I'm trying to apply a de-saturated high-contrast effect to video, as is shown in http://photoshoptrainingchannel.com/desaturated-sharpened-edgy-photo-effect/ for photos. I can get reasonably close....



but not completely. I'm attempting to reasonably closely follow the Photoshop approach, but using kdenlive filters. So, I use the desaturate, levels, and tint filters on my video which is roughly equivalent to the Photoshop approach. However, I then need to add a video high pass filter, and Kdenlive doesn't have that. Now, a high pass filter is not magic; it's basically (as http://www.gimpinfo.org/tuts/high-pass-in-gimp/ explains) two copies of the image, greyscaled, with one blurred, and then grain-extracted. Kdenlive can do this: I take two more copies of the video clip on the timeline, apply a greyscale filter to both, then blur the top one and combine them with a grain_extract filter. That gives me a high-pass copy of the video, which I then combine with the original with an overlay transition.



However, this is quite an annoying way to do it. Image processing in Photoshop/Gimp tends to revolve around the idea of just adding many layers and combining them, but that's a lot more annoying for video clips. Ideally I'd like to apply filters only to the original clip. Is there some suitable combination of filters which will give me the look I want?

What you describe sounds a lot like an unsharp mask (which is indeed a kind of a high-pass). The sharpen filter in Kdenlive is an unsharp mask filter.

Not sure what "grain extraction" would mean? Anyway, sharpening will also emphasize grain.

markoc wrote:What you describe sounds a lot like an unsharp mask (which is indeed a kind of a high-pass). The sharpen filter in Kdenlive is an unsharp mask filter. Not sure what "grain extraction" would mean? Anyway, sharpening will also emphasize grain.

I've tried using the sharpen filter, indeed. Sadly, it doesn't give quite the effect I'm looking for; I can provide a screenshot or two if that'd help?

("Grain extract" is a blending mode between layers; the transition between the two greyscale tracks is a grain_extract overlay.)