(soft music) - What's going on, guys? This is Qazi, welcome
to another epic video. This is going to be for beginners, so I just want to throw that
out there, right off the bat. Okay. If you're a beginner
of colorist, an editor, a cinematographer, director, somebody that wanted to
get into color grading, but it just seemed too intimidating, I'm here to demystify all of that and basically give you
the tools that you need to get started right away. So you're gonna have the
essential skills and logic necessary to work on your next project. It's genuinely one of those that, when I was putting it together, I was like I wish I knew this when I started grading. So you guys are gonna have a ball, and make sure we grab a notepad. Before we jump in, I want to make a really exciting announcement. I'm doing a live training next Monday on May 3rd at 11:00 AM Pacific time. This stuff that I'm
gonna be covering there is going to be exclusive. I will not share that on
YouTube or anywhere else. Plus by signing up, you will
be automatically entered to win my freelance colorist masterclass. I will be picking three winners
at the end of the training, and it's gonna be a
one-time only type of deal. It's absolutely free. Link is in the description
and in the comments below. So check it out. You don't want to miss this. It's gonna be really exciting. And on that note, if you're
enjoying the content, you know what to do,
smash that Like button, subscribe to my channel
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and let's roll the info. (exciting music) Let's get this show on the road. All right, so I'm gonna
start off with this. Say if you're a director,
editor, beginner colorist, whatever, you just brought in your clips in a DaVinci timeline. Okay, so your clips are all right here. What's the next step? Okay. So let's click on this guy right here, and it's gonna pop up our
Project Settings right there. Right? The only thing that I want
to focus on in this tutorial, since this is not a crash
course, is color management. And when you leave it, by default, it's gonna be set to DaVinci YRGB, which is considered a
non-managed timeline, right? So we can basically do whatever
we want on a node level. So I'm gonna leave it as is. I'm not gonna change that. And basically our timeline is saying that, hey, output this in rec 709 with gamma 2.4, which is the standard. So you can leave it as is. Now let's jump over to our color page, and you're gonna be able to
see your clips down here. Now make sure that this guy is turned on, because if it's turned off,
it's gonna look like this, and you will be like,
where are my other clips? So if that's the case, go ahead, click on this Clips little button. It's gonna pop open all
your clips in the timeline. So these are our clips, right? When I first look at it, what I want to do is I want
to park it on a hero frame, which is basically gonna
be where it's in focus, and it's the best representation
of the entire shot. So here I get to see
everything, sky, my dude, you know, he's in focus,
all that good stuff. So this is where I want to park first. So what I want to show you is this. You see this scope right here? It might be set to this or that. So if you're kind of freaking
out, where are my scopes, you can just click on
this little histogram guy, and it's gonna pop open a one-up, which is basically one thing. It could be anything. It could be parade. It could be wave form. You could be looking
at something different. It doesn't matter, because all you need to do
is hit this guy right here and that's gonna expand your scopes. Even if you expand your scopes,
it might be set to a one-up. This is a two-up, this is a four-up, or you can do a nine-up. Here all we need is a four-up, okay? So on the left side, I'm
going to have my parade. On the right side, this
is how I set it up. This is gonna depend on how you work. Right side is vector scope. Here I have my wave form,
and here's my histogram. So if you're coming from Photoshop, you understand what this is. Even if you're coming from
Premier Pro or whatnot, you've seen wave form. If you're in that world of shooting stuff, you know what a wave form is. Vector scope tells us how
saturated our image is, and this is the Skin Indicator,
which I turned it on, which you should turn on too. But when you first open Resolve, it's gonna look like that. So you can click on this right here and go under Additional Gamut and turn on Show Skin Indicators so we can really see where our skin tones are sitting. It's very helpful. So what do we see when
we look at our scopes? The first thing that we see is that it's exposed really well. If it's sitting in the middle, that means, and especially if it's an exterior shot, that means we have everything protected. We have all the range up
top and at the bottom, and this is what a log
