How a pro colorist handles crushed blacks

when I first started working as a colorist one of my least favorite notes to get was the blacks are too crushed and it wasn't because I didn't understand what the note meant I understood perfectly well what the note meant but it's one of these notes that I would get and more often than not feel like by the time we were done addressing it and moving on either the client would be a little less happy or the image would look a little bit worse than it did before and there's a variety of reasons why I think I was experiencing this but really the main one is that this is one of the most common notes and color grading and it can be symptomatic of all kinds of different problems and if we want to identify and diagnose and treat these problems we have to know what questions to ask so today I want to share with you a couple of the questions that I've developed over the years for helping understand what's really going on when the client says the blacks are too crushed it's kind of like when someone goes into the doctor and they say Doc my stomach hurts well a good doctor knows that your stomach hurt can hurt for a wide variety of reasons and they're not going to simply try to to treat your stomach ache they're going to try to understand what is causing your stomach ache and treat the root cause as opposed to Simply medicating the symptom same thing with something like the blocks are too crushed it can mean so many different things that we really need to know the right questions to ask to figure out what this client means when they say these blacks are too crushed okay so I want to give you a couple questions that you can ask to help you through that process the first one it's going to sound really obvious but it's a great place to start frankly for almost any piece of feedback you can get when you're collaborating with clients is my client seeing what I'm seeing sounds basic but it's really easy to overlook and if you're not sitting in the same room looking at the same screen it can be really really tough to have confidence and to guarantee that you're seeing fundamentally the same image and if you are not there's nothing you can do here to solve that problem that's a problem of two different images two different displays that are not agreeing with each other getting your two images uh to agree getting your two displays to agree can be fairly easy a lot of the time it can be quite difficult so something that I always encourage if you have any doubts about this at least at the beginning of the process at least once in the process sit together in the same room and look at the same screen if nothing else what's that's going to do is give your client an image in their Mind's Eye that they can reference back to and if it looks crushed on their device later on they're far more likely to go wait a minute that doesn't look like what we were digging when we were all sitting in the room together so it sounds obvious but it's almost impossible to overstate the importance of asking that question are we even looking at the same thing because if you're not there's nothing you can do here nothing you can do here that's going to solve the fact that you're looking at two different images because of the displays that you are viewing on best solution there simplest solution there if at all possible is to get both sets of eyes on one screen at least for long enough to get a sort of common understanding and get in sync with what the image should look like so that your client actually has the ability to call it out if they're getting a weird reproduction on some other screen okay so that's question number one question number two is my exposure optimized this is a great example of something that doesn't seem to speak directly to block level but if we look at an image like this one here and resolve and I just spin my exposure what is the easiest way to crush my blocks in this image well it's to expose even further down than I am now like yeah those blocks are super crushed but it's not really because there's too much of a contrast ratio in the image necessarily it's because the exposure is really really low so we always want to go back to asking the question has my exposure been optimized and that doesn't mean for a shot like this where I'm looking at the fill side of the character's face that I need to swing it way open and get a super bright reproduction but we do want to make sure that we're really happy with the exposure exposure is a creative parameter so it's not about getting the exposure right it's about getting the exposure where you and your client feel it should sit and a great question that you can ask your client when you're evaluating things at this point of is the exposure correct ask them hey just for the sake of argument just for a second forget about the Shadows forget about the blacks for just a minute just look at the subject I don't care if it's a person or a product whatever it is ask them to look at the subject and to look at the exposure on the subject and to tell you does it feel like that subject is well exposed do you like their exposure level how bright they are sitting in the frame or do you feel like they're under or they're over no matter what their answer that is going to give you some insight into where that feedback that the blacks are true crushed is really coming from and certainly if they're telling you no it's too far under or even it's too hot then you want to get that sitting in the proper position before you start addressing more localized things like the shadows in between that subject and the floor of the signal okay so that's question number two is my exposure optimized okay next question that I want you to just get into the habit of asking whenever that this note comes up of the blocks are too crushed the next question that comes up let's assume all right we have optimized our exposure and things are looking pretty good the next question that I would ask is have I shaped my low end and for that matter my highend enough have I shaped my tonality have I shaped my contrast in the image enough that's something you can evaluate by eye it's also something you can evaluate on your scopes for example when I look at this image and when I look at my histogram here the blacker 2 Crush could well still be a pretty valid note for this image and I can tell by looking at the image itself on my monitor but I can also tell from looking at the histogram and the fact that the signal is kind of like smashing into the wall right now it's just hitting at full strength into this left Edge so that's a clue to me both visually and uh going by my flight instruments that I could stand to shape my lowend more there's lots of different ways you could do this you could do it with your custom curves there's a gazillion tools and resolve for making this adjustment but where I'm going to start is right here in my primaries by opening my lift way up and it may look weird for a second like this looks far too open and sort of like artificially lifted for a second but one of the best tricks that you can employ when you're trying to get a little bit less crunchy or uh you know kind of clipped out feeling blacks is to go up on your lift and then down on your gamma and what you're going to find is that you often need to marry that with going up on your gain to kind of keep things in place but if we now look at the net of this adjustment with the exposure and all we've made a big move and even if we do this let's copy this node and sort of uh separate out our uh gain and lift and Gamma adjustments from our offset adjustments so on this node we're just doing exposure with our offset and on this node we're just doing our tonality with our lift gamut and gain I'm just separating these out so that we can see uh one versus the other so we've got our exposure in place but even once that exposure is in place check this out I'm seeing a lot more into the image and I'm not necessarily just like flattening out the contrast of the image that's the biggest like challenge when you get this feedback that the blacks are too crushed and the biggest like sort of thing that we often bristle against as colorists is we recognize well contrast is necessary we want to have Rich contrast and Rich tonality and we don't just want to flatten things out in the bottom end to make them more visible so this is one good example of how you might go about that of just kind of opening things up down there