Stills from FCPX are high contrast with crushed blacks?

Tom. You were right, Photo Zoom is good. And BenB, you're also right. Topaz and Photo Zoom seem to be on par. Topaz seems a bit more user friendly (to me) ... but that may be because I've been using it awhile. Photo Zoom seems like I'd have to do some tutorials to get efficient with it.

BenB: so in this post there are at least 2 ways to workaround the 'dark' problem. Both easy.

1. If you want to stay in FCPX and work from the timeline, then as Luis suggests: make a 1 frame Quicktime movie (I just did the highest rez = ProRes 4444 QT). When you Command E to export the 1 frame movie, also set the 'Action' to Quicktime Player. Then you'll click 'Next' and save that 1 frame QT movie, but at the same time the Quicktime Player will open automatically and you can Command C to copy the frame, open Preview, Command N to place the frame from the clipboard to Preview, then Command S to save the frame to a 'stills' folder. The still will be exactly the same as the image on the timeline.

1. Faster, less clicks: you export a master Quicktime movie from the FCPX timeline. You open that Quicktime movie in the Quicktime Player. You find your still, then (as above) you Command C to copy the frame, open Preview, Command N to place the frame from the clipboard to Preview, then Command S to save the frame to a 'stills' folder. NOTE: if you leave one still open in Preview, then you can Command TAB from Quicktime over to Preview (not needing to open Preview ever time).

Today I've got a couple of hundred stills to pull that way. My fingers are not happy campers.

Hey Ian,

I'm making a coffee table photo book to go with the film ... so I'm trying to get as high quality an image as possible. No problem with the 4K material, but a lot of the film was shot back in HD times ... and needs help.

Working only with Quicktime does just fine. And as Luis suggested, pulling a still from the FCPC timeline and turning it into a single frame movie, which produces a single shot Quicktime ... which I then convert using Preview to an actual .png ... works perfectly. The image on the FCPX timeline and the final still are identical.

Hey Luis, do you mean in FCPX (from the timeline) or from a Resolve timeline? I'm not at my edit suite at the moment or would just try it.

I take that back. Just tried it. When I go to export from the FCPX timeline ... I put my 'Settings' at Video Only, Apple ProRes 4444 XQ, which makes a single Quicktime frame ... which I then copy and convert to a .PNG with Preview. Right? I chose the highest resolution I could get from the FCPX timeline -- to get the final 'still' matching the resolution of the still I get working ONLY with Quicktime (and the master file of the whole film).

This is good. Thank you Luis. It allows me to more easily select my desired frame ... please correct me if I've got something wrong. This seems to work just fine.

I see it's an operating system issue.

So my solution will have to work for me: I made a 'master' of the film, pulled the master ProRes HQ into Quicktime, and am copying frames from Quicktime and making stills with Preview. A bit more complicated. But the end result is perfect.

Ha ha ha ... dumb me ... I did almost a hundred stills with FCPX before I actually looked at the results. My bad.

Thank you kindly for the link terryb!

Ben

Hey Clint,

This (below) looked like it was working, but, in fact, didn't. It seemed to work on the first still. But then subsequent stills were still too dark and contrasty. So I will shift over to Affinity Photo and see what I can do there.

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This looks like it works. Apple Photos > File > Export > then set the 'Color Profile' to 'Most Compatible' ... and export (see attachment below). The end result looks identical to the original on the FCPX timeline. And ... I can pull all my already created stills (100 plus) right into Apple Photos, and export them all back out with the correct Profile (at least to the eye) in one instance.

I'll also check Affinity Photo (which is closer to Photoshop), to see if it will allow a more specific Color Profile change.

And report back. But meanwhile, this seems to work. Thank you most kindly for your help, super appreciated!

Ben

Affinity doesn't give the Rec709G2.4 option. I used Photoshop for years. When Adobe went into subscriptions I lost interest. I make films. I love FCPX. The usual work I need to do with and on stills I can usually do with Photos or Pixelmator Pro (which also doesn't have the Rec709G2.4 option) ... and I can access Pixelmator or Affinity Photo directly from Photos ... and no subscription required.

I can see I might spend a day or two with no guarantee of success trying to recover my 100 photos. I can just redo them in an hour or so: I open the mastered movie in Quicktime, Command C a still where I want one; the open Preview and Command N to move my still from the clipboard to Preview; then output Command S the result ... and it's identical to the mastered film, which is identical to the clip(s) on the FCPX timeline.

Thank you most kindly for your help Clint! If I stumble across any other solution I'll report it in this post. It would be nice to go directly from the timeline ... often the stills are required before the film is completed. Maybe Apple will fix the bug ...

The Quicktime workaround seems to work fine. And once the image has been selected it's three keystrokes to get an exact copy.

Though this requires creating a Quicktime movie from the timeline first.

Chop chop ... back to work...