scope looks like, okay? If you're working with rec 709, it's gonna be pushed to
the top and the bottom. But if we're gonna be looking
at a well-lit log footage, it should be sitting in the middle, and that's for the day exterior. If it's nighttime or interior shots, it's gonna be, sometimes
gonna be sitting lower than other shots. So like, if I look at this,
it sits right in the middle. If I look at this, it
sits right in the middle. But then if I click right
here, it's a little bit, I wouldn't go as far as
calling it underexposed, but compared to these, it's underexposed, and the reason being is that this is right around sunset time, okay? The sun is going down and it's supposed to
be a little bit darker, so it makes sense. DP made a good call shooting it that way, but we still have plenty
of range at the bottom. Plenty of range of top, okay. So that's something that
we should understand. Now I'm gonna go ahead and park it on my hero frame right here, and all I want to do is set up my basic node tree to get started
grading in Resolve, okay, and this is where the
three-step process comes in. So I'm gonna create three nodes. These are gonna be AKA like, you know, step number one, two, three, okay? Now what I want to do in the middle node, it's really important to understand which cameras you're working with. So we know that this is
shot on an Alexa Mini. So I have that information. You need to make sure that you get that
information, camera specs, from your producer, whoever. So I'm gonna drop in
this effect right here, or effects called Color Space Transform, and once you drop it on,
nothing happens, right? And in the beginning,
I mentioned to you that this is our non-managed timeline. So what that meant was that if I give it a red footage
compared to a Canon footage, to Sony footage, my timeline
doesn't know what's what. It will make it look
like log, but that's it, like it wants you to do the work, okay? So now with CST, which
is Color Space Transform, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say, hey, input color space. So input color space meaning
what is the color space for this camera? So I'm gonna say it was shot on Arri Alexa and the input gamma was log C. See, as soon as I do that, if I turn it on and off,
you can see the difference how my image opens up
and it becomes a rec 709. So now it's converted properly to rec 709, we're ready to go go. Now, as soon as I do that, what I usually do is I
will take my other clips and I will middle-click on the one where I applied the rec 709 CST so I don't have to redo those
steps every single time. With color grading,
shaving off a minute here and minute there goes a long way, okay? So that process is already done. We've converted our shots,
so that was step one. Now, if you're working with Canon, these setting are gonna be different. Panasonic, different settings. Sony, different settings, okay? Now I'm gonna go right here. Now, why did I put my CST here and not the first step into the process? Like you would think that, hey, don't you want to feed
the camera information first and then make changes? Well, this is where I
tell you guys all the time that knowing a proper node tree structure is literally the biggest
difference in the world if you want to get into color grading. And next week's training
is gonna attack this. We will be deep diving and
going through all of this, why we put things upstream
or downstream, okay? And when to use which particular tool before or after the Color Space Transform. So that said, let's get back in here, in our first node now, and when I look at my
image, what does it need? In this node, my only
focuses on the primaries. I want to get the exposure right. I want to get the basic colors right. I want to balance out my image. That's the purpose of our
first node, all of this, okay? Before the CST. So I'm gonna go in here and I'm gonna say, let's
start with my Lift. So I'm gonna bring my Lift down to start adding some contrast. I'm gonna bring it down
somewhere around here, and now the dark areas
are looking pretty good. Right? Then I'm gonna take my Gain
and I'm gonna raise it up. I want to give my image a pop. I don't want to overdo anything, but I still want to kind of go too far and then split the difference. I'm gonna take my Lift again and come down. It's the Lift, Gamma, Gain dance, right? And as I bring my Lift down, look how every color
gets saturated, right? The skin looks like it belongs. The tattoos pop, the
background, everything, right? My main focus will
always be my hero, okay? Very, very important tip that
I'm giving you right here. When you're starting out
as a colorist or again, as a DP, whatever, director, focus will always be the subject. I don't want to grade around this. I don't want to grade around this. I don't want to grade around that. I want to grade around my dude. Okay. So he's important. If it's a car, then I want
