- You know those coveted
LUTs that you've been buying from other filmmakers? Well, what if you knew
how to just make them? (soft ambient music) (beeping) (soft ambient music) (beeping) - [Taylor] Now, don't get
me wrong, LUTs are great. Especially when built by you to repeatedly achieve a similar look on similar footage. The problem with buying
other people's LUTs is, you don't know exactly what camera that was shot on, you don't know what exposure that they were developed for. And, with that, it can
actually be detrimental to your footage sometimes. Final Cut hasn't really
been known for grading because you cannot export LUTs, but many of us use it and would benefit from understanding how
in the world all of it's color grading tools work. All this just reinforces
that we need to know how to grade our footage. And, for those of us in Final Cut, it's time we learned how
to use all the tools. We are looking at each tool within Final Cut Pro, talking about them and showing off how you
can use each of them to create incredible film grades. Now, I was going to be using a bunch of my own clips from my
recent trip to Montana with Sony to show this off, until today's sponsor, Storyblocks, reached out and I thought, "What if I told a story
with only Storyblocks video clips"? Now, before we really get going, lets talk about Storyblocks. How many times have you
gotten done with a shoot and realized you got
all these great shots, but you didn't get that mountain shot that really helped set the scene? Or, maybe you forgot
to get that drone shot over the trees? Then you realize, you
also just didn't record any live sound effects? Storyblocks is a subscription service that gives you unlimited, yes, unlimited downloads of 4K and HD stock footage and audio content as well as after effects templates that you're welcome to use on both personal and commercial projects. If you've ever bought
stock footage before, you're gonna see the
prices and instantly know how much better of a deal this is. Use my link, storyblocks.com/taylormoore so they know I sent you. For real, it helps. And, give Storyblocks a try. Okay, I'm just jumping in to today's video to show this off a bit
through that process. So, to explain Final Cut's grading tools, I wanted to tell a story
with multiple clips. And after jumping on Storyblocks website, I immediately got this
vision for a teal and red, moody, medical, operational
kind of sequence. Here's the basic sequence
of Storyblocks clips that I'm going to be using. As they play you can see that most of them have a similar feel, color wise. Definitely some variation though, especially this doctor clip. Which is gonna end up
making the grading process a little bit more difficult, but also a little bit more fun. So, we got this storyline. What tools does Final Cut offer? And, how do I create a beautiful color grade using them? Lets just go ahead and start high level. Final Cut gives us four creative tools that we can play with, duplicate, move around and stack on top of each other to create our film look. Those being... The Color Board, Color Wheels, Color Curves, and Hue/Saturation Curves. If you want to start with a LUT, they also do have a LUT loader available. Albeit, pretty limited. While Apple doesn't allow you to natively export LUTs at this point, they do allow you to
save effect's presets. Which are still pretty useful and allow you to go in
and edit those grading tools after the fact, no matter what clip you put them on. Before we get started, I like to open my Histogram, vector scopes and waveforms and will use them pretty religiously to ensure I'm not busting up my footage in the process of grading. Now, I like to open window, workspaces, color and effects. This is going to give
you this default layout. What I like to do from here is hit view, I like to hit this three graph setup, 'cause I only need three really. This Luma graph is perfect, that's exactly what I want. This RGB overlay Histogram
is also what I want. And instead of this Luma graph here, I'm gonna change this to the RGB parade. These three graphs, to me, are really the most useful. From here, I'm then gonna
go back up to window I'm gonna go back to workspaces and I'm gonna do "Save workspace as..." and change this to Taylor, color grade. Now this setup is saved, and any time I wanna go back to it, I can go to windows, Taylor color grade, and it's gonna drop those graphs exactly where I have them. So, why use these graphs? Well, the Luma waveform
shows a representation of your image from left to right, showing the exposure
range at any given point. When the peak exceeds 100, you're losing some data in the highlights. And when you're bumping up against zero, you're crushing your shadows and also losing data. The RGB, or, Red, Green, Blue overlay, does something similar
where each color channel is shown individually and then shows the tonal range from shadows on the left to highlights on the right. Each peak in there shows
