Hey this is Denver Riddle with
Color Grading Central and this is a 12 minute color grading
crash course for Final Cut Pro 10, you’ll learn how to grade
in this tutorial you’ll learn the color tools
and together we’ll create this really amazing look
on footage you can download and follow along with. Also, I want to let you know about a free online training event I’ll be doing We’ll go into even more depth, you can ask me questions and
it’s free to attend. Details are below this video
in the description. Alright, let’s do this thing! Here inside Final Cut Pro
if you download the clips provided in the description
you’ll find a few pre trimmed clips from cinematographer and
good buddy Chris McKechnie. I’ve also included an XML
and some instructions on how to bring this footage into
FCPX as as edited sequence. I thought you’d think
that was pretty awesome! Now the focus of this tutorial
is on color grading so we’re gonna work mainly
in the Color and effects workspace and that will bring up the inspector
as well as the video scopes. And all of the color tools we’ll need can be accessed from
right here in the inspector. It’s also worth pointing out
the effects panel where we can do some other things, including adding masks
but more on that in a bit. Now before we jump in and
start grading this thing, let’s discuss basic terminology
for how we define color. The three basic terms that
we use to define color are Hue, Saturation, and Luma. Hue is the name we call colors. Saturation is the intensity
or vividness of a hue. And Luma is the brightness
or shade of hue. It’s also important to know
how to read the video scopes, which can be super beneficial. I’m going to change the view to
show the 3 scopes that I use most. And those three are the luma waveform, the RGB overlay waveform
and the vectorscope. The waveform lets us
correct for exposure. If I overlay an image on
top of the waveform, you can see that the trace,
the stuff you see here, actually corresponds with the
image of the two people as they move toward each other. The RGB overlay waveform is helpful
for correcting white balance issues, and is read exactly the same
as the luma waveform, but also shows the colors channels
in red, green and blue. This makes it easier to spot imbalances if either the image is
too cool or too warm. The Vectorscope corresponds
directly with the color wheel, and I’ve overlaid it here for
convenience. It shows what colors are in the
image as well as their saturation. The further the trace extends
from the center of the scope, the more saturated or
vivid the colors are. Here’s a simple but powerful
workflow for color correction: We first correct the exposure
or brightness of the image, second, the white balance or color
temperature if there are any issues and lastly, the saturation by
either increasing or reducing it. This will make more sense
as we actually do it! Let’s first make a correction
to the exposure of this image using the color wheels. To the right of each color wheel,
you’ll find the exposure controls. The shadows control affects
the darkest parts of the image, the highlights affects
the brightest parts, and the midtones control affects
everything else in between. This 4th wheel is the
master control, which adjusts the entire image and there are some circumstances
where you’d use it. We’ll adjust the blacks first
with the shadows control while watching the waveform. We want to bring the trace
in the shadows down until the darkest parts of the
image sit right above 0. Then we’ll bring up the highlights
with the highlights control so the brightest parts of the trace
sits right about here near the top. Then let’s darken the mid range
by pulling the midtones down… this will help us remove that washed
out look from the talents face. And then I’ll just adjust
this a little more until we have good
contrast and exposure. Next we’ll fix the color temperature
since the image is looking cool. Our goal here is to “neutralize” or
white balance the whites and we’ll want to find something
in the image that is white. In this case, we’re going to use this part
of the image as a reference, and its corresponding trace in the
RGB overlay waveform scope where we can see that the blue trace is elevated above the
red and green channels. Our goal here is to get these color
channels to align evenly and when they do we’ll
get neutral white in the image. So I’ll achieve this with the
temperature control, which adjusts the color balance
along the orange to blue spectrum. In this case I’ll drag it to the right,
adding warm colors, and I’ll keep dragging until this part of the RGB Overlay
waveform turns white. Lastly let’s boost the
color a little bit by increasing the saturation
with the control on the left side of the master wheel. And here’s what the clip
looks like before and after the correction. Pretty amazing right? On the next shot we’ll
repeat the same procedure going for a nice balance
of exposure with the midtones, shadows
and higlights controls. the color temperature in the shot
looks good so we can just add some
saturation. Moving to the next shot, we’ll want to match it to the
first shot, for obvious reasons since they are different angles
from the same scene. To give us a good starting point let’s copy the correction from the
first clip to the second one. We’ll go to the first shot select it and use the keyboard
shortcut command C, to copy... Then we'll go back to this clip, and go to edit menu, paste attributes... Make sure that the Color effect
is checked and click OK. This copies the correction and
gives us a good starting point, but you’ll see that we still
have some matching issues. The image is way too cool, and it can use some
additional contrast too… And definitely our talent’s
face is too dark. To help with matching let me show you my preferred
method for doing this. It’s a little extra work
but it’s foolproof. We’ll option drag the first clip and drag it above the third
clip to make a copy. We’ll then go to the inspector and reduce it’s scale to 50% and drag the x position
to the left. We’re then going to do the
same for the third clip… but this time,
positioning it to the right. Now here’s the really cool thing. In the side-by-side view, we can compare them visually AND in the scopes as well so
