Monday, November 26, 2012

Cineplus lightform Cinema

I use the Flaat profiles when I do shoot on my Canon dslr's for the added dynamic range it gives. Plus I like how easy it is to grade and the nice skin tones the Flaat profiles produce.
I started to look for a color profile that doesn't need grading, for the times I need a quick turn around or for someone that doesn't want the footage to be graded. I found Cineplus lightform picture profile. For a 19 dollar donation you'll get Lightform C, Lightform N, and Cinema picture profile. You can find the profiles here.
http://www.cineplus.ch/
From Cineplus website. "Relight enhanced dynamic range"
"Reskin perfect skin tones out of the box"
"Regrade grading ready headroom"
Lightform comes in 2 profiles. Lightform n "with neutral untouched colors, for those who want full control of the image in post production. Lightform n is suppose to have better highlights, skintones"
Lightform Cinema "with an enhanced version of the highly sucessful look of cineplus cinema picture style. More filmoc overall tones."
Both Lightform n and Lightform cinema can be graded and you can push the curves with out destroying the highlights. It is recommended to use these settings. Sharpness at 3, contrast at -4, saturation at -1 and skintones at +1. But if you want more of a balanced finished look set contrast at 0.
I loaded the Cineplus Lightform cinema profile on to my t2i. I already have Flaat 10n and Flaat 10p loaded. So I decided to see how it looked compared to them and Canon's standard profile. I set lightform Cinema at the recommened settings but I left contrast at 0 to see how good the image would look without any grading.
t2i Smallhd dp4 Glidetrack slider

This is the test footage
 http://youtu.be/eEhCX8mSqbg

When I was editing the clips the Flaat profiles were brighter and the colors more vivid. The Cineplus Lightform Cinema images looked flat and the colors were dull without doing any grading. The skintone shot looked like there was no saturation at all.
I went back to the edit and wanted to see how Cineplus would fair with a quick grade. I adjust the curves and added a little contrast. The images got a lot better with the colors coming to life.
With my first test with Cineplus I have to say you need to grade to get a nice image. I was hoping this profile would give a good image out of the box for quick turn arounds. But a quick grade does give a nice image and the time it took to grade isn't bad at all. On the vector scopes skintones were at the skin line just needed curve adjustments to really get the colors.
I'm going to shoot more with Cineplus with the contrast set at -4 to see how it grades. Now that I have my t3i back from repairs I will add Cineplus Lightform N also to see how it grades.
Here are some grabs from Cineplus Lightform Cinema with and without grading.
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