Preparing Your Images for PhotoLooks

There is a wealth of information — and just as much misinformation — on the web and in print about how to shoot photographs for the best results. This page gives you information, straight from Magic Bullet Creative Director Stu Maschwitz, about how you can shoot the best images in preparation for Magic Bullet PhotoLooks. For more information on shooting and color processing, check out Stu Maschwitz's DV Rebel's Guide book from Peachpit Press.

Turn down the sharpening

If your camera has the option, reduce the internal sharpening control to almost none. The harsh, over-sharpened edges that appear on high-contrast images are a signature giveaway of video. It’s worth experimenting with your camera’s settings to find the best sharpening amount, but it will almost certainly be less than the default setting.

Don’t overexpose or underexpose

DV and HDV do not react well to blown-out areas of the frame. If a hot or overexposed look is your desire, it’s far better to shoot at a normal exposure and use Magic Bullet PhotoLooks to burn it out later.

Many cameras have an option to display a zebra pattern in the viewfinder over areas that are blown out to 100% white. This is a very helpful option when shooting for PhotoLooks. A ND Grad filter can help keep sunny skies from blowing out, and putting one on the camera will even do a better job than Look’s built-in Grad and Exposure tools!

DV doesn't react well to dark areas either! Brightening up a dark DV shot will bring out all the compression and noise that you never knew was there.

Shoot it plain

As an owner of Magic Bullet PhotoLooks, you have the most powerful image adjustment tools in the world at your fingertips. Shoot your footage as “normal” looking as possible, and wait until you get it into a Magic Bullet project to create those crazy PhotoLooks you have in mind. This gives you the power and control to change your mind about how you want it to look. This means avoiding color filters or diffusion filters on the camera (with the exception of the ND Grad mentioned above), and setting the white balance to the correct camera preset for the type of light you’re using.

Shoot it consistent

The best favor you can do for yourself is to ensure that shots in the same sequence look similar to one another. Watch not only the lighting on your foreground subject, but that of your backgrounds as well. Use presets for white balance, so that even if your battery goes dead and you lose your camera settings, you can still return to the same color balance you were using before. Use a color monitor on the set to compare playback of your last setup to the feed from the current one. Try to keep all of your similar skin tones in the same exposure range from one shot to the next—some cameras have zebra patterns in their viewfinders that help you do this. Finally, create a pre-flight checklist for your camera that combines these guidelines with your own experiences, and run through it before beginning every new shot.

As with any advice, please take the above into consideration and make your own decisions. These guidelines worked well for Stu Maschwitz but there could be any number of reasons that you may need to do something different. Magic Bullet PhotoLooks should be flexible enough to handle whatever you throw at it, but if you follow the above guidelines, you are on the road to superior results.

Use a 'flat' picture profile

Set up your camera to record as much dynamic range as possible. This will result in a low-contrast, low-saturation 'digital negative' that allows more flexibility for grading in PhotoLooks 2. You can do this with some in-camera Picture Style settings.

For instance, the Canon 5D has Neutral settings that can be modified to a low Saturation and very low Sharpness and Contrast. Save the settings as a User Defined Picture Style to remove the contrasty, video-like tone curve and eek out a little more highlight detail. Read more in Stu's ProLost blog post.