ADVANCED Adjustment Layers Final Cut Pro - Color Grading FCPX

today we're talking about adjustment layers in final cut pro but before we do i got to give you a little bit of a backstory about how this video came about so recently i uploaded a video on how to get apple prores raw into final cut pro and then into davinci resolve for color grading and in that video i told people now take an adjustment layer and if you guys are unsure how to make an adjustment layer let me know and if enough people requested i can make a video on how to do that but i know not everybody wants to color grade in davinci resolve lots of people are very happy color grading within final cut pro maybe they don't even have davinci resolve so in this video i'm going to show you guys how to make a basic adjustment layer for those who watch that video but then i'm also going to show you guys a more advanced method of making adjustment layers how i organize those and how i would use those to color grade one of my own videos just to kind of give you guys an example of how to use them ready let's check it out for this basic adjustment layer we're going to be using apple motion and i know not all of you have apple motion so for those of you who need just a basic adjustment layer i'm going to leave a link down below where you can download that basic adjustment layer free of charge so the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to open up apple motion and you'll be greeted by this blank project here we're gonna just select final cut title and then for your resolution you want to set that to the maximum resolution that you would normally work with now this is according to apple i haven't seen much of a difference if you set it to something different but since that's what they're calling for that's what i'll go ahead and do frame rate i set mine to 2398 because that's normally what i work with and so we're just going to hit open and then you'll be greeted by this blank title project here what we're going to do is we're just going to select this middle layer here which is our title layer and we're just gonna hit delete now we're gonna go up to file save and we're gonna name it adjustment layer and for our category we're going to create a new category and we're going to name it adjustment layer as well okay create and then we're just going to hit publish and now if we open back up final cut and now you can see we have within our title section we have an adjustment layer section and we have our our adjustment layer and we can just pull that adjustment layer down and drag it across our clip and make any kind of adjustments that we want to make whatsoever now i'm going to show you guys a more advanced method for creating adjustment layers and again stick around because then i'm also going to show you guys how i would use those for one of my own color grades now there is a link down below where you can download these adjustment layers as well all organized and and categorized within final cut but these are not free it did take me time to do this and i don't want people to just come and download something and leave the video because then youtube won't show it to anybody so that one is where you can just buy me a coffee to to be able to download those three bucks or if you want to buy me more i appreciate that as well but i am going to walk you through how i create these and how i use them so we're going to open back up apple motion and again we're going to be greeted with this blank project and we're going to select final cut title again set your resolution to the max that you would use and we're going to hit open and we're going to take our middle layer here which is our text layer hit delete and now we're going to go file save as and we still have our category here is adjustment layer we're gonna leave that and so now we're gonna start working on adjustment layers for our primary color corrections and our secondary color grades and so our for our first one we're going to name it exposure and again leave it in our category for adjustment layer and for theme we're going to create a new theme and we're going to call this primary color grades hit create and we're going to hit publish and now we're going to just start working our way down the list so we're going to go file save as and we're going to name this one white balance everything else stays the same category adjustment layer theme primary color grades hit publish and now we're going to create one for contrast publish and we're going to create one for saturation all right and now that we've got our primaries out of the way we're going to start doing our secondaries so save as and this one we're going to name it contrast as well and for our theme we're going to create a new theme for secondary color corrections we'll call it grades all right and we're going to hit publish and now we're going to create one for power window and again these are for our secondary color grades publish and we'll create a new one here for vignette publish and now we're going to do one for sharpen sorry for the fan noise one of my drives just kicked on and now we're going to do one for our look again everything the same adjustment layer and for our theme secondary color grades and now for our final one is gonna be for our lut and we're just gonna create a new theme that says lut and hit create and publish and now we can go ahead and close down apple motion if we open back