Color Correction Made Easy: Step by Step

welcome to for my focus adventuresome role in visual filmmaking when we bring you the inside tips and make a great digital video and today we're talking color correction so today we're gonna give you our inside tips on how we do color correction and this is mostly for well this is definitely for Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2018 so if you don't have that version you might want to update because some of the stuff I show you might not show up in your version also this is for I would say for more shorter sketches and pull my focus episodes this is the process I use for doing pull my focus this is the process I use for some of our client work we were smaller shorter things bear larger things may you might use DaVinci Resolve or some other program but we're keeping this right in Adobe Premiere Pro so you guys who have no clue on how to do color correction I'll help you out a little bit without further ado let's get into the screen let's jump over here here we are we are in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2018 and what I want you to do first is go to the window option menu and come over to color and that will put you in your color workspace predefined color workspace by Adobe they're so nice one other thing you could do if it doesn't look like this well it's not going to look like this because I changed my workspace a little bit but it's going to look similar go to window workspace is after that and then go to reset to saved layout and that should put you in the default Adobe workspace screen now here we are and I have some some some clips I'm gonna show you different examples of different things that would do if I get these clips and what information I get along with the clips so first of all ignore this scope here and I don't mean ignore it forever because I know some tutorials I've seen online don't use scopes they don't use scopes they just drag sliders around and hope for the best there is an art to color correction and I'm not going to discount that it's not all science and math and equations and some people are really good at just eyeballing everything but I must warn you if you use your eyeballs throughout you entire color process you are fooling yourself because there are certain things that scopes are good for one is white balance so let's talk about white balance that's my first process in my color correction is getting the white balance correct now usually when we show when we shoot when Frank and I shoot we use these little these these guys right here they're really cheap I must have shown this in like five I'm like yeah I must have shown this like five different videos but they're white reference cars one is white one is 18% gray and one is black I never use the black one and if you use those in your shots then you always have a consistent white that you can use later why is that important well let's take this shot for example this is some footage I've shot in Hawaii very nice here's some more also some footage I shot in Hawaii on my Canon 5d Mark 3 in a color space called cinestyle one thing I will tell you is our daily drivers here pull my focus or the Canon 5d Mark 3 and the Canon c100 and on the c100 we're gonna shoot in a color profile called sea log and the 5d I'm gonna shoot in the color profile called cinestyle the only reason we use these color profiles because they they're very when you look at them they're very flat they have very little contrast they have very little color and almost seems like but what they're useful for is capturing the most dynamic range the most information of what you're shooting so the camera is literally trying to do not not not to do too much post-processing on the image because you're gonna do that later so if you shooting c100 try c-loc if you're shooting a Canon 5d try cinestyle we'll leave a link in description below for where you can download sentence in a style but here we are first thing is white balance so what's white in this image ah I don't know I don't I have no clue well maybe this is white and my goal here is to tell premier what white is so I can render white correctly thus white balancing the well here's what I usually do I'll go to out pasady and I will create a mask over what's supposed to be white notice I have my clip select on the timeline there's my mask which limits not only my screen - just that white but also my vectorscope - that white vector scopes are great for determining where the white is in the image because that dot right there in the middle is pure white and everything that reaches out outside of that dot they're different colors all going red magenta blue cyan green yellow if I turn this opacity mask off for a moment you see how that explodes of color exploding color beautiful color anyway I just want white right now that's why I put the mask on now I was pretty close the white balance on my 5d was pretty close to what it was I think I had it set for daylight which was correct because I was outside and daylight but we're a little off where we're drifting towards blue so I'm going to go into this is the Lummi tree the luma tree I always say that wrong dilemma tree the me tree I'm not French basic correction creative curves color wheels hue saturation luminance secondary and vignette we're gonna stick with basic correction we might play with creative a little bit in basic correction here's this white balance selector this eyedropper tool is really neat I can click the eyedropper tool and when I click the white that I selected notice how over here you'll see a shift in that little color spot and it should drift right to the middle I click that bone we've pushed that image into that white is now pure white on the vectorscope and you'll notice over here the temperature Adobe automatically premiere automatically moved our temperature up into the Reds a little more and down to the greens a little more so if I turn off that opacity mask now that's rendered as weight and we can continue the process with color and stuff like that we're going to take a shot from pull my focus and this is Frank in front of one of the he's shooting this with the c100 and what he'll do typically is he will shoot himself with a white card and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take that white card as a matter of fact I can just check out where his white card is what I just did was if you want to know I hit I highlighted I hit F F on the keyboard means match frame so it automatically popped me into the source monitor match the frame that I was at in the program on it just so you know and now I can scrub just through that clip so if you didn't know now you know that's an easy way to do it watch right in the beginning bingo so he'll give me his slate and on his slate he put his white card and his day 