- Anybody can buy a preset nowadays and just slap it on their footage, fact. For example, I sell my CINE LUTS 2.0 pack. Anybody can buy my LUTs
that I use all the time, put them on their footage. But the question is, can
you make your footage look consistent and crispy every single time. (upbeat electronic music) Let's take a look at how to
color correct like a pro. I'm gonna go through and
show you guys some examples of how to color correct footage. Footage shot with this
guy, the Fujifilm X-T30. Friendly reminder, if you
do want to win this one, you have a week to enter,
I'll link it down below. But basically, when we're
talking about color correcting we're talking about exposure and contrast and color balance. And now we can then add on our look, our LUT, our preset, or our color grade. So, color correcting always comes first and then you add on the
look, your preset, your LUT. And why is color correcting so important? Well, it basically makes
or breaks your grade. Like I said, anybody can
buy and slap on a preset but can you actually make
it consistently look good, nice and cinematic. Another massive thing
is that all the footage in your sequence will actually match and it won't be one
clip looking really blue and then the next clip looking all orange. You're gonna have really
consistent colors, again, just making your video a lot
better and look more cinematic. I'm gonna warn you guys,
this takes a lot of practice, but it is definitely worth it and it's actually kind of fun once you understand what you're doing. Okay, so this is my work flow, and I'll show you a little bit
of a different work flow also but this is the way that
I do things in Premiere. First off, I'm gonna add a Colorista, and then I'm gonna have
my Lumetri corrections, and then I'm gonna have another Colorista. And Colorista is just a plug-in basically for color correction. It's really handy, it's
got some color wheels. You can change the contrast
and exposure levels. There's just a lot of control that you have within Colorista and I really like it
because you have control over the shadows, the midtones and the highlights separately. And like I said, you can
have a different work flow for color correcting your footage but this is the way that I
really like color correcting and then color grading. Also, it's good to know that
it makes a massive difference which order you have these plug-ins. You should always be
color correcting first and then adding your
color grade or your look. If you're doing it the reverse order, first adding on your look and
then trying to color correct, you've already manipulated your colors and your image so much that you can't color correct your footage anymore. You need to, first, color
correct and then add on your LUT. Now, we can break down color correcting basically into two different parts, exposure or contrast, and your colors. Exposure has to do with how
bright or dark your image is but also the contrast, how
much of a difference is there between the shadows and the
highlights and the midtones. Now, I rarely actually just
change the overall exposure. I always like to manipulate
the image using the shadows, the midtones and the highlights. And to make color correcting
a little bit easier in terms of exposure, we're
gonna use the waveform scope. I've talked about this before but it's basically your
image from left to right, from zero to 100, zero being pure black. So anything below zero, there's not gonna be any
detail in those shadows and then 100 being your pure white, anything above that there's
not gonna be any detail in your highlights. Now, my first step always
in color correcting is taking the shadows and dropping them until something hits that zero mark. As soon as something hits
it, that's where I stop. Now we do the same for the highlights, we take that and we bring it
up until it hits that 100 mark. Now, where this gets difficult is if there's nothing in your image that's supposed to actually be black or if there's nothing so
bright that it should be white. For example, if you don't have something like this black boot or
the sky in the background that's supposed to be pretty much white, where do you put the exposure levels? Do you always go to zero and 100? No. What do we do then? We look to our old friend Ansel Adams, he's basically an OG photographer, and he made this zone system for where exposure values should lie. And this is basically the exact same thing as your waveform from zero to 100, here we're going from
zero to 10, same thing. We can, for example,
look up pale white skin, Matt's kind of pale, and we can see that it's supposed to be
around 70 in exposure. So if we take this portrait shot of Matt, there's nothing crazy bright,
there's no bright sky, there's no light that's super bright. The brightest thing is actually his skin. So we shouldn't take it too 100, we should take it to about 70 and that's gonna be the
proper exposure for his skin. And this is also how
we deal with midtones, we just wanna make sure
the exposure values are lying in a natural place. And if we want to really
zero in on something and see what exposure
value it is right now, we can just add a mask around it. For example, as skin tones,
we can just make a quick mask. And now on the waveform we're only seeing the exposure
value for his skin tone, so we can see exactly where
the exposure is on his skin and then we can tweak it. Once you're done you
can just delete the mask and then we have the
proper exposure values for the skin tones. And until you know kind of
where the exposure should be, I would just look it up. Look at this Ansel Adams zone system and figure out where things should lie in their exposure values. Okay, so that's how we correct
our exposure or our contrast, now let's take a look at colors. When we're color correcting the colors, we want them to be balanced and natural. We don't want, for example, a
skin tones to be really warm or really cool or too
magenta or too green. We want natural looking colors and colors are a lot harder to deal with than contrast in my opinion. It takes a lot more time to really see colors in their true form. And even if you're experienced, your eyes can really play
tricks on you with colors. To help us be a little bit
more scientific we can, again, use a scope, this time
we're using the vectorscope. And this one's basically
just a color wheel and it's showing where on that color wheel your colors are kind of going toward. So you can see whether your
colors are a little bit too blue and they're going towards
the blue direction or you can see if they're
a little bit too green and going towards the green direction. If it's a balanced image,
the colors should gravitate towards the center of the vectorscope. If they're not in the
center, let's tweak them. How do we do this? Again, we're gonna take