a grade around my car. If it's a toothbrush, then I want a grade around my toothbrush. Like whatever the subject,
whatever the hero is. So I'm gonna take my Gain, I'm gonna raise it a little bit more. I really want to put more emphasis on him, like even, even the shadow areas, right? So right now it's looking really, really good. I mean, we were able to pull a lot of information out, right? So if I do before, this is after a blank, this was our rec 709, 'cause if I go all the way
back, it looks like that. And then after applying rec
709, it looked like that, and then after doing our little
tweaks, it looks like this. So I do see that I can bring
up my Gain a little bit more just to kind of pop them
out just a little bit more, something like that. I don't want to do
anything more than that, because then we're gonna
start losing the detail in our highlights. I want to take my Lift
and I'm gonna bring it up just a little bit, something like that. So when we sit right here,
what are we looking at now? You have to do this step first. You open up your image to start seeing if your image is balanced
or what it needs. Because if I kill this
and look at my scopes, it doesn't really tell me much. But as soon as I do this, I see that, oh my God, there's so much more red in my cloth back there, which should be proper
white, but it's not at all. So how can we fix that? And in that case, what we
can do is we totally see that there's too much
red and magenta here. So when the blue is up and
the red is up the way it is, that means there's tons of magenta, so we have to take that out. So what's opposite of magenta is cyan. So what I'm gonna do is I'm
gonna be using my offsets. First thing that I need to do is go under Color and turn
on Printer Lights Hotkeys. So as soon as I hit that, now you're gonna see on the screen the keys that I'm hitting. I didn't come up with these, okay, these are already included in
your keyboard customization. So once you turn this function
on, you can use those keys. So you'll watch it here, the keys that I'm hitting to fix that. So what do I need to do? Like I told you, it's very magenta, so we want to take out the
magenta by adding cyan. So I'm gonna go ahead and
start hitting that button to add cyan, and as soon as I do that, just look what's happening in the back. How I just got rid of that
magenta in the back that we had. Right? And just look at what happened right here compared to what we had going on. Like all of a sudden,
we filled that gap in. Everything is looking way more balanced. Okay. At that point, after balancing our image, I feel like now we are
kind of low on saturation. And usually my rule of thumb, especially when I'm working with people is that I just kind of get fixated on their lips and start adding saturation to like really see if their
lips feel and look natural, the hue, the saturation in their lips. So I'm gonna do the same thing here. I'm gonna start going too far, and then I'm gonna dial it back and I'm gonna go... Maybe something like that is not bad. Like this looks a little bit
more natural and I'm at 60. And as soon as I, again, when my focus is on hero,
everything is falling into place. Now the sky is looking
really nice and rich, the ground is looking really
nice and rich, his shirt pops, everything is looking phenomenal, right? So this particular shot
is pretty much done. Now somebody can say, well,
there's still a little bit of magenta or red, you know,
in the cloth in the back, and that's because of the sun, right? So the sun is casting a
certain color onto things, like the pure light that you
get from sun during the day is not 100% white when it hits the object. Right? So it's gonna be a little
bit on the warm side. Now, one way to tackle that would be our third step. So right now, our first
step was right here. We performed a technical conversion. The second one was to
work with our primaries to give our image that pop. And then the third step right here, I'm gonna do the most basic secondaries, right? So I'm gonna start off with this. I'm gonna go under my
Saturation versus Saturation, and what that means is that hey, this is my lowest saturation areas. This is my highest saturation areas. So the highest saturation areas
are gonna be probably this, and then the lowest are gonna be like the, you know, the areas with the
least amount of saturation. So what I want to do here is that I want to just grab this and look, keep your eyes right here,
and see what it does. I'm gonna grab this, I'm
gonna start pulling it down. And see like how it makes white white? Right? And you can attest to it right here too. Look at the scope I'm
gonna do before, see? And then after. And it like fills up that gap. But it makes everything desaturated, so we don't want that. So instead, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create
