(laid-back music) ♪ Hello, I've been waiting for you ♪ ♪ Come with your friends
and show me something new ♪ ♪ Hey, yeah, it's a hell of a time ♪ ♪ This world's insane,
but we gon' be all right ♪ - Pretty much every client out there has an idea for a look that they want. When you ask them to describe it, they'll usually give you movie stills or a link from a YouTube video, which makes look recreation
an important skill set for you, as a colorist. It is extremely intimidating, and most of the time you wouldn't
even know where to begin, so in this video, I'm gonna demonstrate
a beginner's approach, so maybe you can catch
some of the mistakes that you might be making, and then I will show
you the pro's approach when doing look recreations. Now, what will be very helpful is that if you have any suggestions for the common mistakes series, drop a comment below. Also, if you wanna make your projects look and feel big budget, then I put together a
live one-hour free webinar that's taking place next Monday on November 8th at 11:00 a.m. Pacific time plus, by signing up, you
will be automatically entered to win my Freelance Colorist Masterclass. I will be picking three winners
at the end of the training, so click the link below to join, and I will see you in the live training. If you guys appreciate the
content on this channel, then do me a favor. Pause this video. Smash the Like button so it can reach more people
so we can help more people. Subscribe to the channel
if you haven't already. Hit the bell icon so you can be notified when
we put out new content. Follow me on Instagram for more behind-the-scenes and fun stuff, and let's roll the intro. (powerful music) Let's get going. First of all, we're gonna look
at the beginner's approach. Let me change this and set this to 10-bit so we can look at our SDR waveform, and basically, I'm giving our beginner a benefit of the doubt, like I said, so he will have his scopes set
up properly, as a pro would, so this is how I have my setup, so I'm gonna leave that
as is so it's a fair play between a beginner and a pro, so this will give us an opportunity to focus on all the main things and not necessarily get
bogged down by stuff that might not be relevant to
this particular subject, okay? Number one, a beginner wouldn't
care about the footage. He wouldn't care where it came
from, what it was shot on. He just, he has no concern with that. He just goes, "All
right, give me anything, "and I'll start to make something up." Secondly, this is our reference. He wouldn't know where
the reference came from. Is it from a movie? Is it from a TV show? What is it? He just doesn't care unless
the director tells him, and even if the director told them that, "Hey, this is from 'The
Assassination of Jesse James,'" he will still just leave it at that. He'll be like, "All right,
cool. Now I got this. "Let me see what I can do," okay? And again, we're giving our amateur a lot of benefit of the doubt that he will know these things, so right now, I'm in my split-screen mode, and then I went under and selected a still images, all right? So then, that way, I'm
selecting my still image, and then that shows up as a
comparison or side-by-side view, so I can start dialing everything in. Another thing that I should
mention is that beginners copy. They don't necessarily use the look as an inspiration or an interpretation. They will look at this look,
and go, "Okay, I got this shot. "I gotta dial it in, "and then I'm gonna darken this area "and that area in my frame, "and I gotta take this chair "and turn it into this
color so it matches, "and I'm gonna take the
skin and desaturate it "and bring it over here," so they will literally look at this and start figuring out ways to 100% copy the look, so it's just a carbon copy of this image, which, in theory, might sound great, but it is absolutely the
opposite approach, okay? So I'm taking my time
telling you these things before we even jump in because then, when I'm gonna
start grading like a beginner, you will know exactly what
I'm talking about, okay? So let's just do that now, so the first step a beginner will take is usually lift gamma gain, right? So we wanna dial in this look, so he will start bringing down the lift, and then another concern
of his is gonna be this: that he does not want to crush his blacks because he read in a
color-grading 101 book that if you go past
this line or that line, your color grade is toast,
so you can't do that, so he'll try to stay
above this line, okay? So that will be his threshold. He doesn't wanna go beyond that point. Then he's gonna take his gain,
and he's gonna lift it up, so he's gonna try to
get as close as possible to what's happening here, and then he's gonna try
to bring his lift down and see, now he's not
gonna go past this point because he doesn't want any
colors or anything to clip, so he's just gonna kinda
park it right there, you see? And we are way off in