2% grey card so once again I'm actually gonna use this let's take this a2 I for in and over out and drag this I'm just going to drag this on top of here and now we're looking at that white balance card that's sweet white balance card once again I'm gonna click it create a little opacity mask and it's see it's seeing the other image I'm gonna go ahead and turn that off seeing a legend so that's supposed to be white let's check let's go back to our scopes it really pretty much is white I'm not surprised Frank has his white balance his lights and everything pretty much locked to mostly correct I really I rarely have to do anything with his white balance but I can still click this guy and click that white in there and move it ever so slightly back to the center so that when we look at this get rid of that mask his white balance is pretty much set I'm ready to go now what I could do is I could take this lumetri color here and do a cut or a copy since I don't need this anymore I did a cut turn this back on and do a paste and that's copy dilemma tree there let's move on to another clip now this is a clip that's not part of Palomar folks or anything this is some some client work we did for chef Roy Helio Garcia who is in the current season of MasterChef he's one of the competitors in MasterChef this is some stuff we shot for him in Napa that would piece what we're doing and this is your typical interview type thing and you notice I'm bringing in my white card in my 18% gray card once again alright so once again I'm gonna go ahead and and I don't have to make a mask every time I'm just I just do that just to show you guys an example how far off we were from actual white and so let's do that this time I'm gonna click the up the little square box and I'm going to drag it over and just create that box you can you can build your own mask oh you can just use the box mask and then shape it boom so if you look at our vector scope here and I'll make it nice and big by the way also to make any of these windows nice and big you hit the tilde key it makes it big hit the tilde key again it shrinks it down something else you might want to play with so here's our white here's our white here's how far off we all were onto the blue areas so I'm going to use choose my white balance selector from basic correction click it it moves us back into the nice white zone let's get rid of that mask and now our white balance is set for this shot so that's how I'm gonna handle white balance if we have white balance reference cards I'm going to use those if there's no card then I'm gonna look for something in the image that is supposed to be white and I'm going to tell premiere to make that white if I have nothing at all and there's no white in the image which is rare but sometimes happens as you see with that one click then if there's other shots I'm gonna base that shot off with those other shots all right let's talk about skintone once your white balance is set that doesn't necessarily mean that your color space is correct one thing that's supposed to look correct for people's skin tones and we did an entire video on skin tone in fact we did two videos on the skin tone and how important it is to get those right now humans see humans all the time so we know if somebody's looking great and healthy and if someone looks ok stop don't do that that's not funny so I want to make sure all my people and my shots look correct how do you do that well it's simple once again use your vectorscope so here's this hotshot of another chef and he's creating something but there's some nice like fire look at that against his face that looks beautiful that's pretty sweet but he looks a little yellow in fact the whole shot looks yellow so let's first do our white balance on here now I don't have a white balance preference card actually I do but let's say for sake of argument that I don't have a white balance preference card what can I do well he's a chef his outfit should be white so I'm gonna go ahead and check his outfit so let's do a opacity around a good part of his uniform and let's check our vectorscope whoa that's really far off that is way yellow and a lot a little bit of red and holy smokes so let's go tell premier white balance selector boom we're gonna say that's white let's turn off that mask and take a look Wow so that has cooled off greatly the kitchen looks really nice now the kitchen looks amazing in fact he still looks pretty good but let's check skintone that's what we're here for once again I'm gonna do another mask and I'm gonna take a nice big portion of his skin I'm gonna take a zombie chunk out of his skin now let's take a look at this we said in our other video about skin tones that this line here at 10:30 is the skin tone line this line means this is where human skin should fall and watch our other video because we go into really great detail about why that is this right now his skin tone is falling a little below that line so let's move that skin tone up on to the line the way I can do it is the obsolete fast color corrector Adobe why is it obsolete we need that the fast color corrector allows me to change what's called a hue angle I can move the colors around white to what they need to be so let's do that I'm gonna go into my effects tab and then just type fast which brings up the fast color correction plug-in and I'm gonna apply that just drag and drop it on to my sous-chef footage and sous-chef footage was shot on the c100 so it's already got great color space now looking at this once again we see that the skin tone is a little below the line what the fast color corrector can do is if I shrink these down a little bit here's the fast color corrector here it allows me to change this that is the hue angle so when as I drag the hue angle around notice what's happening to the color on the skin tone line I can roll it up and down and up and down and what I want to do is I just want to roll it so it's right on the line boom all right all right let's take a look I'm gonna turn off the opacity Wow and now he's starting to look really healthy and vibrant and well he was healthy and vibrant in the actual shot but now he looks even more so so make sure you get those skin tones correct and we're going to link to article by Larry Jordan who explains this in great detail how to make people look correct in these videos in your videos so once I got my white balance is correct and once I have my skin tones correct the next thing I'm gonna look at is all the other little sliders on the basic correction which will give me a better dynamic look to the to the image let's stay on the sous-chef here I'm gonna introduce you now you've you've met the vet respect your scope I'm going to introduce you to the waveform here which is called the looma waveform for luminance and this has a scale and right