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When to use a "flat" profile

Hi Guys,

So ever since I purchased my DSLR, i have been constantly told from various sources... "make sure you use a 'flat' picture profile....

I shoot a lot of promo videos and documentary style stuff on my DSLR and my question is should a "flat" profile only be used for narrative projects?
 
Use a flat profile when you're planning to do full color correction in post, otherwise, use a profile that gives you the final look you're going for. You also get the most benefit in high-contrast lighting situations - i.e. outdoors in direct sunlight. If you're shooting something that's low contrast you're just throwing away useful info with a flat profile - if your camera has a live histogram, use that to judge when not to use it. If the histogram is bunched up in just one portion of the range you don't need a flat profile, if it's spread across the whole range you'll probably get some benefit.

Also, all flat profiles aren't created equal. Personally I use the technicolor profile exclusively, the one's created by end-users all do weird things with skin tones that I don't like due to the limitation of canon's profile tools.
 
The goal of the profiles is to make sure all of the lights and darks fit within the range of brightness values being captured. It squinches everything to the middle to be pulled apart later. You're actually crushing the mids and you'll be forced to quantize those values during correction when rebalancing your levels. Be aware of it while lighting/shooting/selecting what to shoot. You're still better off getting it "Right" in camera with your color waveforms up and maximizing how much of the graph is being filled by the information. I think the "Flat" profiles may go a bit too far as they don't seem to help by grabbing the extreme darks or highlights and bringing them into range, they just prevent you from totally killing them off when exposing correctly.

It'll still be better to expose REALLY well and light to fir as much information into the camera's memory as possible, even when using a "flat" profile.

Just some musings from an old developer and a light geek of the photonic order.
 
Yeah, magic lantern looks awesome. I have it sitting here waiting for me to buy an SD card reader so I can install it... and it resides on the SD Card rather than the camera and can be bypassed on startup to the Canon firmware, so much safer than the "hacks" that are out there for other cameras to get these functionalities from them.
 
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