Category: Lessons

Refining Your Style

You should now have a good overview of the tools available to you in Premiere Pro and the Lumetri Color panel.  Before we wrap up the color grading section of the course, there are a few final techniques I want to touch on.

Mask Tracking

In an earlier lesson, I mentioned the masking tools that are available for Lumetri in the Effect Controls.  You have access to a four-point mask, circular mask, and a pen tool that can be used to create a custom shape.  These tools are helpful for when you want to correct or grade a specific part of the image, such as the sky.  However, they only work well on static shots – unless you use a tracking mask.

Tracking masks follow a specific part of the image.  If you wanted to add a specific color correction to an actor’s face, for example, you could draw a circular mask around their face and have the track mask follow it through the shot.  Premiere makes this process easier by automatically tracking things in the frame as they move around.

After you create a mask, you should see Mask Path options above the controls for feather and opacity in the Effect Controls.  There are icons for frame back, reverse play, forward play, and frame forward, plus a wrench icon for customizing settings: these are the tracking tools.  You can leave the wrench icon alone – the default tracking values should be fine.  If you click on the forward or reverse play icons, the program will automatically begin to track the footage forward or backward.  If you are at the end of the clip, hit the track backward icon; and if you are at the beginning, hit track forward.  If you create your mask in the middle of the clip, you will probably need to click one first, then the other.

Hitting either play icon will cause Premiere to scan through the selected clip and create keyframes affecting the movement of the mask.  Since it creates a new keyframe for every frame of the clip, this is often a slow process – and one that can be taxing on your computer.  I’d recommend using mask tracking primarily on shorter clips without wildly changing movement.  With these caveats aside, the automatic mask tracking really does do quite an impressive job of holding on to the area of the image you select with the mask.  If the results aren’t quite what you wanted, you can always manipulate the keyframes by manually moving the mask.

Master Corrections

Most of the time, Lumetri is used to color grade shots in the timeline individually.  If you want to affect multiple clips, you can either copy and paste the effect, create a preset or LUT, or use an adjustment layer.  However, you also have the ability to affect a piece of footage every time it is used in your project.  For example, if you have a long take that you use several clips of, you can make one adjustment to affect all of the clips.  This is called a master adjustment.

At the very top of the Lumetri Color panel, above the Basic Correction section, you should see two pieces of text: “Master,” followed by an asterisk and the name of the clip; and the name of your timeline sequence, followed by an asterisk and the name of your clip.  By default, the text with the name of your sequence will be highlighted in blue – this is the normal color grading mode that we have been using thus far.  Clicking on the text with the word Master will switch you to that mode.  Clicking on the down arrow will show the timecode of every section of the clip that has been used.

As I mentioned, the master adjustment will affect every instance of that piece of media.  This makes it useful for things like basic corrections – if you need to change the white balance setting for the entire take, this would be a good way to do it.  The master adjustment and the regular adjustments are totally separate as well, so you can make some settings universal and then continue to refine the look of your film on a shot-by-shot basis.

I honestly don’t use the master adjustments very often.  Since Lumetri defaults to the non-master setting every time you click on a clip, it’s easy to forget that the master mode is even there.  On larger projects with lots of sub-clips, however, it can be a great way to save yourself some work.

Obsolete Effects

For the past several years, Adobe has continued to add more and more functionality to the Lumetri Color panel with each successive version of Premiere.  This has allowed editors to handle more of the color grading process directly within the software they are already using, without moving their projects to a different application.  One side effect of this is that Adobe has largely ignored their own dedicated color grading software – SpeedGrade – and made several of the older color grading effects within Premiere obsolete.

However, those effects are still available – they just no longer appear in the Color Correction category.  If you open the Effects panel and scroll down through the video effects, you’ll find a folder appropriately named “Obsolete,” which is comprised almost entirely of color-related options.

For a long time, I did all of my color correction and grading in Premiere using either the Three-Way Color Corrector, Fast Color Corrector, RGB Curves, or some combination thereof.  These are still useful effects, but virtually all of their functionality has been replicated in Lumetri.  The Fast Color Corrector is dominated by a large color wheel that can be used to alter the “hue balance and angle” of a shot.  This can be a fun way to change the look of your footage.  There are also lots of options related to luminance, so you can dial in the contrast, white levels, and black levels.

The Three-Way Color Corrector probably bears the closest resemblance to the Lumetri panel we now have.  It has three color wheels, allowing you to adjust the shadows, midtones, and highlights separately.  There are also sliders for saturation and luminance, as well as a “secondary” corrector for fine-tuning.

The RGB Curves effect is very simple, but that’s what I really like about it.  It gives you separate graphs for luminance, red, green, and blue, which I actually prefer to the combined graph in Lumetri.  Curves adjustments let you really play with the look of footage quickly – you can raise black levels, add contrast curves, and alter the overall color cast with just a few clicks.

Now that Lumetri Color has evolved into such a full-featured toolset, is it still worth using any of the obsolete effects?  I actually think that it is.  The “Hue Balance and Angle” wheel in Fast Color Corrector and Three-Way Color Corrector is a unique adjustment tool that can be fun to experiment with – and if you don’t need an entire suite of color grading options, the RGB Curves can be a simple way to make a quick adjustment.  There are other simple effects in the obsolete folder as well, for things like highlight and shadow adjustments.  Adding them as individual effects lets you customize not only what is applied, but the order in which they are applied.

There’s always more to learn, but at this point you should have a good set of techniques to build upon.  If you need some inspiration, check out some of the videos in the Blog Posts section.  Experiment and have fun!

To Log Or Not To Log

We talked in an earlier lesson about the pros and cons of filming with a “log” recording mode – a picture profile that decreases saturation and contrast to provide flexibility in post-production.  I mentioned then that shooting in log was not always the best idea – it can introduce noise into low-light footage and make things like green screen compositing more difficult.  Shooting log does have advantages, though – it can give you a degree of freedom in the color grading process that you simply don’t have if you are recording normally.  It also makes it easier to correct issues like improper white balance, since the color saturation isn’t as intense.  While I still hold that getting your footage right “in camera” is the best approach, knowing how to use log footage is an important skill.  Often, that involves applying a LUT.

LUT stands for Look Up Table – it’s a small file that applies preset color grading values to a piece of footage.  There are several kinds of LUT files, but the one you will probably encounter the most often is the .cube file.  Because the LUT applies presets across a variety of parameters – contrast, saturation, color balance, and more – it’s important that the footage you start with be fairly neutral.  Hence the importance of log color profiles.  A LUT can certainly be applied to non-log footage, but the result will probably be footage that has been graded too severely.

Also because of this, log footage is pretty bland and unattractive when you first import it.  Colors – especially skin tones – are muted and grey.  Because you are going to be grading log footage pretty aggressively, you want to be using footage that can stand up to a lot of manipulation.  Footage captured at a high bitrate will do better, as will higher quality codecs, such as Apple ProRes and raw formats.  Older cameras, such as our AF100 and GH3 models, capture footage with more compressed codecs and lower bitrates, so using a flat profile won’t work as well.  The BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera and Sony FS5, on the other hand, have flat profiles built in and produce high quality (and larger) video files that can withstand aggressive grading.

Applying A LUT

In Premiere, you can apply a LUT using the same Lumetri Color interface that we’ve been exploring over the last few weeks.  At the very top of the panel, in the Basic Correction section, you’ll find the Input LUT dropdown menu.  Premiere has a handful of LUTs built-in; these correspond to the formats of various cameras.  The options are fairly limited, though.

Fortunately, LUTs are pretty easy to find.  If you do a quick internet search, you’ll find a ton of free options, as well as LUT packs for sale.  Here’s a list of just a few places to download free LUTs, including great stylistic packs from RocketStock and SmallHD.

To apply a LUT to your footage, highlight it in the timeline and select Browse… from the Input LUT dropdown menu in the Lumetri Color panel.  Select the appropriate file and your footage should immediately transform.  Unfortunately, it’s impossible to tell what the effect of the LUT will be until you apply it, although sometimes reference images are provided by the developer.

After you apply the LUT, you’ll notice that none of the individual parameters within Lumetri have been changed.  The LUT packages all of its adjustments together into one file.  You can continue to tweak the overall look of the footage using the various parameters within Lumetri, but you cannot make adjustments to what the LUT itself is doing – it’s either applied or it isn’t.