up final cut here [Music] we can see now within our adjustment layer section we have all the adjustment layers that we just created we have our original adjustment layer we have our lut all of our primary and secondary grades but now i will show you how i use these adjustment layers to help keep things properly organized and just make things more efficient and so what i'm going to do is the first thing is i'm going to take my adjustment layer and i'm going to bring it down for my lut and so what i do to kind of keep these things organized is if you go over here to the inspection window you can see here there's video rolls and it's set to title by default all the adjustment layers will be purple because they're title layers but what i've done is i've created different roles for each one of these different types of corrections or grades and you can create these i have my primary secondary lut look and letter box but you can create these by going to edit roles here and you would just hit add video role and you could name this whatever you want and just hit enter and then you can even change the color to whatever you want but i've already created all mine so i don't need these but here's a look at the ones that i use so we'll just delete that and we'll actually just hit cancel and since this is my lut i'm going to change this over to lut and i'm going to go into my effects window here and i'm going to go into color and i'm going to take custom lut and drop that onto my adjustment layer and go up to the inspector window and then i'm just going to select my regular panasonic to rec 709 conversion lut from panasonic now you can see that's changed my image over to a rec 709 image but nothing special about it it's a little bit flat and a little bit under saturated in my opinion and so i'm going to show you how i would kind of adjust this and so close that down now the first thing that i want to do is maybe add a little bit more contrast so i'm going to go into my primary color grades adjustment layer and i'm going to drop this below the lut layer now this is something that is very important all of your primary corrections you want to do them before the lut layer because the lut is going to make a mathematical conversion and kind of clamp down on your signal coming out of that lut and so you won't have as much room to work with so all of your primary grades and and sometimes even some of your secondary grades you want to put them before the lut but so we're going to adjust our contrast here i'm going to go to my inspector over here and i'm going to change the roll to primary and then i'm going to go up to my color palette and i'm going to go to color curves and we're just going to start adjusting the contrast here a little bit as you can see here i got a lot in the shadows and a lot of headroom in the highlights and so i'm going to just kind of adjust this to taste here bring up my mid tones [Music] and i'm not gonna get like super technical on all this i just want to kind of show you guys what you can do with these and so there's before after actually i'm going to push those mid tones back up a bit [Music] all right we'll call that good and so i know that the panasonic s1 which is what this is shot on has a little bit of a magenta shift to it and so i'm going to go and adjust my white balance so i'm going to bring a white balance adjustment layer here stretch that out across this clip go to my inspector change it to a primary and i normally um i'm going to go into my color wheels here and i'll normally just like take two out of the tint and push it towards green and that usually corrects my magenta shift and now it's very desaturated so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take a saturation adjustment layer and there's no like method necessarily to how these are done i mean it's color grading is very subjective so you can kind of do these in whatever order that you want and you'll be going back and forth between each of these this is just how i do it it's not necessarily the correct way but now i'm going to go back up to my inspector menu here and i'm going to change that to a primary go to my color palette here and i'm going to push up just the global saturation and i think that looks fairly decent [Music] all right that's decent and so i think that's pretty much all i need to do within the primary i don't really have to adjust my exposure too much i did most of that within the contrast and it was exposed fairly well to begin with there's not a whole lot that i want to do creatively here but i will show you guys a little bit how to use the secondary color grades so let's just say um the first thing i want to do is i want to make me kind of pop off the background a little bit more um you know the background's pretty bright and i'm fairly dark but let's just say i wanted to kind of make me stand out a little bit more or draw the focus more on to me since the eye is normally drawn to the brightest part of the image so i'm going to just grab a power window adjustment layer here stretch that out over the clip and go back up to my inspection window and i'm going to set this to a secondary correction and now what i'll do is i'm going to kind of just bring up the mid-tones to where i feel like i look fairly good and as you can see it's like blowing out the sky now we're we're way over 100 ire so we're definitely clipping all that information and so i'm going to create