GoPro Hero 4 Silver – An Aspiring Technical Pro Users Review

11.  LCD for Framing Shots

For the Hero 4 line, GoPro decided to release the Silver and the Black Edition of Cameras. The Main Differences being that the Silver had an Integrated LCD screen and the Black had a faster processor speed and could shoot 4K @ 30 fps (usable) video. The tradeoff is pretty obvious. What I didn’t realize when I bought the Silver was just how valuable having an LCD screen is for framing shots on the go. Now you can buy the add-on Pack for the Black and plug it into the back, but having it built-in with the silver meant that the camera was really compact.

This decision is going to be for you to decide. Do you need 4K video @ 30 fps (versus 15 fps not usable video on the silver) or do you need visual framing and photo review on the camera itself for the retail pricing.

12.  Camera RAW = Protune and Color Correction Options

The GoPro HERO 4 line has a feature called Protune. This is a big topic but suffice to say that Protune is what the Pros want to get more “data” in each shot. By this we mean that by having more Bits of information in a shot or video and by having data that tells us about the data (meta data) it can give us certain abilities in Post production and allow us to creatively or accurately make changes to the image or video  where a standard JPG file without all this extra data would not be able to.

Think of it as creating a Master Image or Video. When mastering you want the highest quality and options but what people see when you post on your blog or Youtube is not a  master, its a Final product after all the correct settings, codec, cropping, color correcting, etc are done.

Enter Protune… GoPro’s solution to the Camera RAW solution (as its known in the photography world).

Protune, by definition is more of an art form then  a science in terms of what you can use it for. Color Correcting or Adjusting is one major reason to shoot with protune on. The other is that it unlocks more manual type settings for your camera allowing you to capture intense images and colors.

I won’t go into every detail of Protune as there are other blogs that can better talk about the in’s and outs however I will go into the settings that I use (and am still experimenting with).

First off you have the White Balance Setting:

I typically Leave this on Auto unless I know for sure that the setting I am shooting  requires a manual adjustment later to get the desired effect in Color Correction software.  If I want to get a more RAW non white balanced color spectrum (more data) I will shoot with Native mode. Keep in Mind that Color correcting is a complicated and very Pro User area and most users will not got to the extremes of changing their white balancing. That being said, You can still edit your White Balance within Protune even using the Auto setting (this is what I do) because it gives you a more realistic starting point for color temperatures. This is very key in dark scenes as well as having a good starting white balance will allow you to deviate only as much as you want rather than trying to correct back to a starting point and then making adjustments.

What white balancing does is figures out where your White point is in the shot and then adjusts everything else to that Color Temperature. these charts (taken from a google search) show the differences in the Color temperature light that is created naturally (if shooting outdoors) or artificially (man-made light sources). Have a look at these charts taken from a google search I did.

Man made Light Source Color Chart

Outdoor Natural Light Temperature

For example, night or evening shots (without a sunset) may look a little Bluish, so you could for example shoot with a 6500 or 5500 Kelvin temperature and change the bluish to a more neutral tone.

This  Example shows how a different white balance setting can change the scene quite drastically
(the next two Images  pulled from a Google image search, hopefully  Jeremy Sciarappa doesn’t mind me using these couple of  images, if you do Jeremy let me know and I’ll remove them and make a couple of  new ones):