Technicolor CineStyle vs. SuperFlat vs. MarvelCine vs. Neutral

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After the popularity of yesterday's post, I decided to continue my tests of grading Technicolor's new picture profile CineStyle. This time I took my beautiful girlfriend and we headed out to get some skin tone tests.

I set up one scene, which I shot at proper exposure and then overexposed.

Since some people asked for comparisons, I shot in what I believe to be the most common picture profiles: Neutral, MarvelCine, SuperFlat, and of course CineStyle. All styles were set to (0, -4, -2, 0)

I brought them back and ran quick color correction over them, focusing on getting them as close as possible, without deviating too far from a basic correction.

--Click images for full sized versions--

Neutral:

MarvelCine:

SuperFlat:

CineStyle:

As you can see, they're all very similar, but the MarvelCine and Neutral came off the camera looking more graded, and they were the most difficult to push to something new. The SuperFlat and CineStyle both kept the most details in the shadows(look at the sunglasses, in Neutral you can barely see her eyes), but CineStyle kept the most detail in the highlights (look at her teeth). I did not like the way SuperFlat held the color in her cheeks. It looks unnatural to me.

If I were to rank this round, it would go as follows:

1st to Cinestyle for keeping detail in her eyes and her teeth, and keeping natural color. Plus it was easiest to grade.

2nd to MarvelCine because it has a wide dynamic range, and also kept the color nicely.

3rd to Neutral because although it had a lower dynamic range, it had great color and was easy to grade.

4th to SuperFlat, because even though it has a wide dynamic range, but didn't produce usable colors without extra tweaking. Plus it was difficult to grade to a natural looking image.

Next I shot overexposed. I kept all of the grading the same, and only tweaked curves using the waveform to create the best image. The over exposed frame grabs strait out of the camera can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/zechw.

Here are the images corrected and graded:

Neutral:

MarvelCine:

SuperFlat:

CineStyle:

Once again, all the images look very similar, but when looking at her forehead, which was clipping, we can tell how graceful each of the picture styles handle overexposure. Again MarvelCine and Neutral performed almost identical, they even both added more red to her hair. But when it came to grading, I had to fight the graded look that it already had to produce a good looking image. Once again SuperFlat distorted its colors and took some extra work to bring skin tones back into an acceptable range (they were greatly over saturated). Also is it just me, or does her hair look softer with SuperFlat. CineStyle was easiest to grade and held its colors nicely.

This round goes to Neutral simply because her forehead looked better and its dynamic range was comparable to both MarvelCine and CineStyle. Next comes CineStyle because of its ease of grading, followed by MarvelCine. SuperFlat came in last because it did not produce usable colors without extra work.

Before CineStyle was released, I used to prefer SuperFlat when I needed the dynamic range and Neutral when I didn't, but now I will most likely be using CineStyle all the time because not only does it have the raised dynamic range, It is extremely flexible in grading. I feel like I could push CineStyle much more than I could Push Neutral or MarvelCine.