Setting white and black point

I’m trying to find a way to set the black and white point in a video. Normally I would do this using the histogram or the levels, but histogram is still on the roadmap and I couldn’t find a levels filter.

Is there any way in ShotCut to set the white and black point of a video with another filter?

Thanks a lot in advance,
Christoph

There’s a white balance filter that will let you set a color temperature
image
There’s also a color grading filter under the video settings
image
You also have a hue/lightness/saturation filter
image

Thank you for your answer, but I don’t get how I any of these filters allows me to set the black or white point.

Regarding the black point, I’m not sure I’ve never actually set that although these will all adjust your visible colors.
Regarding the white point, specifically in photography color temperature and white balance are used interchangeably, I typically balance my camera to my lighting first so I don’t have to change it in the editor however(which is easy when I know my lights are 5500k I can just set my camera to that)

Thanks a lot for your answer. Maybe we’re talking about different things.

As black point I’m referring to a luminosity value of a pixel. If a pixel of the input video has a luminosity value equal or below the black point, it will be black in the output video.

We can add this using the frei0r.levels filter in the engine. It is simply a matter of getting around to it. Maybe I can soon, and I will move this thread to the Suggestions category.

That would be great, thanks a lot!

I just saw that there is a new Levels tool in ShotCut’s latest release.

If companies selling professional software were only that fast in implementing feature requests.

You guys rock!

1 Like

Until then…
I’ve been using the “Neutral color” feature in the White Balance.

I invested in an 18% Gray card - less than $10 on eBay or Amazon or Walmart - and include it in my shots, at the beginning. One click on the image of the card, and Shotcut adjusts both color and brightness as if by magic.

It is a wonderful feature.

To the O.P.: I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish that the lift and gain controls won’t achieve.

Shotcut’s White Balace filter is very useful.

With the addition of the new Levels, Hue/Lightness/Saturation controls, Shotcut’s UI is starting to look pretty butchered up with a lot of redundancy and nonstandard nomenclature.

In order to set gamma properly you need a test chart with 90% white 18% gray and a properly-calibrated scope. Unfortunately Shotcut’s video scope lacks graticule lines so it is not suitable for this purpose.

This spreadsheet relates reflectance to video levels, and there is a link to the test chart I use.

The fun begins when we get into HDR. HLG is just the beginning. I don’t even want to think about PQ.

I took a video on a black background, but the background didn’t appear completely black in the video. Coming from photography, the easiest way to darken the background in a photo is the levels tool (some other tools like the curves tool also do the job). So I was looking for something similar in ShotCut. With the new levels tool it is now quite easy to achieve a completely black background. There may be other ways to achieve the same effect, but I didn’t find them.

Anyway, thanks a lot to the developers which did such a great job.

This topic was automatically closed after 90 days. New replies are no longer allowed.