another point right here and I'm gonna raise that up, and now my focus is on his skin. Okay. My whole focus is on his skin. I want to bring that back to one. Okay. And now if I do before and after, look at this right here, this
is our cloth right there, okay, the fabric back there and look how it's closing the gap and making it less distracting. So like, if I do before, a lot of magenta, after, it's like really
taking care of that. And then once again, we
can keep pulling that in to see if we can make it even better and then grab it more and bring it down a little bit more if you want to, if you want to be a bit more aggressive. And now if I do before and after, look how it was just pure white, and then even the
spillage that's happening on his face a little bit
is actually not hurting. It's making his skin look more natural than like tons of red on his skin. So overall, it's helping us
and it's going in our favor. Now another thing that we can do is under my hue vs saturation, I can see my sky and I'm like hey, I want to pull the sky up. I want to bring more color into my sky. So I can click right
here in the cyan area, because I can tell that
this is what that is. I can go under my saturation, and I can just start raising it, right? So I can just go in here and say, hey, give me more saturation. So I'll always go too far and then kind of split the difference. Now, the next thing that I want to do is I want to say now go under my Hue versus Luminance, and take my cyan and pull it down. So by pulling that down, it's almost like creating a key effect, like look at what I'm doing. If I do before and after, just look at how I'm creating this
almost like a key effect. But you don't want to do too much of it, because I'll show you why. You see how the key is
cracking right here? So if I go all the way back, to like now, see? So I don't want to do too much of it. I obviously want to always go too far and then keep coming back until I kind of split the difference, because if I'm right
here and I look at it, this is not too bad, right? But still I can go even
a little bit lighter. I can do the same thing with my blue. I can just bring it down a
little bit, not too much. And I can just leave my blue
maybe somewhere around here. So just a little bit, right? But like, look, it goes a long way. Now I want to go under my Hue versus Hue, because this blue is just way too blue. I don't know if I'm in
love with it, right? So I can do two things. I can go in here first,
in Hue versus Saturation, take my blue saturation and
pull it down a little bit, so it kind of splits the difference. And then I can go under my Hue versus Hue and I can say hey, take this blue hue and bring it, just add it, turn it into a little bit more cyan. So that's what's gonna happen here, okay. So I'm gonna do just a
little bit, not too much. So now guys, in this node alone, if I do before and after, we cleaned up our whites, we worked on the sky and, you know, gave it so
much more dynamic range, and made our image just
pop out so much more without affecting our dude at all. Barely. And all of this action was done in three simple steps. Again, you probably
have to watch this video a couple of times to get
the secondary part right, especially if you're
new to DaVinci Resolve, but the technique that I showed you here how and where we applied the CST, and look that we got with simple steps, where we started to
where we ended up, okay. Now let's move on to this shot. So we have already saved a ton of time by applying the CST, and everything is properly converted. Now what we need to do, I
can show you another way. And that's usually not
always going to be the case, because you're not gonna be lucky enough to have something pure
white in your frame. But you see right here
how we have so much red and green is down here, so we can see that it's not
properly balanced, right? This image. So one thing that I can do is I can click on this eyedropper, which is my White Balance Eyedropper, and I can just click on the
whitest point, boom, done. And now look at the difference right here. So before and after. So we were able to fix that. But I'm not gonna use this
option here, because again, I want to show you guys a more manual way So you know the method to that madness. You know, nothing happens
just, you know, because. We should understand why
are we making certain moves? So once again, let's start
with our lift gamma gain dance. So when I look at this image, I'm like I'm gonna start with my lift to just bring this down. And then my focus is right now on the darkest area right here. And then where do I like that? So I'm gonna keep it
somewhere around here. I'm gonna take my gain. Ultimately, it's gonna be
all about my girl, right? I want my girl to look as best as she can. And I'm gonna keep her up here, because, especially with women,
