Meet Spigot the dog

[pjanak]

Meet Spigot the dog. My 3rd retouch
Im no expert at retouching. Glad I found this site tonight. I've attached a work in progress of a friends photo. I may start completely over. This photo, taken back in the seventies was developed with a very dark result. The middle image is just using autolevels. The image on the right is the current result after heavy, heavy, heavy, retouching. I'm thinking its partially the autolevels fault that caused some colors to be clipped.Definately the whites are blown out. If you look at the wood panel wall there are clipped green areas. I still havent gotten to removeing most of the dust and scratches on this intermediate version. I may go back and rescan on my new scanner(as its a better one than my friends) and save a far larger tga or tif. The original is only 50 meg. Basically, you all know how camera flashes cause that sort of round spot. All is lighted well except the corners. You can see that plainly in the center image. So I used two copies of the original photo layers. One using a circular layermask. To knockout the blue cast I used the curves editor several times over. I was always thinking that it would be nice if there was a plugin that could map those light density halos and turn it into a mask. After doing all this I did learn of a great set of retouch plugins called PowerRetouche
Just curious of your thoughts on this newb's attempt. First thought is that I should probably learn to stay away from autolevels.
Pete

[Kraellin]

all in all, a very nice job so far. yes, auto-correction software can sometimes do remarkably well, and other times not so good. you didnt mention what software you're using, but paint shop pro and photoshop both have what are called adjustment layers. these are what you want for masking out areas, like your blown out white window area, you dont want altered by a given tool. have a look around on this site for more info on these.

oh, and the Gimp and Gimpshop (a photoshop semi-look-alike) also have adjustment layers and are open source, free programs. these are both pretty good programs.

K.

[Hephaestos]

I think I took a rather sloppy approach, but I kinda like the result. I threw two screen copies on top to deal with the underexposure, then flattened and adjusted brightness on the red channel up 46 (which is pushing it). There was still some cyan cast around the edges so I just vignetted it out.

[pjanak]

Kraellin:

Yeah, I use Photoshop 7. Coming to this site I've learned how handy and "safe" adjustment layers are. Very good. This site is very valuable indeed.

I'm wondering, if one were to sell there services,(at some point in the future when Im good at retouching, I intend to include that in my yet to vbe fully realized DVD authoring business) at what point do you decide its time to sell your skill as a service. First thought is wonce you are comfortable with it. Like my DVD authoring I intend to do. I don't know how to do every single possible way of authoring a DVD. But I know enough to offere a good product. So, would you say the same is true with retouching somewhat? In addition of course that your "work" must look very superior to the original of course.

Pete

[pjanak]

Hephaestos,

Hey that looks nice. Yeah not a lot that you can do with such a pixeleated jpeg as I posted. I know bandwidth cost money but it would be nice if the upload bandwidth values were increased. LOL
Pete

[Kraellin]

pjanak,

authoring dvd's? umm, what are you authoring? i'm a bit confused here. are you archiving things for folks or making videos or what?

as for when to start a business, i'd say this is going to vary greatly, person to person. some might like to just jump in and start, regardless of their skills. others might spend a lifetime working on their skills before starting up. and frankly, i'm not sure what the exact 'right' answer is.

i started a different type of business a number of years ago. i'd had a few years of doing this for others and decided i wanted to go out on my own. i was still something of a novice, but also knew i was better than some others doing it. so, i finally just dove in head first. i ran it for a few years and got an offer for another job and finally quit my own business. my hardest part wasnt the work, but rather the bidding and pricing. i always tended to be too low and thus lived week to week still, it was ok.

as for r & r commercially, i suppose if you're providing a real service/product that folks want, meaning that you're doing something for them that they cant or dont want to do, then i'd say go for it. i tested this recently by taking on some free work. i got nothing but compliments

the hard part of doing this work is encountering something you really dont know how to handle well and knowing that others can, like on this site. there are many, many folks here that are better than myself at r & r, so, how could i possibly offer to do this for folks when i cant produce the highest possible quality at the lowest possible speed? and that attitude will kill you quicker than almost anything.

the thing is, 'someone' will always be better, so dont worry about it. you put yourself out there and offer improvement and charge accordingly. and, if you really cant do a given job, offer the client an alternative technician/artist/company, or at the very least, tell them 'this one is currently over my head'. then, get better as long as you're honest with yourself and honest with the client, you shld do just fine.

