Grading with the Gray Scale

[James R Blann]

Hi all,

 

I'm currently in my first year studying cinematography in the UK. For our end of year film there is no grading and probably minimal

lab work to see, I guess, what we can do with the negative as we're shooting on 16mm. I was wondering if anyone has had any

experience playing with colours by lighting the grayscale in different ways to adjust colour temperature. Of course there's the typical

3200K/5600K balance but has anyone ever played around with different combinations?

 

Cheers!

[Bill Bill]

That is an interesting concept......I was just searching the web to see if anyone had done that. We just installed new lcd monitors in the studio and another tech has been adjusting them. I am old school where you adjust the red blue green to get the temperature that you want so it will reproduce on a camera.(usually on the red side) Now we have LCD tv's and if you use an off the shelf monitor you are lucky if you have some handles to control anything. I was just thinking if you take and put a grey scale on the monitor and then shoot it with a camera and look at that camera output on a waveform monitor, you could null out the chroma on the steps from back to white or minimize them with the adjustments on the monitor. If you experiment with this I would like to know your result......I have seen some try to adjust just the hue on the monitor, but that will get just one

color close, all the others will be off......I am a transmitter engineer right now, but for years and years I also adjusted broadcast cameras. Good Luck with your film......

 

Bill

[Stuart Brereton]

Hi all,

 

I'm currently in my first year studying cinematography in the UK. For our end of year film there is no grading and probably minimal

lab work to see, I guess, what we can do with the negative as we're shooting on 16mm. I was wondering if anyone has had any

experience playing with colours by lighting the grayscale in different ways to adjust colour temperature. Of course there's the typical

3200K/5600K balance but has anyone ever played around with different combinations?

 

Cheers!

 

First off, you need to change your display name to your real first and last name. It's one of the rules on this board.

 

It's a common technique to manipulate the look of the grayscale in order to affect your dailies. it's often done with CTO/CTB to affect color temp, and occasionally with Plus/Minus green and other gels. If you plan on trying it, make sure to include a note with your camera reports, so that the dailies colorist doesn't assume it's a mistake and time it out.

[Chris Burke]

the cool this is that you can shoot several gray scales colored different ways and leave your actual footage alone. this gives you many different options during the grading. When "you" are grading, you go back to the cool gray scale or the warm grayscale or the pink gray scale or what ever colors you have chosen and set that as you mid point, then you grade from there. This is not the norm, but I found it a good way to experiment. I did this with video camera to see an approximation of what the results would be, then I did it for real on set.