LUTs can also be applied in the Creative section of the Lumetri Color effect.  This allows you to make very basic corrections to your footage (such as white balance issues) before the LUT is applied.  Just go to the Look dropdown menu and select Browse… to navigate to the file.

Make Your Own

You can also use Premiere to create your own LUTs, which can be very helpful when working on a larger project.  To do so, make your adjustments as you normally would within the Lumetri Color panel.  When you are satisfied with the look of the footage click on the “three lines” icon at the very top of the panel (next to the words Lumetri Color).  Select Export .cube… and you’ll be asked to input a name and set a location for the LUT to be saved.

What’s cool about saving a .cube LUT in Premiere is that you can use that file to color grade footage on another machine – or even in another piece of color grading software, such as Final Cut Pro, After Effects, or DaVinci Resolve.  Just bring the .cube file and you’ll be able to quickly apply the same look in whatever software you happen to be using.

LUTs Versus Presets

If you want to maintain the ability to make adjustments to the look by tweaking its individual parameters, you may want to save your grade as a Lumetri preset instead of a LUT.  You do this in basically the same way as saving a LUT: click the icon at the top of the panel and choose Save Preset… from the options.  You can also get to Save Preset… by right-clicking on the name of the Lumetri Color effect in the Effect Controls panel.  A menu will pop up and you can enter a name and description for the preset.  You can leave the other settings in the menu at their defaults.

The preset file won’t appear as a new file on your computer, like the LUT does – instead, it will show up in the Presets section of the Effects panel.  To apply it, you can click and drag it from the menu, or double-click on it with the appropriate clip highlighted in the timeline.

The downside of creating a preset instead of a LUT is that you won’t be able to bring that look into another color grading application (like Resolve).  Since Lumetri is unique to Premiere, it will only function within that software.  However, if you plan on only working in Premiere and want the ability to further adjust the various parameters of your grade, presets are a good option.

LUTs have become increasingly popular over the last few years.  Many cameras and external monitors allow you to load a LUT onto the device and view a preview of what the footage will look like with it applied.  This allows you to shoot in a flat picture profile, but still get an idea of what your graded footage will be like.  LUTs aren’t always the best option, but they can be a fun and useful creative tool.

 

 

Make the Grade

As I mentioned in the previous lesson, I think of the coloring process in two stages: correction and grading.  Correction involves fixing obvious problems with the footage, generally related to white balance and exposure.  In Premiere Pro, most of this work can be done in the first section of the Lumetri Color panel, appropriately called Basic Correction.

This first stage of the coloring process is also where you can make adjustments to try to match the footage between two cameras.  Every camera manufacturer interprets color in a slightly different way, which means that even if the white balance is set to the same value, footage from a Canon and footage from a Sony will look a bit different.  You can use the scopes to help determine these differences and they can generally be resolved using the White Balance adjustment sliders.  Again, pay particular attention to skin tones, the sky, and white areas of the image – they will be the obvious indicators of problems.

With your footage corrected, you can move on to the aesthetic aspect of the color process: grading.  Let’s work our way through the rest of the Lumetri panel to see what we can do.

Creative

The Creative section of Lumetri Color gives you a handful of tools that can very quickly transform the overall style of your footage.  At the top of the section, you’ll find the Look options, composed of a dropdown menu, preview window, and Intensity slider.  The options in Look are presets, several of which are designed to emulate different film stocks.  If you click through the arrows on the preview window, you’ll see the effect they have on the image.  If you click on the preview image, it will be applied to the highlighted clip in the timeline.

Many of the preset looks are a little on the extreme side when you first apply them, so you can dial them back (or up) using the Intensity slider.  If you don’t want to spend a lot of time color grading, the looks are a great option.  You can also further refine them by adjusting the rest of the parameters in Lumetri.  However, if you really want to control the look of your footage precisely, you should probably skip the Look section and make your adjustments manually.

Incidentally, to remove a look from your clip, go to the dropdown menu and select None.  For all other adjustments in Lumetri, you can reset by double clicking on them.

Below Look is the Adjustments section.  Faded Film raises the black levels to create a vintage film look.  Sharpen adds digital sharpening, which can help if your focus is a little soft.  However, over-sharpened footage starts to look weird very quickly, so use a light touch.  Vibrance and Saturation affect the intensity of colors.  Saturation affects all of the colors in the shot while vibrance increases the value of more muted colors.  Vibrance can be useful if you want to increase the amount of color without making things like skin tones look unnatural.

The last options in the Adjustments are related to shadow and highlight tint.  We’ve talked before about the popular “orange and teal” look and this is one place where you can push things in that direction.  After you apply an adjustment to the shadows and highlights using the color wheels, you can push the image towards one or the other using the Tint Balance slider.

Curves

The Curves section of Lumetri is dedicated to making adjustments to color levels and is composed of two tools: a traditional diagonal RGB curves graph and a hue saturation color wheel.  In the RGB Curves section, you can choose the red, green, or blue channels, as well as the overall exposure by clicking on the colored dots.  You can then click on the diagonal line to create points and make adjustments.  The top right corner is pure white and the bottom left corner is pure black, so you can adjust the highlights, shadows, and mid areas fairly precisely.  Use an “S” curve to create contrast (brighter highlights and darker shadows) or a reverse “S” to lower contrast.  Little curves adjustments go a long way.

The Hue Saturation Curves section lets you target the saturation levels of very specific colors.  You can click on the white line to add points or click on the colored dots below the wheel to have the program add them around certain values.  Dragging points towards the center of the wheel will desaturate those areas and dragging towards the outside edge will add saturation.  You can use this wheel to add or remove color areas fairly precisely.

Color Wheels

The Color Wheels section is the most like a traditional color grading interface, where there are separate wheel controls for the shadows, midtones, and highlights.  These are fun color wheels to play with; try pulling your highlights and shadows in the opposite direction for a complementary color grade or pull everything towards the same value for something more analogous (remember your color theory?).  The sliders next to each wheel adjust the luminance, so if you want to raise or crush the blacks or accentuate the highlights, you can further tweak those values in this section.  I’ve said this before, but a little goes a long way with these adjustments – just a slight push can really transform your footage, so don’t feel like you need to go nuts.

Here’s the same shot, first with the oh-so-trendy orange/blue complementary split (with milky raised blacks for a filmic look), then with a green/teal analogous and contrasty Matrix-esque grade:

HSL Secondary

The HSL Secondary section contains a lot of options and it can look overwhelming at first; it could probably stand alone as its own separate effect.  Once you understand what it does, however, there are some very cool possibilities.  HSL Secondary targets very specific parts of your image, based on hue, saturation, and luminance (HSL).

With this section, you need to start at the top and work your way down.  In the Key area, you can use preset color dots, the eyedropper tools, or the individual HSL bars to choose which area of your image you would like to affect.  I’d suggest either the dots or the eyedropper.  To see which area you have selected, click on the box next to the Color/Grey dropdown menu – it will grey out everything not selected and show the selected area in color.  You can refine your selection a bit with he Denoise and Blur sliders, but these can also give you a weird “mushy” selection if you use them too much.  Clicking on the icon next to the Color/Grey menu will invert your selection, which can be handy.

Once you have a specific area selected, you can adjust the color using either a single or triple color wheel (there are two small icons directly below Correction to choose between them), and refine the temperature, tint, contrast, sharpening, and saturation.  These options all work the same way they did in the Basic Correction section, only on a targeted area of the image.

In the example below, I was able to bring more saturation into only the green areas of the image, making the grass and bushes in the shot more prominent, without affecting the rest of the image.  That’s a pretty simple example of what HSL Secondary can do, but you could use it in all sorts of creative ways to highlight different aspects of a shot.

Vignette

Vignettes draw the eye to the center of the frame and are generally aesthetically pleasing.  Feel free to use them, but (again) don’t overuse them or your footage will look like it has a cheesy filter on it.  The options in the Vignette section are pretty straightforward: dragging Amount into a negative value will add a dark vignette, while a positive number will add a light vignette; the midpoint changes the overall size; roundness changes the effect from an oval to a circular shape; and feather controls the fall off.  If you are having a hard time seeing what effect the vignette is making, try turning the Feather slider down to zero.

Light vignettes are sort of unusual; I usually use a value between -.2 and -.8 in the Amount slider.

