Dark Editing

[Kandy Swartzel]

Whenit comes to my own work, I prefer a happy middle of the two. I could never find a specific preset that did everything that I wanted, so I ended up creating my own. I think of them as starting points; they evolve with each & every session.

The range of tones and character of light can only be adjusted so much in post-production. The biggest factor is how the photo was taken in the first place. And that involves a countless amount of decisions & variables.

The first thing that I would recommend is examining your shooting style. I always try to nail exposure in camera to preserve both the highlights and the shadows. So in a super bright environment, that usually means underexposing by a stop or two. In darker settings, that might mean overexposing a bit. But really it depends on your subject(s) and the primary focus of the scene.

When it comes to editing, I apply a light tone curve to boost contrast. From there, I start going down the list of tone & presence settings. I generally bump shadows and then adjust the highlights no more than plus or minus 20 in either direction. I typically bump vibrance 10-20 points and decrease saturation by about 20%.

They didn't get the first thing of what cinema is about. Every great action scene has to cut out the joints of a sequence in order to boost the speed and to make the audience a complice by actively filling the gaps.

Wait: There are multiple car chases from multiple views. Haven't we got the goddam right to stay oriented? Shouldn't we know exactly about directions, positions and frigging road maps? Everything should be clearly followable (as for the participants in this chase, they know everything, they see everything, they foresee it).

There are such unwanted, annoying continuity errors, the new Carrie is full of them, where someone raises his hands, cut, akimbo. And they can destroy the magic. But, Mr. Emerson, Sir, you chose the wrong example. Nolan clearly is a master of 'prestige', he knows what he is doing and why. Go see a doctor, have your anal fixation fixed.

Nolan is a master of big strokes, but he is sometimes sloppy and imprecise. To say cinema is not about audience following wtf is going on in the scene is like Kanye West saying that leather jogging pants are not about comfort, because fashion is about style. That is precisely my definition of bullshit.

Emerson, as I see it, belongs to those who want cuts to be logical, not stirring or, God forbid, emotionally disturbing. They have a real problem with breaks and jumps and find relief only in nice sequences like A> B >C >D. But that's not language. You measure a cut not by it's correctness but by it's impact. Good cuts hurt a bit, some bold cuts more.

The main complaint about the sequence is that Emerson can't follow, but it never crosses his mind that this might have been his problem. I watched the film twice, together with big audience, and none of the supposed failures waked my disbelief nor that, obviously, of the fellow cinemagoers who followed alright. It now crosses my mind that this might have been my problem, can it be that I left my disbelief at the entrance?

Shooting and editing with strict continuity and clear topography is not cinematic and almost never a good idea. Many great directors pretend to do this, with establishing shots and seemingly plausible action, but then deliberately expand the borders of logic (Nolan as one of the most prominent). Eisensteins famous Odessa stair sequence (meticulously planned by the way, nothing sloppy about this storyboarded scene), Kubricks taunting overview of the Overlook hotel (planned as well), Finchers steal plant prison in Alien, where the place becomes an alien as well, many Hitchcock sets (which are the most surreal sets of all, see especially Vertigo and Psycho), Welles' Xanadu, Leones western landscapes, you name them.

And then there is Panic Room. I love Fincher, and I like the film, but it actually defies it's own premise by describing the exact whereabouts of every character at every moment, shrinking the set to a theater stage.

Or watch a later part of the Emerson video, where he praises Salt, one of the dullest action movies of all time, in which A. Jolie performs perfectly timed acrobatics with A >B >C editing. Unless you admire it for it's almost mechanical precision, you couldn't care less.

To be honest, nothing could save Salt from sucking, the story, the stunts, the acting and the lighting ( in this scene especially ) were really bland, but the smooth editing at least doesn't leave you confused.

In Dark Knight, for example, the shot from above where we see police column encounter a burning blockade, that was a very poor establishing shot...first, we very briefly see something burning as it enters the shot, but its not clear enough....then, for almost an eternity we see the cop's reaction to it....so he is already reacting to something we haven't had a chance to process yet......and only then, briefly, in the next shot do we get a closer look at what he was looking at...but by then we have to mentally re-edit in context to understand the cop's reaction...that is annoying because it takes you out of the movie when you should be IN IT.