we want to make sure that you know, it just, everything
looks perfect, right? With men, we can make it, make them look gritty
and do all the things. Most of the time, when we're
working with female talent, we just want to make sure that, you know, they got their makeup done and everything so everything looks proper unless the story calls
for something different. So I'm gonna take my Lift,
I'm gonna pull it down and keep adding that contrast. But again, I don't want
to overdo it this time. I'm gonna take my Gain,
I'm gonna lift it up. I'm gonna park it somewhere around here. But this is looking pretty good. Once again, guys, what are we seeing here? We see our blue up, our red up. So what we have to do is
add cyan to get rid of it. Once again, I'm gonna go
under my Printer Lights, look at these numbers right here, and I'm gonna hit it once. And as soon as I hit it once,
it makes a big difference. As soon as I hit it twice, like, look at it's evening out everything. Okay. Now, one thing that I can do is I can take my yellow and add a bit more yellow in here. So as soon as I do that, like
look at what's happening. Now we're basically subtracting blue. So blue is sitting up top right
here and up top right here, and as soon as I add more
yellow, it evens it out. And now this looks a
really well balanced image. Okay. And as soon as I did that, made these changes in my offset, my entire image got lifted a little bit. So now let's make up for it. So I'm gonna take my Lift and
bring it down a little bit, and get somewhere around here. I'm gonna take my Gain and
just raise it a little bit. Now, what I want to do is
just again, saturation, and let's just start with a little bit and then come back, and then where do we want to keep it? So we want to probably keep it
somewhere around here, okay. So one thing that I am noticing is that maybe let's go back on
the yellow a little bit and see what happens, because once you have say, found a look, right? So, I mean I'm just gonna take
out a little bit of yellow. So now I'm making the
changes on a quarter level than like full stop, okay. So now that I'm here and
I'm looking at my image, I'm like, okay, this is
looking really, really nice. One more thing that I can do is I can go under my Contrast and start adding a little bit of contrast. This is where contrast comes into play because when your Lift and Gain and Gamma are where they're supposed to be, but where you still need
a little bit of more pop, contrast is a perfect tool. Just a contrast slider,
crank it a little bit, bring it back, and just leave it somewhere where it's literally not overwhelming, it's not doing too much, but it's just doing the right amount. And once again, guys, we can go in here and make our basic secondary changes. We can start off by going under Luminance versus Saturation, or actually Saturation versus Saturation, and once again, if you want
the whites to be really white, like just keep your focus right here. I can take this and I
can start pulling it down until it's like this, and then I can grab it from here, and now my focus is gonna be her skin, and where do I want her skin to be? And I'm gonna leave that,
say, somewhere around here, make sure it's at one. If I do before and after,
you see the difference. How much we were able to clean up. And now what we can do is just go into our Hue versus Saturation. I'm gonna take my red and
I'm gonna pull it down a little bit, and that's
gonna make her skin look so much better. And then I'm gonna take my cyan, and I'm gonna crank it up. So that's gonna bring out the background, and that creates that really cool effect, like where the background comes to life, and then we're taking the attention off the front just a little bit
so it's not too jarring. Okay. What else can we do? I think this is helping quite a bit. One thing we can do is,
under Hue versus Luminance, we can go into our cyan and pull it down to make it even deeper. See, to like really, really pull that out. So in this one step, once again, without pulling any keys, without doing any of that, we cleaned up our whites even more. We made her skin look much better. We popped out the background without really making any changes that we did in our primaries. Okay. So where we started to where we ended up, and like, look at it, how good it looks. Right? Now let's go to our third example. This one doesn't really need a lot of work to be honest with you. So I'm gonna park it on my hero frame. So where is my hero frame? Like maybe something like that. That's my hero frame, let's just say. So what am I really seeing here? I get to see the sky, I
get to see all of that. Once again, the one step is gonna be click on your White Balance
tool and hit the white, and then that should do it. But again, I'm just not really
happy to how extreme it is. I like to have more control. So the first thing here,
