Advice on color correcting an overexposed 8mm project in CS5 Premiere Pro

Matt Stevens · January 2, 2013

Gents and ladies, I have never color corrected on my own. I did an 8mm short for the Straight8 festival and boy oh boy did I overexpose. It's the worst super8 I have ever shot. I shouldn't have trusted the light meter, which was always telling me I was underexposed. Bullsh**. Clearly the 500t was not. Oh well. Now I know to just go with my gut.

I'd like to do what I can to make this look a little bit less offensive. This is a basic capture that was inverted and sent back to me without any real color correction (I couldn't afford a professional scan + color correction for just one roll).

I have CS5 Production Premium. The auto color correction setting sure don't seem to do anything special so I am hoping for some advice here.

Adrian Sierkowski · January 2, 2013

A quick curves in photoshop gives me this:

You could probably massage it a bit more and pull some of the saturation out as well (as curves adds sat in my experience)

Certainly not the worst i've seen film before bringing it back to niceness.

Adrian Sierkowski · January 2, 2013

And after a quick vignette and an outside/inside correction and warming it up a bit with -14 on sat (all this in photoshop but i'm sure Premier has similar controls?) :

(also I am in no way a colorist at all, though i do know how to open apple color :ph34r: 0

Matt Stevens · January 3, 2013

Looks better than my fiddling so far. This is quite a learning curve. What I am finding is that my negative was not quite as overexposed as I thought. They pushed it hard in the scanning, likely by mistake.

Adrian Sierkowski · January 3, 2013

Once you start to play with curves it all states to make sense.

Art Leal · January 3, 2013

My two cents, using a combination of Sony Vegas and After Effects with a lot of trial and error and a filter named Shadow & Highlights in AE. Would love to see this film at some point!