Masks

If you want to only use Lumetri Color on a certain section of the image, you can do so using a mask.  The masking tools in Premiere aren’t as advanced as those you might find in something like After Effects, but they will do the job for simple tasks.  You won’t find mask options in the Lumetri Color panel itself; instead, look in the Effect Controls panel.  Under the name of the effect, you should find options for a circular mask, a rectangular mask, and a custom mask using the pen tool.  clicking on one of these options will add the mask and create additional control parameters in the effect.

The mask can be resized in the Program monitor by clicking and dragging on its key points and you can adjust its feather either in the Program monitor or in the Effect Controls panel. You can even animate the shape of the mask by turning on the Mask Path keyframes – although, again, these controls are fairly limited.

Adjustment Layers

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you can use Lumetri on multiple clips at once by applying it to an adjustment layer.  Adjustment layers can be resized over any length of the timeline and will affect any clips beneath them.  To create one, click on the New Item icon in the Project panel (it looks like a box with one turned-up corner) and choose Adjustment Layer.  It will be dropped into the Project panel (not the timeline), so you’ll need to drag it into your sequence and resize it as necessary.  To add Lumetri to it, highlight the adjustment layer and either choose Lumetri Color from the list of effects or make an adjustment in the Lumetri Color panel.  Adjustment layers are a great way to add things like vignettes to an entire project or section of a film.

Between the various options in the Lumetri Color panel, you have a very capable and adaptable toolset for altering the color of your film.  Take some time to play around with the various options – like a lot of these techniques, the best way to get a handle on it is to just start experimenting.  Occasionally, you may find it helpful to switch the visibility of the effect off in the Effect Controls, just to see how far your footage has come.

Red, Green, and Blue

All color film and video is made up of the combination of three colors: red, green, and blue.  Color correction and grading is the act of altering the relationship between those three colors.  Until fairly recently, when color grading was a chemical process, film negatives were exposed to different chemicals to change the amount of red, green, and blue in a sequence.  Strips of film were placed into chemical baths for a very specific amount of time to do this, which is why color grading was once also called “color timing.”

Color grading, color correction, and even color timing are still used as largely interchangeable terms.  However, I’d like to draw a distinction between correction and grading.  When I refer to color correction, I’m talking about the initial “fix it” stage of the color manipulation process.  Color correction largely involves making changes to a shot’s overall brightness, raising or lowering the shadows and highlights, and compensating for white balance issues.  I think of color grading as the stage where you add a distinctive style to a piece.  Grading is the stage where you dial in the film’s “look” – you might crush the blacks, or warm up the highlights, add a vignette, or make other aesthetic choices.

In order to get to the color grading stage, you have to start with the color correction stage.  It’s important that you start with a “blank canvas.”  Today, we’ll be focusing on the correction process.

Software Options

We’ll be using the color correction and grading tools in Adobe Premiere Pro over the next few weeks.  Adobe also has a dedicated color grading program called SpeedGrade, which offers a lot of fine control and advanced features.  However, Adobe hasn’t updated SpeedGrade since the 2015 version.  Instead, they’ve migrated many of the features – and some new ones – into Premiere, making it a more viable all-in-one option for editing and color work.

Despite the lack of updates, SpeedGrade is still a solid piece of software and a good option for color correction and grading.  DaVinci Resolve is another popular options; DaVinci has approached the issue from the opposite direction as Adobe, by starting with dedicated color software and adding more and more editing functionality to it.  Some editors have switched from Premiere to Resolve because of its stability and advanced color features.  There’s even a free version of the software called Resolve Studio.  Final Cut Pro X has its own set of color tools, some of which are quite good.  Like a lot of the features in Final Cut, however, a lot of the process has been streamlined and automated.

Scopes

If you’ve spent some time using Premiere, you may be aware of the different workspace configurations it offers.  Along the top of the program, you should see options including Assembly, Editing, Color, Effects, Audio, and more.  These can also be found in the Workspaces section of the Window dropdown menu at the top of the screen.  Like most Adobe programs, your workspace can be completely customized.  You can choose individual windows from the Window menu, rearrange and resize them by clicking and dragging, and save a custom workspace.  If things ever start to look strange, you can always reset your workspace by choosing Reset to Saved Layout from the Workspaces menu.  I find that the Color workspace is actually quite useful for color correction and grading, so I use that preset often.

There are two important panels that will appear when you select the Color workspace: Lumetri Color and Lumetri Scopes.  Lumetri is the suite of color-related tools that Adobe has been focusing on ever since SpeedGrade was discontinued.  Many of the color tools in its library are available elsewhere, but Lumetri gathers the most important and useful ones together in one place.

The Lumetri Scopes panel can show the color information in a shot in various ways.  If you right-click in the scopes window, you will see options to display two different vectorscopes, a histogram, a parade, and a waveform.  You can display all of these scopes simultaneously, or choose whichever ones you like.  As you play shots in the timeline and program window, the scopes will display color and brightness information in real time.

The most “advanced” scopes available are probably the two vectorscopes, which display color and hue information in a circular graph.  The YUV vectorscope displays saturation based on distance from the center of the graph – signal close to the edge is saturated and signal near the center is monochromatic.  We’ll take a closer look at the vectorscopes in a later lesson.

The waveform, histogram, and parade display color information based on the breakdown of red, green, and blue in the shot.  On all three, 0 brightness (pure black) is at one end and 100 brightness (pure white) is on the other, allowing you to see both chrominance and luminance.  I personally find the waveform and parade to be the most intuitive scopes to use, since they allow you to quickly see how much of each color is in the shot and what the overall exposure is.

Fixing White Balance

It’s almost inevitable that at some point, you will forget to set your white balance, set it incorrectly, or accidentally leave it on an automatic mode.  In the midst of a shoot (especially using a small monitor), it’s all too easy to overlook – until you pull up the footage to review it.

While some white balance problems are obvious, you might not realize how off a clip is until you look at the scopes.  In the waveform, you should be able to see if either the red, green, or blue channel is more prominent than the others.  Of course, some shots naturally have more of one color in them than the others; green screen footage, for example, will show a lot of green in the waveform.  Pay more attention to areas like highlights where you expect roughly equal amounts of the three colors.

The simplest way to adjust for improper white balance is probably to use a Curves effect.  Curves gives you graphs representing each of the three colors as well as luminance.  You can use a pen tool to adjust the graph and change the amount of each color in the shot, as well as the overall brightness.  What’s nice about this approach is that you can make very specific adjustments in the shadow or highlight areas of the image.  However, recent versions of Premiere have moved the Curves effect to the “obsolete” section; instead there is now a Curves section of the Lumetri effect.  I still use Curves from time to time, though, since it’s such an easy way to make a quick adjustment.

The benefit of the Lumetri effect is that it gives you a ton of different color-adjustment tools in one place in a fairly logical order.  There are sections for Basic Correction, Creative, Curves, Color Wheels, HSL Secondary, and Vignette.  The idea is that you would go through these sections in order to finalize the look of your footage.  While that doesn’t always work out exactly, it does provide a very good framework for refining color.

There is an area of the Basic Correction section of Lumetri dedicated to fixing white balance, so let’s start there.  As soon as you make an adjustment in the Lumetri Color panel, the effect will be added to the Effect Controls of whatever clip you have highlighted.  If you don’t see the Lumetri Color panel, either switch to the Color workspace or select the panel from the Window menu.

The White Balance options in Lumetri are comprised of an eyedropper selector and two slider bars: one blue and orange and one green and magenta.  The eyedropper can be used to select an area of the frame that should be pure white – it will make an automatic adjustment based on that.  This can be a good place to start from, but I prefer to dial in the white balance manually, using the Temperature and Tint sliders.  Since most white balance issues stem from the camera being set to record either too “warm” or too “cool,” the temperature option usually takes care of the most significant issues.  Just slide the dial in the direction that the footage needs to go.  As you do so, watch the scopes to see the effect that the adjustment is making in a more objective way.  If there is too much green or red in the shot after the temperature has been adjusted, make some adjustments to the Tint slider.

If there are still areas of the image that still seem off, trust your eye over the scopes.  Again, shots naturally have different levels of color in them.  Pay the most attention to skin tones, since they are what will immediately tip your audience off to problems in the shot.

