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The best way to control highlights and shadows in post WITHOUT LOSING CONTRAST!
  • Hi guys i thought i should share this with everyone because it has saved quite a few shots for me recently. As some of you may know with the recent releases of photoshop there is now support for video's! But what is best about this is camera raw can now be used on video's! (As far as i know this will ONLY work in the latest cc version of photoshop.)

    Now for the instructions! 1. Import your video into photoshop 2. Right click your video in the layers section and change it to a smart object (Important) 3. Now go to the filters section in photoshop and add the camera raw filter to your video. 4. Adjust the highlights and shadows as you would like then click done. 5. Go to file>export>render video>adobe media encoder>quicktime uncompressed 6. Now wait for it to render (It will take A LONG TIME) but it will be worth it none of the plugins in any of the other video suites have this much capability when handling highlights and shadows) that's why it take so much longer to render. 7. Enjoy your results and have an excellent day i really felt i had to share this because i have been trying tons of plugins and they never worked well enough. Also i should add that you can finish your grade in davinci, premiere, after fx, final cut etc. Good Luck

  • 17 Replies sorted by
  • It might be faster if you save as ProRes – uncompressed needs really fast disks…

  • @nomad I only have a pc so prores is not an option but you can try that if you like, however the codecs in photoshop are limited. So i'm thinking prores isn't available on mac either within photoshop. Uncompessed is always a safe option and better to grade with.

  • First of all, you can use smart filters in CS6. Maybe post a small clip showing the difference, plus the original so anyone can see if it can be equaled in Premiere. I certainly use the lens correction tool in PS as a smart object.

  • ProRes codecs are available for both Mac & PC from Apple.

  • @caveport Yes but not available for exporting in photoshop... I try and do something nice and give you guys a tip and all i get is these supposed corrections and no thanks or anything, man what a world i live in lol

  • and you can not do this in cs6 try it yourself and see @DrDave ... I have tried many other ways i do not think there is an equal honestly especially in adobe software

  • @caveport ...

    I've tried to get prores for Windows, but the only thing I have ever found is decoders for Quicktime Pro for Windows machines ... nothing that allows one to say export a file in ProRes. The Windows alternative is the DNxHD format, similar in many ways.

    If you can point to the place where Apple makes ProRes available for encoding on Windows I'd be more than obliged to you ... ;-)

  • @rNiel Yeah, you are correct. My apologies. I tried the process and the limiting factor is that not all installed codecs are available to Photoshop for exporting QuickTime movies.

    Personally I prefer to use DaVinci Resolve for shadow/highlight adjustment as I get even more control & very fast rendering with batch export.

  • In the next version of PS the Cineform codec should be an alternative (it's high-version), at least it will be supported by AME and Premiere on both platforms. Plus, it's true that Apple delivers only ProRes decoding for PC, but small companies like Miraizon or Cinemartin offer encoders too, probably based on reverse-engineered codecs from FFmpeg. They work quite well, but may not be supported by PS.

  • @tatzu if what you say is true, it should be easy enough to document it. PS filters are very useful for video (I use them with CS6), but I'm not sure I would use them for highlights/shadows.

  • Well, it seems those filters in PS can do something like micro contrast adaption (similar to HDR tone-mapping), which may be useful in some situations. I'd make some tests with varying motion and lots of detail, though, since this can lead to fluctuations which don't look good in motion.

    We did extensive tests with HDR tone-mapping for motion and didn't find it satisfying – maybe that's why you don't find such functions in most color grading software. In Resolve 11 you'll find a mid-tone detail function in the RAW adjustments for DNG sequences which seems to work in a similar way.

  • @rNeil: there are converters; 5DtoRGB does prores, as does Hybrid

  • Nice, but cant afford to buy new software, so I use Resolve 11 to grade my gh4 footage. I did buy some 3D LUT's from that Neumann Films dood and they work great in resolve 11. 3D LUT's for all different cameras, canon, blackmagic, Arri ect I like using the Lut's for the RED camera they seem to crush the information to my taste, but not for all projects.

  • @manstok ...

    5dtoRGB in Windows outputs to DNxHD codecs ... it can read ProRes, like PrPro can ... just can't output to that in Windows. As far as I've ever found ...

  • @rNeil, after a conversion the file shows up with a 'apch' codec: Apple ProRes 422 High Quality: 'apch' ('hcpa' in little-endian); a 150mb h.264 4k gh4 file turned into a 1,9Gb file!

    5dRGBprores.jpg
    618 x 562 - 129K
  • So guys instead of agruing over whether you can use pro res in windows :/ Has anybody actually tried the method i mentioned?

  • Yes, I tried it. It's way too slow for my work. I prefer Resolve as I get perfect control & high speed batch exporting. I can also use any codec or image sequence format that I have installed.