you where on the tonal range each color is sitting. If those curves bump up left or right, you're again losing data. Last, the RGB parade
gives you a visualization of the whole clip from left to right and indicates intensity
in each color channel across the tonal range. From shadows at the bottom, to highlights at the top. This is a really useful and helpful tool for diagnosing white balance issues with your footage. If we look at the graph here, we do see that the blues tend to peak a little bit higher than the greens and the reds, indicating that we should
see some more blues in the midtones in the highlights. And, sure enough, if you
just look at the image, that's indeed true. We do see more blues across the midtones and the highlights. Now. Woo! It's time to color grade. As we dive in, remember these graphs. We're gonna be looking at them a bunch and referring back to them. Now, this first tool that we're looking at, Color Board, this really is Final Cut's legacy color grading tool. It allows us to adjust color saturation and exposure across the entire clip or any combination of shadows, midtones and highlights. For each component and color, the slider can be moved horizontally to affect hue and vertically to change the intensity. Where moving it up is going to add color, and down is going to subtract it. This is where a color
science understanding will really be very handy, knowing that the opposite of Blue is Yellow, Green is Magenta and Red is Cyan. So, with that in mind, a negative yellow is
gonna look very similar to a positive blue. And, if we move back and
forth between the two, you can see you basically end up with the same result. With the numbers below, you can also go in and fine tune the hue as well as the intensity across each piece of the tonal range. This is super, super helpful. Instead of having to drag that dial and fine tune it, you can just drag the number and get it exactly where you want it. And, if you mess it up, you
can hit the reset button and it'll even everything back out again. Saturation and Exposure are both going to be
slightly easier to use, where it only uses a
vertical move to increase or decrease in the shadows,
midtones, highlights or the master. As a reminder, your
saturation is going to alter the intensity of colors across that piece of the tonal range, where exposure is going
to alter the intensity of light. So, when will I personally
use the color board? Well, generally for base color corrections to get my footage to a proper exposure and accurate colors. In this case, the colors look very neutral and pretty even. And, so, I'm gonna jump
over and adjust exposure and I'm gonna shift both my shadows and my midtones down
and I'm gonna bring up my highlights. This is going to add
what we call contrast. So, if we turn that on and off, you can immediately see the difference. And, I think this already
looks much better. Now, if I wanted to use
this to create a more stylized effect, I might first want, maybe, my skin tones to look slightly more red. So, with that, skin tones sit in the midtones. So, I might adjust my midtones to a hue of 27, this sits in the red, and, adjust it to 31 percent. This is now looking pretty orange, so I might offset this now by moving my shadows to a hue of 214 and then changing that
intensity to 18 percent. This, already you can see, it's offsetting that orange by bringing in some blue. The last change that I might make would be to bring some blue into the highlights as well by going to a hue of, roughly, 212 and bringing that up to just five percent. Now, if we look back at our RGB parade, you can see that those peaks are a little bit more even. Our white balance is much closer, and the skin tones now have a lot more red in them. If we turn those on and off, you can see that there's a lot more red in the skin tones. We're also looking at our Luma graph. We can see that our peaks are still below 100, so we're not losing any data in the highlights. And, boom! With one tool we were able to take what was really a well shot clip that looked great from the beginning, and turned it into something that really has its own filmic feel. So, there you have it. Color boards. Next up on the list, we
have got Color Wheels. Now, color wheels really are just another form factor of the color board. Each wheel affects the three different tonal ranges across the image. Shadows, midtones and highlights. And, then, you have the
master wheel as well. Just like the board, you can change the hue and its intensity using the color wheel. The saturation with
the slider on the left, and the exposure with
the slider on the right. And, then of course, for each,
you have individual resets. If you would rather deal
