Today's video is sponsored by ViewSonic. So what we're talking about
is how you do color grading, and I'm gonna break down
step-by-step the basic things that you need to know and the
workflow to be able to get better looking footage out of the shots that you're capturing. All right, guys let's get into it. (dramatic impacting music) So what I want to do in this video is demystify the process of color grading. It's actually more simple than it looks, and you just have to
understand what to look for to be able to get the best
look out of the footage that you are capturing. Now your camera does a great job of getting good looking footage, but what you do in post is
tweak it just a little bit, and then you can make that
footage look even better, and a lot of times people are
looking at different creators and seeing these insane color grades and just wanting to buy
like LUTs or presets. When in reality, all it takes
is a little bit of tweaking and understanding what
you're doing with the color, and then you can get these looks. You don't have to go and buy a preset, and most the time when
you buy a LUT or preset, it will work to a degree,
but you still have to have a knowledge of understanding
how to color grade to be able to use those LUTs properly, and we'll talk about LUTs and preset looks towards the end of this video because that is the third
step of the process. So once you start looking at your shots and comparing them against each other, you'll start noticing that
not everything is shot perfect shot to shot to shot to shot, and even if you're a
super skilled shooter, and you're getting some of the
best footage out of camera, once you sit down in the edit, you'll notice discrepancies
between the footage, and when you really see a video pop, that's when the color gradient
is on point for all the shots and so it just flows. So what you're doing with color grading is correcting issues, matching shots, and then creating a look so
that your footage has more of an impact with the
story that you're telling. So it's a three step process
to be able to color grade. Now step one is just
correcting for issues. This is exposure, this is colors, this is everything that might
be wrong in your footage. So if something's
overexposed or underexposed, something has a blue or
a green color cast to it, that is the first step
in this whole process. Now step two of the process is you wanna group these shots together. So if you have a sequence
like I have here, it's four shots back-to-back that you wanna have the same look to it, you're gonna group these together. And then the third step of
this is you're going to create a look that goes across
all of these clips, and the beauty of this
workflow is that you're doing all the heavy color grading at first, and then when it comes
to creating your look, you're building that look
over a batch of footage. So you're not having to
go shot by shot by shot, and it makes the whole
process much easier and faster and a lot more enjoyable
for you as the creator. Now the tools that I'm
gonna use are in Final Cut, but you'll find these tools
in most editing software. If you're using a basic editing software, you might have only access
to some of these tools, but I want you to continue
to watch this video so that you have an understanding of the what you're
supposed to be looking for when it comes to color grading. Before we get into the editing software, I just wanna mention that
having a good monitor makes all the difference when
it comes to color grading. For me, I personally
use ViewSonic monitors. So this is one of them that I use. This is a 4K seamless monitor. Like it's amazing to work with this because of the color
accuracy and the ability that you can just see all the colors as they should be on this monitor. I have another ViewSonic monitor. I have the huge curved
one in my office, as well, and I use ViewSonic monitors
because when it comes to colors they're super on point. If you don't have a monitor that's made for people doing this
kind of creative work, photographers, filmmakers,
graphic designers, then what will happen
is what you're producing isn't gonna end up looking right when you've finished the product. So you wanna make sure that
you have the best looking image when you're going through
this color grading process. So I highly suggest if you're in the market for a new monitor and you really wanna
enhance your workflow, then check out the
ColorPro from ViewSonic, and I'll put a link down
below in the description to the monitors that I use because I think these are awesome tools that we need as creators, and when I'm home, I am always working off of one of these monitors. All right, so let's jump into Final Cut, and let's go through
this three-step process. Now there's three tools that we'll use in our color grading software
that allows us to see the color values on a chart. The first one is your luma waveform. And what this shows is
all your exposure values from black to white, and so
it's a visual representation of the exposure of your image. Now the second tool that we're
gonna use is our RGB parade. So this is showing your luma waveform, but it's broken up into
your red, your green, and your blues within the image, and you're gonna use this to help balance the color of your footage out. Now the last tool that we're
gonna use is the vectorscope, and this shows all the
colors within your footage and it puts it on this disk-like graph, and the image in the center is your trace, and the further away from the center the more saturation towards that color. So you can see in this footage right here it has blues and yellows in
it with a little bit of reds. So you can use this to help
match the colors in your shots and also the intensity of the saturation. So if something has a lot of blues in it and it's highly saturated in the blues, you'll be able to visually
see this here on the graph. Now let me show you a
shot that needs corrected. In the luma waveform, you
can see that all the traces at the bottom of the graph which means that this footage is underexposed. Now on the RGB parade, you
can see that the red channel and the green channel are pretty even, but the blue channel
is spiking which means that there's a blue color
cast on this footage. And then on the vectorscope,
you can also see this because all of the saturation
and colors in the image are pushing towards the blue channel, and so looking at these graphs, you can see exactly what you need to do. You need to fix the exposure and you need to fix this color cast that's happening on the footage. Okay, so let's just do a quick grade of this shot of me and an elephant. So this is super dark so it
needs to be properly exposed. The tools you have at your
disposal are your master which is gonna affect
all the exposure values in your footage. You have just your highlights. You have just your shadows, and then you have your mid-tones. And so you're gonna use
all four of these tools to properly expose your image. Start by pulling the highlights up, and you just want to make sure that you're not over
exposing here at a 100. So parts of my neck might
start exposing eventually, but we're also gonna
play with the mid-tones to bring up the exposure, and it's gonna brighten
up the image as a whole. Now we'll keep our shadows near zero, and then we'll use our
