Basics Of Color Grading In FCPX (no plugins)

hey friends dylan bates here with the final cut bro this week we are going to be covering color grading color grading is easily one of my favorite parts of the filmmaking process it's where you finally get to see all your beautifully shot footage come together perfectly today i'm going to be showing you my color grading process in final cut pro without using any plugins to show you how to get really rich skin tones but also have a completely unique look to your video so let's get started okay so today we are just going to be looking at this shot here and i will show you how i achieved this color grade in particular i thought it was a good shot because it has a lot of skin tones that we have to maintain while also having a lot of greenery and whatnot in the background so i'll actually show you the before and the after the very first thing i highly recommend that we do is actually go up to your final cut pro preferences and then you'll go to general and from general you'll actually go to your color correction selection here and choose color wheels this will set color wheels as your default color corrector which in my opinion is far superior than the color board that comes down to personal opinion but that's just what i like to use the next step is we are going to push command 7 or if you prefer menu so you can come up to view and go down to show in viewer video scopes now if your vector scopes actually look something like this or maybe a large wheel you can actually come up to view and select this layout and that will give us the information that is needed we can actually even size this up now what's important to note is on the vector scope here on the left which if you don't have this you can actually come up here to your scope selector and select vector scope you'll see this line which shows where your skin tones for your video should be falling your luma waveform which is over here it will show you information for where your darks your highlights and your midtones are all falling on this grid so now if you don't have the luma waveform you can come up here and make sure you select waveform and then go down down to luma our next step will be to balance this shot now you can either press command 6 or you can come to your effects viewer and we will just look up color wheels and we'll drag that on there now again command 6 is much easier and it just automatically opens up this box for you from there we are just going to adjust our shadows and highlights and mid-tones to get them in the ranges that we want so let's go ahead and drag our shadows down and we just want that to be just a little above zero and that's so we can maintain as much information in the shadow areas as possible next we'll come to our highlights and raise that so it's just below 100. now this can actually come to taste and if you want a darker scene you can certainly drag your highlights way down but today i'm just gonna drag it to be just under 100. now we can adjust our mid-tones and i actually like to have them fall between 50 and 75. now for this scene i actually used a cine 2 profile and i reduced all the saturation completely out so let's go ahead and add a little saturation back in so i'll just raise the saturation on the master barely very tiny increments here and that'll be the key to achieving a really good grade is just doing everything very subtly our first step is going to be adding an additional color wheels and we are going to add a color mask and this will help us to protect the skin tones as best as possible so we're just going to click and drag over the arm and as i drag it actually selects a larger portion of the skin tones and we're getting a little bit of the tree but that is actually okay and then i'm going to push shift and i'm going to select a few more areas all within this skin tone region now we can drag the softness up just a smidge so now we are just going to achieve the classic teal and orange look which i know is extremely overused and whatnot but this is just really good practice for learning color grading so go to your mask and select the outside portion and we are just going to drag our shadows down towards the teal section this is going to be very subtle so now we've got a little bit of a teal and orange look going on now we can come back to our mask that's inside and we can drag it just very very slightly towards the orange portion very very subtly now from here comes the really fun part we're going to go up to our color wheel selector and we're going to add a hue and saturation curve we will now select all this green portion and we can just push that towards the teal direction now it's going to be a little bit intense so we're going to want to tone it down by using the hue versus saturation and we'll just select the green area again and we'll drag our saturation down just a bit and we can even take our luma down and already our skin tones are starting to really pop against this background now what's important is the dark areas are carrying over a little bit of our teal look and it looks pretty unnatural so to fix that we're actually going to come to our luma versus sat curve here and we're going to add a point here two spaces in on the grid and we'll go ahead and just drag our shadows all the way down and it's it's very subtle you can barely see it it definitely helps with achieving a realistic look it's definitely a lot more apparent when your shot has a lot more shadows within it so now i'm going to actually add another hue and saturation curve and i actually like to raise the brightness on the skin a little bit so we're going to come to our hue versus luma and we're going to just select our hand skin tone here we'll just drag that up just very slightly and again this is completely to taste it depends on the shot that you are doing from here i feel like we need just a little bit more contrast in this scene so we could either come to our very first wheel correction here and we could drag down the shadows and raise the highlights just a little bit and that's already doing a really great job or we could achieve the same thing with using a curves modifier so let's go ahead and add color curves what's really commonly used is the s curve you'll hear it talked about quite frequently and that's just when you create an s within your curves here and it adds a lot of really nice contrast so this is after this is before and you can play with these as much as you want say you want those highlights to come down a bit more so the scene isn't quite so bright that's really easy to do some people like the faded film look i'm not a fan but you could raise your shadows here and that will give you more of a faded film look which is very common right now or if you want to add a little bit more contrast you could drag your darks a little closer to the right so curves are something that you just gotta play around with a lot so again here's the after here's the before i think that our our skin tones are maybe just a slight smidge to orange we could go back to our color wheels and maybe pull back whoops color wheels too i wish you could name these so badly i hope they add that in a future update so in your on the inside of your mask we can drag this just slightly away from the orange and just undo what i did originally don't really like that let's see if i can maybe pull it towards the pinks now one way to check our skin tones is to get a mask a draw mask which i got from the effects down here we'll put that on there go to our video and we will just draw as much of the skin tones as we can in this mask and this will not be permanent by any means but this will give us a really good idea of where our skin tones are falling and as we can see they're definitely getting a little bit too orange so let's go ahead and fix that if we come to our hue saturation curve number two which i desperately wish we could rename we can select the hue vs hue and we'll just select our skin tone and we can drag this into submission so this is without this is with i think that's looking a bit better so here is our shot i feel like the greens might be a little bit too vibrant in the background so let's go ahead and drop the saturation there and i feel like we're getting a really good shot now one last tip i actually really like vignettes some people like them some people hate them so you do you but we can add a vignette here and we'll just decrease the darkness on the edges and we'll put it over the top of the hand and again this is personal taste um i like vignettes some people hate them and despise them so it's up to you but i just feel like the vignette adds a lot of really nice shape to the scene so here is our final shot and we can disable the effect that's before this is after and i really feel like it makes the colors pop nicely it's got that teal and orange look that people really like i really feel like the colors make this shot pop out great just a couple things before this video is over teal and orange is not the only way to grade your footage i strongly recommend you push it around try trying other color combos just make sure that you maintain really good skin tones and that will set apart your color grade from any other videos if this video was helpful at all please consider pressing the like button consider subscribing for more videos just like this one every week if you have any questions let me know down in the comments and i will answer those to the very best of my ability or i'll send you links to stuff that does have answers i appreciate you guys watching so much and i cannot wait to see you next week you

Channel: The Final Cut Bro

Views: 1,103

Keywords: The Final Cut Bro, color grading, basics or color grading, how to color grade in fcpx, how to color grade in fcpx without luts or plugins, color grade without luts, no luts color grading, coloring without luts, coloring, color grading tips in fcpx, final cut pro color grading, final cut pro, final cut pro x, fcpx, editing, video editing, color grading tools, how to color grade, easy color grading, beginner, how to color grade like a pro, teal and orange, orange and teal, free

Id: Xuhs-4fXasM

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020