K.

[pjanak]

Kraellin.

DVD authoring is what the process of creating DVD video's is called. I know that anyone one can do it IF they buy the software. But I know I am not wrong when I say there are plenty of average consumers who either don't want to learn how to do it themselves, don't have the time, or don't even know that such software for the consumer exists. More than that parents who have kids in sports oftewn have Sport scholarship videos made so they can "sell" thier kid to the coaches at potential colleges.. Eventually I'll seek business from corporate entities. Very often at my old video duplication job crappy business meeting videos would come in wanting anywhere from 7 to 700 copies. So I figure, even better to make a chaptered DVD and I can be the middle man for the mass duplication when needed.

Your advice on the R and R is good. I'll keep that in mind. So far with what little skill I have in r and r I've recieved no complaints from friends. But who really knows if thier just being nice. LOL

Pete

[deadants]

Hi pjanak,
Another angle you might consider is doing DVD slideshow. How many people go on holidays, or just take photos in general with their new digital cameras, just to download them onto their hard disk? If they are smart, they will at least burn them to CD. The problem is they never get around to looking at them more than a couple of times.

I have done a couple of these slideshows for family, their friends have seen how good they come out and ask if I could do theirs. The best thing is they have to burn them to CD to get them to me which I put in the case with the finished DVD. Once they have watched the DVD they tend to store them in their entertainment unit. They may only look at it once every four or five years but it’s better than losing them altogether.

[Kraellin]

pjanak,

ok. thanks for clearing that up for me. now, what is a chaptered dvd? a video set in chapters?

i'd never even thought of authoring dvd's. good idea. does your job do r & r on these or is it more of a cut and paste editing sort of thing, or just duplication? also, what software do you use for this? i've seen some software for doing video, but never really looked into it very closely, so not real familiar with it. i'm also a bit curious how dvd's capture and store what they take. is it a frame by frame basis like film, or do they do more of a streaming content type thing in code or maybe even a diff's sort of thing? also, do you do frame removal and printing, where you'd take one frame from a video and make a print of it? interesting area.

yes, friends and family can be 'polite' and not give you what they really think. one way to judge what they really think is, do they come back? do they tell others who then come to get things done from you? when i ran my other business i was never quite sure till i started getting repeat business.

K.

[pjanak]

deadants,

Oh yeah I'll consider all possibilities. My company motto will be "Anyway you want it"

Kraellin,

Its certainly possible I could have used my own termanology, but for example any DVD you buy or rent in the store is usually 1 or more SOLID videos(main movies/behind the scenes) each video has periodic chapter points. These allow you to utilize the chapter selection menus and the next key on your remote I beleive. I'll be open to using a premade video or I'll even do the splice and dice editing in Adobe Premiere. So far I've made 1 DVD for a very convincing breast prosthesis. Not a big deal and the quality wasnt great as the source was a VHS. It was a freebie through a friend at my old company. The idea was to show the my old employer that I can be used as a freelancer. When I worked at the company we were primarily a Video duplication house. Now they have implemented DVD authoring and mass duplication of CD's and DVD's.Stamping and burning. No r & r When I was working there and still isn't. often clients wanted graphical slates created to put at the head of the videos(holds time date and duration info and 10 sec count down sometimes). Oddly enough our art department lacked the skill and knowledge with regards to the needs for video. So I made them myself at home. Didn't require major skill. Just a little.
Like this graphic. Very basic. For some reason they wanted the word "represents" instead of "presents". This graphic appears before the actual video. kinda blah but hey it was free, it impressed the client and my boss so whenever needed I was "the man". Really awful video by the way. LOL.

Stangely enough, frame removal and printing was a common request at the duplication house. We did it. Usually with really awful results. Theses days I can come up with a better result but since video has scanlines, correcting for this still tends to look messy.

