Hi,

As probably many of you, I realized that use a "flat" colour profile is much better later on for grading and picture quality. On my Nikon dlsr, to have such flat profile I decreased contrast to minimum, sharpens to minimum, and saturation to middle. Later on I can manually adjust all those settings in kdenlive.

My question is, how do you use kdenlive, to have back good contrast, saturation and sharpness? Do you watch any histogram or vectroscope or just adjust it manually? I am asking as many times my contrast is little bit to high or little bit too low (the same with saturation), so maybe I should watch such histogram. To the sharpness, I usually render small part of the video and I am watching if it enough or not (or too much).

I would like to also ask if is it possible maximize "project monitor" to nearly full screen or something like that, so I can see the changes I done. Usually the project monitor is too small for such thing as adjusting sharpness (its enough for editing). When I am trying to "un-pin" project monitor, I cannot have it separately as window, as it immediately trying to be somewhere in the kdenlvie window.

Hello,

yes, in general you should be monitoring the colour changes in the histogram, the vectorscope or the RGB Parade. Personally, I prefer the histogram.

On Histogram:

https://kdenlive.org/users/granjow/introducing-color-scopes-histogram

These previous posts on the topic of colour grading might help.

https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=265&t=117901

https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=265&t=124230

https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=272&t=121113

As for sharpness, I suggest having it done mainly with the optics and settings of the camera to do if necessary only minor adjustments in post-production.

As far as I know the project monitor can't be maximized. But you can detach it, move it to a second screen and resize it there. Or you can pull down the time line, this gives you a bigger window.

In order to prevent highlight clips and/or underexposure it's best to watch camera's histogram (if there is) when shooting in the first place. Histogram and false color are very good tools to get best exposure at the time of shooting. ONce shooting is done, with Kdenlive my first preference effect would be "curves" which is under "color correction". Curves do really work well in Kdenlive. If you grab a good understanding of how to use the curves you most probably wouldn't need any further levels and gamma adjustment at all. Curves is the answer to your question with contrast.

Sharpness is another beast. There are too many factors effecting sharpness. It can be a whole topic. Like for instance shutter speed. At 1/25 or 1/24 moving objects will suffer motion blur unless of course you don't track them sacrificing background sharpness. But since contrast is the cousin of sharpness you can boost it a little bit to fake eyes.

Right, thanks for the answers. I have found this video: https://youtu.be/j7InWoXY80g
which explains: colour correction and colour grading are 2 different things.

I would like to concentrate on colour correction. In which particular orders should I start and what tools should I use form Kdenlive?
[a] White Balance (especially when I use more than one camera) - how you use kdenlive tools for this?
[b] Exposure (to set the proper one, not over or underexposed) - it was bit explain by you above, but do you have any YouTube links?
[c] Saturation (not too much, not too low) - vectrosope topic.
[d] Contrast

Right, I have found very useful article in this topic:
Balance using Parade and Vectorscope
http://www.niwa.nu/2013/05/balance-usin ... ctorscope/

So we can go from this:

to this:


The main steps in order:
[1] The first thing to do is to adjust the highlight balance.
[2] Next we adjust the highlight luminance level of the whole image.
[3] A small adjustment to the highlight balance and white area’s R, G and B is level again.
[4] Now let’s adjust the black level by lowering the luminance in the shadows.
[5] A slight adjustment to the shadow balance removes the green cast and we have a pretty clean image.