How to Grade Under & Over Exposed Images

if you've spent any time at all here on the channel you know how passionate I am about the idea of thinking photographically about carrying the concepts and ideas and methods of cinematography into the way that we color grade I feel like all too often we think photographically we design shots we capture shots in filmmaking and then we get into the post-production process the color grading process for those images and we discard the ideas of cinematography and photography and swap them in for an entirely alien set of tools and language and I really feel like that comes at the detriment of what we're trying to accomplish for our images so huge believer in carrying the ideas of Photography all the way through the color grading process which is why I'm super excited about our topic today we're talking about exposure and in particular what we might call overexposure or under exposure but what to me is really a simple matter of how do I move exposure as a colorist how do I navigate exposures where they come in to my color grading environment versus where I want to see them go and what do I do when there's a larger Gap there as sometimes happens so again you might traditionally call that over or under exposure but I want to emphasize as we begin this conversation about exposure that there is no such thing as over or under exposure exposure is an expressive tool just because an image feels more Airy or open or bright that does not mean that it's Overexposed and just because an image feels more moody or murky or you have to kind of lean forward to make out the details that does not mean that it's underexposed that's simply a matter of creative intent the only over or under exposure is an exposure that does not yet agree with the creative stakeholders intent for that shot that's what we're going to focus on today but that said there are plenty of instances where we need to be able to move exposure I want to share some of the ideas and techniques that I use for this here inside of resolve before we dive into resolve if you haven't been hanging out here on the channel for a while welcome super glad you're here we love color grading here on the channel it's all we talk about we do two videos a week we do a live session on Fridays where we go into more depth on what we covered in that uh in the prior two videos for that week so really glad you're here make sure that you subscribe and hit your notifications if you like this kind of content if you want to stay up to date on all the cool stuff we were doing here on the channel let's dive into resolve and talk about exposure so I've got a couple shots lined up here that are easy examples of shots where we might indeed want to move the exposure and this first one is a great example where we might look at it and say Hey I want to bring that in a little bit it feels a little bit Overexposed to me and before I dive in and start working on my exposures I just want to point out the foundation that I'm resting on it's the same Foundation that I'm always resting on when I begin a color grade first of all I've set up my overall color management which means I'm using good color science to take me from what my camera saw into what my display can reproduce and I've done that for all of the clips here on this timeline if you're not familiar with color management lots of great content here on the channel on that subject make sure you check it out because we're resting on that Foundation already the only other thing that I've done thus far is you can see in all of these shots I have a template node graph in place so there's nothing currently happening in these nodes but it gives me a structure to operate within as I move into each shot and start to make adjustments within them all right so with that said let's go back over here to shot number one and do something that is honestly the first thing that I do on almost any image that I grade regardless of whether I feel like exposure needs to move a lot or a little or not at all I just want to see what's in there I just want to see what's in the negative and the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to grab my offset I'm going to be in my exposure node and in this case because we're a little more on the open side I'm going to see what's in that high end by swinging over to the left here and I'm going to go way further than I really would in a color grade I just want to see what's in there you can see where the what I would call pinned highlights are by going far enough over the left you're like all right those highlights are not recovering detail they're just sort of like flat white things that are getting darker as I spin the wheel so those are what I would call pinned highlights and what I want to do here is look at what we would do if we felt like okay I want to get more of like a normal exposure a little bit less of an Airy blown out exposure like we're seeing here I would say you can go about as far as this and pass that you're going to start to do something that I talk about a lot here on the channel which is devising a solution which is worse than the problem that it is meant to solve so much past here okay sure you're getting to like a more quote unquote normal middle gray exposure on our subject down in the bottom of the frame but the solution is actually worse than the problem because you've got all that pinned highlight and strangeness happening up in the high end here's the other thing that is really easy to forget with overexposure and color grading in general don't forget to press play okay because the shot evolves look how much the shot evolves you want to make sure before you start swinging your exposures all around that you're not misinterpreting the intent of the photographer in this case I would argue this is a shot that is designed to evolve when this flare goes away that exposure I really like how that feels again we could argue all day oh I want this to be a little moody or a little more open but I actually feel like this falls into a really great sweet spot and depriving a shot of its ability to evolve is