combination of playing with our mid-tones and our highlights to get an exposure that looks much better, and you can see that on
our graph all the exposures are slowly drifting up
the more that we play with our highlights and our mid-tones. And typically I don't touch the master when I'm doing these grades. I use a combination of my shadows, highlights, and mid-tones, and you can see here this
is before and this is after. The shot is now properly exposed. Now also with this because
I shot with less saturation I'm gonna need to add
some saturation here. So depending on which color
profile that you're working on, you might add saturation in this part. So you can pull up your vector scope and you can see where
your exposures are lined. This looks like the color is pretty good. We don't have a crazy color cast on this. We got some blues, we got some greens, and we've got some yellows
which is true to this footage. I'm gonna pull up my saturation
and you can see how those are all expanding from the the center, and I'm just gonna pull
that up to my liking. So I like it right around there. It's not super saturated, but
it's not super desaturated. So let's pull up the RGB parade, and now we would work on a color cast. So just looking at this footage,
everything's pretty close. It might have a slight green tint to it. So I'm gonna put a little
bit magenta into it, and that's using your tint tool, and this goes from magenta on one side to green on the other, and then on color temperature, you have either tungsten or daylight. So that's your blue, your oranges, your greens, your magentas. So let's go back. I'm gonna add a tad of magenta into this. And that looks pretty
good for the first shot. Now let's do another shot
that has a blue color cast. So we're gonna go through
that same process. I'm gonna pull up my luma, and I'm gonna do a quick
fix on the exposure. We're gonna pull up our vector scope. and I'm going to add a
little saturation to this, and this is where you can see where we have a major issue going on. Everything is pulling towards
the magentas and the blues. So that means our color balance is off, and you can also just see that
by looking at the footage. So I'm gonna pull up
my waveform RGB parade, and you can see very clear
that it's towards the blue like in the vector. And so now I'm gonna use
my temperature, my tint, and I'm also gonna start
playing with the colors of your highlights, your
mid-tones, and shadows to try and get this color cast out. So I'm gonna use a mix of my RGB parade, and just watch as I make tweaks, and then if you're working in a sequence, you can start comparing this
to another shot that you have and start working on getting
the color as close as possible. Now this is where practice comes in because you're gonna start noticing some issues with your footage, and it's just gonna take
working with these tools and playing with
different types of footage so that you can start understanding where you need to drag the
colors to be able to get the proper exposure and the
proper color for each shot. Now I have two shots here
that match really closely when originally they were far off. So step one is your basic color grade, and step two is group these shots. so I'm gonna work with
these shots together and group them so that they
all have the same exposure so that we can move onto now step three. So now that I have these
two shots that are matching, let's put a look on both of them, and so what I use is an adjustment layer above both these. This is just an empty layer file, and what you can do is then
create looks on this file. So for example, if I was to
pull up my color grading tools, I can make adjustments, some crazy color, and it's gonna affect both the same way. So this is why you wanna
set up all your footage in step one and step
two so that they match and then group together
because then the final step is use these adjustment layers
and affect all the images and create your creative look. So for me, I'm gonna add a LUT, and like I said at the
beginning of this video, you can't just drop a LUT on and expect it to work every time. So I have a custom LUT that I made, and it's super extreme in
terms of reds and teals. So with this LUT at full,
it's like a crazy look, but you can see what I've
done to build this LUT. I'm pulling in the reds, and
I'm pulling into the cyans. So I'm basically
compressing all the colors into those two streams of colors, and the reason is that
creates color contrast. Now this creates a very distinct look, and this might not
necessarily be what you want out of this footage, and
so I'm gonna use this LUT, but I'm not gonna use it at full. I'm only gonna put it on say 25%, and the reason is now I've created a look over both the shots that has
a very different quality to it than the original shot has. Now let's pull in another
LUT here from CINECOLOR. It's called Sunlight 11. So they've developed a series of LUTs that are for different lighting scenarios. So they have a bunch for sunlight, and you can see when I pop this on, gives a higher contrast
look to the footage and it gives you a very warm color. Again, if you don't like this look, you could just dial it back at this point. Maybe I'll do like 50% and that creates a completely
different look to the footage. So if you don't wanna use a LUT and you just wanna build your own look, you can also use this adjustment layer and play around with your colors and create more of a distinct look. And because we fixed all
the footage on the front end and got everything to match, we can just play with these colors and it affects all the footage, and then we can see how it translates to all the different shots
that we've worked on. What's really cool about these tools is once you understand how they work, you can pull up a shot of another creator or another film if you really
like the look of the grade, and pull it into your software. Just pull a screen shot and you can see on the
vectorscope where the colors lie, how much saturation there is. You can look at your RGB parade and be able to start pulling apart why you like that look. Is it because the colors are warmer or is it because the colors
are more cooler, more blues? When you look at the luma waveform, where did the exposure sit? Are they more in the
middle and it's more flat or is the image super contrasty and there's a lot of darks
and a lot of highlights? And so start using these tools
to start picking apart looks that you like to see and you
can use that to help start guiding where you wanna push your looks of the footage that you're creating. So these are tools to be able
to help you see the colors and to be able to fix problems
but also to be able to create looks so you can
have that cinematic quality and create something
distinct with the footage that you are shooting. All right, guys, I hope that
was helpful in giving you an understanding of how
to start color grading. Now if you're looking for a monitor, I highly suggest the ViewSonic monitors. They work great in getting
awesome color accuracy. And if you wanna see more videos
on how to do color grading, I'll put a playlist here on
the screen that goes through all of my color grading tutorials. All right, guys, that's it. I'll see on the next one.
