Color Grading HDSLR footage in Photoshop - Experimental coloring test

[Liszon]

Greeeeeetings!

I never really liked the existing options for serious color grading in video editors - like the almost "industry standard" Magic Bullet Looks, which is not really matching my taste, both in results and interface - so I decided to give it a try in photoshop CS5.1, with the plugin I use often called Exposure (by Alien Skin).

Results - choose 1080p if you want to see some real grain:

[url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jghMw8KHX9g#ws]Color Grading HDSLR footage in Photoshop - Test[/url]
The footage was made with a Canon EOS 550D (no ML) + the Meyer Orestor (Preset Pentacon aka the "Bokeh Monster") 135mm f/2.8 lens + some shots with a Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8.

The reason I like Exposure is that the interface is really clean "Windows 98" type, has really useful and tasteful presets of old film stocks, and it has a serious film grain emulation tab (and I think the right amount of grain can cover some h.264 artifacts, and its more "film-like" too), also the other tabs are loaded with curve, tint and other adjustment options, and you can save and export your custom made presets. (Maybe there are similar points with Magic Bullet, but as i said, the interface and the results with Looks seems inferior to me.)

So what i did was I simply opened the raw h.264 clips into Photoshop, if you click to import, there is a 500 frame limit - simply open it, and you get a nice full range layer. You should open the animation panel also, so you can make IN-OUT selections etc.
If you would like to apply a filter, you should convert the video layer into a smart object first, so the effects will apply to the full video, not just one frame. When you finished, you can render as video.
In my experience, if you want to use "cinema worthy" formats, you can export in Avid DNxHD, Uncompressed AVI, and Uncompressed QuickTime. I tried to use Cineform, but the result was an error message every the time, so I decided to stick with DNxHD (1920x1080p - 23.97fps, 10bit, 177Mbps - there is no better options like 220Mbps) - more encode time, smaller size - better method if you make longer sequences - and sometimes I rendered in Uncompressed Avi (in 24bit) too, because it was quick, and Cineform's encoder can handle it versus the Uncompressed QT (file not supported error in HDLink).

Encoding time was a bit longer than average but still acceptable, especially if I consider my Intel C2D E7300 based PC's computing power.

If you would like to save some time:

1 - you can export smaller clips in Uncompressed AVI (but for me, after 5Gb encoded in one row, the final footage was "corrupted" - at least thats what HDLink said - but files around 2-3Gb was fine.)

2 - you can export a specific range from the clips (Photoshop lets you set the first and the last frame just like Premiere) So if you already edited your footage in Premiere, you can check the final length of the clips to be graded, and use the same IN-OUT points (or last-first frames) in Photoshop.

Also you can grab a frame from your footage as bmp/tiff, and make grading plans in Photoshop, save the presets, so you can pre-visualize the final color theme with stills.

For comparison, here is four before-after frame grabs (big files!):

[URL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/835/94560427.jpg/][IMG]http://img835.imageshack.us/img835/6903/94560427.th.jpg[/img][/URL]

[URL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/85/69870184.jpg/][IMG]http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/5973/69870184.th.jpg[/img][/URL]

[URL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/109/95079495.jpg/][IMG]http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/3200/95079495.th.jpg[/img][/URL]

[URL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/840/82555769.jpg/][IMG]http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/2633/82555769.th.jpg[/img][/URL]

Thanks for looking, i hope this was useful!