terms of the contrast, so then, he's gonna take his gamma, and he's gonna bring it down, and this is me, again, giving
him the benefit of the doubt that he will know how
to get these parameters to get close to what he's going for. He's gonna raise his gain again and keep it somewhere around here, and this is the extent of the main contrast changes that a beginner will make, okay? So doesn't look terrible, right? Where he started to where he ended up without knowing which camera
it was shot on and everything. Here, another thing the beginner will do is they will never touch the
offset or printer lights. They just think that... They don't even know what this is, so they only use these
controls right here, okay? So let's say he takes his gain. He thinks that, "Okay,
the image is really warm. "I wanna cool it off." He takes his gain, and he
starts bringing it down, and obviously, he's gonna be lacking on the accuracy a little bit because it takes an expert's eye to understand exactly where
everything is sitting. A pro will look at this image and break it down into
highlights, midtones, and shadows, and know exactly which color needs to come out from which section, if you will, okay? Amateur won't do that, so he'll just park it
somewhere around here, and he'll go, "Okay, we're getting close," and then the next thing he's
gonna do is go under saturation and start dialing it back, so so far so good, right? Not bad. You're kinda looking at it, and you're going, "Dude, I mean, "amateur is kinda killing the game here. "It's not bad at all," and that's true, but wait. What happens next? Then he's gonna create a new node, and here's the thing because beginner's approach is reactive, he will go through the entire grade as like he's stumbling over and trying to catch
himselves before he falls. That's always the approach
when you're a beginner, right? I've been there, so when you're grading, you don't necessarily have a game plan, so what I mean by that is
that next thing he's gonna do, we already talked about it
that he's gonna copy the grade instead of creating an interpretation of what this look is and then building on top of that, so he's gonna go, "All
right, this is dark. "This is dark. "I need to do the same thing in my image," so that's where the window comes in, and he'll go in there, create a window. Let's say it's sort of
like a vignette like this. Let's make it a little bit bigger, and once again, like I said, I'm gonna give our amateur
a lot of slack here, so I'm basically doing a proper softness and all that good stuff, right? Then he's gonna invert that,
go under his primaries, take the gamma, and start pulling it down, so let's pull up our image
again, and make it bigger, and now look at it, and he's
gonna keep bringing it down until he starts to see that, okay, now it's getting really dark. This is looking good. So once again, in theory,
you can look at this and go, "Dude, what is wrong with it?" I mean, this is really good. All these steps are great until you see the pro version, right? 'Cause the big problem with
that right here is this: Now you start moving your image, and in this case, the amateur is lucky that
the shot is kinda locked off, but it's not because even if you look at in this area, the window's kinda moving, so what's his other option? To track this window? Well, this is not the only window that he's going to create, all right? 'Cause that's the thing, right? The next thing that he's gonna do is this, and once again, he's stumbling
through the entire grade. Now he's looking at it, and going, "There's
still tons of saturation. "I wanna take this chair, "and I wanna turn it
into this," all right? And that is literally the
ultimate rookie mistake that I see day in and day out, even in our FCM challenge
that we hold weekly where people, when we do look recreations, they just try to take
any object in the image and start swinging the hue, and try to get it into some weird world where it doesn't belong, right? So this is a leather chair with this nice brown, dark brown color. It needs to live in that, right? So what they will do is
this: go under qualifier. A beginner will always
use qualifiers and windows over HSL curves, okay? So they're gonna go and select this and then Shift + H, and obviously, their knowledge
is gonna be so limiting to how to control this, they're gonna leave it
as is, their qualifier, but again, let me just
help him out a little bit, so try to bring this close, move it around so we only select the couch or majority of the couch,
something like that, okay? This is where the beginner's expertises are gonna kinda choke when
it comes to qualifiers, so he's gonna do this,
then go under saturation, and start killing the saturation, and now, if I do a split
screen and show you, once again, you can look at it and be like, "Dude, stop
hating on our beginner "because he's doing a great job "because now it is kinda
matching than before." Before, it was kinda distracting.