As far as DVD's capturing and storing stuff you must be thinking of of DVD disk recorders. Soon to replace the VHS tape recorder. DVD's = any standard video converted into mpeg2 format. The nature of mpeg format is not frame by frame. Its a quality compressed format that only copies the information thats changed. Guy walks across a solid blue background..... The only data in the video thats changing is the guy walking. Therefore, intead of also copying the blue background to each frame along with the guy. The mpeg "borrows the blue from the previous and next frame. This is why mpeg 2 is such high quality and yet relatively a small video.

So you just transcode your standard video to mpeg2 and load it into any DVD authoring app, add chapter points, create menus via photoshop, burn, your done.

DVD disk recorders do the encoding "on the fly" I believe. I don't own one but I imagine there are flavors that encode staright to DVD and there are others that first encode to a built in hard disk. Bad thing about DVD disk recorders is they mainly come with cheesy menu graphics or none at all. A few let you insert your own graphics I think.

Right now I'm using DVD-lab-Pro. On the consumer side its the most open to the mpeg2 spec. Need all the capabilities offered by the mpeg-2 specification? Then you'll need to spend minimum $3,000 on Sonic Scenarist(www.sonicsolutions.com) Te only package in existance that offeres access to the complete spec.

Family can be ah "kind" indeed My sister emailed a ton of baby pics. They looked awful. Too dark to harsh, too this or that. So I color corrected them. And in as kind as possible way I asked if her camera settings were wrong and sent her copies of the images to see if she liked these better. zero response. Turns out its because MY MONITOR'S RED GUN WAS BAD. I didn't notice. LOL. So all the pics I sent her were flaming red! LOL!

Pete

[Kraellin]

ok, kinda thought that's what you meant by 'chaptered'; just wanted to be sure we were on the same page there. thanks.

mpeg2... ok, so it is a diff's thing. cool. so, when i watch a hollywood movie dvd, it's more than likely in mpeg2? and, if they're doing a diff's thing, then when i take a screenshot of a dvd movie, even though it looks like i'm taking a shot of one frame, i've really taking the accumlation of diffs that have been rendered and sent to the monitor. so, i'm taking the shot off the monitor, not off the dvd in its mpeg2 format. ok, that makes sense.

now, isnt there a way to convert mpeg2 to something that is a frame by frame? mpeg2 to mpeg4 maybe? of course i dont know how mpeg4 is done, but i mean if you wanted a frame by frame full rendered type of thing, it would be possible, yes? and if so, what software would convert this?

i know there's software to convert vhs to digital. i forget the names right off hand, but seems like that would be an area for commercial work all by itself. and surely there's a family home video cam corder authoring service industry as well, yes, no? or are mom and pop pretty much doing these themselves?

i know you can also use hardware like an ATI 9800 pro all in wonder, a capture card, to capture directly off a tv or vhs recorder. you using any of this in your work? seems like a good way to take vhs and convert to digital. i had an older capture card in an older computer system of mine that also had a tv tuner built in. i could watch tv directly on the computer and capture anything i wanted, much like a tivo. i never did very much with it at the time, but since i've taken a new interest in r & r and related services, i'm curious as to what may be out there and how good/bad it is. and, since i mentioned tivo, i would think there might be an area for some work also. copywrites might be a stopper there, though.

all in all, digital has closed some industries, and opened others. breaking into r & r isnt very far removed from what you're already doing. maybe you're heading into r & r for video, which would seem to be an area that needs some pro's. there have to LOTS of vhs tapes out there that could stand some cleaning up for archiving. you might also look into archiving and restoring film to digital. i've seen some of the old film vaults, disney and others, and this is an area that shld bring big bucks and lots of business to someone who could do it relatively fast and of high quality. re-mastering is big business these days. every television show and hollywood movie made on film seem to be being re-mastered and re-sold any more, and with 50 + years of television and even more from hollywood, this has to be a pretty large industry.

K.

[pjanak]

Not more than likely. Its no ifs, ands, or butts if its a commercial DVD. In fact even a consumer DVD MUST be MPEG2. VideoCD is mpeg1 and I think SvideoCD is MPEG2. Yeah screen shots are off the monitor. Not out of the source.

If you've got the conversion software then yeah Mpegs can be converted to avi or mov, another type of mpeg. flash, etc.PAL or NTSC too.

