All language subtitles for Procolor_C07_L1a_Concept_Colormanagement1

Now let's talk
about what for some people is a very big,

intimidating concept and their management.

This is a part of color grading that
many people kind of skip or shy away from.

But if we can start with a really good
color management

foundation,
it just makes everything so much easier.

So what is color management?

I think the easiest way to kind of

think about this is with the analogy
of developing film.

So back before digital, still cameras as
well as movie cameras would shoot on film,

and unless you had your own darkroom
of some kind,

you would have to take your film
to a store to be developed

and you couldn't see what kind of pictures
you were taking.

You couldn't look at your images
before they were developed.

And it was only after
the film was developed

that you can actually look at the images
your camera captured.

Now, luckily,
we aren't in that state anymore,

but this is a really good analogy for how
we need to kind of respect our images.

Pretty much all professional video
cameras nowadays shoot with what's called

log encoding.

That's short for logarithmic,
and there's a bunch of fancy math

that has to do with logarithmic functions

and how different brightnesses
are transformed and all this stuff

that is a little bit intense
if you're not a super nerd.

But what it really means is

this When you take an image of something
that exists in the real world,

there are a range of colors
and a range of brightnesses

that exist, everything from really bright
light, looking directly at the sun

all the way down to just about black
in the darkest shadows.

And our eyes are really good at adapting
to whatever brightness we throw at it.

That's why at night,
if there's a full moon out,

you can actually see pretty well.

And if it's a bright, bright, sunny day,
you can still see, well,

if you were to expose your camera
for bright sunlight

and then don't change any of the settings

and you try and shoot at night or any
dark house, everything is going to be way,

way, way too dark to the point
where you can't even see what's going on.

And that's because the difference
between the brightest parts

and the darkest parts in real life is way
bigger than what a camera can see.

This difference between the bright
and darkest parts is called dynamic range.

So as cameras have gotten better,

they've gotten better
at capturing more of this dynamic range.

If you've heard of HDR images,
those are designed to capture

really bright
and really dark at the same time.

But even then, the video files
that we're recording,

they just can't really hold
all this information.

So in order to get as much information
as we possibly can

with the equipment that we have,
cameras shoot in, log.

And like I said,
there's a bunch of fancy math here.

But really what it's doing
is it's darkening the brightest parts

and it's brightening the darkest parts
so that you can get

as much dynamic range
possible in your image.

So something that's like ten brightness
might be brought down to five brightness,

something that is 10%
dark might be brought up to 30% dark.

You can think of this
like when you're all done camping

and you're packing up your tent
and you take the tent poles out

and everything and then you squish it all
down into a stuffed sack of some kind.

That great big tent kind of gets
folded down into a little tiny space.

And that's really
what our cameras are doing with the colors

and brightnesses
that they see in the real world.

It's kind of folding them
and pushing them into this little space

that it can actually think about.

And when it does this, the byproduct of it
is that we get

this kind of gray washed out image, which,

if you look in our project here,
if we turn off my color grades here,

that's what we have this really gray
washed out, ugly looking image.

And this is

all about getting the most detail
in the brightest parts of the image

and the darkest parts of the image,

as well as kind of taming back
the brighter colors.

For instance, this pink was really,
really bright on set,

but it doesn't look very bright here
in our log image.

Everything looks gray
and washed out and ugly.

So then that presents a problem
when it comes to color correction.

How do we get this ugly
gray log footage to look natural again?

Because we don't want it
to look ugly and gray.

We want to have as much of the information
as we can from our original image

and also have it look natural.

But how do we get there?

Well, basically,

there are two major ways to turn a log
image into something that looks natural.

The first way is to do color by eye.

This is essentially looking at the log
image and saying,

okay, these highlights need to be brighter
and brightening them up.

These shadows need to be darker
and darkening them down.

Whatever colors are in the image

need to be more intense
and then upping the saturation.

And so we kind of dial this in by eye,

which does work,
and it gives us a nice looking image.

But one problem is it's really up
to whoever is running the color grading,

and it's really dependent

on what kind of monitor
they're using, whether it's calibrated.

And all of the things that we talked about
in our chapter about color set up.

And it also has to do with personal taste.

And there's all these other factors
that go into this image.

And the final image

may or may not be accurate to what
this actually looked like in real life.

Now, is that a huge deal?

Not always.

But what happens when we do it this way

is that we're not really beginning
with the cleanest starting point.

We're not working to make better
an untouched image.

We're actually kind of messing with it
first.

And it's really

dependent on personal taste
and kind of what looks good in the moment.

That's why we call this color by eye.

And the fancy term for this is display
referred, which means that it's

referring to what your display looks like
and kind of how this image looks.

Again, for a practical sense,

is anyone really going to know
that it didn't really look like this?

No, probably not.

But we're not truly giving ourselves
the best shot to make the best image.

So what's a different way
we can go about this?

This is where color management comes in.

The job of color management
is to take this log image

and identify what camera it's from
and take into account

how the camera records this log signal
and unfold it

to be as accurate as possible
to what was actually there on set.

We call this scene referred
because we're actually referring

to the scene that we shot
and the way it was shot.

What camera was used to shoot it this way.

We're giving ourselves an objective
starting point and we're not making

any creative decisions before we see
what was actually captured by the camera.

Again,
this is kind of like developing your film.

When you run something
through color management,

that's the first time
you're seeing what the camera actually saw

and not just this kind of log image,
that sort of the image

at an intermediate state.

So a simplified explanation
of kind of how this works is imagine

you had a graph of the brightnesses
in an image

and it ranged from the darkest part
all the way to the lightest part.

This is how it looks in real life.

And then a log image messes
with that graph a little bit.

So the things that are really bright
might be brought down to not quite as

bright. The things that are midtown's
might be a little brighter.

And basically every point along
this line is adjusted in a way

that will maximize the dynamic range
that's recorded.

So this little curve
that makes a log image

and what we can do is use something
called a color transform

that is pretty much this exact curve,
but inverted.

And when you add this curve to this curve,
it kind of reverses things

and you end up with an image
that looks more natural.

You can

think of it sort of like this
I'm going to hide a few things on our

interface here, but our custom curves here
is kind of a similar graph.

And if the camera does something like this
to the image

where the darkest parts
are kind of lifted up like this

and the brightest parts
aren't quite as bright,

and this curve kind of flattens out
as it gets brighter.

If we take this curve
and kind of do the opposite,

we end up with a more natural
looking image.

And that's basically
what a color transform does, is it adds

the opposite of whatever curve
the camera uses to record images.

But if we're just going to reverse this,
then why go through all of this anyway?

Why don't we just not deal
with any of that and not record in log?

The reason is so that we can do all of our
major color work on our log image

that has a bunch of information
packed into it

and use as much information
to do our color work.

And then we kind of adapt that to whatever
display we want it to look good on.

This gives us a lot of wiggle room
to be able to do all kinds of fancy

color things while keeping the detail
in the highlights or the shadows,

making sure colors aren't too bright
or we don't lose any information.

If you've never really worked
with color management before,

this can be a lot to kind of
wrap your head around.

But for now, if you can remember this,
we record images in logs

so that we can pack as much information
into a compressed file format as we can.

Then we can make our color adjustments
and then reverse that log curve

so that things look nice on our display.

And that whole workflow
is called color management.