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Ready for a tip that you probably never even thought about unless you’re in the video industry? In fact, they’ve had this down for years now. But first, a bit of hack history.
Earlier on in recent camera history, the Canon 5D Mk II never was hacked or had the ability to shoot RAW video. And so a company called Technicolor worked with Canon to develop what is known as a flat cinema profile. This profile allowed editors to have the greatest amount of color detail and dynamic range in the editing process. To do this, they nerfed the contrast and made the overall look of the image to be, well, flat. This is also one of the reasons why cinematographers use vintage lenses–because their contrast is much less than modern day lenses.
Modern day lenses employ a bunch of things to make their perceived sharpness even better. Besides having excellent elements, there is also typically more contrast and punchier colors. More contrast fools the eye into thinking that an image is sharper than it really is. But inherently, more contrast also makes us lose details in the highlights and the shadows. Despite the fact that modern sensors (we’re talking about five year old full frame sensors and younger) are incredibly capable, you’d be amazed at what else you can actually pull from a sky or a deep shadow.
If you’re an HDR or landscape shooter though, you might want to either adapt a very flat color profile to your camera or use glass that might be a tad vintage. For example, you can adapt old school medium format lenses to your cameras and those lenses can also usually be had for quite an affordable price. Also realize that this turns the image shooting process into one that will mostly become a post-production process.
