Shooting for Color

Posted by admin on June 11th, 2008 filed in Personal

Yesterday, I met Anthony Jacoway. He is a color correction and motion graphic specialist who is the head of a new media department at JMU. His technical knowledge is sharp and I really learned a lot regarding shooting for color. When shooting digital, even if its high-definition, your color is compressed. However, you still want to make sure that you capture as much information about those colors in order to have more to work with when performing color correction. You can always take away information and tweak it, but you can never add it.  

With the Sony HVR-V1U, a couple things you want to manually set, in your Picture Profile, to get the most information possible for your color are;  

1. Sharpness, turn the sharpness down to ZERO (or at least lower it), this setting automatically puts lines around some of your images to give them a sharper look.  This looks weird and can make them impossible to color correct.

2. Black Compression, select STRETCH, this will decrease your blacks, capturing more information, which will allow you to do more with the shadows and blacks in color correction. 

3. Setting the Knee Point to LOW, the Knee point acts as a curve for your high end whites. This will capture more information about your high end whites that are close to being overexposed.  

For more information about Anthony check out his website and reel. Also, if you want to know more about shooting for color just shoot me an email.