what I want to do is I want to look at the darkest
area, like in the hair. I want to take my Lift and kind of just add some depth there, and that's good enough. I don't want to raise the Gain. I don't want to do anything else, because the skin is looking
really nice where it's sitting. But one thing that we do see is that there's, once
again, way too much magenta. So we can counter that
magenta by cyan, once again. So I'm just gonna hit
my cyan one more time, and I'm gonna hit it the second time. And I feel like the image is
already looking so much better. To be honest with you, I will
dial back my cyan by one, and just split the difference between magenta and cyan because nighttime light is coming through, right, and it has that, usually sunsets have like a little bit of magenta
embedded in them, right? So we want to leave that there, because that's what
makes it look realistic. I can take my Lift and just
pull it down a little bit more to just kind of add a
bit more drama, right? Her makeup detail just stands
out and all that good stuff. So I'm gonna leave it right there. Now I'm gonna go into my secondaries, and in my secondaries,
once again, same practice. We can just go under
Saturation versus Saturation, and I'm gonna pull this down, and then I'm gonna just
keep my focus on her skin, and keep it somewhere around here. And it does quite a bit, right? Like, I mean, it really
cleans up the whites without really affecting
too much of our image. I'm even gonna split the
difference a little bit to be honest with you. So I'm gonna do something like that, because I don't want this color to creep in too much into her hair, but it is cleaning up
my whites a little bit, so I'm happy about that. I'm also gonna go under my Hue versus Hue, I'm gonna take my reds, and all I want to do is
just swing it a little bit so her skin is supposed
to have that blush, but I still want to
control it a little bit, just a tiny bit. So I mean, that change is gonna be like the type of change that
you can barely see, but it does help. Okay. And you can even see it right here. Her skin is sitting right there. Like it's bringing it close
to that Skin Indicator. Another thing that we can do is we can go under Hue versus Saturation, and we can take our
cyan, which is our sky, and like really add a
lot of color in there. Actually I'm under Hue versus Hue, so Hue verses Saturation, and then add a lot of color in there. And same thing with blue. Let's add more color in there. Probably, maybe not too much. So something like that. So if I do before and after, you can see how much color
we're adding back there. So this is before this
is after in this node. You don't always have to
make a ton of changes. If a little bit gets you
by, then that's enough. In Hue versus Saturation, another thing that I want to do is I want to go under my yellow and I want to kind of pull them down. Always go too far and then pull it back. So this does a really nice
trick to kind of control the just dirty yellows that seep in sometimes and clean that up. So another thing that I want to do, the rose, all the roses in the back just kind of pop out a bit too much, so I'm gonna go ahead and
this time click on it. So as soon as I click on it, it creates a point right there, right? So now I can just go under
my Saturation and I can go, hey, just bring them down
a touch, not too much. And now my focus is not there. My focus is on her. So that's the beauty
of secondaries, right? Like you can do a lot by
doing just not that much. If you use secondaries the
way that I'm showing you. People go nuts and just
drop 100 power windows and they do 100 qualifiers, and that's just no way
to grade your projects, especially if we're gonna be working on music videos that you need to turn around in the same day or commercials
or films in like a week, or week and a half, something like that. You need to be very
efficient with your time. So guys, there you have it, right? So I'm gonna, once again, go and park it on a hero frame right here. Now, one thing that
bothers me in this shot is like how cool the
highlights are on his face. So that's a cool look, right? Because we're really
cleaning up the white. So it has a bleach bypass effect, so I am 100% okay with it. I will leave it as is. If you want to mess with it, and just kind of add
a little bit of color, we can go under our log
wheels and Highlights, and now I'm just gonna take my Highlights and start adding a little bit of color. So not too much, just
a little bit of color. So if I do before and if I do after, just keep your eyes right here, okay. So let's just keep our eyes right here. So I'm gonna do before and then after, before and after. So it does just enough, but once again, I wanna split the difference. If like, I will keep it