something we really want to avoid as colorists so this is a case where as this shot evolves I'm actually pretty good with letting it open up hotter there and evolve into the sweet spot where it does but if we did want to optimize a little bit maybe we go to like somewhere like that we're not yet revealing any of those egregious uh pinned highlights yet and if we play through it I think it's going to evolve out pretty nicely even that was too much let's go back a little bit there we go I'm also going to go to my ratio node and reduce my contrast a little bit just using my contrast pivot which are my tools of choice for contrast ratio which is what the ratio node is dedicated to like that feels great if I wanted to get fancy and keyframe that I can and do like an iris pull or something like that but honestly I really like watching shots evolve and fall into a sweet spot like that so make sure that you're not doing work that isn't necessary or that's running counter to something that could be really lovely which is a shot that evolves and kind of falls into a sweet spot there last thing I'll mention on this shot even with a little bit of exposure trim that I've done here something that's standing out to me is that these highlights feel extra clipped because there's this hard Edge between saturated stuff and very unsaturated stuff so something that I will often do in that case is go to my loom versus SAT curves grab the rightmost control Point here and just dip that down a little bit it doesn't have to be anything crazy like a 0.8 is plenty that's going to have a pretty minimal effect on your subject and on things like her lipstick it's just going to smooth out that transition between very high exposure and truly clipped values there at the top of the container okay let's move on to shot number two and talk about another form of the problem so here's a shot that we've all had to deal with we've all had to deal with shooting for those of us who are uh you know on the production side in any capacity there's not much you're going to do to improve this exposure have to wait right if you got four hours it's going to get better when the Sun starts to fall but right now honestly the exposure is pretty well optimized for the subject so what are we going to do here well again exposure node first thing I'm going to do let's just grab the wheel see what's in there nothing there is nothing in there whether that's because the sky is clipped or whether that's because there's not much going on in the sky it's hard to tell exactly but regardless I'm not going to be able to bring that sky in and get a bunch more detail out of it if I drive it down hard enough so that tells me I need to adjust my expectations and do what I can again without devising a solution that is worse than the problem that it's meant to solve okay so exposure I actually feel like that exposure is pretty well nailed I'm going to go to my ratio node maybe soften out my contrast a little bit like so let's go to the balance node and we're going to warm things up a little bit again I'm using offset for that like so and here's what I'm going to do about this guy again we've kind of seen for better for worse there's just nothing that we're really going to dig out of that but one thing that we can do especially for sneaky about it is we're going to do a grad essentially doing a circular power window setting my aspect to 100 so it turns into a horizontal grad we're going to tilt up we're going to go super super soft I'm going to turn my window preview off so that I'm not seeing that window outline and I can just focus on what it's actually doing I'm going to gain down ever so slightly and just start to nudge things toward blue ever so slightly this is all about being sneaky like it's so easy to go too far and have it look crazy but if you do it just a little bit I'm going to tilt that window even a little bit further up if you do it just a little bit it can give you a nice subtle uh feeling that maybe there's a little bit going on up in the sky a little bit of shape up there one thing that you can do on uh a situation like this is if you go to your qualifier just go to your luminance and I'm going to sweep the low range of the luminance if I turn on my highlight mode here I'm just going to sweep that low end so that the little vegetation there and that like you know telephone pole or whatever we're looking at is being left out of the bargain go nice and soft there turn that highlight mode off and now you can see that's kind of tucking in even more and that's feeling really good to me I'm going to go over to my balance here and I'm going to try actually doing a little bit of gamma in my balance as well just because I feel like I've moved my highlights as far as I need to again I'm just little tiny nudges trying to warm things up a little bit and sort of incredibly sell the idea of a sunlit day as best I can so if we look at our before and after we're not magically re-lighting the shot that's kind of beyond our domain as colorists but we're making things a lot better and it doesn't look like we've like overly stepped on uh or overtly manipulated the image if we go full screen there's your before there's your after that's a great start so that's how I deal with situations like that where we just need to be realistic with ourselves about what we are going to be able to do versus what we're really not going to be able to accomplish let's look at another example here this shot is going to be similar we really just need to limit our exposure adjustment based on the fact that again if I spin my wheel to the left those highlights are pinned on the snow that's really not a problem until I make it a problem so as long as I don't pull the exposure wildly too far in from what the negative will allow that's totally fine you can bring the exposure in a little bit if you like so that those highlights aren't quite so hot maybe go to the ratio node pull back on some contrast not that far and then I'm going to kind of favor my Pivot toward the floor so I'm affecting more of the high end so the pivot's getting lower that is maybe I