Now, it's really cool. It's getting close. He's gonna take it a step further. He's gonna double down on this, and he's gonna go under his gamma and start bringing in more of this sort of like a green that we see. See how close it is now? Look at this to that, so this is what... See? So the beginner will do this, and once again, if you just look at it and kinda go, "Dude, I kinda like it. "This is cool." Well, what's not cool about it is this: In an actual grade, your shadows won't just
turn weird, weirdly gray in the middle of your grade, okay? Look at what's happening here. Look at what's happening
around the face, right? Look at what's happening
here, like around the chin. It's all of it, okay? Forehead, it even cracks
around here, right? And the worst case is
when I do a playback, you're gonna start seeing
a lot of chatter, right? There's a lot of chatter just going on, and that's basically our key being dirty, so if I play it, you see all of this? This is all the gunk that's
gonna be more and more visible the bigger the screen is that you're viewing this content on, okay? And don't forget: This
is one of the many shots that's gonna make the scene
or this entire short film, or whatever type of project this is, so a beginner won't
think about those things, so let's go back to our hero frame, and once again, I'm giving
our beginner a lot of credit that he will know about the hero frame and all that good stuff, and then, after that, he's gonna do this: He's gonna look at this frame again and go, "All right, you know what? "I still need to bring this area down "so it matches this right here, "and I wanna take some color
out of this painting," okay? This painting has some colors that, this red and all these colors, that we don't have in this frame, so I wanna take that out
so it gets even closer, so if anybody watching this kinda going, "All right, dude, now
you're kinda pushing it," I promise you, if any of my
FCM members are watching, and if you guys have done
this, what I'm talking about, drop a comment below. Let people know that this is a real thing, and this is not to put anybody on blast, but just literally talk about
the things that would happen when you're starting out as a colorist, so then, they're gonna take
this, add some softness, right? And go under their primaries again and take their gamma and
start pulling it down. I am making all these
changes in a subtle way, so it's still pretty, and I promise you when I
post this on my Instagram as a tristack between pro and beginner, I can tell you right now,
there's gonna be tons of people saying that they like the beginner version because I'm doing justice. I'm still creating a good
look, even as a beginner. I'm not just roughing it and doing what I did with
the power windows episode between beginner versus pro because that was just like I
took it to a comical place, and obviously, you guys hated it, and now I watched that
video, and I hated it too because what the hell was I thinking? So here, I still want to keep it true, but just show you the difference in the process and the approach, so then you can make a better decision as you move along in your
color grading journey, so this is where we're at, right? Now he brought this down,
he's going, "Okay, wow. "This is looking really close
to what's happening here, "so I'm really happy
with all of those things. "What do I gotta do now?" So like I said, I wanna
bring down the colors here, so a beginner will create another window, so another node, another window, click right here, and now he's gonna go around here. Actually, you know what? He's not even gonna do this. He's gonna do one of these windows because that's a lot better for our frame back here, right? So something like that, bring it close, and guys, I'm not making
this thing up, okay? This is real, and then he's gonna go in here, grab the saturation,
and pull it down, right? So now, if I do this to this, I'm going, "All right, cool. "Yeah, these colors were unnecessary," but what happens now if I do a playback? It's moving all over the place, so he goes under tracking, and he tracks forward
and backwards, right? So he goes, "All right,
perfect, I nailed it. "Everything is being tracked. It's great." Again, let's not lose sight
of this is only one shot. We're working on one shot. We have to work on the
entire picture, okay? Entire commercial,
whatever have you in a day. Let's just say this is a music video. We have one day to grade the entire thing, and the entire thing has 180 shots. This is shot number one, okay? So all this work that
the beginner is doing, like all these windows and qualifiers, he has to mimic that when you cut to a wider
shot or a tighter shot, whatever comes next, all right? So let's go back here, and now he's looking at it and going, "All right, dude, I think
I'm kinda nailing it. "This is kinda looking good.