Fixing Exposure

If a shot is too dark or blown out, you can also make some basic adjustments to exposure in the first section of the Lumetri Color effect.  The Tone area contains sliders for exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks, as well as “HDR Specular,” which you probably won’t need to worry about.  There’s also an auto-adjustment button, but – again – I’d suggest doing this work manually.  The sliders in this section go from most extreme to least: Exposure and Contrast will make dramatic changes to the entire image; Highlights and Shadows affect specific brightness ranges; and Whites and Blacks target only the brightest and dimmest areas of the image.

I’d suggest starting with the highlight and shadow sliders, if necessary, then dialing in the white and black levels.  It can be tempting to just crank the exposure adjustment up or down, but it makes such a sweeping change that I try to avoid this unless absolutely necessary. The more you raise the exposure, the more digital noise and distortion you will introduce into the image, so don’t change this more than you have to.

With the exposure and white balance adjusted, you are ready to start adding a more stylized look to your footage.  That can be achieved, in large part, using the rest of the Lumetri Effect – the Creative, Curves, Color Wheels, HSL Secondary, and Vignette sections.  We’ll take a deeper look at those options soon.

Wrapping Up Lighting

Before we break for the mid-semester recess and move on to the wonderful world of color grading, there are a few last tips and techniques I’d like to discuss.

There are also some great videos that have been posted to the Blog Posts section of the site, so be sure to check those out when you get a chance!

Shooting Log and Other Camera Settings

If you pay attention to the wold of indie filmmaking, you’ve probably heard people extol the wonders of “log” settings on various cameras.  Different manufacturers use their own log variants: high-end Sony cameras come installed with S-Log (usually multiple versions), Panasonic has V-Log, Canon has C-Log, and so on.  So what is a log setting and why do people get so excited about it?

Simply put, log is a camera setting that lowers the contrast and saturation of the image being recorded; a “flat” picture profile.  Log footage is pretty unpleasant-looking at first – milky, bland, and washed-out.  Log footage comes to life in the color-grading process when saturation and contrast is added back into the image.  Because you are starting with more of a blank slate, log footage can be color graded and tweaked more aggressively in post-production.

So should you always be shooting using a log profile?  Actually, no.  Because log footage has low contrast, it protects the details in both shadows and highlights.  That makes it great for shooting environments with very bright areas and very dark areas.  However, if you’re in a situation where you don’t need to recover details from both the shadows and the highlights, there really isn’t much point to shooting log – you’d only be adding unnecessary work later.

There are also lots of cases where you definitely should not use a log profile.  Because log footage requires intensive color grading, it can actually create more prominent noise and grain in the dark areas.  In low-light shooting, log footage can end up looking much worse than footage shot with a normal picture profile.  If you are taking the time to properly light and expose your image – so that you are capturing what you want in-camera – then shooting log might be unnecessary or even negative.  You should avoid log shooting when filming against a green screen, since you want the screen itself to be as saturated as possible.

The way your camera records video files also makes a difference as to whether or not you should shoot log.  Without getting too technical, cameras that use low compression (4:2:2 as opposed to 4:2:0) and capture lots of color information (12 or 10-bit as opposed to 8-bit) using a robust codec (RAW or ProRes as opposed to H.264) will do better with log footage.  In our collection, the BlackMagic Pocket Camera and Sony FS5 are better suited to using flat picture profiles than cameras like the GH3 and AF100.

Finally, shooting log can be problematic because it’s difficult to imagine what your finished footage will look like when everything is desaturated and grey – it can even be challenging to light and expose correctly, since the footage appears so flat.  However, some cameras and external monitors (like our SmallHD DP7-Pro) will allow you to load a LUT (essentially a color-grading preset) and preview your footage with a more finished look.

In summary, log recording is potentially useful, but it definitely has a time and place – I think that lots of inexperienced shooters record in log simply because they can.  We’ll look at the specifics of color grading log footage later in the semester.

Whether or not you shoot log, there are other camera settings that you may want to tweak before filming.  Our Panasonic GH3 and GH4 cameras have several picture profiles available, with different levels of saturation, color balance, and contrast.  This becomes a matter of personal preference, but I like the “Natural” profile on these cameras, since it has a slightly lower contrast “filmic” look, without dipping into the flat look of a log profile.

On cameras where such things can be tweaked, you may want to slightly turn down the sharpening, contrast, saturation, or noise reduction.  Doing so will give you more flexibility in post-production – all of those factors can be quickly added back using editing or color grading software – while avoiding the potential pitfalls of shooting log.

Problematic Practicals

We’ve talked about practical lights – lights that are visible within the shot – quite a bit already.  Practical lights are great for adding ambience and “motivating” the lights that you have placed off-camera.  However, sometimes practical lights can cause unexpected issues when filming.

Flicker is the most common problem you are likely to run into.  You may notice that certain light fixtures and screens pulsate when filmed.  This is the result of the interaction between the frequency at which the light is emitted and the shutter speed of the camera.

Fortunately, this fix is usually pretty simple.  You probably can’t change the frequency of the light in the shot, but can change your camera’s shutter speed.  Adjusting it up or down will almost always clear up the issue.  Of course, changing the shutter speed will affect your exposure – and, to a lesser extent, the amount of motion blur in the shot – so you don’t want to alter it more than you need to.  However, it’s almost always easier to fix this issue on set than try to salvage the footage in post-production later.

The other common issue with practical lighting is color temperature.  Professional video lights are specially calibrated and tested to emit light of a certain color (or be adjustable as needed).  Random lightbulbs on set are not.  The lights in your scene may be warmer or cooler than the lighting you would like to use.  If this is the case, I’d suggest adding some CTO or CTB to the light to take care of the issue.  If that’s not possible, you may need to adjust your off-camera lights and play with the white balance of your camera to resolve the issue.

Lighting Multiple Subjects

This topic has been asked about a few times, so I thought I’d address it.  Most of the time, you will probably be lighting primarily for one subject – even in shots with multiple actors, most shots will be focused on one of them.  In wide shots, master shots, and shots with multiple subjects, however, you may need to light multiple actors.

Lighting for multiple subjects isn’t really any different than lighting a single subject: if both actors are facing the camera, they should both have key lighting, fill lighting, and back lighting, in addition to any lights illuminating the background.  Depending on how your actors are positioned, you may be able to use the same key, fill, and/or back lighting for both of them; or, you may need two sets of lights.

There are alternative methods to lighting multiple subjects, though.  I found the following lighting diagrams in an old issue of Videomaker Magazine.

 

 

 

 

 

When the Lighting Gets Tough…

This week, let’s look at some slightly challenging lighting situations: green screen, low-light/night shots, and the great outdoors.

Outdoor Lighting

Want a quick way to make your footage look better?  Shoot it outside!  There is a ton of light outdoors and digital cameras love light.  The ambient light you get outside will help your image quality, but it can also make shaping and controlling the light more difficult.  Here are the tools and techniques you should be using.

• Reflectors and Bounces – A reflector is your best friend outdoors.  If you’re having a hard time with shadows or shade, bring a reflector close to your talent to help illuminate them.  A white reflector or bounce will provide the softest light; silver and gold will reflect more, but the quality of light isn’t as pleasing.  If you can’t tell whether or not you have a reflector aimed correctly, ask your talent if they can see the reflected light.  If you don’t have an actual reflector with you, any flat white surface can be used as a bounce.
• Diffusion and Shade – One of the most challenging aspects of outdoor filming is having too much light.  It can be difficult to get correct exposure and you may have harsh shadows depending on the cloud cover and the position of the sun.  In those cases, try blocking some of the light using a white reflector or diffusion.  If that’s not enough, you can use a black flag – or move your subject to a shady area.
• Battery Power – Just because you’re outside, it doesn’t mean you can’t use lights.  You may need to get the lights quite close to your subject to make any significant impact.  If you don’t have access to electrical outlets, your best bet is probably battery-powered LED panels.
• Location, Weather, and Time – Because you can’t control the position of the sun, you need to be mindful of where and when you are shooting.  If the sun is behind your subject, you may need lots of front lighting to avoid them being silhouetted.  Filming when the sun is high in the sky – late morning to early afternoon – can result in unflattering “raccoon eye” shadows on your talent.  The sunrise and sunset “golden hours” give beautiful light, but that light also changes and disappears very quickly, so organization is a must.  Overcast days are ideal for filming, because the light is diffuse and easy to work with, no matter the angle.
• Exposure Tools and Filters – If you are outdoors in daylight, you can probably keep your ISO as low as it will go; there usually isn’t any need for additional gain.  If your image is still over-exposed, you can close your aperture, but then your depth-of-field will get deeper.  To maintain a shallow depth-of-field, you can use ND filters – some cameras (such as the FS5 and AF100) have them built-in; otherwise, you can use screw-in filters on the lens or drop-in filters with a matte box.

