COLOR CORRECTION

The music video clip Everybody Knows I Love You (Unplugged) by the Lovebugs presented me with two separate tasks regarding color correction: raising the overall luminance while preserving the shadows on one hand, and neutralizing color imbalance while matching up the scenes on the other. The footage, recorded in a concert hall, showed the band playing on a stage that was lit with an array of spotlights, changing the colors of the overall light scheme constantly, in true rock concert fashion. Now, this might look groovy while watching live, but produced an overtly purple/red tinted footage in certain shots. These had to be "toned down" to match the rest. Other sequences, lit with yellow lights, were somewhat unflattering to the band members' skin (strong suspicion of liver problems...). These scenes had to be neutralized, too, by shifting the overall color balance away from the yellows and more towards blue. In addition, some of the color saturation — especially in the super-saturated red stage lights — had to be capped to prevent possible broadcast problems. A general issue calling for primary color correction was the overall luminance level, being too low in most of the scenes, so that some were too mushy even to be sure what was going on in the picture. Therefore the overall luminance was hitched up, while taking care to leave the darkest hues intact, thus preserving the grading in the shadows.