What else do we have to do?" So now I'm just actually asking that
question to myself too. What do I have to do? Do I have to? Maybe I gotta bring out his face more, so now we create a new window, a soft oval. A beginner will not know
when to use an outside node, so he's not gonna be doing that. That's why I'm giving you
a realistic scenario here, so he's gonna go in here, and he's gonna take his gamma and gain up and then maybe lift down
to keep the contrast there, so now, if we look at the two, it did bring us closer, right? I mean, even in the, right here, right? Like in our scopes, we're a lot closer, so if I do this, and if I start pulling this out, at a first glance, not bad. The beginner didn't do a terrible job. Now, I was being very gentle
and swift with my moves, all the changes that I was making. Obviously, if you're a beginner,
you won't be doing that because you wouldn't know how to be gentle with certain tools, like beginners usually
tend to push it too far, and everything just kinda
looks muddy and weird because they don't necessarily know. They haven't developed the taste bud yet when it comes to color grading, right? So they just don't know what's tasteful, so they're kinda going
all over the place, okay? Whereas in here, we still did a pretty good
job as a beginner, right? Let's run through it really quick. He didn't know anything about the camera. He was more reactive in his
approach in terms of proactive, so he started with like, "All right, "let's just throw something
on here on the canvas "and see what happens." He didn't do any due diligence or research about the image that he was working with, so he just kinda threw himself in and just took it one step at a time. He created a window. He is not using parallel nodes. He does not respect
the node tree structure because that doesn't matter. He has limited information, so here he creates some qualifiers, introduces a lot of
chatter in our footage, and then he goes in and
creates another window to, again, try to copy this look instead of using it as an interpretation and building his own flair on top of it. Then he goes in and desaturate and take out any colors that
do not exist in this frame, and then he finally creates another window on our guy in the middle and then just pulls him out, and once again, this
window is not tracked, but we're lucky that there's
not tons of movement here, but if there is tons of movement, then he has to track all his windows, so that's how a beginner will
approach look recreations. Now let's check out the pro approach. All right, so here comes the pro version. I'm gonna move on to another version here by hitting Command + Y for a new version, and so we still have our beginner version. This is our pro version, and here, what I wanna do is the first thing the pro would do is ask the editorial department to send him the camera specs, so he knows exactly what he's working on, so he figured out what camera it is. It is shot on ARRI AMIRA,
which is not ARRI ALEXA, but in here, if we apply
the color space transform, we know we only have ARRI ALEXA available, but not necessarily ARRI AMIRA, so what do we do in that case? So first thing that he
will do is go online, read the white paper, and try to understand that, okay, if we only have
ARRI Log-C to Rec 709 LUT available in Resolve, can that be applied to ARRI AMIRA? And yes, it says right here. The ARRI ALEXA Rec 709 LUT can
be applied to these cameras: ALEXA, ALEXA XT, SXT, AMIRA, ALEXA Mini, and the list goes on, okay? So now he knows exactly
that he will be okay when he applies that LUT to get the proper Rec 709 conversion. Next question he's gonna ask is that, "Hey, where is this reference from?" So okay, this reference is from "The Assassination
of Jesse James," so then, the next move is
gonna be to pull up that movie and look at some other
stills in the same world too to just get a better sense of like what is this look about? A pro will always look at look recreations as a whole. What kinda mood are they trying to create? What environment was that look created to evoke a certain emotion? So now, we're looking at "The
Assassination of Jesse James." We're looking at all these frames, and our frame is right here, so when you click on it, you wanna look for a few things. Format, it says 35-millimeter film, so it was shot on film. It doesn't say digital. If it said digital, then it
was shot on digital, okay? So as soon as we see
that, okay, interesting. If it's shot on film, now I need to know the next step is which negatives did they use and which film print they used when it was projected, right? So now I go on shot on what? And I type in "The Assassination
of Jesse James," all right? And now I come down here,
and boom, all right? Bingo. I got all my information. If it's shot with these
Kodak Vision 2 film stocks, so we have the 5212, 5217, 5218. The reason why there's multiple is that for different scenes, for different like nighttime, daytime, they use different stocks, right? So we got all of that
information right here, plus we even know the
film print stock, okay? So they used the Fujifilm 3513, which is an interesting choice, and that's one of the things that I learned about Roger Deakins that he loves to mix and match, so they're shooting the negative is Kodak, but then the positive
