Hi Jason
I don't know enough about changing the tones. I've only matched different shots and adjusted white balance.
I don't suppose you can change his face without changing hers too.
Would love to hear more about how the HDR is done too! It's a new one to me.

Hey man,

I too am relatively recent to film, and my knowledge of the HDR process comes from SLR photography. I know that some of the best HDR photography I've seen doesn't rely solely on tonemapping; rather using manual exposure combination via layers in photoshop.

I used the equivalent process, all within Final Cut Pro 6.0.

Having shot the 'correct' exposure of Veronica's dialogue (i.e. face tones exposed, sky completely overexposed), I then removed her figure and shot an equal length shot with the clouds behind exposed correctly.

Next, I put both the 'face' exposure clip and the 'sky' exposure clip in the timeline, with the 'face' shot below, and the 'sky' shot above.

All I had to figure out (largely by trial and error), was the appropriate way to control the combination of the two video 'layers'.

The most important step was to change the composite mode of the 'sky' shot to "darken". This ensure that pixels from this shot will only be composited when they would result in a darkening of the existing pixels (from the 'face' shot).

This produced a similar effect to the one you see. I still needed to change one more thing though, because the (darker) branches were overlaying onto Veronica's (lighter) face tones (due to the "Darken" composite mode).

The really accurate way to have finished the process would have been to create a mask exactly around her head and apply this to the 'sky' layer. However, as I know how time-consuming it is to create frame-accurate video masks, I took a shortcut.

I found a filter in FCP called "soft edges" [Effects tab > Video filters > Matte > Soft edges] - which allows you to control the opacity of the edges of a clip.

First I selected 'invert' at the bottom of the filter controls (so that the image is revealed, not hidden, at the edges). Then I tweaked the left and right crop values, and the smoothness value, so that the 'sky' shot was only being composited towards the edges of the frame. This is why there is still a halo of over-exposure around Veronica's face, but it prevents the branches behind her from being added onto her skin tones.

Hope that makes sense to you - feel free to ask for clarification on any of the stages.

Look forward to seeing your own experiments with similar HDR compositing techniques!

cheers,

jason