Night Lighting

Lighting at night – or lighting for a nighttime look – poses the opposite problem from shooting outdoors in daylight.  Virtually all digital cameras struggle in low light, so night shoots require an extra level of planning.

• ISO, Shutter, and Aperture – If most of your image is going to be dark, your camera may warn you that things are under-exposed.  That’s okay, embrace the darkness!  Exposure tools and automatic settings assume that you are looking for a well-lit shot and will try to raise your ISO, open your aperture, or lower your shutter speed.  Keep your ISO low – grain and noise show up in the dark parts of an image first, so you want to protect those.  Opening the aperture instead is a good idea, as long as you don’t mind a shallower depth-of-field.  You can lower your shutter speed a bit if you are desperate, but don’t overdo it.  Your best option is to bring more light into the scene.
• Back and Side Lighting – Single-source lighting is one way to get that nighttime look.  Remember that the light should be motivated – is it coming from the moon, car headlights, a computer screen?  This is especially important for night shoots, since “unmotivated” lights will stand out.  Lighting your subject primarily from the back or side is another way to get a usable image while maintaining a style that reads “night.”  Finally, consider lighting the background of a shot and letting your subjects fall into silhouette – this can be a cool effect.
• Using Color – We tend to associate warm orange and yellow light with sunny days and cool blue tones with night.  Use this to your advantage and light your scene using a blue color palette to simulate a nighttime look.
• Believability Versus Realism – Moonlight isn’t really blue and you probably wouldn’t really be edge-lit in a dark and spooky forest.  That’s fine.  Instead of trying to realistically recreate a dark scene, think about what might believably represent a dark scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qz2gq3frA8

Green Screen Lighting

The key to good green screen compositing isn’t the post-production process you use – it’s the prep you do on set.  Lighting and exposing your green screen effectively will save you countless headaches later.

• Screen Prepping – Your green screen should be as smooth as possible, with no obvious wrinkles or folds.  If you are using a fabric screen, you may want to use a portable steamer to smooth it out.  You can also use weights to pull it taut.
• Screen Lighting – Use soft, even lighting and make sure that the light is cast equally over the entire screen.  You want to avoid having some parts of the screen lighter or darker than others.  In the studio, we have special green fluorescent lights that we can use to help even things out.
• Camera Exposure – If you have access to an RGB waveform, set your exposure so that the green channel is hitting around the 40-50% mark.  Pushing it higher (brighter) can introduce other colors into the spectrum, which will make keying more difficult.  You may also want to shoot with a wide aperture so that the green screen falls out of focus a bit – this will help smooth out any small wrinkles or imperfections.
• Backlighting and Spill – If your subject is too close to the green screen, it will reflect green light onto them.  Get your subject as far from the green screen as possible and use a longer lens to compress the distance.  Back-lighting is also extremely important for green screen work, since you want to separate the subject from the background.  You may want to try using two backlights, one on each side.
• Key and Fill – If at all possible, you should have a good idea of the lighting you will be trying to match when you film against a green screen.  Will the final composited scene be high key or low key?  Outdoors or indoors?  Match that lighting on your subject as closely as you can.  You may also want to light your green screen using daylight-balanced lighting and your subject using tungsten – this will help create separation between them and the backdrop.
• Green Screener – I haven’t tried it yet, but there is an app called Green Screener that uses your phone’s camera to check the quality of a green screen setup.  You can get it at both the iTunes App Store and the Google Play Store.

Shaping Light

At this point, we’ve spent some time discussing fundamental lighting setups, equipment, and the use of color.  Next, we’ll start looking at more specialized equipment that can be used to create stylized looks.  A lot of that comes down to our ability to shape light effectively.

We know that a light’s size and distance affects the hardness of the shadows it casts: lights that are small and/or far away cast hard shadows and lights that are large and/or nearby cast soft shadows.  As we look at examples from different genre styles, think about the hardness or softness of the shadows being cast, as well as the contrast ratio between the light and dark areas.

However, we have additional tools for controlling where light falls within a frame.  Flags, gobos, cookies, and barn doors are pieces of equipment with weird names that all do the same thing – block and control the light being emitted.

A flag is simply an object that blocks light.  It can be virtually any size and it can be used to control light spill, prevent lens flares, or simply create negative fill.  Cookies and gobos are both light “stencils” – they have opaque and transparent areas that create a pattern when light shines through them.  Cookies and gobos can be used subtly, to give some variation to a light, or overtly, to create distinct patterns on the screen.  The difference between cookies and gobos lies in their placement: cookies (the word is actually short for cucoloris) are put in front of a light and gobos (which stands for GO Before Optics) go inside the light itself.  Not all lights can accept gobos (since they need to be inserted into the light itself), but cookies can be used with any light source.

Barn doors are flags that are attached directly to the light itself.  Many lights incorporate barn doors, but they are most commonly found on fresnels.  Barn doors are used to shape and control the light being emitted.  Some lights have a barn door on one side, some have two, and some have four.  Barn doors are usually removable.  Lights such as soft boxes and some LED panels that are designed to cast soft even light over a large area do not use barn doors.

Enhancing Light

We talked last week about how color can be used to reinforce the themes, aesthetics, and psychology of a scene.  Continue thinking about color as we look at different genres and styles.  How is the color palette of a western different from a horror film?  What are the similarities and differences between a thriller and a science fiction film?  Or a period piece and a romantic comedy?If you are looking to emulate a certain style of film, it’s important to emulate its color palette.

We have tools such as gels, color-adjustable lights, and reflectors to manipulate color, as well as basic production choices such as location, wardrobe, and what practical lights are in the shot.  We can also completely change the lighting in a scene using fog or haze.

Fog and haze are technically different, but they can be used to achieve similar results.  Fog is the less expensive option; it creates a more dynamic, less uniform effect than haze.  Both can be used add (literal) atmosphere to a scene.

The obvious use for fog and haze would be something dark and moody like horror or science fiction.  While fog can be great for that, it can also be used to give shots a bright, dreamy quality.  Fog softens and diffuses light, so it can be used in almost any situation, as long as it’s sufficiently spread out.  Fog can give a soft glow to a romantic scene or add swirly mist to a gritty drama – it’s more versatile than you might initially think.

Here are some tips on using fog from Film Riot:

We have a fog machine that can be checked out – just remember, this fog can absolutely set off a smoke detector.  You can also purchase canned fog, if you need something more portable.

Project 3: Genre Looks

The next project will be done in two groups of three; you can divide up however you choose.  Each group should create three video clips between 10 and 30 seconds each – each one emulating a different genre style.  You should not do any editing or color correction to the clips and they should all be in color.  Your goal here is to capture different looks in camera.

Possible genres are:

• Horror
• Film Noir
• Thriller/mystery
• Period drama
• Comedy
• Romance
• Science Fiction
• Western

Think about contrast ratios, color palettes, locations, and practical lighting as you work on this project.

This is due by 10pm on March 1.  You can submit work to me at dan014@bucknell.edu via WeTransfer.

The Color Wheel

This week, we’re talking about color.  This could be considered more of a general cinematography topic than a lighting-specific topic, since the color in a shot is defined by location, props, and wardrobe, as well as lighting; not to mention the crucial role of color correction in post-production. However, lighting plays a vital role in the color composition of a shot and some understanding of basic color theory is important for everyone behind the camera.

Color can be described using three properties: hue, saturation, and value.  The hue is the color itself: blue, purple, yellow, magenta, etc..  The saturation is the intensity of the color.  Value describes how light or dark the color is.  We can use these terms to describe any shade of any color that we can see.

Red, yellow, and blue are the three primary colors.  These three colors are the basis of all others; yellow and blue combine to make green, blue and red combine to make purple, yellow and red combine to make orange.  Orange, purple, and green are the secondary colors, which can be further combined to make the tertiary colors like magenta, yellow-green, teal, and so on.  If you place all of the colors on a wheel, with the primary colors equal distance from each other and the secondary colors in between them, and the tertiary colors in between them, you end up with the color wheel.

The color wheel is a hugely important tool for a cinematographer.  It allows us to look at the relationships between the colors in a shot and judge how harmonious or chaotic they are.  For a “standard” color wheel, red should be across from green, yellow should be across from purple, and blue should be across from orange, forming three primary/secondary pairs with the tertiary colors in between.