film print is Fujifilm, so kinda just making a very cute baby when you mesh Kodak and
Fujifilm together, okay? So once the pro knows this information, the next thing is going to be to evaluate what are my options here? How can I achieve that look? Another thing a pro will do is drop on a color palette or effects to analyze the image further. Let's just look at these colors. I mean, this is a borderline
monotone image, okay? We got good blacks, but
they're lifted quite a bit. Look at it right here. Nothing is touching the bottom, right? Our highlights are super-protected, and that's Roger Deakins' style. All his stuff lives
right here in the middle, but according to his standards, this is even kinda contrasty, but still has a lot of
breathing room, okay? White balance is pretty,
it's pretty well balanced, but we do see that everything is living on the top left quadrant, okay? And it's a little bit
on the warm side, right? 'Cause if I go under my global offset, and I start moving it down, I can really just even it out, right? So now, if I do before and after, we're making it, right? We're balancing it out, and somebody can say, "Well, the bottom is now out of whack," and that's really easy to fix. We can just do that, right? I'm not even looking at,
I'm not even looking at, I'm just looking at the scopes
and trying to dial it in, and just like that, we cooled it off, and we're bringing it, we're
making it more neutral, right? All of that is coming up, but obviously, that's
not what we wanna do, so I'm gonna reset those two
things, changes that I made, so now we're back to our default, and we're looking at these colors, so once the pro has all this information, now you might be going,
"Dude, are you really serious "that a pro will spend this
much time on these things?" Yes because right now I'm announcing all these steps to you, so it's taking longer, but if I am grading, all
these steps takes seconds. I'm already there looking
at all the information, and then I'm just hitting
the ground running, okay? Now, let's go back to our image. Let's find the hero
frame, 104, right here, so that's my hero frame, so now, time to assess our options, and one of my options, professionally, if I'm working on this, would be this. I want to get those negatives and positive film prints in here, so what are my options? One of the options that I can use, I'll have couple of nodes
to give me a buffer, and then I can go right here and look up Look Designer. Look Designer 2.4, and I'm assuming that Look Designer will have both the negative
and the positive LUTs that I'm looking for, so right here, I can just choose the Rec 709 ODT, and here I can choose ARRI ALEXA, and already, I got the Rec
709 conversion built in here, so technically, I don't even need this, but now, what I can do
is go under my negative, go under negative stock, and start going through all these stocks, and I'm looking for 5213, right? Like was one of them, so let's go and check it again. 5217, 5212, 5218, so okay, not 5213, so we have 52... All right, so we're missing all of them, but what if we go to gen 2,
and now go through these? So we got 5213. Are they using 5213? So basically, we still don't have these. That's a tricky one that they use, so we have every other one, but not the ones that they're using, so in that case, okay, so in that case, we have to figure out a way
to kinda get that look DNA in in a different way because what we can do now is that we can go under our print stock, and we have the 3510, right? The Fuji 3510 that they use. If I'm not mistaken, it's 3513. Jesus, so in this case,
this is not gonna work, and if this is not gonna work, I know for a fact that Dehancer doesn't have these film
prints or film negative and Fuji and Film Convert
doesn't have them either, so I know that for a fact, so now our options are to create this film curve our own custom way, okay? Which is not the end of the world, so here's the process. A pro will work proactively
instead of reactively. That would be the pro's approach, so he will methodically place
out his entire node tree and then start building everything, okay? So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna drop on my color
space transform downstream. That's my ODT. Why am I doing that? You can watch my free training to learn more about that, okay? 'Cause this is a bit more involved than just giving you a
quick crash course here, so I'm gonna go in here and say import color spaces ARRI ALEXA. Gamma is Log-C. Give me a Rec 709 conversion,
and output gamma is gamma 2.4. As soon as I do that, now I got the Rec 709 conversion, okay? And we're in a good spot because we can do a lot of push and pull. Our image has a lot of give
on the bottom and the top end, so now that we have this, I'm gonna go. This is gonna be my look DNA. This is where I'm going to build my actual characteristics of my look, a film curve, if you will,
like this kinda film curve. See how the bottom is
just kinda crushed, right? But it's not really crushed. There's still a lot of breathing room, but then the top is so soft, so I'm gonna build that here, okay? And this is gonna be my
look adjustment, all right? This right here is gonna be my primary, and then Shift + S, this node right here, is going to be my halation plus grain, okay? And if you wanna learn more
