STH is the real thing. Much, much better for anything else, meaning for 99% of that what usually DPs do.
Click to expand...

Very well said.
 
I've been grading for a time now and I rather have a little more grain (I call Dragon noise grain because it doesn't look like digital noise), than have colors all over the place. I can actually just apply some curves and the colors from the Dragon looks good on their own, something not possible on the MX. I would only use the LLO if there was a special "we-need-to-shoot-in-night-time-with-only-practicals-at-half-strength". In those cases it might be good, but even some low light cases still looks better with the STH.
And have anyone shot something with fluorescent lights? The STH handles the colors very well in those kind of situations.
 
I started working with the dragon sensor since june, by reading all the noise about the sth olpf I was a bit worried because it was what I had installed on the camera. but seriousely after 3 month of different gig I don't see the point to order a LLO and I'm not the guy who shoot million dollar project.
Shoot 6K FF, expose well, use fast lenses and all will be fine in a 4K world.
B.
 
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