Color Schemes

Different color schemes are described in terms of the location of the colors in a shot on the color wheel.  Harmonious color schemes us colors that are equidistant from each other on the color wheel.  However, it’s also perfectly acceptable to deliberately use a non-harmonious color scheme to introduce tension or foreshadow conflict.

There are four main harmonious color schemes, plus the discordance scheme.

• Monochromatic – Monochromatic color schemes use only one color, with variations in saturation and value.  Black and white film is obviously monochromatic, but color film can be as well.  For example, there are many shots in The Matrix that are monochromatic green.  Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic uses multiple monochromatic schemes to represent different areas and themes in the film.

• Analogous – Analogous color schemes use colors that are adjacent on the color wheel.  This creates a pleasant, unified look, with more variation than monochromatic schemes.  In the following shot from O Brother, Where Art Thou?, yellow-green, yellow, and orange are the significant colors used.

• Complementary – Complementary colors are opposite each other on the color wheel.  This is a very common color scheme because it creates a visually-pleasing tension in the frame.  Orange and blue are a common combination today, but other complementary pairs are frequently used as well.  Many shots in Amelie are almost entirely red and green.  Generally, one half of the complementary pair is predominant with the second color used for accents and highlights.

• Triadic – Triadic color schemes are somewhat uncommon; they involve three colors equally spaced on the color wheel.  Yellow, blue, and red is probably the most common triadic combination, as seen in the following shot from Superman.  Triadic color schemes are usually bright and vibrant – almost cartoony – because they rely on hues with so much variation.

• Discordant – As the name implies, discordant color schemes deliberately break from the harmonious schemes described above.  Sin City – with its splashes of color amidst high contrast black and white footage – is an obvious example, but there are subtler ways of achieving this effect as well.  For example, a pop of blue will sometimes be inserted into the otherwise complementary red/green scheme of Amelie.

There are other color schemes as well; for example, a quadratic color scheme would involve four colors equidistant from each other on the color wheel and a split-triadic involves one color opposite two colors that are near each other on the wheel.  The five above are by far the most common, though.

Color Psychology

The basic idea of color psychology is that different colors carry different intrinsic meanings.  Studies have shown that when seeing the color red, people experience an elevated heart rate; when we see blue tones, our breathing and heart rate slow down.  Color theorists have assigned all sorts of meanings to different colors.  Some are obvious, some might surprise you.

You can find lots of lists with colors and their meanings, each defined slightly differently, but most of them follow a similar structure.

• RED – anger, passion, rage, desire, excitement, energy, speed, strength, power, heat, love, aggression, danger, fire, blood, war, violence
• PINK – love, innocence, healthy, happy, content, romantic, charming, playfulness, soft, delicate, feminine
• YELLOW – wisdom, knowledge, relaxation, joy, happiness, optimism, idealism, imagination, hope, sunshine, summer, dishonesty, cowardice, betrayal, jealousy, covetousness, deceit, illness, hazard
• ORANGE – humor, energy, balance, warmth, enthusiasm, vibrant, expansive, flamboyant
• GREEN – healing, soothing, perseverance, tenacity, self-awareness, proud, unchanging nature, environment, healthy, good luck, renewal, youth, vigour, spring, generosity, fertility, jealousy, inexperience, envy
• BLUE – faith, spirituality, contentment, loyalty, fulfillment peace, tranquility, calm, stability, harmony, unity, trust, truth, confidence, conservatism, security, cleanliness, order, sky, water, cold, technology, depression
• PURPLE/VIOLET – erotic, royalty, nobility, spirituality, ceremony, mysterious, transformation, wisdom, enlightenment, cruelty, arrogance, mourning, power, sensitive, intimacy
• BROWN – materialistic, sensation, earth, home, outdoors, reliability, comfort, endurance, stability, simplicity
• BLACK – No, power, sexuality, sophistication, formality, elegance, wealth, mystery, fear, anonymity, unhappiness, depth, style, evil, sadness, remorse, anger
• WHITE – Yes, protection, love, reverence, purity, simplicity, cleanliness, peace, humility, precision, innocence, youth, birth, winter, snow, good, sterility, marriage (Western cultures), death (Eastern cultures), cold, clinical, sterile
• SILVER – riches, glamorous, distinguished, earthy, natural, sleek, elegant, high-tech
• GOLD – precious, riches, extravagance. warm, wealth, prosperity, grandeur

Want to see some specific examples?  Check out this post.

The interesting thing about color psychology is that the meanings aren’t fixed.  Warm red and yellow tones might represent safety in one film and danger in another.  Individual characters can also have colors associated with them, which carry throughout a film.

Cinematographer Shane Hurlbut has a great post on how to use color to inform mood and tone on his blog.  I’d also recommend the book If It’s Purple, Someone’s Gonna Die, by Patti Bellantoni.

 

Equipment

Here are some of the tools we have at our disposal for manipulating color.

• Variable Temperature Lights – Many of the lights in our collection have a fixed color temperature of either daylight (5600K) or tungsten (3200K).  Other lights, such as the small Genaray panels, can be adjusted between tungsten and daylight.  A few of our large LED lights, such as the Celeb, Source Four, and Arri L7-C can actually emit light of various hues and saturations.
• Gels – Gels are transparent sheets of colored plastic plastic.  You can get gels in just about any hue you can imagine and they can be fun to throw onto a fill or back light for a little pop of color.  Exercise caution when using gels with halogen lamps, since not all gels are made to withstand high temperatures.
• CTO and CTB – CTO and CTB stand for Color Temperature Orange and Color Temperature Blue.  These are gels used to modify the color temperature of a light; so, if you need to match a tungsten fresnel to a daylight LED panel, you could put CTB on the fresnel.
• Reflectors – Most reflectors come with multiple sleeves: white, black, silver, and gold.  Using the silver of gold side can add some color depth to a shot.
• Practicals – Let’s not forget about the lights that are visible in a shot; lamps, neon signs, screens, and other sources of practical light can contribute to the color palette.

 

Stops of Light

In the first lesson, we discussed the basic properties of light: its color value, measured in degrees kelvin; and its brightness, measured in lux or foot-candles.  However, there is another measure of light that you will probably hear discussed in relation to photography and video: the “stop.”  It’s common to hear photographers talk about gaining or losing a stop of light – so how much light constitutes a stop?

Measuring light in stops is different than measuring light in lux, in two important ways.  First, stops are used when measuring the amount of light coming into a camera, as opposed to the amount of light on the subject being photographed.  Second, a stop of light describes light in relative terms, not absolute ones.  Every time you add a stop, you are doubling the amount of light; and every time you lost a stop, you are cutting the amount of light in half.

Have you ever noticed that on most cameras, the ISO values double with each increment?  Most cameras start at ISO 100, then jump to 200, then 400, 800, 1600, and so on.  It makes sense that a camera set at ISO 800 is twice as sensitive to light as a camera set at ISO 400, which means that going from 400 to 800 adds a stop of light.  Shutter speed works the same way: going from a shutter speed of 1/30 of a second to 1/60 of a second takes away a stop of light and vice versa.  Aperture is the same, although the numbers aren’t quite as logical: you double amount the light going from f/1 to f/1.4, then f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, and finally f/22.

Here’s a chart breaking down the stop measurements across ISO, shutter speed, and aperture:

Measuring light in stops is useful because it allows us to compensate these various factors and maintain the same exposure.  If I decide to move from f/4 to f/2.8 to gain a shallower depth of field (going up one stop), I can compensate my changing my ISO from 400 to 200 (going down one stop).

Thinking of light in terms of stops can be a bit confusing at first, but it’s really useful for getting – and keeping – proper exposure with your camera.  As we start to experiment with different lighting setups, we’re also going to need to make sure that the cameras we use are getting the images we want.  That means controlling the exposure.

