Correcting Shots - The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction - page 303

Leaving the Primary room, Pep creates a secondary and enables a
vignette, creating a tall oval shape around the subject's face. “Now I'm
going to go outside and I want to crush just the midrange and the blacks,
leaving the highlights alone right now. And now bringing the highlights
down a little bit to where I can see detail in everything. Now I'm going to
bring the midrange down, down, down. Now I'm going to bring the black
levels up. I'm just seeing . . . it's a feel, you know?”
Always going past the sweet point and then coming back. It's like
rack focusing. You have to go past, so you know to come back.
- Chris Pepperman, NASCAR
As I watch Pep dial in his correction, I assume that one of the sign-
posts he's using is the amount of “grit” and noise that begins to appear
in the trees. “That's exactly what I'm trying to do. I don't want to see
any noise yet, but I want to see detail. And I want your eye to go toward
him, obviously. I'm just playing around with the background right now
so I don't get any noise. And now I'm just cranking down the video
levels, and I'm cranking down the blacks too. I really like that. So what
I want to do is now is just open my window [vignette] a tad, move it
down, and soften it.” His vignette almost perfectly describes the subject's
face, hair, and neck. “Now I love it ( Figure 7.63 ) . The only thing that's
bothering me is the sky. The sky looks like it was clipped and brought
down. It doesn't look natural to me. So all I'm going to do is stay on the
outside and brighten up the gain a little bit until it starts to look natural.
Just about there, so it looks like a bright day and it doesn't look like it's
clipped and brought down. It's bright back there, so it's going to clip. Let
it clip! Take it up to 100. Maybe even a tad bit more. Now the last thing
I'm going to do is go back inside and just bring up the blacks, because I
want to see where I have them. Then I want to bring them back down to
right about here.”
Pep and I discuss the boundaries he was reaching as he tried to deter-
mine the black level. On the low side, the blacks were creating “grittiness”
and noise, but when he brought them up, the blacks became muddy.
“That's when I brought it back down,” he explains. “Always going past
the sweet point and then coming back. It's like rack focusing. You have to
go past, so you know to come back. Same thing here applies. Once again,
if I was to do anything else here, I might go back to primary and try over-
all saturation and add just a tiny bit.”