poita said:
Nope I don't touch the blacks at all, Davinci has tools to just work with individual components of the signal, so I probably have a very different workflow to you.
Your images posted here look very different when I bring them into photoshop, but it is most likely just a colourspace thing. I was just wondering if you load these images from OT.COM back into photoshop if they look different to you.
e.g. if you save http://imageshack.com/a/img837/5302/7tsj.jpg and load that into photoshop, does it look the same as it does in the browser here. Wanted to make sure we were both looking at the same thing :)
Anyway, it's not all that important, was just trying to quickly whip up a rough image to illustrate what I meant by making the skintones less flat.
Some people prefer the flat look anyway, I personally feel it looks a bit lifeless, but I've had some clients disagree.
No I wasn't suggesting that you had followed those steps, only that using my program that is what I would probably have to do to recreate what you did there. What I worry about is blowing out highlights if you brighten and boost contrast too much, any change like what you've done there would have to be pretty subtle, certainly more subtle than what you've demonstrated but I get the gist of what you're saying, adding a little more 'punch' to the image to make it more lifelike.
I've found it can be a slippery slope though in film grading because in the past i've got carried away (I remember especially having this with star wars the very first time I started grading it, pretty much the first regrade I ever did) and boosted contrast too much to get that extra punchiness. I've then played back the video on my tv and almost burned my eyes out the contrast was so strong hehe film grading is very different from photography grading in that sense, you have to be a lot more restrained and have far less leeway as far as boosting contrast and adding punchiness is concerned, it least from my experience, that is if you don't want to burn viewers eyes out hehe.
That soft filter is definately a step too far for me though, looks too much like DNR for my liking and i've had enough of that in blu-ray transfers of my favourite films to last me a lifetime. Anybody wanting to soften up star wars can apply DNR filters on their TV and achieve the same effect. I'm not planning to take away people's choice to watch the film with as detailed an image as possible, like the studios did with the DNRed Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones blu-rays.
I just tried saving that image and opening it in photoshop, it says an rgb profile is missing, I select 'leave as is, don't color manage' and the image loads up looking very desaturated and different to how in looks when I open it in acdsee or when I look at it on this page. Is that the same thing you're getting? Must be some sort of color profile issue.