Histograms of Blu Ray screen grabs

[Josef Heks]

I've been trying to use Blu Ray screengrabs of shots I like from movies with the hope to being able roughly decipher the histograms to get an idea of how they have been exposed. But what I'm finding is that nearly every frame I find looks sort of dull - the images themselves look beautiful, but they mostly seem to sit in the lower half of a histogram when I put them into photoshop..

 

Do you think the images have actually intentionally been exposed like this? I dont find movies at the cinema this dull, but perhaps its due to the bright projection and dark cinema..

Or does a whole lot of brightness detail actually get lost during a DVD/bluray transfer?

 

Heres an example, of the lovely ms zooey:

 

http://www.highdefdiscnews.com/screenshots/%28500%29_days_of_summer_8.png

 

put this into photoshop and you'll see what i mean.

 

 

Thoughts??

Edited May 18, 2011 by Josef Heks

[Josef Heks]

I notice that link doesn't work.. just click it, then take the / of the end in the address bar (after the .png) and the pic comes up.

 

sorry!

[Josef Heks]

Heres a second example, from Apocalypse Now:

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/233/anr8.png/

 

Notice how a whole chunk of detail is missing at the top end of the histogram, even though there seem to be highlights in the frame which look as though they are basically blowing out..

[Brian Drysdale]

Most of the image is at the lower end, with only a couple of highlight's, there's actaully not much at the high end.