Monitor discrepancies
Posted: Sun Feb 28, 2021 6:11 amI've been doing a favor for a friend trying to clean up some interview shots that weren't shot that well. The main problem has been soft focus on the subject and a great deal of shine. I've tried to fix the shine a couple of different ways, both my making masks of the face at different exposures and then adding color to the shiny bright areas until they matched , and also using the anti-shine tool in face refinement . For the soft focus I've just done whatever I could with midtone detail and the blur palette. The compression of shine on the face however does seem to have flattened some of the basic contrast on the lit side of then face . Plenty of shadow on the other side but that's not the problem.
The results won't win an academy award , but the basic shot is nice enough and it looks a helluva lot better than when I started . However I've been troubled by an odd inconsistancy in my monitoring .
I am using a a 2017 27" iMac 5 K retina, have a secondary computer screen with an Apple thunderbolt 27" display and connected through a Davinci mini-monitor to a Flanders 17" monitor. The flanders isn't color critical but I've compared it to other monitors and its very good. When looking at most footage the IMac and the Flanders look remarkably similar though I guess the IMac's whites are probably brighter. The thunderbolt looks a little bit less saturated and less magenta though not much .( I've tried using mac's tool to calibrate the monitor but it always comes out looking different.) I've been using 709-A in Resolve and that's gotten me a nice match in general between Flanders and computer.
On this interview however they suddenly look wildly different. For one thing on both computer monitors it looks overexposed if I bring this face up to 60 or especially 70%, so I'm keeping it a little lower for them . On the Flanders though it looks horrible at that level , way oversaturated and dark. If I desaturate to look good on the Flanders it looks colorless on the computer monitors and vice versa.
I figure this has something to do both with the lack of contrast in the face itself and maybe the fact that there is a difference in the gamma of my Flanders (typical video 2.4) and the Mac which is flatter . I am surprised though at how severe the problem is on this shot and how well it works for most material.
Actually while writing this I decided to try changing the gamma of the Flanders and it does help the match to lower it to 2.0. But the blacks are now higher than my computer screen, and I know its not normal for a TV monitor. Haha - Maybe I just answered my own question, but it does leave open another question in general:
I assume this will be never be seen on a regular TV only computer screens . In that case should I lower the gamma of my Flanders all the time for that kind of work? (I realize its a mess because PC's have a higher gamma than Mac's of course ) is that a reasonable solution to monitor mismatch?
Any thoughts?
BTW - I'm just getting my feet wet with coloring and though I do a few projects for people I'm not at the stage to spend the dough on a full fledged color critical monitor. I suspect that even with a great monitor I might have the same problem though.
The results won't win an academy award , but the basic shot is nice enough and it looks a helluva lot better than when I started . However I've been troubled by an odd inconsistancy in my monitoring .
I am using a a 2017 27" iMac 5 K retina, have a secondary computer screen with an Apple thunderbolt 27" display and connected through a Davinci mini-monitor to a Flanders 17" monitor. The flanders isn't color critical but I've compared it to other monitors and its very good. When looking at most footage the IMac and the Flanders look remarkably similar though I guess the IMac's whites are probably brighter. The thunderbolt looks a little bit less saturated and less magenta though not much .( I've tried using mac's tool to calibrate the monitor but it always comes out looking different.) I've been using 709-A in Resolve and that's gotten me a nice match in general between Flanders and computer.
On this interview however they suddenly look wildly different. For one thing on both computer monitors it looks overexposed if I bring this face up to 60 or especially 70%, so I'm keeping it a little lower for them . On the Flanders though it looks horrible at that level , way oversaturated and dark. If I desaturate to look good on the Flanders it looks colorless on the computer monitors and vice versa.
I figure this has something to do both with the lack of contrast in the face itself and maybe the fact that there is a difference in the gamma of my Flanders (typical video 2.4) and the Mac which is flatter . I am surprised though at how severe the problem is on this shot and how well it works for most material.
Actually while writing this I decided to try changing the gamma of the Flanders and it does help the match to lower it to 2.0. But the blacks are now higher than my computer screen, and I know its not normal for a TV monitor. Haha - Maybe I just answered my own question, but it does leave open another question in general:
I assume this will be never be seen on a regular TV only computer screens . In that case should I lower the gamma of my Flanders all the time for that kind of work? (I realize its a mess because PC's have a higher gamma than Mac's of course ) is that a reasonable solution to monitor mismatch?
Any thoughts?
BTW - I'm just getting my feet wet with coloring and though I do a few projects for people I'm not at the stage to spend the dough on a full fledged color critical monitor. I suspect that even with a great monitor I might have the same problem though.