Hi John EB,

Thanks for the video link, I had not seen it.

Since my cameras do not use log exposure, then the use for LUTs gets down to Emulating film and Looks.

You mentioned in my bugs post that there is some Gernam text on the Brightness/Contrast screen. I don't see any, but I do under keyframing for the Shot match screen - at the bottom "angewendet."

For the Brightness curve, I was able to modify one of the individual colour lines without first making an adjustment on the overall brightness curve. Click on the pop down button beside Channel RGB and you can select a colour.

You didn't attach the sample from PSP X7 showing the pipette sampler, but I know what you mean. None of the pipette samplers in VPX have a readout of the RGB composition. There is a pipette sampler under Color for White balance/White point, and two pipettes under Shot match, but no readout.

Some of the NewBlue tools, like Color Fixer Pro have pipettes that can sample colours, but the image is too small for any precision. Select a point and the colour above the pipette will take on the sampled point. Click on this colour button and the Color screen opens showing the HSL and RGB values of the sampled point. But how would knowing this help with the colour correction tools that we have? This is the closest that I could find that at least provides the information in VPX.

For Shot match, I have only made a couple of tests, both in the snow. In one, the white balance was way off and the snow was bluish. The other was fine. Shot match corrected the snow colour to match the good image. However, when I tried with another source image, one that was a close up (of Bernadette with a red vest), the snow ended up too orange/yellow, and the vest heavily saturated bright red. Doing an enhance manually on the snow, corrected the snow colour, but the red was still too saturated and my wife's black coat tinged purplish. Doing an additional enhancement on the red vest gave blotched/posterized red vest. A third enhance using the dog's black boots and my wife's coat reduced the purplish tinge somewhat.

My conclusion here is that the images have to be more similar in nature as per the manual, so a wide angle shot and a closeup were really not compatible for this method.

Here are the images:

Source:

Target:

Result 1:

Source 2:

Result 2 - automatic:

Result 2a - manual enhancement on snow:

Result 2b - manual enhancement on dog's vest

I'll hunt down and try out one where from one frame to the next the colour shifted dramatically, with the highlights suddenly becoming very yellowish.

Hi John CB

. . . . some Gernam text on the Brightness/Contrast screen. I don't see any . . .

You are correct, I was going from memory which effects I had been playing with and found the German text - Shot Match was one of them.

. . . . Click on the pop down button beside Channel RGB and you can select a colour. . . . .

This I do however as when I select the curve it picks the white line not the selected colour, also the dropdown goes blank when I do get the single colour curve as shown below

. . . .the Color screen opens showing the HSL and RGB values of the sampled point. But how would knowing this help with the colour correction tools that we have? . . . .

I use colour correction by numbers using curves in PSP.  The same principle can be applied to video if you know your starting values for RGB in VPX.

Essentially you ensure that all the neutral colours eg black, mid greys and whites are correctly balanced for R, G and B then all the other colours automatically become corrected - I got this from an old book - Professional Photoshop 5 by Dan Margulis - and used to teach the technique in my Digital Photography classes. 

If I had the numbers from the video then I could add points to the curve then use the indicated input boxes to  enter the correction numbers.

Here is a before and after example of a still image corrected by this method

As you can see the original has a distinct red cast.

Shot match

You are getting the same results as I did with snow pictures - I was testing matching tose woth a blue cast to other correct ones - as you say the images have to be a very close match in terms of colour content.

John EB

Hi John EB,

I can't reproduce your problem. If I first change the colour to red then select the line, the red line is selected and moved and Red is still showing in the dropdown.

I am still lost on most of this despite a lot of reading.

"Essentially you ensure that all the neutral colours eg black, mid greys and whites are correctly balanced for R, G and B then all the other colours automatically become corrected..."

How do you ensure that the neutral colours are correctly balanced for RGB?

I took a look at the Virtual Dub plugin - Gradation curves (there is a 64bit version) and read through the tutorial.

I also found an ON1 tutorial that seems quite useful for the work process of colour grading using filters. I have the ON1 Free effects 10 (it was free) and Perfect Effects 9 that came with PSP Ultimate X7 or X8. But trying to translate that into video, I got lost with the B&W part and the blending.

I have also been looking at Pixelan FilmTouch 2.0 Pro. It is important to read the tips to understand how to use the sliders. It would be nice if there were instruments to go along with this to see what happens. The effect stays in the plugin so there is no preview in the VPX instruments. With the VirtualDub gradation plugin, changes are previewed in VPX and in the VPX instruments.

Hi John CB

. . . . I am still lost on most of this despite a lot of reading. . . How do you ensure that the neutral colours are correctly balanced for RGB? . . . .

In a nutshell, neutral colours ie blacks, though greys to white have equal amounts of RGB, balance these correctly and all the other colours are automatically correct.  However there is a 'prescribed' method for doing this.

I am currently in Germany  - I will put up a full tutorial of how to do this when I am back home.

Cheers

John EB