about halation and grain and why I'm using it upstream, you can watch my Resolve 17.4 video to learn more about that, so now, like I said, I'm gonna start off with
my look DNA, all right? So what I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna move this over. I'm gonna go under my custom curves, and this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna pull up my split screen, and right now, the whole goal is that, all right, we wanna preserve
some information up top. I also wanna preserve, lift my bottom because the bottom is lifted, right? And now, I wanna start
dialing in that curve, so I'm gonna create a point right here. I'm gonna create another point right here, and I'm gonna lift it like this, okay? Some of you might be watching this going, "Dude, what are you doing? "What is happening?" Just stick with me, okay? And now I'm gonna do
another point right here, and I'm gonna really just... I'm only focusing on the contrast, okay? Nothing else. Only, only,
only focusing on the contrast. Maybe I can just leave this here. I have another point right here. Okay, so if overall
contrast we look at it, you see what I mean? We're sort of like in that ballpark, yet our image has so much punch, right? That's the thing that the rookie's image was missing. Okay, I'm happy with this, so now, and I'm gonna
leave this here for now, but we can obviously come back
and make some adjustments, but contrast-wise, I'm really
happy to how it's looking. Now, I'm gonna go under my primaries, and I'm gonna go under my
printer lights, my offset, and I'm gonna go, "All right, let's cool
the eff down, right?" It's just way too punchy and contrasty in terms of where all
my colors are sitting, so I'm gonna start bringing this back, and I'm gonna go. I just want a neutral point. I just don't care about, like, right now, I just want to make it just literally something neutral, right? And see how easy it was for me to do that? And now, look. All of my colors are living, and our exposure or overall contrast is very close to where
we are in here, okay? And as soon as I do that, it
start to look pretty good. Now, what I wanna do is go under my gain, lift it up, okay? I'm gonna lift up my gain. I'm gonna take my gamma,
and I'm gonna pull it down, all right? That's gonna make sure that my image doesn't look thin, right? It still has a lot of that film curve that we see in this image right here, so that's not looking bad at all. Now I'm gonna take my gamma, and I'm gonna pull some of the warmth out using my gamma, okay? And as a pro, I'm gonna start building some of these cool tone
characteristics in here in here in these areas, not necessarily taking the
chair and flipping it into this because that is what an amateur will do. Now, in our look adjustment, we're gonna make some
very beautiful changes to dial in these desaturated
highlights, right? There's barely any
color in the highlights. There's a little bit more color in the midtones and in the shadows, so I'm gonna go in here
under sat versus sat, I'm gonna take the low saturated areas, which are these highlights, and I'm just going to pull them down, and just look what happens. As soon as I do that, I start to pull out a lot of the color, and now I'm gonna go under
luminance versus sat, and I'm gonna take the
bright parts of the image, and I'm gonna start pulling
the saturation down, and look how easy it was to just one move, and how we pulled those colors down to not have any distracting areas, even look at the lips. Here the lips. They're almost exact. Just by making these changes, I mean, just look at it. I mean, we're basically there. We're almost there, all right? So now, at this point, what do I need to do to get even closer? I can do couple of things, right? I can go under my contrast here, and try to just add a bit more, a bit more contrast on the low end. I feel like this has
started to look even better. It really, really does, so now I'm gonna go in here, and I wanna... 'Cause another thing
that I see in this image is that there is a little bit
of halation going on, right? There's a little, just a tiny bit halation around these areas, in
the highlighted areas, and also, there is a lot of grain. There's a lot of grain here. We don't have that in our
image, so let's introduce that. I'm gonna go in here. I'm gonna type in halation, and guys, I think Resolve hit
a home run with this plug-in. I think this is just
straight-out fire, okay? It's absolutely insane once you get a hang of it a little bit, so as soon as I drop it
off, it just does too much. The thing is, I don't want to take away from the strength of this plug-in. I don't want to take away the threshold. I don't wanna change any of that. All I wanna change is
when I turn it on and off, I just want to take out the saturation, and let's see what happens, all right? So I'm gonna do just that. I'm gonna go under saturation, and I'm gonna start dialing back, and guys, look at it. Just by dialing back the saturation, now we have only this bleach bypass-like effect, which is very natural and is giving us a similar
thing that we're feeling here right around the edges in our highlights. This looks absolutely beautiful. I wanna leave that in, all right? Now, we might wanna bring the threshold or our strength down just a touch, right? Because I'm just looking
