Taming Very Hard Reflections on Leaves

Shot some material in Mini-DV in Blazing sunlight. The lights reflection on the leaves is very distracting and almost unacceptable. Is there a way I can tame these reflections with filters?

Assuming you haven't shot them yet--or can reshoot them, a polarizer is just the ticket. You lose one f-stop of light, but you can rotate the filter on the front of the camera and watch the effect.

It can be startling. At one setting, all the shiney leaves, or reflections in water, or from glass just vanish and you can pick any setting in the middle.

In post, you're stuck.

Koz

I have no idea if this will work, but if you're desperate:

1. Move the clip you want to adjust to the second track. (Assuming it would normally be on the first track.)
2. Desaturate it.
3. Use the brightness/contrast controls to turn everything black except the light on the leaves. Assuming this is superwhite, you should be able to turn everything else black. (In my test clip, I was putting contrast at 100, brightness at around 40-45.)
4. Invert the clip, so the leaf-reflections are now black, and everything else is white.
5. Go to Modify>Composite Modes>Darken.
6. Hit 'F' to bring your clip into the Viewer. It will retain it's in-and-out points. Go to the beginning of the clip (in the timeline) and insert it on the first track. You will now have two clips one on top of the other, but one will have all these filters on it.
7. All of your hotspots on the leaves will now be black. (Yuck.) Lower the opacity of the upper layer until they turn gray.

At this point, my laptop was overwhelmed and I had to stop the experiment, but:

1. If the gray looks fine, leave it.
2. If the gray looks too digitized (mine did) apply a blur to the upper clip.
3. Consider adding a color to the upper clip, so instead of gray, you get green, or sepia, or whatever. The only issue I see cropping up here is that your whites will probably get the color, and your blacks will stay black.

Mike

You can also adjust the luma to make a travelling matte, and then sandwich a layer inbetween with a suitable substitute color.

1. In other words, make a luma key -- this will put holes into your clip where it's very bright.

2. Beneath that, put another image that you would like to see where those holes are.

3. Pray.

<<<3. Pray.>>>

Do that first.

Anything you do in post is going to look fake because the character of the leaf is going to be gone. You could paint in green veins on each leaf.......

Koz

Excellent tip Mike - I just tried it on some blown out ducks here and it made great progress.

This is a wide shot with a distant tree line. What I have is a million blown out leaves.

All of the suggestions here would work for that. Especially the darken composite one, perhaps cropped over the treeline if need be.

The clip that I tried it on had three ducks walking and grazing. Several of them were overexposed on the chest where the morning sun was striking them. I did the desturate/invert/darken comp as above and it worked great.

Boy, if you'd asked me how long it would take before someone like you was getting advice from me, I'd've said "um...never."

I'm glad it worked!

Then I reckon you need to rethink your own ability. That was great sideways thinking requiring a very high level of FCP knowledge. And I've written it down

The only adjustment I made was that instead of moving the clip to V2 and then match framing it, I just copied it straight from V1. Click on your clip on V1, hold shift and option and drag upwards. This will give you a copy on V2 in perfect sync with the clip on V1.

Thanks for sharing.

That's a great adjustment. I left it off so Joe could see the transformations he was making to the clip more easily. But Opt + drag is the way to go, you're right.

Thanks for the compliment.