a power window add a shape mask and just kind of shape it over me here and then i'm going to feather this way out so it's not so noticeable and you can see that that's kind of brought the rest of it down but still within the window it's it's clipping and so i'm going to bring the highlights down within that maybe bring the mids down just a little bit and so let's see so that's giving me a little bit more pop i think i'm going to add a little bit of saturation to me as well so that way there's a little bit more color separation maybe that's a little bit too much so now i'm popping a little bit but so it's brought me out a little bit it's kind of made me pop a little bit more but now i want to kind of darken the background some so i'm going to go to my mask here and i'm going to go outside and then i'm just going to kind of lower the overall exposure maybe lower the shadows a little bit actually i'll leave the shadows and i will lower the midtones since i'm in the mid-tone range and just kind of not wash it out too much bring the highlights up just a little bit let's see how this looks so you can see that's kind of brought the focus to me there in the center so it looks a little bit better kind of draws the eye more towards me rather than the background and so i think that looks pretty good what i'm gonna do now is i'm gonna create a bit of a look so we're gonna take an adjustment layer and i wouldn't necessarily create a look for just a simple tutorial like this but again just to kind of show you guys and so we're gonna go back up to the inspector and we're going to change this over to look we're going to go to our color palette here and i'm going to stick with the color wheels and so what i'm going to do is just overall globally i'm going to kind of shift this towards cyan a bit kind of cool the whole thing down some and then that's kind of putting a little bit of blue on me and i want a little bit more color separation between me and the background again to draw the eye towards me a little bit more and so since i know i'm sitting in the mid tones i'm gonna shift this back over to towards orange see how that looks [Music] that's all right but let's draw the saturation up a little bit on that [Music] so before after just kind of overall cool things down it looks a bit more like a overcast day now and so i'm going to close these down get a better look at it here so i like that but i think i kind of want to make me pop out a little bit more kind of brighten me up a little bit more so i'm going to go back into my power window here and so i'm going to create a curves adjustment still within the same power window and i'm going to just kind of boost that up a little bit kind of the mids there attack me and then again put another shape mask over this [Music] size it down to me a little bit under and feather this way out [Music] let's see but it's kind of blowing out the highlights up here so i'm gonna have to bring those down [Music] that looks fairly good and so it just kind of brightened me up over overall a little bit more turn that off so and so yeah that's that's how it's looking now that's a pretty good looking image in in my opinion um and so i'll kind of show you what we did here so i'll turn all of this off except for the lut and so there's where we started that was just converting over from log to rec 709 and there's with all of our adjustments so before after and i'll go through each one of these individually so here was our contrast and then here was our saturation there was the white balance adjustment there's the power window and then here was creating the look so it's got a nice kind of teal orange look to it that's a basic color grade on one of my videos about exposure if you haven't seen that video go check it out it's my most vlog style video today which was a lot of fun but really the adjustment layer method and color correcting color grading in general is something that is very subjective and really there's no right or wrong way to use them this method just gives you a little bit more of a proper workflow and how to keep things organized and stuff like that to where you can get to a better end result so if you have any questions let me know down in the comment section i'd love to help you guys out give this video a thumbs up if you found it helpful and subscribe if you are not subscribed but other than that i will see you guys on the next one thanks for stopping by now to install these on final cut what you're going to do is you're going to open up finder you're going to go up here to go and you're going to go to home and you're going to go to movies you should have downloaded a folder says motion templates you're just going to drag and drop that over here and you'll see with inside it's got a titles folder with the adjustment layer and so that's pretty much it to install it if you have final cut open you may need to close it and reopen it to get them to show up

Channel: Glen Reed

Views: 944

Keywords: adjustment layers in final cut pro x, final cut pro tutorial, final cut pro color grading, final cut pro color correction, adjustment layers, fcpx color grading, fcpx workflow, final cut pro x tutorial, final cut pro x, final cut pro, fcpx adjustment layer download, final cut adjustment layer download, glen reed, color grading tutorial, color grading

Id: JTkfraOy-tA

Length: 19min 3sec (1143 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 21 2021