Light Meters

One of the most valuable tools for getting correct exposure and creating different lighting looks is the light meter.  Here’s a short video showing a light meter in action:

https://youtu.be/8lMTUszr6P4

We have two light meters in our equipment collection: a digital meter and an analog meter.  The both do the same thing, but you operate them in slightly different ways.  Here are video instructions for both:

Terminology

• Hard Light and Soft Light
  These terms refer to the quality of the light being emitted.  Hard light has a sharp edge and creates harsh shadows.  Soft light has a diffuse edge and tends to wrap around things, creating subtler shadows.  Hard light tends to be dramatic while soft light tends to be flattering.  Generally speaking, large light sources (or lights close to the subject) create soft light and small light sources (or lights far away from the subject) create hard light.
• Spot and Flood
  Spot and flood are the two extremes of a light’s “throw.”  Spot describes light that is concentrated in a small area, generally with a well-defined edge.  Flood light is spread over a wide area, generally with a soft edge.  Some lights, like fresnels, are focusable, allowing you to go from spot to flood.
• Contrast Ratio
  Contrast ratio describes the amount of light in two different areas of a shot – generally, the two sides of the subject’s fac.  For example, a contrast ratio of 4:1 on the subject’s face would have four times as much light on the key side as the fill side.
• High Key and Low Key
  These terms are related to the overall look of a shot, in terms of its contrast between light and dark areas.  A high contrast shot with dark shadows is low key and a low contrast shot is high key.
• Key
  This is the main light illuminating an actor in a scene.  It should be placed in front of the subject and off to one side, creating shadows on half of the face.  Be careful not to confuse the key light with high or low key lighting
• Fill
  The fill light softens the shadows created by the key light and adds illumination to the side of the face not illuminated by the key light.  As such, it should be placed in front of the subject on the opposite side from the key.  The fill light should be set to an equal or lower intensity to the key – if it is greater, it becomes the key.
• Rim/Back/Hair
  The back light is the third light in a classic “three point” setup.  It is placed behind the subject, generally on the same side as the key.  The back light is used to create an edge of light on the subject and provide visual separation between the subject and the background.
• Bounce
  Bounce lighting is reflected off a surface before hitting the subject.  Lighting can be bounced off of a reflector, a white card, a wall, the ceiling, or just about anything else.
• Practical
  Practical lights are the lights that are visible in the scene – for example, a lamp in the background of a shot.  You can place practical lights in a shot to correspond with the off-camera lights you are using to make a scene look as though it is light naturally.
• Ambient
  The light that exists in a space before it is lit is its ambient light.  Light coming in through a window is one example.

Three Important Points

You’ve probably heard the term “three point lighting” about a million times.  It’s often described as a “basic lighting technique,” but I think that description is actually a bit misleading.  Saying that three point lighting is a “basic” technique implies that there are more advanced methods that presumable use more lights: say, five point intermediate lighting and seven point advanced lighting.  That’s not the case.

Three point lighting isn’t a basic technique, it’s a fundamental technique – the fundamental technique – for lighting a subject.  There may be dozens of lights set up for a shot, but the subject (the actor, generally speaking) will still be lit using three point lighting.  That’s because three point lighting describes how we see other people every day, with different levels of light and shadow.

When you are outside, you are probably being primarily illuminated by the sun – that makes it the key light.  The sun can be a hard or a soft light, depending on the weather and time of day; overcast days are generally considered great for filming, since the light is diffuse and flattering.

Depending on the sun’s location, it will cast shadows on one side of your face or the other, but these shadows are softened by the other lights in the environment: either light from the sun that has been reflected off of other objects or other sources of nearby illumination.  These softening lights are the fill.

Finally, there is almost always light coming from behind you – usually either the sky or some reflected light from the sun.  If this light overwhelms the light of the sun (the key light), you will be silhouetted; if it is fainter, it will wrap around you from behind as a rim of light.  This is the back light.

You don’t need to go far to find this “natural three point lighting” – the next time you are outside, just take some time to look at the patterns of light and shadow on the people around you.

In the studio, we don’t have access to the natural three point illumination of the sun, so we replicate it as best we can.  We use a key light to illuminate the face, a fill light to soften the shadows, and a back light to illuminate from behind.  This method looks natural because it replicates what we see in nature.

Here’s a video analysis by wolfcrow on how and why three point lighting works:

When you are setting up three point lighting, you have a few factors to consider.  How harsh should the shadows be?  How intense should the back light be?  Which side should the back light be on?  These are largely a matter of personal preference and can change from one setup to another.  I personally think that the back light looks best on the opposite side from the key, but many lighting diagrams show the opposite.  The important thing is to be conscious of how these choices affect your scene.

For a very quick overview, here’s a brief video from Full Sail.  There are about a million three point lighting tutorials out there, but this one is concise and accurate.

Contrast Ratios

When we talk about contrast ratios, we are generally talking about the ratio of light between the key side and the fill side of a subject’s face.  To measure the contrast ratio, you can take a reading with a light meter on the key side with the fill off, then on the fill side with the key off.  Here’s another video from light guru wolfcrow about contrast ratios.  He has some specific ideas about measuring contrast ratio in aperture stops that I don’t find totally logical, but the general idea is the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_hyiLZiggk

Contact ratio is incredibly important because it can really help establish the mood of a piece.  You will often see a high contrast ratio on highly dramatic or tense films.  Look at how dark the shadows are on Marlon Brando’s face in this shot from The Godfather.

A low contrast ratio is often used on films that are meant to be lighthearted, such as comedies.  Since low contrast lighting is usually flattering, it’s also used on romances.  Look at how even the lighting is in this shot from Mean Girls.

In terms of actual numbers, an average contrast ratio is somewhere around 4:1.  In a film with high key lighting, the faces of the actors might be lit with a contrast ratio of 3:1 or 2:1.  Ratios lower than 2:1 are not often used, since at that point you start to lose the details of an actor’s facial features.  Films with low key lighting might use a contrast ratio of 6:1 or 10:1 or higher – the greater the contrast ratio, the more dramatic the lighting.

Project 2: Faces In The Dark

For the next project, we are going to work as a group.  Set up a key, fill, and back light in front of a black backdrop.  Using the same key light, we’ll adjust the fill to create different contrast ratios: low contrast (less than 4:1) for high key shoots, average (around 4:1), and high contrast for low key shoots (greater than 4:1).  Everyone should take turns being in front of the camera so that the entire group gets a chance to operate the equipment.

Safety First

All film equipment needs to be handled safely, but this is especially important when it comes to lights, since you are dealing with electricity and heat.  Here are a few tips for handling lights and lighting equipment.

• Use an appropriate stand.  Large, heavy lights require large light stands.  We have stands in many sizes available, so don’t risk it falling.
• Most folding light stands should be extended to the point where the legs form an equilateral triangle.  Do not over-extend the legs or the stand will be unstable.  If you put the stand on the ground, you should be able to feel the point where the legs naturally fall.
• When raising a light stand, start with the top riser, then work your way down.  Don’t over-tighten the knobs.

• Keep cables, cords, and wires neat.  If something has to be run across the set, tape it down to avoid tripping.  Use extension cords when necessary.
• Use gloves when handling lights that get hot.  When in doubt, use gloves.
• Let lights cool down before putting them away.  Do not set hot lights on the ground or on a flammable surface; leave them on stands.
• Say something before turning on a light!  You can say “striking,” “sparking,” “light coming on,” or whatever you like, as long as it gets the point across.

• Coil your cables correctly.  There are actually multiple techniques for coiling wrapping; you will probably come across the “over/over” and “over/under” methods.  Check out the videos below for a quick tutorial.

Types of Lights

Here are the different kinds of lights that you have access to in the F/MS collection.

• Open Faced Lights – Smith-Victor Q60

This is probably the simplest light design – it’s just a bulb in a housing.  You can use barn doors to manipulate the light, but you can’t adjust the throw, color temperature, or even the brightness.  The light produced is sharp and direct – good for creating dramatic shadows.  This light will get hot, use gloves.

• Tungsten Fresnels – Arri 150 and Lowel Pro Focusing Flood

Fresnel lights (the “s” is silent) have a special lens in front of the bulb that allow them to be adjusted from flood to spot.  This makes them very flexible – we have lots of fresnel lights in the equipment collection, because they are so versatile.  The tungsten fresnels will get hot during use, so use gloves.

• LED Fresnels – Lite Panels Inca 4 and Arri L7-C

The LED-based fresnel lights in the collection offer the same versatility as the tungsten lights, but they don’t become hot during use.  The Inca 4 has a fixed color temperature that should match the tungsten lights, while the much larger Arri L7-C has adjustable color temperature.  Both lights can be controlled remotely via DMX.