now is showing negative twenty all the way to 120 we want to worry about 0 to 100 and what we want to do is we want to make sure that we're spreading out the dynamic range across as much of the image as possible well so we want to go from 0 to 100 with but as much of the information as possible if I could put it really simply and just to be very clear so you understand what's going on here is this is showing the intensity of the image from left to right the intensity of the image from 0 to 100 okay if I move this a little bit around you'll see it move around a little bit and you'll see see this hotspot here this is his this is his outfit his uniform so when I'm moving around you'll see it kind of moves with him all right and there's another scope I'm introduced you to work Wix called the RGB parade which I also used and I like the RGB parade to show up down here this is all the red this is all the green this is all the blue these are basically like three different luma waveforms but they're dedicated to just red green and blue and you could also have a Y UV parade but we're gonna deal with RGB just to be simple now I'm gonna work first thing I'm gonna do is work on my blacks so here I am in cult basic color correction I'm gonna drag the blacks down and notice in the luma and also in the RGB parade they're starting to come down and I can even crush the blacks but by crushing the blacks I'm taking the the bottom most black information in the in the video and I'm moving it past zero way past zero in fact there's a setting that's defaulted in Adobe Premiere Pro called clamp signal if I turn clamp signal off all that does is it'll render it'll show me the information and I'm dipping below zero so notice if I move the blacks they actually go below zero they go way below zero but I can still see what's there if I do clamp signal they all kind of pile up on the zero point and it's not showing me so that's basically what that's for so as I bring those blacks down you notice how the image gets a little more contrast and the next thing I'm going to reach for is the whites some people reach for exposure I would avoid reaching for exposure immediately mostly because different cameras handle exposure differently so I'm gonna be able to move my exposure much higher on the c100 then I can on the 5d because the sensors are way different so I'm gonna do whites let's bring the whites up as a general rule some people say your starting point could be make sure your highest whites are sitting between 90 and 100 what's that doing that's basically letting me spread the dynamic range of the colors across the entire spectrum okay so instead of keeping flat colors like this notice how we're losing a lot a lot of the information is just crunched up between 0 and 60 if I bring the whites way up and spread it out notice how the image gets more vibrant or a lot brighter and there are highlights there are peaking whites but they're not part of the information that we really are concentrating on we're concentrating on the sucia so some of those can actually get smashed out to hell I don't care I just need him to look good beyond that then you can start to mess with the shadows and the shadows fall somewhere in the lower area of the range so when I move the shadows around you see the lower area moves okay the highlights move the higher areas up so I can change the highlights here and another thing I like to do is contrast if you bring the contrast down the picture doesn't look like it has as much range I'm gonna boost the contrast up a little bit and finally we can talk we can talk a little bit about the creative part when you go into creative correction that's where you're talking about Luntz or look-up tables which could be the subject of a whole entire other video so I'm gonna skip that for now but suffice to say nuts are basically presets and their presets of all the stuff we just stand it's a preset information of the blacks and the whites and the highlights and all that stuff let's talk about saturation and vibrance because this is the next thing I'm going to touch on now there is a big difference between saturation and vibrance saturation when you move your saturation up or down you're you're telling premier to either subtract color or add color to everything across the frame every single pixel will add or subtract so if I take the saturation of the sous-chef and I move it way up it starts to get a little crazy anyway I'm not gonna do the saturation what I typically do is I'll boost the saturation a little bit maybe I'll go to 105 or 110 oh well this in this case I'll go 105 and I'll mess with the vibrance vibrance is kind of intelligent saturation where if you move the vibrance up it boosts the muted colors the lower colors get boosted and the skin tones don't get messed with so it's a smart saturation and I'll usually reach the vibrance grab the virus and make it more vibrant before I start making the saturation blow everything out and there you have it in a nutshell this is how you create the more dynamic shots now like I said color correction is an art I use the Scopes for the most of the beginning of the process we haven't talked about a lot of things we haven't talked about color grading which is different from color correction color correction is the process where you're getting your your pictures to look correct ie white balance and skin tones and dynamic range color grading is where you're going for a specific mood you're trying to make it you know like in the matrix where it was a green tinge when it was ever in the matrix and was a blue tinge when it was in the real world that's color grading so hopefully I taught you something that you didn't know or maybe I taught you a different way of doing things please post in the comments ask plenty of questions I hope I didn't rush too fast they tried to make this shorter than longer but there's a lot to cover in color correction so let me know in the comments below what you guys do what your process is for color correction if I helped you out that'd be great don't forget to check out pull my focus that TV for all our articles and videos and like I said hit me up let me know if this helped I'll be happy to do more tutorials about our process and until then see you next time [Music]

Channel: Pull My Focus

Views: 45,099

Keywords: Color correction made easy, Pull My Focus, PullMyFocus2017, Pixel Valley Studio, filmmaking, movies, short, tutorial, how to, on set, digital filmmaking, making video, video production, video cameras, tips, DSLR, step by step, white balance, skin tone, setting skin tone, premiere pro, editing, color grading, color correcting in premiere pro cc, vectorscope, waveform monitor, Rogelio Garcia

Id: 1z-jXUPtPhE

Length: 22min 58sec (1378 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2018