somewhere around here, but I like the bleach bypass effect, so I want to leave that on. But let's kill all of these and see the simple three steps that we had to start grading in DaVinci Resolve. So we started with our CST, which meant that we needed
to know the information of each camera. In this case, this is all
shot as part of a music video, it's all shot on an Alexa Mini. And then once I did a proper transform, this is my rec 709. If you're not a colorist
and you just drop a lot, this is what your image will look like. And then I went in and showed
you just with primaries, how much power do we have
in these tools right here? And simply we can create like stunning, stunning image, and you can just print
this and you can be fine. But then we further enhanced it right here with our secondaries. We really went in and just
modified the F out of it, like brought out our sky quite a bit. You know, if you're
into this kind of look, turn in that kind of look, like you don't need to go this route. I just wanted to show
you an extreme example, that if you really want
to push it and go there, how easy it is to create
something like that. We cleaned up our whites right here. I made it look really nice. And then in this image, once again, our node tree was exactly the same. Started with our rec 709 conversion, and then did our primaries. Our focus was our subject always. And here I could have just called it a day and it looks beautiful and we're done. But then I went in and just accentuated tons of these little parts to like bring out the background, cleaned up my whites, bring down her skin a little bit, just to make it a bit more classy. And then here, we can do the same thing, let's kill everything. So it started with our rec 709 conversion. The primaries, I wanted
to stay true to how the director or the DP wanted it, so I kept it in that magenta world. I just split the difference
between magenta and cyan, pulled it back a little bit, but then the main focus was
to keep it looking soft. So I didn't want it to create too much unnecessary contrast in this shot. And then I went into my secondaries and attacked that one problem in the back where the roses were just so red. So pulled that down, and
you can see it on the vector scope to just pull
it back a little bit. And then we just went in and just swung the hue of the yellows
or the reds on her face to just make it a bit more proper, sort of skin tones are hitting
our indicator right there. And then just went in and added tons of blue into the skies. If I go there and you look at it, like you're really, you know, created color contrast, if
you will, by not doing much. And by cleaning up our whites, even like her teeth look better. See? So it even worked on that. So we're working on so
many things like, you know, the eyeballs right here, like, everything is looking much cleaner and it was just so simple to do. Now, one last thing. This happens all the time
that you will finish grading and then you'll go well,
compared to these two shots, this looks a bit more grim, and that's how I feel
with this shot, right? So, I mean, I did all this, which is cool, but I feel like I just went a bit too far, especially when I put it into context with the rest of the footage. So in this case, what
I want to do is, again, go to my hero frame right here. And I want to click on my node key, which is this guy right here. And now here I can control the opacity, especially all the Premiere Pro and Final Cut 10 users here. So if I just go to zero, I
basically kill the entire effect. I don't need to turn off the node. It's just the effect is gone. So what I want to do is I
want to split the difference. So I want to take it
to 100 first, like one, so now it's in full effect, and I want to say, you know what, like, let's split the difference. I'm gonna start doing this, and I'm gonna see where it
looks really good to me. So I'm gonna keep going back and forth, and I genuinely feel like
right at the middle part is like a perfect balance. The whites are cleaner. The sky has more depth. Everything just pops. But it's not, again,
as quote, unquote grim. So now that we did that, let's
check out the final looks in full screen. (soft music) Hopefully you guys found this helpful. And let me just say this. The stuff that you've seen here is not something that once
you become a pro colorist, you're gonna toss that out. It's gonna be built on
this foundation, okay, what you learned here. Implement it in your
workflow day in and day out, and you will start seeing
the results right away. Not to mention that you're gonna be so much more efficient if
you really followed along and understood the entire concept of how I approached color
grading for beginners. I do not forget to sign
up for the live training. Link is in the comments. Link is in the description. Make sure to smash that Like button, subscribe to my channel
for more awesomeness. I will see you guys in the next video. (exciting music)
