Cinematic Color Grading for Drone Footage

[Music] hey guys what's up welcome to another color grading tutorial my name is Evan Schneider and it's so great to have you guys here first of all thank you so much to all of you guys you new subscribers I really appreciate your support and I love seeing all of your comments down below it really helps me be encouraged and inspired to make more videos so if you're not yet a subscriber and we'd love to have you as part of this community make sure you hit that subscribe button and even the bell icons so that you can get emailed every time I release a new video second of all I just released a new drone film that I shot in Iceland I'm super proud of this video I think it turned out really amazing and I think you would really enjoy it so you can give that a watch first step so we are here in DaVinci Resolve 15 and I have a clip loaded up but imagine this as part of a finished edit maybe you did it in DaVinci Resolve or premier but today I'm just gonna do it on this clip to show you guys how to color grade drone footage I created a video about the Mavic 2 Pro that I go over all of my settings I do a little bit of a review and I also show you how to color grade that footage to that'll be super helpful for you in this tutorial I want to show you how to color grade just drone footage in general you can apply these techniques to pretty much any drone footage you shoot so let's get into it so I'm gonna click on the color tab and in the color page you want to make sure that you have your parade scopes up these are a super helpful tool that can help you see what's going on in the image rather than just looking at the image on the screen you can see kind of what's going on under the hood in addition to the parade scopes we're going to be using color wheels and also the curves tool so I'm gonna right click on my first node and change the label and I'm just going to call it curves the first thing I want to do to this image is I want to add contrast right now the image is a little bit low contrast as you can see in the parade scopes how the bottom the kind of the darkest point of the image is not touching full black my highlights are almost at the top of the scopes and so I'm probably not going to touch those much but I can definitely see that I want to bring the blacks down I'm going to use the curves tool for this and what I'm gonna do is create a point kind of near the bottom and I'm gonna click it and I'm just gonna drag straight down and as I'm dragging you can see on the scopes that the image is getting darker because it's moving towards the black point so that looks pretty good I don't want to crush the blacks underneath the bottom point I just want to get them nice and close the next thing I'm going to do is just create another point right here so that can smooth it out a little bit so that we have a nice gradual curve into the blacks this is a good technique to use because instead of crushing your blacks and just bringing them straight down underneath the darkest point in the image we're actually compressing the blacks so that we're retaining the detail in the shadows but we're still adding contrast to make that image pop the next thing I want to do is bring up the highlights a little bit I have to be a little more careful with this image because the highlights are already pretty close to the top so I'm gonna create a point up here and I'm just gonna click it and I'm gonna drag up until we get really close to that top point I'll stop right about there and so as you can see in the image we're already giving it a good level of contrast I'm gonna create another point right here just to smooth out those highlights and I might bring this point down a little bit so that I'm not going over the top and clipping the highlights and so right now you can see the image this is after and if you click command D you can turn off this node and see before so this is before and after before and after and so just using the curves tool we've created a very powerful way to to achieve a good amount of contrast in this image the next thing I might want to do is create a point right in the middle and I think I'm gonna bring that down a little bit as well and so I'm bringing the midpoint down adding a little more detail and bringing kind of the overall exposure level down using curves this technique using curves is called creating an s-curve and you can see this slope in the curves kind of creates an S shape and this is one of the most ideal ways to create contrast because you create a nice roll-off in the shadows and the highlights so now that I have contrasts the next thing I want to do in the image is add some saturation to bring those colors up a little bit so I'm gonna right click on the curves node and I'm gonna add a node and add a serial node this creates another node and nodes are kind of like layers so with this node I'm actually going to go to the Loom versus saat curve and this curve graphs saturation from the darkest points in the image to the brightest points in the image and I really like to use this curve because instead of using the saturation slider right here I'm only deciding to saturate specific parts of the image oftentimes if your shadows and highlights in the image are too saturated it can start looking a little unnatural so I'm just going to create a point right in the middle of this loom versus a curve and I'm just gonna bring it up ever so slightly that looks pretty good to me so you can see before and after before and after you can really see the color coming in in the grass in the middle of image and a little bit in the sky I'm going to right click on this node and change the label to saturation so the image is looking a lot better the next thing I want to do is kind of balance the colors in the entire image so to do that I'm going to create another node by hitting option S for serial node and I'm gonna change the label to primaries in this note I'm going to be using the color wheels to kind of balance the image out so right now I kind of want the image to look a little bit