in that low end I'm going to show you one other alternative to this let's grab a still here and I'm going to delete this node for now so we've just got our exposure but we again want to work on our tonality here's something else you can do go to your custom curves and tap the sort of upper region of what you're thinking of as the crushed Shadows okay so for me that might be somewhere around here as the light is falling off from this uh far side of his face uh to the fill side that's closer to camera I'm just going to tap somewhere around here and now I'm going to option click and maybe move this up a little bit and I'm going to bring some fill light just down into this Zone okay something like that now this is something that because it's quite localized you can totally take too far and make it look weird but this can also be a really really powerful way of just slightly opening up the low end of your image and I want to do the same thing here I'm just going to copy this and wipe out this custom curve and then paste and wipe out the exposure adjustment here so I've got the curve in a separate node you can see here like sometimes that's all you need when you're getting that note that the blacks are too crushed that's another thing that I feel like I had to learn over time is when I would get that feedback I would think oh my God I have to like completely rewrite the image and I don't know how to CU I don't think it looks that bad right now but sometimes all you need is that little nudge and sometimes all your client needs is your encouragement that like hey I see what you mean the blacks were feeling a little bit clipped out and crunchy before and I feel like just making this little nudge really makes a big difference and adds texture and dimension and life down in the low end and I don't think your your blacks feel crushed anymore sometimes that's as big a part of anything you're going to do for the client is what you say to the C client and help them uh sort of get a fresh perspective on how the image is feeling to you as the colorist okay that's another really good one to ask is like have I shaped my lowend my high end enough million different ways to do that we just looked at two of them and you can even do a shootout here like this is what we just did with our LIF or gamma in our gain like so and this is what we just did with our fill sort of different approaches but they're both tackling the problem in different ways and I think I actually prefer this second solution that we just implemented here but you can try out both and always be working on how you shape things in the very bottom and the very top of the image that's really where the money gets made for us as colorless most of us can figure out how to make an image look good in terms of middle exposures but if you can shape things really really well in the low and in the bottom end then you're really going to start to see big gains in uh what you're doing with your color grades okay so that's question number two question number three rather and the last question that I want to leave you with is this one do I have the right look in place we have even talked about our look in the course of this entire conversation today but if we go over here to the timeline section of my node graph and take a look at my look it's doing a lot to this image right I'm using my Kodak 2383 L here this is a free download that you can grab uh in the link in the uh description for today's video but this L is doing a lot and this L can do beautiful things to an image but if you're getting this note about crushed blacks especially like on a recurring basis if it's not coming up once but two three five times across different shots at different moments in the project that can be a clue that you might not have the right look in place and when I say the right look I don't mean the look is terrible I mean the client may not like the look that you guys have landed on and they might not even realize realize it because they're just looking at one shot after another so this is another really good question to just train yourself to be asking if you're getting recurring feedback of the same type really of any type it doesn't have to just be about crushed blacks any feedback that you're getting getting on a recurring basis can be a good clue that you may want to go back and revisit your look and in the case of the shots that we've looked at uh here in this timeline or this shot specifically and some of these others what we might find is that we simply need to back off on our look a little bit now there's lots of different ways that we could go about that but one really simple way would be to just prepend a Serial node set a pivot point in my contrast pivot at 336 and just do a little bit of negative contrast like so okay let's go back to the shop that we've actually already exposed properly we probably don't even need that much by the time we've uh done some of those local Solutions but this is something else that you should just be in the habit of sort of asking yourself and then asking of the client like hey do you want to go back and take a look at our overall look just for a second and make sure that we're not doing something that is at odds with your creative intent for this project so that's the last thing to leave with is do I have the right look in place or do I need to tailor or tune in or do I need to get rid of it completely and try a different look that's getting me images closer to what my client wants to see right out of the box that's a good clue when you're uh implementing your look you should be looking at images once that look is applied and you and your client should be going cool that looks good and then wanting to address finesse things as opposed to looking at an image and going no no no no no the blacks are too crushed which as I said is a a note that's what's the opposite of near and dear not near and dear to my heart because of uh the number of times I felt stumped by it and flx by it uh early in my career but it's one that comes up a lot so we want to know how to address it and this is another really good way to address it way to diagnose the note is to assess whether we have the right look in place to begin with and that really connects to the biggest single thing that we can keep in mind when we are uh taking this note and trying to implement an adjustment for it of the black or 2 Crush it's all about your client more about your client than it is about the image you need to understand what they're seeing whether that's physically what monitor they're looking at it on or what they're responding to in the image and what they want to see more of or less of the more you can focus on your client and on managing your client managing their expectations in some cases encouraging them that you don't actually think the blacks are too crushed this stuff is as much a part of the process as anything that you're going to do right here so it's something I want to encourage you to always keep at the front of your mind when you are thinking about color grading and if this is something you want to learn more about how to work with clients at a professional level and really be an effective collaborator who clients love to work with and love to come back to it's one of the main focuses that we emphasize in my colorist career accelerator course we run it several times a year we're going to be running it again very soon and we'll have a wait list ready for uh you to uh jump on to if you are interested in staying in the loop about that course and signing up for it for the next time when we do it and really talking about how to take your client management skills how to manage your client's expectations and a professional level and give them great images and a great collaborative experience that makes them want to K coming back to you again and again and again so hope you enjoyed this walkthrough on the way we can think about crust blacks in a bit more of a specific way and a bit more of a nuanced way than just swinging the left to the right and seeing how far we can go before we hate it there's a lot more to addressing this note than simply opening up the low end of the image and I hope I gave you some good food for thought today with these questions that I have suggested

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 33,361

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Id: 9BaBJa-OUFA

Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2024