with values instead, and you don't like just dragging sliders and moving dials around. You can also adjust each Red, Green and Blue channel across each piece of the tonal range individually as well as saturation and exposure. So, here we've got the master. I can bring green up, I can saturate it, and I can reduce it's brightness. That's actually kinda cool looking. The main difference is the color board can actually be slightly easier to adjust intensity if you feel that you've nailed the color. Wheels can be a little bit tricky and require some patience to really nail the color, because of the need to operate in the Red, Green and Blue channels instead of that single hue value. The benefit with wheels, though, is you also get temperature and tint to fix those more macro white balance base issues by adding or subtracting warmth, and then altering the Green and Magentas. There, of course, is also a hue dial if you want to direct the next Avatar movie. Now, we're gonna go ahead and start our anchor clip that will set the look for the whole sequence. So, for this first layer, I'm using color wheels and I'm only going to adjust and fix exposure as well as a little bit of saturation first. No color shifts yet. So, midtones and shadows, I'm going to go ahead and bring down to -.14 and -.03 I'm also going to raise
the midtones saturation up to about 1.32. This really just helps
bring out the skin tones. Now, because I brought down the shadows in the midtones, I'm also going to bring up the brightness in the highlights to .11. If you see our Luma graph, that gets us closer to 100, we're not clipping. At the end of the day, base correction, I'm gonna go with wheels. I feel good about this, but we have a lot more to
do using the next tools. These are where most people really are not getting all of the value out of them that they could be. The luminance curve, as part of the color curves adjustment, is one of the best tools
for adjusting exposure and creating contrast across your image. The graph here represents the tonal range of the image from shadows on the left to highlights on the right, with the graphed diagonal line being the base current condition. When points are added, they can be moved vertically adjusting the exposure across the shadows, midtones and highlights by shifting the points up to increase and down
to decrease exposure in that tonal region. Other points can be added to pin exposures in different portions of the tonal range. This doesn't have to just be the S-Curve that most people instinctively add. An "S" is really common because it's going to darken your shadows and it's going to
brighten your highlights, thus adding contrast. That being said, the
Luma curve can be used for much more fine-tuned adjustments than just the S contrast curve. For instance, if we select
the eyedropper tool, this now allows us to select any specific exposure on the image and it's going to place a pin on that specific exposure. So here, I don't like how exposed the hairnet is so I'm
gonna place a point there and then from there, I am going to add a
couple points around it so that the rest of the
image isn't adjusted at the same time. Now,
if I go ahead and bring that point down slightly, you'll see that it
recovers just a little bit of that brightness in the hairnet. In this case, it's just helping recover some of that detail that was being lost in those highlights. We can also select these shadows here around his eyes, and from there, we can go ahead and bring those up and just restore a little
bit of the brightness to those shadows that
we see around his eyes. They're just a little too dark for me in this scenario. If we turn this on and off, you can see how in this case, it actually flattened
the image a little bit. I wasn't going for adding contrast, I actually wanted to pull some out. Remember, too, with this
that small adjustments make a huge difference. When you start making
big movements on here, you can ruin your image pretty quickly. Last, I wanna create that slightly faded filmic look in the shadows. So, I'm going to pull up our black point. Meaning, there is no longer a true black in this footage. And then, I'm also pulling
this shadow's point down just a hair. You'll also see on here that it has Red, Green and Blue curves. We're gonna come back to those later. But, for now, I've used the curves to alter contrast and
exposer in the image. Lets get to one of the most fun parts, the Hue/Saturation Curves. If there is one tool
that seems to be vastly underutilized, it's the
Hue/Saturation Curves. Lets first talk about how these all work. The names of each is
going to largely indicate what's affected with that curve. But, you're gonna need to know how to effectively read them. So, lets go ahead and
start with the second one, actually, Hue vs Sat. The way that you should
be reading this is, "This curve alters the saturation of the hue that I select". Thus, this is telling me that if we use the eyedropper and we select the blue in the mask, it's going to place three
points on the curve. The middle one is going
to be the exact color that you selected, and if we move that up, it's going to raise the saturation of the hue that we select. In this case, Teal. If we bring that down, we can completely de-saturate it. This is an incredibly powerful tool. This is also how you can create images where certain colors
