Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of World War I’s end, a documentary titled They Shall Not Grow Old has been released. Directed and produced by Peter Jackson, it contains footage you have never seen before, restored and colorized to add a new dimension to these striking shots.
In this video by BBC, you can hear about the painstaking process the crew went through and what it took to colorize the shots and create this amazing documentary.
This tutorial was graciously supplied by Datacolor
Using multiple cameras is common practice for some photographers. For example, wedding and event photographers often use more than one camera at a time. In some cases, there will be more than one photographer using multiple cameras. To complicate things, these photographers might be using cameras or lenses from different manufacturers. No matter how many cameras are used on a shoot, color harmony is important to help tell a cohesive visual story. Datacolor SpyderCHECKR can help make this easy and precise.
As the New Year rolls in, I find myself looking forward to new things—new directions, new goals, new relationships. But with the start of a new year also comes a time for reflection (literally) of what I’ve accomplished and how much I’ve progressed. As I perform my annual “house cleaning”—purging old work which isn’t up to snuff, and transferring the remaining photos to yet another new hard drive (I’m amassing quite the collection)—I’ve had the opportunity to put a fresh set of eyes on everything I’ve shot over the past year or so.
For me, this is always an extremely educational experience. This year in particular, in conjunction with the typical photography and post processing learning curve, has been one of a lot of experimentation and attempting to define my “style”, and my portfolio has seen a lot of progress as a result. But I find reflecting on this old work is critical to moving forward; by analyzing what does and doesn’t work in the images I have produced, I can further understand my own style and instill it (or avoid it) in future work.
Furthermore, in reviewing old images which may not have resonated with me initially, I gain a fresh perspective and may now see some in a new light (particularly as my post processing techniques improve); and vice versa, what may have excited meinitially now appears outdated and amateurish. Even so, some of those may even be salvageable with a new edit.
When you edit, and especially when you colorize, you want to do it in a relatively dim environment. And if you cannot achieve that, you at least don’t want any direct light falling on your monitor. That can really screw up the color your eyes perceive. If you are using a calibration tool like Datacolor’s Spyder (reviewed here) it will notify you when there is too much light hitting your monitor.
But even if you don’t have a tool for that, it is always better to work with a hooded monitor. Hoods for 21 inch screens run for about $30–$35, which is fairly reasonable, but I could not get one locally and did not want to wait. So here is how I made my $5 hood in 5 minutes flat.
If you ever wondered about how grading deeply impact a film, take at a look at this interesting experiment or re-grading the Man of Steel – Zack Snyder’s 2013 superman remake.
VideoLab took the film for a ride and re-colored the released, desaturated film, to bring some of the natural color back.
Grading and Coloring are part of the creative workflow that any piece of video goes through (or at least any fully produced piece of video). It controls the overall ‘feel’ of the movie. When I started doing movies in addition to stills this is one of the things that got me on the first few times. It is a very similar concept to using curves, hue/saturation and other tonal and contrast tools on a photograph.
Colorist Rob Bessette of Finish Post gives a great introduction into coloring a video (hosted by Rule Boston Camera). It covers everything from what coloring actually is, through basic principles, setting a monitor up and ends up with a spectacular demo of coloring a commercial. If you are unfamiliar with coloring, you would be surprised at how different a movie looks once a colorist is done with it. [Read More…]
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