Moment — online sellers of video- and photo-related gear like bags, filters, gimbals, drone– and smartphone filters, and even smartphone apps — have added CineBloom Diffusion Filters to their webstore. Who’s still using filters? Back in the day when I was still shooting film and in the early days of digital cinema, I never rolled the camera without at least three filters in the matte box. While NDs and Color Conversion filters were a necessity, I often added a touch of diffusion to soften the contrast. Black- and White Pro-Mist, Hollywood FX, and Diffusion were my usual “weapons of choice”. Soft contrast using MOMENT CineBloom Filters. Image Credit: MOMENT Nowadays I practically never put filters in front of my lens: It’s too easy and flexible to add gradients, color, or diffusion in postproduction. I hardly even use a polariser, because the dynamic range of modern cameras is so good, that I can pull back the sky and add more blue in grading, plus I don’t get the waxy-skin-effect most polas introduce. However MOMENTs release of their CineBloom filters caught my eye and I decided to have a closer look. What is Diffusion? You can think of diffusion filters of optical “compressors”. The light coming from bright sources — like practicals, sky, or brightly lit surfaces — hits the filter and gets “broken up” by tiny bumps in the filter glass and redistributed to darker areas around the bright core. The contrast of the image overall is reduced and bright parts...
Published By: CineD - Friday, 25 September, 2020