Before/After color grading (video frames inside)

JonaBeth Russell

As many of you know, I shoot luxury real estate media for work. It's fun and continually challenging, as EVERY property is unique in its own way. When it comes to luxury properties, whether creating still imagery or video, one thing remains the main thing...the view, thew view, the view. It could be a cardboard box, and if there's a view, you'd best be showing it.

However, with video, the option of strobes to paint shadow tones is out. BUT, I can definitely utilize a combination of lighting and high dynamic range video to essentially 'bring the outside to the inside'. For this home, I used two LED video lights with temp & brightness control to help offset how the dark wood ceiling eats up the natural light in the rooms with a view.

These two frames show what kind of work goes into making a luxury video pop. I shoot on a Sony a7r3 (and sometimes a73), in 4k, and use a log profile (logarithmic), which maximizes the dynamic range at the cost of heavy post production. The first frame is straight out of camera, and as you can see, it's flat, desaturated, and a bit noisy. The second frame is fully edited, using a series of masks to isolate various color tones, shades of brightness (or shadows), and then finally overall noise reduction (yep, you can do NR in video).

In the finished still frame you can see a little bit of noise still in the shadow areas, and some color breakup. However, when playing the video, these artifacts are not visible, as the scene is moving, and the frames are blending for a continuous smooth effect. (you can see the video at the bottom of this post if you like...it's only 1min long).