at his face to here. I wanna bring the strength
down just a touch. This is looking... This is looking really
good to me, all right? Now that we're here, we do see that there's a bit more yellow in the highlights overall, right? It's just a bit more warm highlights than what we got going on, so that is not really hard to get. All I have to do is go
under my log wheels, crank up my midtones just to kinda get a similar
highlights on his face, kinda strong highlights, and then, what I wanna do is just add a tiny bit more
warmth in my image, right? So first, I can try adding
that by using my gamma, and let's just start adding some warmth, and I'm right here, and
how do I feel about that? I can take my highlights in my log wheels and add some warmth, right? So if I go, if I look at the two images, right? We have a little bit of warmth coming in, but I feel like our image
is still very saturated compared to that, so what do I need to do? I'm gonna go under my look adjustment. I'm gonna take my color boost. I'm gonna keep cranking it down. I'm gonna crank it down
to something like that, and if now I go back and forth, just look at these two images, okay? And now I'm gonna come out of
here, go back to this mode, and all I have to do
now is add some grain, so for you to see the grain, I have to kinda punch in and
keep the image right here, so first, when you turn this on, it's super, super heavy, so we're gonna have to
dial that back quite a bit. I'm gonna bring this, the
strength down to around 0.1. I'm gonna bring the
size down to around 0.2. As soon as I do that and do on and off, and now if I come out
and do a comparison here, in terms of the grain and everything, it is way more believable, okay? One more thing that I am seeing is I do want to add just a tiny
bit more warmth in my image, just a bit more yellow, so I'm gonna go under my gamma,
actually, in my primaries. I'm gonna go under my gamma, and I'm gonna just try to lift it up. Now, our look DNA still needs some work because when we look at this right here and see where it bottoms out, our image keeps going down, right? So we have to kinda lift it up to have this sort of contrast, which is, again, very
cinematic and filmlike, so I'm gonna make a few
changes in our look DNA. First of all, I'm gonna lift
these up quite a bit, okay? And then, as soon as I lift it up, I have to grab this and start moving it over like so, okay? And now, if we look at where we are, we're basically closing the gap, right? I mean, look at this area
right here to our image. We are coming up quite a bit, and we can make it a little bit subtle, right? So we can have our image up, so when we're making these
changes they're not too extreme, and here, I can bring this up like that, and now, if I look at the contrast, even just like, see how
his pants are so lifted, and they're not pure black, and now our pants are starting to do that. I mean, just look at how much difference this one node is making, okay? So now we started to do that. Overall, what I'm seeing is that our image is still way more saturated. See right here compared
to this right there? So what we need to do is
once again go back in here, or actually, you know what? I will do one better. I will double up on
luminance versus saturation and sat versus sat, so I'm gonna go under sat versus
sat in our primaries node, and I'm gonna grab this. I'm gonna bring our reference here, and I'm gonna pull this down, and then I'm gonna go
under luminance versus sat, and I'm gonna grab this, and
I'm gonna pull this down, okay? To something like this, and now, overall, like I said,
if I go under my log wheels, my image is just missing
a little bit more warmth, literally what I just did. I just took my midtone, and I just cranked it
up a little bit, okay? Not too much. I don't wanna overdo anything, just even something like this, and now, if I go before
and after between the two, I can actually take my midtone and bring it down a little bit. I don't wanna overdo it, and if I do before and after, before and after between the two, you started to get,
like look at it, right? Saturation-wise, we're almost there. We're living in the same quadrant. In terms of our bottom, we're right there. In terms of our highlights,
we're right there, right? Our overall contrast when we pull up the two
images next to each other, I mean, just look at it. We're basically practically there. We can still take our midtones
and crank it up a little bit if we really wanna match the
intensity on the other shot, and we can take our
highlights and do the same, but personally, I would keep it somewhere around here because at the end of
the day, like I said, it's more about how, the feeling that we wanna get
between the images, right? Interpreting the images instead of just replicating the images, and one more thing that I will do now is that final step will be a pro will start broad and
then narrow everything down, so now, when I look at this image, right? I go, "This area's not really serving me, "doing anything for me, "so if I pull this down, "if I bring the brightness down here, "the focus will automatically go there," which means what? I will create a node here. I will do a gradient window, and I will go something like this. I will hit Shift + H, so we
