Since Druid Street was first shot (vimeo.com/16445812), I have been asked many times how the cameras were setup and the colouring achieved. I hope this "before and after" version helps.
We had very bright street lights and dark shadow areas so I went for a very flat picture style to try and hold the highlights but still retain detail in the shadows. This was created in the picture style editor supplied by Canon, a tedious piece of software but useful when you get used to it. Effectively a sine wave lifting the blacks and bringing down the whites keeping the middle point unchanged, hence reducing the contrast. The more extreme the curve, the less the contrast but be careful, it can go horribly wrong! Due to the picture style all of this was shot at ISO 400.
More on this and links to other picture styles are in Luka's fine tutorial: vimeo.com/7256322. Cinema5d also has a good thread with a download for a picture style very similar to one we used: cinema5d.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=3401
We also had vastly differing light colour temps so I went with 5200K in camera but I did end up with a horrible yellow cast that needed correcting so about 4000K would have been a better choice in hindsight although it would have rendered the end scenes very blue. Normally I would shoot a grey card at the beginning of each shot but this was all shot in 80 minuets as we were getting rather wet, even under the umbrellas. You will see a raindrop which sneaked through the matt box onto the lens in the centre of the street light at 0:38 which had to be removed in post.
I colour corrected the shots in Photoshop, firstly with a curves layer adjusted the white point to where I wanted. Then with a hue & saturation layer, tweaked the over saturated yellows and reds and finally brought back the contrast with an additional curves layer, be careful as you can generate a lot of noise if you go mad and lift the exposure too much so watch your histograms all the way through. You can do this in Premier or Final Cut Pro in a similar way but Photoshop seems to give you more control and you have tools not available elsewhere. You can also see live colour histograms as you work.
Then into Premier to edit and import the Photoshop files as if they are footage. It is actually faster to edit with the original files first and then replace the footage with your psd files as editing is very slow with layered psds as you can imagine. The great thing is, right clicking a clip gives you an option to “edit in Photoshop”, you can jump back to tweak the colour if needed when you see it all together.
There are now many picture styles available and many “flat” ones. Going flat allows you to shoot in very dark locations and still get great results but pulling your shots back from the grey mush you get, can be a little daunting. Practice, test, practise... especially if you don’t have a generator truck on set with a lorry load of HMIs and a $20K lighting budget. Good luck!
