@shian what exactly do you mean by difusion? Give me an example and I'll let you know.

diffusion filter- like in tiffen plugin and magic bullets. Photoshop does it with gaussian blur. Softening of facial skin flaws is common use.

@sanzadez Thank you, and you're welcome. Can't wait to see the footage.

@hallvalla If the grain bothers you, try a GHrain Killer GHear at about 30-45% to kill it, or mix down to 10-20% to just tone it down.

My first test - wanted to bring out the red bark color on the manzanita - I like! Just a simple GHears with opacity. Slightly warm + spectral enhancer (33%):

@shian thx - my work just upgraded me to the 27" i7 iMac - can't wait to use ColorGHear on it, and otherwise.

@shian Have you done the Mercury Engine hack with your iMac's graphics card? Just curious, thanks.

@matthere

It's not actually the main info panel, you might try checking the little flyout menu in the corner of the info panel and making that there is a check next to "color samplers". The color samplers listed as #1 #2 #3 and #4(if you made four) should show up on an expanded lower part of the info panel just below the XY and WH information.

@jpbturbo - nice work. I used to do something similar in PS with IMG sequences and batch processing, and grew tired of it when I learned to do everything more quickly in AE alone. But if you open your image and the CGT image in separate tabs or download and compare, you'll see that the CGT version has a lot more color depth and richness, it took me under 5 minutes to get the result, and I didn't have to do all that much work. I haven't gotten to the tutorials that deal with grading entire scenes, yet, but when you move from just grading one shot to having to do entire scenes, and, as it follows, an entire film, you want something that's not going to make you wanna blow your brains out from the tedium.

http://www.personal-view.com/talks/uploads/FileUpload/19/80914fce28d4ba747bb855f65eab15.png Yours http://www.personal-view.com/talks/uploads/FileUpload/35/1d40f3a83ea2ec900634b2520cac32.png CGT

I've provided the links to save time, but don't take my word for it, go back a page and download the images for yourselves and compare.

It's a digital image, normal tools are tailored just as specifically for the GH2.

You can also open video in PS too if you wish, AE also runs on the Photoshop engine, there's a lot of power in stock AE.

The normal tools are simple, 'specialist' packages are convoluted with so many controls imho.

I attached a quick grade using the curves in photoshop. Before anyone jumps on me and says this is about AE not PS just let me explain. I use the curves in photoshop a starting point when I am trying to emulate a look.

Here's the process, open a frame grab of the target look in PS, in this case I used Shian's graded .png from the post up there^^^ Then I take a .png from the raw footage and also open it in PS and drag it into the same document as the target .png. With the target .png visible I use the color sampler tool to set three reference points, a light, mid, and a shadows(hopefully all black/gray/white), the rgb values for each of the sample points shows up in the info box and I'll maybe write them down for easy reference. Then I turn back on my raw footage .png and with it selected and visible (and making sure that I am still on the color sampler tool) click on Image > Adjustments >Curves.

Once the curves dialog pops up I click on the drop down that says RGB and switch it to Red for the red channel. Next I Ctrl+Click on each of the color sample points on the image it will add a corresponding point on the diagonal line in the curves dialog. Now I adjust the points on the curve until the rgb values in the info box match up with what I wrote down earlier. This should get me in the ballpark of the overall color I need. On the curves dialog just next to the OK button is a little flyout menu that allows you to save the curves setting as a .ACV file. Go back into AE and add yourself an adjustment layer, apply curves, click on the load curves button(looks like an open file folder) and add the curve you saved out.

Anyways, Just another way of doing things I guess. One of these days I'll get a real monitor so I can see what stuff looks like instead of having to play by numbers :)

-Josh

@rockroadpix Here's the skinny

@shian

i read a lot of monitor reviews, where you know the consensus is that 200$ Dell screen (U2311) is calibrated properly out of the box, to the point where you don't think anymore that you need a Nec or worse an Eizo. Still haven't made the purchase of buying that Dell monitor, but i still think i should take the chance to check it. Anything by Apple is too expensive for me at this point. I assume something like a Spyder or Eyeone could probably be useful, too. My main work is in audio and i always thought i could skimp on (loudspeaker) monitors, but i have learnt by trial and error they are the most important and that there are almost no cheap monitors that can show you what you're working on. I suspect it might not be different for graphics, but i'd love to have it all with a 200$ IPS.

Damn..., shian can we see the final 1920x1080 frame? I agree, what lens was used here?

@johnnym No I haven't, yet. I'm still trying to figure out if it's better to shoot a live video demo or screencast that to get it across, but it is definitely coming.

At work we did a test...years back, where we tried to train our eyes to see just how far off from true color different monitors were, even when "Calibrated" and found that the with a little disparity, the old anti-glare Mac Cinema Displays were nearly dead on with our DVS monitors, enough to where we could work on them, confidant that when we got in the projection room, there wouldn't be any surprises - they were about a 1/4 stop darker, and ever so slightly more magenta, but almost a perfect substitute for the real thing, if you understood just how much they were off from "true". When the new Cinema Displays, the crystal clear glass ones came out, we were floored that when calibrated they were almost dead on without being too dark, and without the magenta issue. PC monitors were ALL OVER THE PLACE back in 2006, and still are, always too bright, impossible to even get into the ball park, and so we gave up on them. (which was hard for me, because I was not yet a mac convert, so I didn't want to eat crow, but I couldn't argue with the results)

Right now I use a 27" iMac. I calibrate AFX by importing color bars generated by FCP, and balancing the Pluge and sort of half-assing the blue gun only test, by using the Blue lut...but I always double check, switching over to the Panasonic Plasma I have connected and calibrated with a bluray home theater calibration disc. NOT IDEAL. But who has $21,000 for a reference monitor? Not me.

Sometimes, when this system is rendering, I'll mess around with grading on my laptop which is impossible to get calibrated properly, and I forget how much of a magenta skew there is on it, and if I don't have it plugged into an external monitor everything almost always comes out too green. I know what you're thinking, why can't you just adjust your monitor to compensate, well you can't You start moving across the green spectrum, and it throws everything else off luminance contrast, other colors move out of alignment. It's the damnedest thing.