don't need that much of it just a little pinch maybe add a little bit of saturation down in the lower segment of the node tree to compensate for that saturation that we lost with our contrast that's feeling really good this is a shot that you know like sometimes our awareness of clipped highlights can be worse than actually what we're seeing only other thing that we might want to do here is after the saturation node let's steal what we did in shot number one do this Loom versus SAT thing I'm just going over here tapping this node hitting command C I'm going to go to shot number three again tap node six hit command V and I was just noticing as the shot evolved a moment ago kind of what was happening up in the highlights there again in the edge between like colorful highlights versus fully uh kind of bleached out highlights this just helps kind of like homogenize those two zones together so that's a great start there and to round things out I just want to look at the other end of the spectrum on a couple shots let's look at you know quote unquote under exposure or exposures again where we want to move things more open we want to open them up a little bit and do what we can we've got a couple of interesting shots that we can look at here but I'm going to focus in on this one and again in this case because I know ultimately I'm going to end up doing some amount of exposure opening I just don't know how much instead of spinning my offset to the left I'm going to spin it to the right and just see what's in there and just start by going way way way too far like Okay cool so there is we're definitely seeing the noise floor in you know like the subject's beard and stuff like that's what's in there and again this is not like my first crack at grading I just want to see what's in the camera negative so with that in mind that's going to help me guide my adjustments and say like all right that that's probably plenty for opening the exposure I'm going to go to my ratio node soften out my contrast maybe a little bit oh wait I'm doing that on the wrong note let's go up here ratio soften that out let's go down to the lower section of our node graph and add a little bit of sat to compensate for the loss of sat from dropping our contrast this is an instance where because we're opening up and we've got a little bit of noise I'm going to hit it with just a little bit of noise reduction nothing crazy I like spatial noise reduction over temporal noise reduction we have a whole video on noise reduction if you want to go deeper on this and we did a grade school episode where we talked about it for like an hour it was a good one for now I'm just going to do some shorthand here and drop that in not trying to obliterate the noise I'm just trying to remedy it somewhat and so again this is you know like a a theme that is kind of emerging of when we have a gap between where we are and where we want to go we want to have two things in mind we want to know where we want to go but we need to let the image guide us because the truth is we can't take image a and guide it toward any arbitrary point on the map all images have places they can go and places they really can't go and if we try to take our image in a place that it can can't that it can't go we're not going to succeed in our color grade so we want to be sensitive not only to what we want but to what the image can really accommodate so I feel like this shot we're like all right I want to see a little bit more this is a good example of doing what we can for opening up the exposure a little bit and I think it's again worth emphasizing like we don't need to get this somehow back to a level position so that we have a quote-unquote correct or good exposure if we want to move things more open we can up to the limits of what the shot will allow but it's not about like correcting the shot or getting it to some sort of like arbitrary ideal and what I'm doing right now as I'm talking is I've actually backed off on my offset even further I think with a second look that feels really good and it's nice and clean nice and organic it's supportive of the design of the original shot we're just seeing a little bit more into the original image so I hope that's some useful principles for you guys about how I think about moving exposure from point A to point B and that's really a good theme to put on moving exposures that I mentioned a moment ago it's on one side about okay where are we and where do we want to be and on the other side about all right let's start moving that way and letting the footage tell us how it likes that and letting the footage tell us whether it's going to let us go all the way halfway or a little bit of the way and finding that negotiation finding that compromise with what the material is and what it will allow and what we see for it and candidly reminding the people that we're working with or reminding ourselves if we shot the material we don't need to rewrite the image there's something strong Something Beautiful about any image that we shoot and ultimately we want to lean into that as opposed to trying to get it to an arbitrary point that we've decided is going to be best for the material so that's a good initial discussion on exposure we could talk about exposure a lot I hope we get to talk about it in our grade school live session in a longer format because honestly there's a ton to think about when it comes to designing and shooting and then ultimately finessing exposures it's a big subject in a way it's the fundamental consideration of filmmaking so it would be hard to over discuss it but this is a great start to the conversation here today and I hope you enjoyed it if so make sure that you subscribe to the channel make sure you turn on your notifications so that you can be in the loop on videos like this on our live session that we do on Friday mornings all the cool stuff that we have going on here on the channel about color grading

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 23,480

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Id: VxCcs3ZWYtg

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023