Gadgetory

BenQ reached out to us to sponsor a video about their SW 271 monitor which is marketed as engineered for photographers and great for video editing too but what does that mean well it means it has hardware calibration support fantastically accurate colors covering over 99% of the Adobe RGB color space and it's 4k to boot so then with a tool like this at our disposal we thought well hey why don't we take this opportunity to take a look at how we have done a less than perfect job of color correcting some of our own videos here at LTT while offering you guys three tips and tricks for taking our color correction and maybe yours too to the next level and since I can't tell pink from periwinkle I've enlisted the help of our very own director of photography Brandon Lee okay hey you go okay okay so taking a look at our backlog from the last six months or so I was able to identify three common let's call them shortcomings that I think we could improve on the script is not moving at all what the heck number one foreground to background color exposure balancing this can be really challenging especially if you're shooting outdoors like we were in our recent Asus a imesh video let's freeze-frame there we didn't okay job balancing the exposure here but it could have been better the image is overexposed overall but it's particularly bright in the background compared to Linus so what we should have done is brought the background highlights down to make Linus in the laptop stand out more like this number two color consistency throughout the video if your colors are inconsistent then scene changes are really jarring and distract the viewer we were guilty of this on our tech length announcement video where we quickly jump from location to location and each spot had a different dominant light source in this case the biggest issue is white balance at the beginning we start in Linus's office where he's being lit by a daylight balance aperture 120 d the daylight from the outside is mostly being stopped by the window shades and the white balance on the camera is a little warmer because I personally think it's a good fit for the friendly tone of the video but then we moved to Nick's office where the guys are being lit by much warmer overhead lights and the shades are open so we see blue daylight behind them to keep the color ideal for this shot I split my white balance between the cool daylight and warm overheads otherwise their skin would look really orange but in a fast paced shooting environment you have to make these changes on the fly and they're not going to be perfect which is okay as long as you close the gap in post-production which we didn't do this time we release a video every day all right give me a break all right that's fine because I've done the color correction now and watching the before and after you can see that it's a smoother experience since the scenes have more unity and finally number three color grading this is the process of deliberately altering the colors in the pursuit of artistic expression rather than neutrality and realism but here's the thing in order to do color grading properly color correction has to be done first if your starting point doesn't have consistent and neutral colors and exposure then color grading will usually only serve to make your videos look amateurish our camping battlestation video is a good example of a video that is ready for color grading its nicely balanced but it lacks that wow factor to take it to the next level tweaking the green and yellow tones throughout each shot as well as the adjustments to the overall contrast make the video pop just a little bit more we did actually color great our murderer box video see how those warm colors shine through but in my personal opinion we could have worked in a bit more color contrast by pushing cooler colors in the shadows to contrast the warm orange mid-tones there we go so that's it Brandon's top 3 tips for taking your videos our videos to the next level back to you Linus thanks Brandon yeah we're really doing the newscaster bit okay whatever now let's take a closer look at the SW 271 so first and foremost it comes with a shading hood this not only helps cut out glare but perhaps more importantly makes your monitor and by extension you look like a super badass it even comes with this little door in the top for your spectrophotometer or your color imager so you don't need to take the hood off when you need to calibrate the display which you can do with the included pallet master element software that in our case made the already great out of the box color accuracy even better thanks to hardware calibration it managed Delta e values under one well under what's perceivable by the human eye so thank you fourteen bit 3d lookup table it also comes with this little puck controls right for the face puck controller which not only makes the on-screen display easier to use but also lets you set shortcuts like switching between srgb Adobe RGB and advanced black-and-white modes and it nests nicely into the stand in this little nook right here keeping it nice and clean the stand by the way it's very sturdy mitigating screen wobble while still affording a generous amount of swivel elevation Oh tilt and even 90 degree pivot although it should be noted that your shade will not function quite the way that it does when you have it in landscape mode this gives no oh really oh cool nevermind I stand corrected now in terms of i/o we've got two HDMI 2.0 s1 DisplayPort 1.4 as well as DisplayPort over USB type-c which can also deliver both data and 10 watts of power plus there's a no rotation required USB hub with an integrated SD reader that you can check out here on the side so big thank you to thank you for sponsoring this video big thank you to Brandon for providing me with some much-needed color correction tips you guys can check out the SW 271 photographers monitors as well as other monitors in this lineup like the SW 3 20s W 2700 PT + SW 240 which is just 400 bucks at the links below there's one for B&H photo and one for amazon.com where the first 50 people can get 10% off by using our promo code then after you buy one you can get a $25 gift card just for writing a review and if you have more color correction questions make sure you leave a post on our forum where you can chat with a giant community which includes Believe It or Not some professionals and enthusiasts as well as some trolls I'm not gonna oversell it so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if is awesome get subscribed hit that like button or maybe check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally doing