One movie I think that had the right to be confusing and nauseating was Gaspar Noe's "Irreversible"...it was part of the point of the film, and was effective. In fact, Nolan himself did it even better in Memento with reversing the chronology...but Memento was still a masterpiece of precision...in every scene individually you were always extremely spatially aware...for example, there was a repetition of an establishing shot of Teddy's murder scene in BW and Color..Nolan was extremely careful to orient us properly.

I think he was probably not very confident in directing action ( it is one of those things that you either got, or you don't, no matter how great of a storyteller you are otherwise ), hence the lack of precision in that Dark Knight action scene.

Take a look at James Cameron directing a very similar but much better truck-chase-in-a-tunnel scene in T2 and see how amazingly clear the cuts are, this lets us as an audience to feel the action without having to think "Wtf is going on".

I share your verdict. To be brutally honest, I rarely find chases engaging, or fights and battles. These are the obligatory scenes an action move has to have, in the script it probably says Joker attacks the convoi in a garbage truck, and Batman joins in his batmobile, if I drank too much Coke a chance to go to the toilet.

I can easily imagine Nolan telling someone, can you put this together somehow and make it look good. Take all those miniatures and throw in some close ups of expendables, but don't waste too much time for this, I won't chastise you for being sloppy. Look, everybody knows that this defies logic anyway, so don't try too hard to be convincing.

I never witnessed anyone saying, great fun all in all, but the chase sequence was completely unfollowable, after we left and discussed the film in the foyer. It just doesn't deserve all that attention.

Here comes Emerson, presumably some TV show editor, to examine the corpse and lecture on bad editing in minute detail. Oh yes, he's so right, it's really frustrating to see so many inconsistencies in a multi million dollar movie. Come on, Nolan, we deserve better.

Personally I think the OP video has a lot of good points in it... There are times when you need that spatial awareness in the edit, and good action sequences is one such time. There actually doesn't seem to be many great action directors & editors around at the moment. All the films which should be really entertaining, enthralling action films seem to have turned into expensive stage plays with the emphasis on po-faced photo-realism and characters so deep you can't understand them.

Seriously, this is just nit picking! Nothing is real in Batman, Gotham isn't a real city, the Joker is a fictional character. You have to suspend belief to enjoy Action Movies! When a bullet goes through a person, they don't fly back 10 metres, do they? I think this guy has the cork jammed in a bit too tight!!

The markup toolbar appears to adopt either a light or dark theme - as dictated by the image being edited. The dark theme toolbar does appear to be consistently difficult to see - in particular when overlaid against a black background. By example:

There are other issues with the Markup Toolbar in iPadOS17. Any pre-existing saved signatures cannot be accessed subsequent to the iPadOS 17 update (but are still accessible to devices running iPadOS 16.x or earlier) - this affecting both Notes drawing and system-wide markup tools. The markup magnifier tool is similarly absent from the latest release, despite this function being documented within the updated iPad User Guide.

You might also be well advised to seek assistance directly from from Apple Support - as they may wish to record and escalate as appropriate. You can contact the Support Team using the Support link at top-right or bottom-left of this page. Alternatively, you can initiate and manage your support cases from Apple devices using the excellent Apple Support App. If not already installed, the App can be downloaded from the App Store:

If submitting a Bug Report, ensure that you include details of your iPad model and installed version of iPadOS within the body-text of your report. Don't rely upon the pick-list - as this rarely includes the current versions.

(I toggled and retoggled, so I made no real changes) Reduce Transparency, Increase Contrast, Differentiate Without Color - already much improved the bar brightness, and finally Auto-Brightness (tried this in a dimmed room too, and it was a dramatic change in overall brightness, so manual correction in Control Center was required)

The dark and moody style of photography is a great match for scenes with shadows and blacks such as indoor scenes, golden hour sunsets, and woods or forests, just to name a few. In contrast, the dark and moody style is generally not as good of a match for bright, high-key scenes with colorful elements.

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