this makes matching a breeze. To match the traces better we’ll drop the shadows with shadows
control... increase the highlights… Increase the midtones... And then decrease the shadows one
more time to compensate. We can see in the Waveform that both traces look like
they’re at the same level. To improve the color match, I’ll drag the temperature to
the right to warm it up… and the tint slightly to the left
which adds a little green then we’ll just increase the saturation. Alright that’s a nice looking match. Ok, now let’s disable our reference
clip by clicking on it and using the keyboard shortcut V
to disable it. We'll then reset the transform
properties on the third clip. The face is looking a
little too dark so to brighten the talent’s
face for this shot, we can do that with a shape mask, where we’re effectively
relighting the scene, something really cool we can do. Now in order to do this we’ll need
to add another set of color wheels, which we can add from here. Then to add a mask I’ll click here
and select shape mask. I'll then resize and position it
over his face… and rotate it a little to match
the angle of his face. then to brighten his face,
we’ll increase the midtones… And you can see when we play it back
the talent's face moves. So we’ll want to address that, we’ll set a position keyframe
at the beginning... and the end… and adjust the shape here. And badda bing, bada bang! The shape moves perfectly
with the movement of our talent. In the interest of time, I’ve already gone ahead and finished
performing the corrections to these remaining clips,
but let’s say in this next shot, for whatever reason the
director decides that he doesn't like that the
woman’s hair is purple and would prefer it to be black
with red highlights. Well the cool things is is that we can do that with a
color mask in Final Cut Pro X. So we’ll need to add another
color wheels effect… click here to select a color mask… and then let’s click and drag through
the talent’s hair to qualify it. We can add a little more
by holding shift key and dragging. You can see we’re grabbing a
bit of the man’s clothes as well, so to further qualify this all we
have to do is add a shape mask, and put it right about here,
but it doesn’t have to be perfect. Now to change the color of
her hair, let’s add warm colors to the highlights
until her hair is a bright orange color… we’ll then reduce the master
saturation significantly… and drop the brightness in the midtones. Here’s what is looks like
when we play it back. Worked like a charm!
Fixed it in post! Okay now we’re to the really fun part and that’s creating an awesome
look for these clips, I’m gonna show you a quick way to apply the SAME look on
top of all of these clips and this will save time and ensure you have a consistent
look across the board. To do that we’ll highlight
all the clips… then right-click and select
"new compound clip." Now when we make a color
adjustment to the compound clip, it will apply the correction to
all of the clips uniformly. Pretty sweet huh? Alright now let’s create the look, and this time we’ll do it with
color curves for added control. I can do that by selecting them here. And a quick crash course
on the way this works in case you haven’t already used these
in applications like Photoshop, the bottom point adjusts the shadows, the top point adjusts the highlights and we can make as many points
as we want on the curve in between to shape the tonal range. To give the contrast a soft muted look,
on the luma curve, we’ll reduce the contrast by
dragging the top point down… and then the bottom point up. I’ll then make a point here and
drag up to brighten the midtones, and then another point here and then drag down to adjust
the density in the shadows. Now for color, to give this a
warm sunny California look we’ll go to the blue channel and drag the top point down
subtracting blue to warm it up. Then with the bottom point
we'll drag to the right subtracting even more blue
from the shadows. Going to the red channel,
we’ll drag the bottom point adding more red to warm
up the shadows. And then another point
here and drag down to balance the midtones so
the skin tones aren’t too red... And then another point
here and drag down to create color contrast by
pushing teal colors into the shadows. Finally we’ll add some saturation
by adding a color board layer, and increasing the overall
saturation to make it pop more. To take this look even further, let’s make some secondary
or isolated adjustments to make elements in the scene
fit better with our look. Namely we want green to
appear more yellow and blues to appear more
aqua or cyan. The cool thing is we can do this
easily with the Hue/Saturation curves. I’ll add them here, and we’ll work with the
Hue vs. Hue curve. We want the green grass to
be a little bit more yellow, so we’ll click on the eyedropper,
and select the grass. This will make 3 points for us here, and by dragging the middle point up, we can make the grass
appear more yellow. I’d also like to make the blues
to be more of an aqua color, so again I can use the eyedropper,
clicking here… and drag this point up
and to the left. Ok now I’d like to selectively
adjust the saturation. I’ll switch to the Hue vs. Sat curve and use the eyedropper again,
clicking on this part of the image… then drag the middle point up to add
more saturation to the teal colors. Great! Here’s a before and after
of our Hue vs. Hue and Hue vs. Saturation corrections. Wow that looks amazing! What an awesome sunny
California look! If you really like this look and want to save some steps
by applying this as a look-up-table You can download this as
a LUT when you sign-up for the live workshop event. Now I know we covered a lot here and I skipped over a lot of details but what I wanted to do
was give the big picture. And if you like this tutorial
and want to see more, then sign up for our free
workshop event where we'll go into even more depth. We'll cover more color theory
and you can ask me questions. So to save your spot just follow
the links in the description below this video and I promise you it will be well worth your time and
you'll get a lot better from one simple training. So I hope you enjoyed this crash course
as much as I enjoyed creating for you. And I look forward to
seeing you at the training. Have a great day!
