Avoid Nasty Noise In Low Light Scenarios
Shooting in low light situations often creates nasty shadow noise that’s troublesome in post production. This ugly shadow noise ruins the quality of the image and all the hard work put in on set. Colorist Brandon Jones, at Swatch Four, has built LUTs to help alleviate this problem and create cleaner images in low light cinematography situations. During his development process, I tested the LUTs on several camera systems to see how they work in each color space.
The concept behind the Exposure Compensation LUTs is to help ensure the camera sensor receives enough light in low light situations. It’s easy to underexpose a low lit scene when judging lighting from a monitor. But when the footage comes into post production, it’s often dark and underexposed, which creates additional noise during the color grade. This can be alleviated if the image is exposed brighter on set so the sensor receives adequate light, even if it’s a dark, low light scene.
Each LUT darkens the image in specific T stop increments to bring the image down on set. This darkening naturally requires more light to be added by the cinematographer on set so the image looks good. The captured raw image looks slightly overexposed, but when the LUT travels with the image into post, the colorist corrects the image down to the exposure seen on set. This produces a cleaner image with less noise and more leeway in post production.
We shot the cinematography tests at Liminal Space Rentals, who also provided the camera packages and Tribe7 Blackwing7 lenses. We evaluated the LUT’s on the Arri Alexa 35, Arri Alexa Mini, Red Komodo, Sony FX9, Blackmagic URSA 4.6K, and Blackmagic Pocket 6K. This covers 6 different color spaces, a broad range of professional cameras on the market today. Although we weren't able to test all camera systems, he has LUTs for Canon, Panasonic, and any current camera used by a cinematographer.
This helpful Exposure Compensation Toolkit can be downloaded for FREE from the Swatch Four website.