warmer and a little bit more green so I'm gonna push up and to the left until I see it a good level and that looks pretty good to me and so if I hit command-d it'll turn that node off so you can see before and after before and after so I've introduced a subtle bit of warmth the next thing I want to do is I want these mountains the white snow to be kind of pure white maybe a little bit more on the blue side and so since these are in the highlights you can see right here my blue channel is a little bit low meaning that the image is being pushed towards kind of reds red and green magenta so what I can do is go to my gain and I can bring it down into the right kind of towards blue and so as you can see as I drag that my blue channel is coming up and the red and the green are kind of going down and so now if you look at the snow it's a lot more white it looks a lot more pure and it looks a lot better so you can see before and after before and after so the next thing I want to do in this image is create a kind of look and so one thing I really like about this particular shot is that the blue in the sky and the brown grass creates a really good color contrast so I kind of want to accentuate that a little bit more so I'm going to create a new node a serial node then I'm going to change the label to look and for this I'm going to be using the humorous hue curve and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna create a point at yellow kind of to hit the grass and then another point in the blue to kind of hit the sky and what this curve does is it takes any color that you choose on it and you can adjust the hue for that specific color I am thinking that this grass looks a little bit kind of weird green and I want to push it more towards kind of a Bert red and so I'm gonna take this yellow and I'm just gonna push it up very slightly you can see that that kind of evens out the grass makes it look a lot more rich and a lot more unit form the next thing I want to do is the sky looks a little bit on the purple side of blue and I kind of prefer a more teal blue and so I'm going to take that sky color on this blue slider and I'm just going to push it up so that it turns towards teal and just with those two adjustments you can see that it creates a much stronger color contrast and so I'm going to hit command D to show you the difference of this node so before and after before after you can see that that color contrasts really pops and it makes the whole image come to life the next thing I'm noticing in this image is that the shadows are looking a little bit warm to me so I'm going to click back on my primaries node and I'm going to go to lift and I'm just gonna drag those straight down so that I'm kind of adding in taking them down to a blueish green level that looks a little better to me and you can see here on the bottom of my parade scopes that the red green and the blue channels are almost matching up I can adjust those a little bit more so that they're almost perfectly matching up and that basically means that those are a version of grey or black they're almost black but it's good here because they're not being crushed so I know that all of the detail in the image is still being retained the last thing you can do to drone footage that makes it look pretty fancy is I'm going to create another serial node hitting option s and I'm gonna create a vignette on this image so to create a vignette you want to click on the window tab create a circular window and I'm just going to expand it to the edges of my frame and then I'm going to increase the softness maybe increase the size a little bit more adjust that a little bit and then I'm going to invert this node and then I'm just going to bring the offset down a little bit and maybe the gamma down a little bit as well so you can see I'll click off of there before after I'm gonna go back to my look and I think the grass is looking a little too saturated so I'm gonna go to my hue versus sat curve and I'm gonna click on the yellow and I'm just gonna bring the saturation of that down a little bit so that's looking a little bit better you can see we've done a lot to this image in not too many steps this is before and this is after before and after we've increased the color contrast we've created a really consistent look we've changed the color of the grass and the sky to complement each other really well and we've added a good amount of contrast and saturation to this image the only other thing I noticed is that when I created the vignette it brought down my shadows and crushed them a little bit so I'm gonna go back to my primaries node and I'm just gonna bring it up a little bit so that my blacks aren't being crushed at all by the way one helpful tool that you can use to save you time is you can create a lot out of all of these different steps what you can actually do is right-click on the thumbnail and you can generate a 3d LUT and I'll title this Iceland Garonne save now I can pull up this LUT I can load it into resolve or I can even load it into Premiere Pro to get this exact same look on any video one thing I've actually done is I've created my own Lutz from different looks that I've created so if you're interested in those you can check them out I left a link below if you shot your footage in some sort of log format say like DJ as d log your S curve is going to look a little more drastic than this because you're taking that log image and you're converting it to a linear profile [Music]

Channel: Evan Schneider

Views: 23,754

Keywords: drone color grading, how to color grade drone footage, dji color grading, how to color grade dji mavic pro, drone luts, drone footage, how to color grade, color grading, drone tutorial, cinematic color grading, davinci resolve color grading, dji mavic pro, dji mavic 2 pro, color grading tutorial, dji tutorial, cinematic drone footage, dji phantom, drone cinematography, davinci resolve tutorial, mavic pro cinematic, teal orange color grading

Id: PpYOwq-p-yM

Length: 13min 21sec (801 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 10 2018