are completely removed. Another way that we
can go about doing this is with Hue vs Hue, AKA, "This curve alters the hue of the hue I select". With this in mind, I am gonna place a point on his skin. In this case, I think his skin is looking just a hair too yellow. So, I'm gonna take that point that I just created and
I'm gonna raise it up, which brings some red into his skin, and in this case, looks much more natural. This is the secret sauce, right here. Lets go ahead and work
our way down the list now, there's a bunch more on here. And, frankly, they're really
some incredible tools. So, we're gonna go down to Hue vs Luma. This is telling us, I'm going to alter the
Luma, or the brightness, of the hue that I select. With this, I can take
everything that is blue and I can make it lighter or I can make it slightly darker. Luma vs Saturation. "This curve alters the
saturation of the Luma", or the brightness, "that I select". This one is interesting. With it, you can saturate or de-saturate your image in the
brighter or darker areas. So, if the shadows are really colorful, you can de-saturate them to better match the highlights or vise versa. Shadows on the left side of the curve, and highlights on the
right side of the curve. Here, really the only thing
sitting in the shadows is going to be his eyes. And, so, if we bring down the Luma vs Sat on the lower end of the spectrum it's just going to de-saturate his eyes. Saturation vs Saturation. This, again, is another interesting one. The scale here is from most saturated to least saturated, and it allows you to alter the saturation based on current saturation levels within the footage. This has absolutely nothing to do with the brightness
of the image at all. In this case, I'm going
to drag the more saturated portion of the graph down to help even out the saturation across the image, leaving the less saturated components at the same level while de-saturating the more vibrant portions of the image. The last one is just a little bit odd. It's going to default
to Orange vs Saturation and it allows you to
dial in the saturation of a specific color based
on where those colors sit in the tonal range of the clip. Meaning, if you wanna boost saturation of orange, specifically in the midtones, this is built for that. In this scenario, I'm gonna boost orange in the midtones to help
bring out his skin tones. You can actually go in
and choose any color that you want across the color spectrum. But if you want to add a second color, you're going to have to go back up to the corrections, add another Hue/Sat curve section and then add another color for you to be able to go in and adjust it. After making some small skin adjustments with Hue vs Hue, some small blue adjustments with Hue vs Saturation, adjusting the saturation on the whole of the Saturation vs Saturation and then boosting the saturation in the skin tones with the
Orange vs Saturation... Gosh, I said saturation so many times. That is a really drastic difference, and in my opinion, looks substantially more natural. We are now on to the last piece of the color grade, and this where we get to really stylize a bit more. Now that you know how they all work, I'm going to go ahead and add another color wheel's adjustment layer. This time, I'm gonna refer to this as my stylized color wheels. This is where we're gonna really add some personality to the footage. I know that I wanna create a more Red and Teal look, with red primarily in the midtones, and then some blue in the shadows. So, I'm gonna go ahead first, and add red in the midtones where the skin tones sit. And my RGB values for that are gonna be 38, 9 and 0. And then, we're gonna go ahead and bring down our brightness to .07 Now everything has some red to it, so I'm gonna open my shadows. And here, I'm gonna add 0, 51, 128 as my color. That's a whole lotta blue, right? And then, again, in the highlights we need to counteract this. So, I'm bringing in 90, 57, 0. And this is going to bring
in some of that orange to counteract the teal from the shadows. I'm also going to counteract the brightness in the midtones and bring up my brightness to +.04 Moving this back to all wheels so we can really get an idea of what those changes
did across all of them, this is the final grade that we are going to go with
across all my clips. So, if we turn these on and off, you can see just how big of a difference this makes. I really love
the way that this clip looks. Now that we've got the color grade direction of the project, we need to apply it to
all of the other clips. The easiest way to do this is going to be command C, highlight all the rest of the clips. Command shift V, and then from here you can go in and you can paste that attributes that you want and you'd be good to go. But, we don't want to practice this, so I'm gonna click cancel. We're gonna go back to
the clip we just edited. We're gonna click, "Save Effects Preset". From here, I'm gonna call it, Teal and Red. We're gonna save that to my folder that is called TM4K Color Presets. From here, we're gonna turn
