So you finished filming and editing your
clips, but your shots are looking a little flat. Well, I'm gonna teach you how
to take those flat images and turn them into more dynamic ones in just a few simple steps! Hey everyone, Camber here showing you how to use
your camera to make good videos so if you're new, consider subscribing and also joining my
private Facebook group where I can better answer your filmmaking questions.
But when it comes to color correction, there are two main parts to making your
image look good. First you have to edit the exposure, and once you have it the
way you like then you need to move on to edit the image for white balance or
color. So we're gonna look at some shots from one of my short films, and I'm going
to take you through the process of correcting exposure in this video, and
then I'll take you through the steps of correcting white balance in the next
video. But the most important thing when it comes to exposure is to try to get it
as close to correct as possible in camera for the best results. So if you
need some help with getting that right, then check out these videos here on
exposure and camera metering to help you get the best exposure in camera. And now
let's head over to the computer. So here we are in Final Cut Pro, and I have a few
clips from of my short films here that we're gonna look at that each have their
own issues that we're gonna cover how to fix those with these exposure
Corrections. But the first thing you'll notice especially here is that it looks
a bit washed out, and the reason for that is because I shot all these using a
picture profile on my camera. Now if you don't understand what a picture profile
is, basically it's setting up the camera to shoot in LOG or if you're shooting
RAW, what's gonna happen is your image is gonna look more like this because
it's retaining more of the highlights and shadows, and then you expand that in
post to get a better dynamic range. And if you want to learn how to do that then
just look at the links in the description on setting up picture
profiles, or if your camera doesn't have the ability to do that, I have a video
that also shows just how to tweak your camera's video settings in order to get
more of a dynamic range out of it. So the first thing we're going to do is add our
color controls. So if you come to here, you see this. It'll say show inspector.
You click on that, and that brings up all of your effects that you can do. Another
option is to just push command 4 for that to make things quicker. So then right here, you have show the color inspector. So you
click on that, and that brings up all the color controls. And just to show you
another shortcut. If I close that you can push command 6, and it'll go straight to
your color board. So the color board here; you have master overall color for your
clip, then you have shadows, mid-tones, and highlights. Then this tab gives you
saturation overall for your master, and the same shadows, mid-tones, and
highlights. And then the last tab is exposure, and the same thing you have
your master for the overall image, shadows, mid-tones, and highlights.
However, I don't actually like using the color board, and I'll show you why here. If you
click add color wheels, this is what I prefer using. And it gives you all the
same controls, but you can see everything all in one. So you have master, shadows,
mid-tones, and highlights just like before. On the left side of each one is
your saturation, on the right side is your exposure, and then in the middle is
your color control. So I like having this so that once I get through with color
correcting both the exposure and the color, I can just click on this and see
everything that I've done rather than looking at this color board and having
to click through each tab to see what I've done. So looking at those color
wheels, that also gives you this option to adjust the temperature and tint, which
is going to help us out once we get into the white balance correction. So if
you want to change this default setting from the color board to the color wheels,
you come up to Final Cut Pro preferences; and then here on color correction you
can choose color wheels. Now whenever you click this button, it'll bring up the
color wheels instead of color board, and the same if you push command 6, it'll go
straight to that. So the next thing we're going to do is click on view, show in
viewer, and then here video scopes. And also you have the command 7 option which
is the shortcut I like to use. And that brings up this for us to look at. So
we're going to click on that and make sure it's set to waveform if that's not
what you have already. And then luma and units IRE. So what this is showing
us is the overall exposure on the image. The zero to one hundred is the exposure
range, which at zero you have black and anything below that's going to be
underexposed. And at 100 you have white, so anything above that's going to be
overexposed. So ideally we want to keep everything within that range so that the
whole picture is a proper exposure. And as you're looking through here, you can
tell this part here is probably the wall, that's pretty bright. This part here we
have this post that's bright, and right on the edge here we have the light on
that white part of the doorframe that's lighting it up. So it's showing your
overall image. So now getting into our Corrections, the order we always do
everything is shadows, then highlights, then mid-tones for correcting the
exposure. Starting off with the shadows, I'm going to grab the exposure slider
for the shadows. I'm gonna drag this down until this gets right about to the zero.
So we're pulling that down on the zero. And now I'm gonna go to the highlight
slider, and I'm gonna raise it until the peaks touch right at 100. So right about
there. And then the mid-tones. This is gonna change if you have a more contrasty
look or if you want to have less. If we brought this up, you see there's less
contrast; it brightens the whole image. But then if we bring it down it gives a
little more of contrast to it with more darkness in the shadows there. Gonna
bring it just a little bit down. So if you see here before and after, we can
click this check box that shows before and after. So there's not a huge
difference, but you can see there's more dynamic range here. Now there's a little
more contrast and it just makes it punch a little better. So now moving on to this
clip, you can see here just looking at the scope, the brightest part is only at
50. So this was quite a bit underexposed on this shot. So for shadows there's
really not, I'm going to bring it down just tiny bit, there's not much to do
there. So with the highlights I can bring this all the way up to a hundred like
that. And the thing to be careful with is if it's really underexposed, the higher up
you push this, the more grain you're going to get in your video. So you have to
just kind of balance how much you want to actually do. And then you can bring
mid-tones down to where you like it. So there we have before and after, and
actually this shot for how I want to look, this is a little too bright because
this is a bedtime shot. I don't want it to look really bright so I'm going to
bring those highlights back down to around 75. I like how that looks, and bring
the mid-tones back up just a little bit. So now before and after; I like how that
looks for how I want this shot to look in the video. And then moving on to the
last clip, one of the things we want to make sure we're doing as well is kind of
scrubbing through the whole clip and seeing how your highlights and your
shadows change. For instance if I based all my corrections off of this shot, I'd
probably bring the highlights up too much, and then when we're here, this part
would be way overexposed. I'm going to go through and look for the part where I
have the brightest; right about there and base my correction off of this. So
obviously we can bring the shadows down a lot here right down to the zero, and
for here I'm not going to bring the highlights up. Whereas you can see right
around here maybe that could come up some, but we're already overexposed, and
up here in the brightest part you can see that this is above one-hundred
already in a flat line which means that it's overexposed. So we can't get any of
that image back, but we can bring it down to the 100 and it makes it just a little
bit better where it blends into the trees. It's not quite as overexposed. And then
here if you wanted, you could bring the mid-tones up some. But I actually want
some more contrast in this shot so right about there I think it looks pretty good.
So before, after you see a pretty big difference there. And the idea is you
just want to do a little bit. You don't want to go overboard on any of this stuff
like making it super contrasty like that because it just doesn't look good. A
lot of times with video effects less is better. And that's it! Just a few simple
steps using those exposure tools, and you've taken your image from looking
flat and washed out to having much more dynamic range and contrast. So now you're
ready to move on to the second step of the color correcting process by
adjusting the white balance of your image for the best colors, which we'll
cover in next week's video. And if this video was helpful with them please help me out, leave a like, subscribe if you
haven't, and I'll see you soon!