Yeah theres a "family" industry but its rarely excluslively family as you wont be able to sustain a business that only focuses on the the average joe. At least not one with an substantial profits.

some consumer cameras can be ussed as the "middle man" VHS deck to DV camera to firewire card in PC. passing straight through. While other require you to first make a miniDV video. And then output that into the PC.. I also have a external conversion box in/outing DV/S-video/analog in PAL, NTSC or SECAM.

Best way to capture is via firewire. Well actually best way is totally uncompressed MOV or AVI. Next best thing is a DV-MOV or a DV-AVI. Looks just as good. Mpegs and other compressed avi's bad idea. Totally uncompressed AVIs however require tons of space and a very fast all around computer.

Tivo is actually a stupid idea. I mean sure its great being able to do what TV offers. But you do not need tivo to do that. so you can do it for free. especially recently. You can by set top hard disk recorders that behave exactly like tivo but there is no service to pay for.

ah yeah, at another old company I work for... a post production house. They did film to video transfers. and restored films too. I think the machine they used was called a Davinchi. Mega dolars for the machine not to mention the per hours. Each frame is restored on a per pixel basis. Just like cloneing dust out of a photo in Photoshop.

Now thats funny. all this somewhat off track discusion and whats the last word.....Photoshop. LOL

[Kraellin]

yes, poor spitgot the dog got lost somewhere in here

ok, so let's say i want to convert some of my degrading vhs tapes to digital. in fact, i've even got older laser discs hanging around that might be smart to convert also. i've got a vcr. i've got a laser disc. i've got a computer. and i've got a tv. would the best way be to get a capture card in the computer with an s/video in and a tv or vcr with an s/video out or, would i be better off to get a dvd player/recorder and dub straight from the vhs vcr and then just run the dvd in the computer? and, i'm not even sure what jacks the laser disc has on it, but it prolly has at least composite out.

and, to take this even further, if i did manage to convert my vhs tapes to digital, what would i need to clean them up? would it be better to convert them to .avi first, asssuming their going to be captured in mpeg2?

this stuff gets confusing; the acronyms alone can drive you nuts

K.

[pjanak]

If you already own a DV camera, it may allow for "passthrough". Whereby the signal is sent from the VCR/laser disk into the DV camera and then simaltaneously dumped to the compueter via Firewire. In this method you would be "capturing" to DV-AVI. Doing so, the quality or lack thereof of the VHS or Laser Disk will not be lost. Bad Idea to capture to mpeg 1 or 2 since they are heavily compressed. . No sense it satring with a heavily compressd format to only result in the finale output also being compressed again. With DV-AVI you wont see hardly any loss. Also doing it the firewire way and DV-AVI, its very difficult to lose frames of video. Where as capturing via an analog capture card it can be very easy AND you likely don't have a computer fast enough to capture totally uncompressed AVI so you'd have to use a codec to compress it. Resulting in a video that looks worse than a DV-AVI.

A analog cards can be dirt cheap but arent very good at what they are for. quality analog captures going to run you about $1000. But there are ones for between 2 and 500 dollars that might do well. They are okay but again not perfect. An OHCI compliant firewire card on the other hand can be as cheap as $20 and you'll have no issues, your DV camera video will look exactly the same and be exactly the same quality when its on your PC. There isnt really a "capturing" process at all with DV. Rather the DV codec is a "bridge". A method of transport. So you get out exactly what you put in. a consumer DV camera can be had for as low as $200. Or you can buy a DV convertor unit that has DV/S-video/Composite/component Ins and outs that connects to the PC via Firewire. I bought mine direct from Canopus.com so it ran me almost $700 but you can buy it on 3rd party sites for about $300 or less Its an ADVC-300. It has noice filters and some color adjustiing ability but you don't really need that IF you have a video editor(NLE) AND have various color corection and noise reduction plugins designed for it. Since you are here you know that plugins can be dirt cheap or almost cost as much if not more than the software they plugin to.

Whew. Hand cramp. LOL

[pjanak]

Also, if you don't want to deal with creating your own DVD menus and such then yeah your easiest option is to use a set top DVD recorder. Some come with crappy basic menus, some with really nice optional menu graphics. Some allow you to insert your own graphics.