Exporting stills to Photoshop

Hi,

I'm very new to Photoshop so wonder if you can tell me the best way to accomplish my goal.

I have a surveillance video in my FC timeline that I need to pull stills from. I need to enlarge and sharpen in Photoshop to try and identify someone sitting in a car. Should I export as a jpeg or photoshop file to bring it into photoshop to work on it?

Also, any other tips on how to bring about detail besides the sharpening filter and adjusting the contrast would be helpful to know.

Thanks,
Shelley

Shelley
MacBoo Pro 2015
16 GB Ram
OS X 10.13
Premiere Pro CC

You'll get lots of opinions on this, but we'll start with mine. I do a lot of still capturing from video.

Avoid capturing as JPG, choose TIFF or PNG. PSD is overkill. JPG compresses, and loses detail in a picture that is already pretty lousy if it's from a surveillance cam.

The biggest image improver of all when capturing from video is to de-interlace. in PS: Filters > Video > de-interlace. You have a choice of upper or lower field, try each one to see what looks best. You might even want both, in separate images. You'll be amazed at the improvement if there was any motion at all in the video.

For contrast adjustment, use Levels (cmd-L). the Auto button often does a great job by itself.

It's a start.

Scott

I would use TIFF as it normally uses less space on disk.
With layered TIFF you can also use Scott's method of de-interlacing by copy the basic layer to a second one and then use the different line inpretations. Set the transparency of the second layer to 50%.
You also set both layers to 50% and then used "add" for the layers behaviours - this will give you a slightly different result.
Layered TIFFs keep all the PSD options while they are smaller and easier to handle with FCP.

Andreas

Some workflow tools for FCP [www.spherico.com]
TitleExchange -- juggle titles within FCS, FCPX and many other apps.
[www.spherico.com]

Don't forget to fix the aspect ratio of the still capture as well. You will want to use square pixels once you get to photoshop, other wise your person is going to look heavier and it may effect the ID.
Surveillance video usually suffers from every defect known to video: Bad lighting, camera shake, lenses that haven't been focused in months or ever, tapes reused over and over, decks with dirty and unaligned heads. Unless this is a surveillance you shot or someone who knew what they were doing shot your chance of pulling something like an id of a face is slim.
What you can usually get are class comparisons such as types of cars with specific damage, hair styling, areas were there may be tattoos,clothing especially if it's some thing like a sports letter jacket.
Are you working a criminal case? Are there booking photographs from the day of the crime. Can you compare anything in the video to anything connected to the person in question?
Facial Id, usually not. Contrast and compare classes of objects, mostly doable.
As far as sharping in Photoshop-use smart sharpen as it has some deconvolution properties that actually can focus an out of focus lense or tighten up a blur.
Jack

There's a shadow and highlights filter in Adobe CS3, i think....



www.strypesinpost.com

One way to pull stills is to open the .mov file in Quicktime and just drag the frames you need into a folder. If you have a lot of stuff scattered across the timeline this is by far the quickest way to do it