• LED Spotlight – Source Four 26°

This powerful LED light has a fixed throw of 26 degrees.  Lights like these are often used in theatrical productions and can be controlled directly or remotely via DMX.  Because it uses LEDs, the light does not become hot during use.

• LED Panels – Lite Panels 1×1, Genaray SpectroLED, and Genaray 7100T

LED panels don’t generally produce as much light output as fresnels or spotlights, but the light they produce is flattering and diffuse.  These lights can be battery-powered, which makes them a good choice when portability is important.  The larger Lite Panels 1×1 and Genaray SpectroLED have a fixed color temperature – daylight, or 5600K – while the smaller Genaray 7100T can be adjusted.  These lights can be handled without gloves.

• Large LED Panel Fixture – Kino Flo Celeb

The Kino Flo Celeb is a large, high-quality LED panel with variable color temperature.  It produces even, flattering light.  At roughly 24 by 14 inches, the Celeb is much larger and heavier than the LED panels made by Genaray or Lite Panels.  The Celeb requires external power and can be controlled via DMX.  There are also preset controls on the unit itself.  This light can be handled without gloves.

• Fluorescent Light Panels – Kino Flo Barfly and Kino Flo Image 45

The Kino Flo Barfly and Image 45 are both large fluorescent panels that produce a high output of soft, even light.  The size and weight of these lights make transportation challenging, although the Barfly can be loaded into a hard-sided case.  If you need to fill a large space with light, these are good options.  These light fixtures can generally be handled without gloves, although the bulbs themselves should not be.

Other Equipment

• Reflectors

A reflector (or “bounce”) can be used to reflect, diffuse, or block light.  Different covers can be put onto the reflector for different effects – generally, white, silver, and gold. Folding reflectors can be a challenge and there are different methods.  You can “make a taco,” for example; I prefer to just twist my hands in opposite directions.  Give it some practice.

• Gels

A gel is a piece of colored plastic used to tint a light.  When using a gel with a light that becomes hot during use, be sure to keep some distance between the gel and the bulb.

• Scrim

A scrim is a semi-opaque cloth used to diffuse light.  It is usually white or black.

• Cookies and Gobos

A cookie is a small plane that a light shines through, creating a distinct pattern.    These can be anything from leaves to window blinds.  A gobo is similar to a cookie, but it doesn’t create a distinct pattern – it is simply a plane that is placed between a light and the set to block some of the light’s output.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Spring 2018 session of the Film/Media Studies Production Practicum.  This semester’s topic delves into two areas that are crucial to film and video production: lighting and color grading.  I’ve chosen to pair these two topics together because they parallel each other in different stages of the production process.  Lighting affects the way footage is captured during filming, using a combination of on-set equipment and camera settings; color grading affects the way existing footage is processed during post-production, using either editing software or a dedicated color grading program.

Taken together, lighting and color grading contribute enormously to the overall look of a film.  Beyond aesthetic preferences, they can imbue a piece with specific emotions, highlight themes, set moods, serve narrative functions, and much more.  While lens choice, camera angle, and shot composition often work in obvious ways, lighting and color grading can work more subtly.  When used thoughtfully, they are invaluable artistic tools.

This semester, we’ll spend the first half of the term on lighting: using various techniques and pieces of equipment to shape the look of the footage we capture.  We’ll spend the second half of the term manipulating that footage using post-production software such as Premiere Pro and SpeedGrade.  By the end of the semester, you should have a powerful collection of cinematic techniques at your disposal – whether you are behind the camera, behind a computer, or both.

Color Temperature

We’re going to be using a few terms quite frequently throughout the semester, so it’s important that we define some things right from the start.  One of the most important things that we’re going to be talking about is color temperature.

Put very simply, color temperature is a measure of how “warm” or “cool” a light is, measured in kelvin (K).  If you want to really dig into the science behind color temperature, it has to do with the temperature of black-body radiators and lots of complex equations are involved.  For a relatively concise and clear summary, check out this excellent video from Filmmaker IQ.

You don’t really need to understand the Newtonian physics of light or Planck’s Law to understand color temperature (although it certainly couldn’t hurt).  All you really need to know is that “white” light actually always has a tint to it and that tint is measured in kelvin.  Low kelvin light is very orange – candlelight is around 1000K.  High kelvin light is very blue – the light from a blue sky on a clear day is around 10,000K.

Different charts will give slightly different values for various light sources, but the general idea is the same across the board.

White Balance

If all white light is actually tinted blue or orange, why don’t we experience the world in those hues?  Your brain is actually very good and making adjustments for different color temperatures automatically.  For example, if you are in a room lit by incandescent bulbs (which have a yellow cast) and then go outside on a bright, overcast day (which has a blue cast), your eyes will quickly adjust to the changing color temperatures.  You probably won’t notice the transition; your brain quickly and automatically compensates.

While our brains can go through this process automatically, cameras rely on specific settings.  The kelvin value that a camera considers white is called its white balance.  If you are using a camera indoors with incandescent lighting, you might set the white balance to 3200K.  If you are filming outdoors, you might set the white balance to 5600K.

Obviously, the specifics of setting white balance vary from camera to camera.  Most cameras have preset options such as “direct sunlight,” “cloudy,” and “incandescent.”  This can be a great place to start, if you want to dial in your white balance quickly.  Some cameras include the option to manually set the specific color temperature (in kelvin), which is a more precise option.  If you can take the time to set the temperature yourself, that’s generally the best way to do it.

Some cameras allow you to use a white or grey source to set white balance.  You can hold a card or piece of paper centered in front of the lens and tell the camera to use that particular shade for “true” white; the camera will adjust things accordingly.  This is a good option because it allows you to dial in a setting that is unique to your shooting situation without trying to figure out the kelvin value.

Watts, Lumens, and Lux

We can use degrees kelvin to describe the color of light, but how do we describe how muchlight there is?  In other words, how do we measure brightness?  This gets a little more complicated, because there are different ways of thinking about brightness.  Are you measuring how much light is being produced at the source of the light itself, or a certain distance away, or how much is shining on a surface?  Because light can be considered in so many different contexts, there are a number of different ways of quantifying it.

When you buy a lightbulb, you probably look at its wattage to determine how bright it will be; for example, a 100 watt bulb is brighter than a 40 watt bulb.  However, wattage is a measure of energy, not brightness.  Furthermore, as low-energy LEDs have replaced incandescent bulbs, the relationship between wattage and brightness has changed.

The amount of light being emitted by a source is actually measured in lumens. A lumen measures the amount of photons being emitted through a conical area of 3D space.  You will often see watts and lumens used together to describe a light source’s efficiency, or “luminous efficacy.”  The higher the lumens per watt (LPW), the more efficient the bulb will be.

However, for the purposes of getting correct photographic exposure, we use a third unit: lux.  Lux measures the amount of lumens in a square meter; this can also be referred to as illuminance.  Lux measures the amount of light on the surface being illuminated, rather than at the source of the light – this is what makes it useful for cinematic purposes.

To illustrate, the light in an average office will fall between 300 and 500 lux.  Brighter studio lighting could be around 1000 lux.  The hour around sunset is around 400 lux and a full moon on a clear night will provide less than a third of one lux.

You may sometimes see illuminance measured in foot-candles, which uses square feet instead of meters.  One foot-candle is roughly equal to ten lux.   Screens and monitors also have brightness ratings, but since these aren’t meant to illuminate (only to be seen), a different unit is used: the nit.  A normal HD television may range between 500 and 1000 nits.

We’ll be primarily using lux to measure light in this class, since that is the unit that will help us help us capture properly exposed footage.  If you’d like to get deeper into the technical side of things, check out this article, which dives into the science and math behind measuring light.

Project 1: Light That Moves Us

Determining the color temperature and illuminance of a light allows us to describe its characteristics with scientific accuracy, but it can all start to feel a bit sterile.  As cinematographers, we want to paint with light, not just describe its wavelength.  We’ll build on what we discussed this week in the next lesson as we use light meters and other tools to get proper exposure.  In the meantime, I’d like to see some examples of lighting that you find interesting.

Drawing from movies, television, or short films, I’d like you to send me two examples of lighting that grabs your attention.  Don’t worry about the technical aspects too much – instead, focus on the emotional or narrative effects of the lighting in the scene.  Send me a still image (or a clip, if you can find one) and a short sentence or two about why you chose that particular shot.

Here are a few of my favorites: Nosferatu, The Third Man, The Exorcist, In the Mood for Love, and Skyfall.