talking about james somerton's dogshit color grading
okay, i see people talking about how poorly james somerton's videos are lit and at first i was like "how does this dumbass not understand three point lighting, its like something you learn about within the first month of film school" but then someone on twitter pointed out he probably just didn't know how to properly grade footage and i was like ooooh my god how did i not realize?
so when you first shoot something, it will probably look fine on your camera, but when you import it to your computer it might look like dogshit on your monitor, like in the image on the left. this has to do with whether you shoot it in LOG or RAW. basically RAW= huge file size but no change in saturation/exposure/white balance, ect. LOG= smaller file size but really ugly, little saturation and contrast, etc.
when you take this footage into your color grading software, you have to put a LUT (look-up-table) matching the camera you shot on onto the LOG footage to restore it so it looks like the image on the right. After that, you can start grading (fixing the exposure, adding colors to the highlights or shadows, there's a million different things you can do when you color grade.)
but whoever edited these (I'm assuming it's James, who we can always count on to be extremely lazy in his "creative" endeavors) just skipped that crucial step and went straight into color grading the LOG footage. Which is a huge no-no.
that is the reason why shots like these look so weirdly lit. conversion to LOG literally drains the contrast and saturation from the footage. which is why it is STEP ONE to correct it in post. but this dude probably just went straight into applying filters and colors and just thought upping the exposure or brightness would fix the footage.
obviously i don't have access to these files personally, so i can't say this with 100% certainty, but it would explain why the footage looks so damn weird. in my personal opinion it's not a lighting mistake necessarily (though the choices of colored gels he uses for his lights are very questionable.)
