Fixing poorly lighted scenes in post

Dutchboy · Feb 17, 2009

I'm finishing up a short and, like usual, I have a scene that could just use a little more light. Rather than reshooting it, is there a way in post to brighten it up a bit without ruining it? Any suggestions would be great. Thanks.

knightly · Feb 17, 2009

You can twiddle with color correction, but if it's more than just small correction, it'll start to degrade the clip quickly.

Will Vincent · Feb 17, 2009

When there's not enough light there's not enough picture information either.. so there is only so much you can do before it just looks like a mess.

First thing to try would be a gamma adjustment, and then some general color correction. You're probably going to have to live with it being a bit dark and chalk it up as a lesson learned -- Digital Video needs a lot of light.

EvsFX08 · Feb 17, 2009

Yeah, I found this out just recently with my first music video I did this weekend. For music videos though, you have a little flexibility and can disguise some lighting flaws by adding an artistic filter to it, so adding some special touches could asisst, unless it's a film and you need the lighting to be just right. Like dutchboy, I wasn't able to reshoot, so I had to do the best with what I had.
Here's the thread to a music video I shot, edited, and did some color correction work on and some other VFX work. This is the first rough cut, it still needs work, but the artist is pleased with the majority of it.
http://www.indietalk.com/showthread.php?t=16340

EvsFX08 · Feb 17, 2009

Will Vincent said:
When there's not enough light there's not enough picture information either.. so there is only so much you can do before it just looks like a mess.

First thing to try would be a gamma adjustment, and then some general color correction. You're probably going to have to live with it being a bit dark and chalk it up as a lesson learned -- Digital Video needs a lot of light.

I think I need to adjust gamma in my product as well, I gotta mess around with gamma, but I don't remember seeing that under Color Correction, is it under there in AE?

Will Vincent · Feb 17, 2009

Gamma should be in the image control effects bin... It's in premiere, and I am pretty sure it's in AE too.

Dutchboy · Feb 17, 2009

Adjusting the gamma under levels (FCP) helped a lot. Thanks again, guys.

Dutchboy · Feb 17, 2009

color correction helped as well.

EvsFX08 · Feb 18, 2009

Believe it or not, the Auto Contrast gave me the look I was looking for, go figure.

knightly · Feb 19, 2009

So often, just setting your whites and blacks will improve the look of your (our) shots.

EvsFX08 · Feb 19, 2009

knightly said:
So often, just setting your whites and blacks will improve the look of your (our) shots.

Yup, oh and hey, I took your critique of my first video (much appreciated) and we made a few changes, man, it looks really good now, but I'll post those changes in my original Thread, I don't wanna hijack this Thread.