off the transformations. Unless, for some reason, you know every single clip is going to have a position rotation or scale adjustment that needs to be made. Generally, we really only wanna save the effects to this preset. So, we're gonna do that. And, we're gonna go ahead and click save. Here, you now see this
preset added down here. If I highlight that, of course, it's gonna double up on this clip. But, I can now drag that and place that on all of my other clips and it will apply all
of those same settings to each of them. From here, now I have
applied that same color grade across all of these other clips and you can get an idea of what it does. It gets us more or less close, although, pretty quickly you can realize that the adjustments we
made for that first clip don't necessarily apply to all of the others perfectly. So, we're gonna have to make
some fine tune adjustments. Now, to get to a place where I feel all of these clips really look good, those micro adjustments are
going to need to be made and I'm going to show you what I did to get each of them to that place. We did use two sets of color wheels, so for simplicity, the first I'm gonna call
base correction wheels. And the second, I'll call my style wheels. So, here's a quick rundown of all of the tweaks that I made to fine tune each clip. Notice here that his skin tones, they look a little too yellow. So, in Hue vs Hue, I altered the oranges to more of a red. First, here, the clip... It just became too dark. So, in wheels, I boosted highlights from .11 to .22. I mentioned that we'd come back to the RGB curves later, and here we are, we're gonna talk about them now. So, with the Red, Green and Blue curves, each curve adds or removes
that specific color across the range that you select. I wanted more reds in the highlights and in the midtones, but I didn't want more
reds in the shadows. So, I brought reds up
slightly in the midtones and highlight sections
of the Red Color Curve while leaving the shadows unaltered. I also wanted to add just a small amount of
yellow in the midtones. In the midtones section
of the Blue Color Curve, I brought down blue. The opposite of blue is yellow, so bringing down the
blue curve adds yellow. All of these curves can be changed to whatever color you want them to be. A feature that I haven't
fully explored a ton, but it does allow an incredible amount of flexibility to just add, say, sea foam without having to blend
the blue and green curves. You can just click on the title, drag it down, you'll see
it change to sea foam and now you can go ahead and
add that across your image without having to blend green and blue to achieve sea foam. You can see the before
and after these changes, and it really makes a big difference. Now that we're done in curves, I shifted the blue hue to more of a cyan and then de-saturated
it as well as magenta to get rid of some color
fringing I was getting. With this next clip, in the base color wheels, I raise midtone exposure and lowered highlight exposure. In the style wheels correction, I added more orange in the midtones and de-saturated
everything via the master. Here in the base correction wheels, I raised the midtone exposure and lowered the highlight exposure. In the RGB curves, I
added both blue and cyan in the shadows and midtones. In Hue vs Saturation,
I saturated the cyans. Style wheels, I added more
orange in the midtones to affect the skin tones and de-saturated the master. And, finally, base correction wheels, I raised exposure in the midtones. Curves, I added a tiny amount of red in the midtones. And in style wheels, I boosted orange in the midtones and de-saturated the
master just a small amount. With that, the last piece I added is an emotional backing track that I think really adds
a brooding moodiness to the sequence. A bunch of sound effects around hospitals, including beeping, heartbeats, hospital ambient sounds. And, before you know it, you've got this final sequence. (soft ambient music) - [Man on Video] All
doctors, report to the ER. (beeping) (heartbeat) (beeping) (soft ambient music) - [Taylor] Remember that
Apple does have masks built in, as well, that can be key framed for motion. So, if you need to
isolate a certain portion of the image and apply a
grade only to that one area, this is definitely possible. But, it doesn't have the ability to be internally motion tracked the way that you can with something like Da Vinci Resolve. This is one area that
Apple's still growing in, and I wish that they
would go to that extent with the way that they
allow us to color grade. So, that is gonna be it for today. Hopefully, this whole sequence gave you some ideas of how to
really use these tools to improve your color grading within Final Cut without having to buy any other external plug-ins. Thank you so much for watching. Hit that thumbs up if you
learned something new. Subscribe if you wanna see more tutorials. And, I will catch you in the next video. (upbeat music)
