Graphics Reference
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detail is a personal preference. The image still looks washed out to me and
the majority of the darker portion of the image is still around 10 or 12IRE.
Lower the blacks even more. Somewhere between 58 and 73 on the
input of the graph, I think the black is pulled down low enough and the
clipping isn't too extreme. As you try to focus your adjustment for black
somewhere in that range, change from watching the waveform monitor to
watching the video monitor. Try to rack “focus” back and forth while look-
ing at some critical areas. In this image, for me, the critical areas are the
hair just above his forehead, his eyes, and his skin tone. I don't want the
texture of the hair to be lost by pulling the blacks too low. I also don't want
to pull the blacks down so low that I lose the sparkle in his eyes. There are
a lot of reflections in his eyes that give the image life, and if the blacks come
down too far, you will lose them. Other colorists that I watched work on
this image were less concerned with the eyes and brought the blacks down
a lot farther than I did. The other tonal region you need to look at in addi-
tion to those two areas is the skin tones in the midtones. You want a nice,
rich skin tone that doesn't look too washed out. There are other things you
can do to enhance the skin, so instead of trying to get it perfect right now,
use the detail areas of the hair and eyes to determine how low to bring
your black levels. I settled on a value of 60 for input and 0 for output. That
means that in the source footage, everything (on Color Finesse's scale from
1-255) that was below 60 is now remapped down to 0. Then the entire
range of the source from 60-255 is now spread from 0-255 ( Figure 2.26 ) .
Fig. 2.26 Note the dif-
ference in the image in
the split screen between
the source image on the
left and the effect that the
black correction has on
the right.
 
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