4EvrYng wrote:I can understand your and Nick's perspective as professionals. But many of people out there aren't in the same league nor position, don't work on sets, aren't in position to setup a shoot nor retake it. Only thing we can do when served a lemon is try to make lemonade little less bitter tasting.
Actually, if you're an amateur, all you have is time. You'd be surprised how rapid the pace is on LA & NY commercial, TV, and film production, where they may well not have had time for proper tests (due to scheduling and budget issues), or they only had one day of prep and the tests were incomplete. But with students, or low-budget YouTube productions, or amateur shoots, you can take 3 days or a week or 2 weeks or a month to get it right the first time and stop the mistakes before they happen.
There's no reason students or other people learning can't learn the need to bracket exposures, take your time, experiment, try different things... and not assume that every mistake you make can be fixed in post. Often, all we can do in the final color process is take something from horrible and make it "barely acceptable," which is not a good compromise. If you expect more than that, you're going to be disappointed a lot of the time.
I have conversations with DPs all the time, and it's been a bone of contention for years: "how much can the DP 'bake' into the shot (like color filters, grads, vignettes, etc.)" vs. "how much should be done in post?" Top DPs often complain about losing too much control in post, where producers and directors change the photography and push it in unanticipated directions. If they apply the filters/vignettes/grads/etc. during production, they can't be changed... but the problem is, if it's wrong, now we can't fix it. So it's an ongoing discussion.