can see what we're grabbing, back to the window, pull this
back, something like this, and now I'm gonna go under my primaries. I'm gonna take my gamma, and I'm gonna pull it down, okay? How much do I wanna pull it down? It's up to me, so if I go this far, I think that's maybe a bit much, and I also wanna go back in my softness, and I wanna kinda pull it back because I don't want it
to affect my dude at all, so even something like this, and this is basically take it or leave it. This is not necessary, but I personally feel
like it helps the image, and it won't matter, right? The way these windows work,
gradient windows are perfect. They don't affect your image at all. They just blend in, okay? And now, if we just do, go between the two, back and forth, you can see how far we've come
and the image that we created and on how many levels it is matching exactly to what this is, but it still has our own flair. It still speaks like I took something, and then I made it mine, right? Compared to just like I
copy-pasted these grades because I still look at it, and I go, "Mine has a little
bit more of a steely look "than this overall warm
look that we see here," so one way to actually get
that is to take our gamma and start adding some of that, right? So take out the green so much, and add a bit more of the warmth, and now, even in the skin, and even, I'll add a little bit more, so now, if I look at it, we
have a very similar vibe, even better than before, right? So I can take this and
start going through it, and you can look at it, and it's almost the same,
but still very different. It has its own flair compared to just literally
mindlessly copying the grade, and when it comes to look
recreations, it's all about that. Do your research. Figure out a plan. Find the best solution,
the most effective solution that can be applied to the entire scene or the entire project, and then attack it, okay? Start broad and then narrow it down, so that's what happened here, so if I go back here, now
let's just break it down, so we started with the Rec 709 because we figured out other ways that just weren't gonna work, so we had to build our own look DNA. We used custom contrast
to dial in the contrast, and we did our primaries to
just balance everything out. Look adjustment took out all that color by showing you unique techniques, and then we added the halation and grain, and it just really helped
pull everything up, and now, halation can use
maybe a little bit more work because, but I personally
feel like we're very close because there is a little nice
glow and halo going on here, and we're creating a
very similar thing here by using our halation, and finally, we added a window. It wasn't necessary, but I think it does help
and brings everything down, so this is what a pro version is, right? And when we created the beginner version, it looked really good, but now, let's pop that open and see how good it
looks compared to this, so here's our amateur version, so this is our beginner version. This is our pro version, all right? Beginner, pro, and I'll do you one better. We'll just do, we'll do this. We'll save the beginner version, and we're gonna open this up
and select all three of these, so this is amazing, right? I'm gonna hide this, and
I'm gonna move this over, so this is our... Actually, let me do this. There you go, so this is our reference. This is our beginner version. This is our pro version, and just look at how gorgeous this is. This looks like a photograph shot on film, and this was created right in front of you without any LUTs at all. I personally feel like it's just a smoother
version of this, right? And that's the whole point. That's why we wanna use the
references as inspiration, and then we wanna build
on top of it, right? Compared to the beginner, now it just looks so cheap and cheesy, not to mention how difficult it must be to go from shot to shot and then match everything the
way it was created, right? Like, with all those
windows and qualifiers, so guys, there you have it. Let's check out these
looks in full screen. ♪ Hello, I've been waiting for you ♪ ♪ Come with your friends
and show me something new ♪ ♪ Hey, yeah, it's a hell of a time ♪ ♪ This world's insane,
but we gon' be all right ♪ - Personally, I think this
format is just so useful. When we were building the beginner's look, it held up, right? Relatively. It looked good until we
saw the pro's version, and then, all of a sudden,
light bulb moment, right? Like, what just happened? Pro's version and approach
was just so much better, so lean and effective, so hopefully, you guys
got a lot out of it. If you want even more, then make sure to sign
up for the free webinar. I'm telling you, next week
on Monday. It's a live event. I'm gonna be there to take your questions and give you tailor-made answers, and just in general, it's gonna be a good time to see people, and we're gonna be bringing people live to have a face-to-face,
one-on-one dialogue, so it's gonna be epic. Do not miss it. Link is down below. Register as soon as possible. Limited seating, and on that note, remember, work hard, get
obsessed, get possessed, and I will see you guys in the next video. (powerful music)