a look at the shadows, the midtones and the highlights. Now, usually I start with the highlights because I find that this fixes a lot of the color balance issues right away. So let's take a look at the highlights, the brightest parts of our image. Do they look too blue? Do they look too magenta or green? What's going on with the
colors in the highlights? For example, here we can see that they're a little bit too magenta and we can also see
that in the vectorscope that it's pushing
towards the magenta area. So to fix this, we're just
gonna take the highlights towards the opposite direction
of magenta which is green. Again, if you want to be more specific, you can just do a mask
around the highlights and we can really see where
are those colors going towards especially if it's, for example, the sky. It should be pretty balanced
white right in the middle. It shouldn't be going in any direction, so you can really quickly
see what direction you should be taking those highlights. And then we just do the same for the midtones and the shadows, paying special attention to the midtones because that's where the skin tones lie. You really want your skin
tones to look natural and that's probably the
most important thing about color balancing or
color correcting your footage. Just like with waveforms,
we can use a quick mask to see the exact specific
color of a certain area. Now, this is where it
gets a little bit tricky. I said that the color
should be around the center but a specific color, for example, skin tones here shouldn't
be in the center, they should be going towards the orange section of the vectorscope. Not towards yellow or magenta but somewhere in the orange section. That's where they're gonna look natural. So overall, the colors should lie around the center of the vectorscope but specific colors will go in
the direction of that color. For example, a pink sign will not be in the center of the
circle and that is okay. The center of the circle is
like a neutral gray no color. So if your skin tones
are looking too blue, take that mid one wheel and drag it towards the opposite
direction which is orange. Now that we fixed the skin tones, the whole image looks
a little bit too warm and since the skin tones are good we're just gonna add a little
bit of blue to the shadows to cancel out some of that warmth. And this is what color
correction is all about with colors and with exposure also, you're gonna tweak one thing and then you're gonna have
to change another setting because they all kind of
affect each other a little bit. In this case, we changed up
the skin tones a little bit and that affected the
shadows in the whole image, so we need to correct for
that in the shadows area. Also, adding a whole bunch of saturation can really help you see what's
going on with the colors so just add a bunch of saturation, check out the colors,
fix it a little bit more, and then take off that saturation. Once the colors are balanced, we just need to take a look at saturation. And in that vectorscope, the
further away the points are from the middle, the more
saturated your image will be. The closer they are to the middle, the less saturated your image will be. And saturation is a little bit hard. There's no exact standard for how much saturation there should be, but I just basically eyeball it, but don't go overboard with saturation. Once you add too much,
it really just kills that cinematic look completely. More importantly, you want to make sure that each of your clips has
the same amount of saturation. So each clip, the colors
should be going out from the middle of the
vectorscope about the same amount. Once the color correcting is
done, we go into the Lumetri, we add in our preset, our LUT. In this case, I'm gonna
use the Cinema LUT, which is part of my CINE LUTS 2.0 pack. Bring it way down as usual with LUTs. And then that last Colorista is just tweaking the look a little bit. If I want the shadows to
be a little bit more blue or if I want ray shadows
or dropped highlights, this is where you tweak that part. You do not do this part
in the color correcting. The color correcting should
make your image look natural and then later on you change the look. So, on that last Colorista is where I would really dial in the look. Whether I want it to be low
contrast, high contrast, saturated or not saturated, really teal and orange or not so much. This is where you would manipulate the final look of your footage. Color correction is to make
your footage look right, and then color grading is
making that final look. Okay, let's just do one example, all in Lumetri if you
don't have Colorista, which a lot of people don't have. You can do all of this in Lumetri but you don't have quite
as much control over it. So again, we start with the exposure. We're gonna take the blacks, we're gonna drag them down
until we hit that zero level and then we're gonna do the
same with the highlights until they hit the 100 level. Then, we can tweak the midtones and that looks about right for exposure. Let's take a look at the colors. In this case, we're just
gonna use the Tint slider and the Temperature slider. So if your footage looks
a little bit too magenta, we're just gonna drag it towards green and if it looks too blue,
then we're gonna drag it a little bit more towards
the warm direction. Remember, when you're
trying to cancel out colors, you want to add in the
opposite of the color that you have in your image. Then we have the Cinema LUT, and then we tweak the
look to get it just right in the creative section
using the color wheels and whatever other tools you want. The reason why I don't do
everything in Lumetri is I want those color wheels
before I add in the LUT, not just after, I want them
before the color correct and then after to change the look. Plus, with Colorista you have a lot of fine tuning abilities
using the HSL section. So, yeah, I think it's
a worthwhile investment to buy Colorista. I've been using it a ton ever
since I started filmmaking. But everyone has their own work flow, so you just need to figure
out what works best for you. Maybe you color correct using curves. I do not suggest this, but some people are
really good with curves and that's their most comfortable way of color correcting and
color grading their footage. Whatever works for you,
that's the best method. As long as you're color correcting, I don't care how you do
it but color correcting will always make your
videos so much better. It'll make your footage
look way more cinematic, way more consistent and just have that nice consistent
crispiness every single time, not just when you add
your LUT or your preset and you get lucky and it looks good. And lastly, remember small tweaks go a long way with color correction. So, yup, that's how I color
correct all of my footage. That is my process. I hope you learned something and I hope you can take
something for your own workflow. Okay, I'll see you guys later, bye. (energetic electronic music)
