Color correction .. of sorts

[haruo]

Hi. I'm new to amv making and this is my first post, regarding my second amv, though my first one is yet to be reliesed due to lack of an internet connection at home.

I am using footage from both Fantastic Four movies and was forced to use a scene from the second one, where Sue is struck with a spear from Doom, with the last fight scene of the first one, against Dr Doom. Unfortunately the colors from the hair and background do not match. I've done some minor brightness adjustments but it still not good enough.

If you've seen the movies you probaly know wich scenes I am talking about. If not, I cannot load any footage right now, but I am posting two screenshots from the internet, hopefully it will be helpfull.

Any tips as to how I should aproach the problem will be quite usefull.

Thanks in advance.

Sincerely,
Haruo san.


The fight scene from the first movie.


Not exactly the scene that I am using. But as you can see, she's a lot "blonder".

[haruo]

By the way. I am using Adobe Premiere Pro CS3.

[Zarxrax]

Better camera plus professional color correction led to the 2nd pic being much nicer. I don't really think its possible to get that look with the first one. You should be able to improve it somewhat though. Try the levels or curves filters first of all, and premiere has some sort of 3-point color correction tool you should use as well. Don't remember what that filter is called at the moment though.

[kmv]

Oh boy, you are going to have fun matching those two, the main problem being that they are lit and structured so very differently. But in short you have two things to do: adjust the colour (probably on only one of them) and adjust the luminosity (probably on both of them).

The tool to do this is a filter called "Three Way Colour Correction". I have no idea what its exact name is in Premiere Pro, but it will be some combination of those four words and probably in your "Colour" filters folder.

Five minutes of tinkering produced this:
Before:


After:


I am sure with more than just five minutes of effort I could produce a better result, but this is you project not mine, and the purpose of this post is to put you on the right path.

The most useful part of the 3-way colour corrector is the "Match Hue" function and is usually characterized by the eye dropper tool. You use it to select a part of the picture in your target and then select the same kind of thing in the picture to be adjusted, and you do this for the whites, mids, and blacks.

For example: In the above I used the match hue tool to select the white in Johnny's "4" badge and then selected the white area in Susan's "4" badge. This pushed the whites in that image towards the blues. For the blacks I selected a dark area in their clothing, and so on.

To correct the luminosity difference between the two I pushed the whites up in the picture of the two of them (this filled in the white blast area a bit, but something has to give) and pulled the whites and mids down in the image of the four of them.

You can see the result:

Changes to image of the four:


Changes to image of the two:


I suggest you find the filter and have a play.

Two things to note:

1. The colors that you are seeing here are probably not the same as the colours I am seeing. I am on a mac and have gone to the trouble of using a colour calibration device to configure my monitor. Windows is notorious for how little it cares about colour, and pretty much every monitor I have seen on a PC is different too. So don’t ask me a detailed question about a particular hue in the above images, odds are we will be seeing different things.
2. The Fantastic Four is not anime, so its not actually an AMV you are creating.

Hope this helped.

[haruo]

Thanks to both of you. It's just for a small portion of the clip but I couldn't go without it.

To kmv:
Don't worry. I am not asking for a tut, just a path, as it was said. I find it a lot more usefull to be pointed in the right direction and take the steps on my own. And... ok, it's not an AMV but what do I call it? Can I still upload my video on AnimeMusicVideos.org?

[Krisqo]

Thanks to both of you. It's just for a small portion of the clip but I couldn't go without it.

To kmv:
Don't worry. I am not asking for a tut, just a path, as it was said. I find it a lot more usefull to be pointed in the right direction and take the steps on my own. And... ok, it's not an AMV but what do I call it? Can I still upload my video on AnimeMusicVideos.org?

If it doesn't contain 60% or more anime in it then no.

[Machine]

If you are editing on a Mac, I really recommend using COLOR for anytime of color correction.

[kmv]

If you are editing on a Mac, I really recommend using COLOR for anytime of color correction.

Color came out with Final Cut Studio 2, I have FCS 1, and Color is more suited to the correction of an entire sequence (timeline) rather than a couple of random scenes. But aside from that... yeah.