Getting perfect exposure and colors everytime

hello guys my name is Tom and in this video I want to show you how you can get perfect exposure and also colors and all of your videos and it's gonna work with a DSLR DSL M type of camera or even a full-size production camera at first let's talk about getting at the perfect exposure so there's various tools out there that you can use to help you achieve that the most common one or the kind of the most popular one I would say is the light meter and this is something definitely they want to learn to use as you get you know I kind of further ahead in your career because especially once you're working on bigger production so it's like a film shoot you're gonna be communicating to your lighting team not by telling them your camera settings but you want to be able to tell them in actual light levels and that's where a light meter comes in handy where a light meter might not be so handy is when you're actually adjusting the settings in your camera and that's because especially today we're using all these different cameras different sensors we're using also all kinds of different lenses doesn't you know let's say f five point six on one lens isn't necessarily an F five point six on another lens it might be slightly off also you're using let's say a variable ND filter that's totally gonna throw off your settings and you're getting you're gonna get with the light meter same thing for example using like speed boosters or things like that the first time I'm gonna show you that it's gonna really work wonders when it comes to getting perfect spot here is something very simple and very affordable which is a middle gray card here I have these kind of fancy ones from X right this is a the passport version one which just Falls and allows you kind of take it with you on location and it has a few other things that I'm going to show you later on here's a larger one again from X right that shows you the middle gray which is this little square here and it shows you some other wave squares which again are coming in handy when you want to do other things but you can literally get these simple pop-out foldable middle gray cards there are around ten dollars in Amazon and again that's gonna do the same thing it's just as long as you have a you know proper middle gray so here as you can see we have this middle gray in the shot I have it here up here I can hold it up and based on this we can adjust our camera settings or we can adjust the brightness of the light in this case I'm going to be adjust the light since I don't have anybody operating the camera for me and I'm just gonna adjust it toll basically this is exactly at the right level that it's supposed to be so middle gray or 18% gray some people call it is actually for TIR e means that this thing should be around for the IRA when in your final image or in with your camera is capturing so how would you figure this out well you basically the first way to do it is probably by using zebra in your camera pretty much all cameras these days have a zebras so just enabled adding a camera in my case again because I'm here and I also want you guys to see I'm gonna enable it in this monitor so enable zebra and right now you know you can adjust the zebra to different settings right so you can go from 100 usually will go down to around 50% there are some cameras that will allow you to have zebras set to even 20 30 whatever but in this case we have zebra the lowest we can go is 50% well this thing is actually like I said 40 Ayari so we want this square to be in basically the 40 level how do I do that well since my zebra right now is set to 50 if I increase the brightness of the light in here so basically increase the exposure and I'm gonna do it just until you can see this square here this middle gray is actually now you know basically covered by the zebra that's telling me that now this thing is around 50 percent or 50 Ayari level which is a little bit overexposed because like I said it's supposed to be 40 so easy way of doing that is now you can adjust your camera settings or adjust the brightness of your light just until this zebra basically disappears now if you in your camera if you can set the zebra to 40 you know percent then you want to make sure that the zebra covers that area but right now I'm just gonna basically take this and slowly decrease the light and somewhere there I can see it I can see yeah they're basic you can see the zebras disappeared off of those two middle gray areas and now another way of adjusting exposure is by using histogram histograms are something that you're gonna usually find and more kind of higher end cameras so more like cinema kinda production cameras or actually the saanjh five has it that's one of the reasons why I like that camera well anyways this is how a histogram looks as you can see and literally what it's showing you is it's showing you here left to right it's where it is in the shot so if I you see if I move my hand you can see like left to right you can see everything kind of moving there these levels but the up and down is actually showing your percentage of your IRA so up here I don't know if you'll be able to see it but basically at the top here we have hundred percent then the next line below that is 80 percent sixty then we have forty percent here 20 and then the bottom one is zero different you know monitors might have slightly different scales but it's gonna tell you basically what the scale is so since we know that this middle gray basically is 40 Ayari so we want that to be more or less than 40 so how would you adjust it is like I said again put it make sure it's in your shot and then adjust the brightness of the light now right now we have the exposure set perfectly because I just adjusted it so we check this you can actually see up here there's like this little line and this line actually represents the basically the middle gray if I cover this line you'll see that that line now suddenly disappears see if I take my head out line is clearly visible but basically here I'm gonna show you if I increase the brightness now the shot but say increased you can see how drastically this one went up so right now our mellow gray is at 60% there so right now this is at 60% that line that's definitely not where you want to have this and you'll look at the shot right now I basically look overexposed so now I'm going to bring it down like I said to around 40 so and this way you can get really kind of get really specific very exact with I think so right there it's getting it exactly at 40 now you can also go even lower if you wanted to and you can see for example if you want to under expose the shot so here I'm gonna put it to 20 IR and you can see and then the the top one here the 80 or 85 somewhere around there it's supposed to be what's actually now at 60 so definitely it's underexposed and I can tell that just by looking at the shot so that's that's how you would use the the histogram so here let me go again and adjust the brightness here till I get just the perfect kind of things like I said I want that middle grade to be at 40 so there it is and I think that looks that looks pretty good to me so again that's how that's how you can use your your gray card to make sure that you have perfect exposure now what's the advantage of using something like the color checker here whether it's the larger version or their smaller one well because like I said it shows you more than just the middle grade shows you 20% for example here and you can see that there's another line here around where the 20% is and then this one which is 80% so it shows you that also that it goes up to 80% here you know a waveform and again you can use this with zebras too so if I disable this and I go to zebras and I turn it on and let's say set my zebra to 80% right now as you can see just to stop square here is a you know it's highlighted by the zebra and that's because we have a well exposed shot now what do you have to do for example if you want to get perfect colors in your shot and the way you do that is by just you know basically adjusting your white balance in your camera so again if you can use this 18% gray and and so if you have a you know the middle gray card you can use that in this case I'm going to use this one it's slightly brighter and the surface actually from color checker is it's nice because it reflects all of the frequencies of light identical basically intensity so it doesn't shift the colors at all it's not going to change your settings on you so that's the reason why I'm gonna use this that's also one of the reasons why I like this little passport thing because definitely a lot more handy to take with you than this bigger card and like I said it has the the different exposure has color checkers up here but it also has a little card here which is identical cord there's a larger version you can use for white balance so right now I'm gonna go basically to my camp behind my camera and just kind of adjust the white balance and show you guys how how it looks so as you can see the colors and the shutter completely off there it's just way too blue so I'm going to use a custom white balance setting up here and when use that card and you can do this with a great middle card or in this case the white balance card so in the settings here I'm going to go to a custom preset and I'm going to select with white white bounds and I want to basically zoom in kind of make sure that you know and if you have to do you want to bring the camera closer to your subject because you do not want to bring the card closer to the camera because you want the court to be where your your actor or your subject is going to be so in this case you want to make sure that you're just seeing that gray card or or like I said in this case it's the white balance card and then just press set and that's gonna balance the colors you can see right away the colors look a lot nicer so now the shot should be properly balanced when it comes to colors now if you want to take this a step further I would say you probably want to take this into your editing process off 2000 that actually in Adobe Premiere this is gonna work pretty much in any editing software and I'll show you again how easy it is to make sure it's spot-on when it comes to exposure and color balance so in your editing application you want to bring up the shot where you can see your gray card or in this case our color chart and then we just turn on the Scopes so here's our histogram and premiering it is right-click on and you can choose what kind of histogram you want for example a waveform you can have the luma right now RGB we just care about the brightness I'll leave luma on and you kind of want to look at your gray card so you can see it is a whole bunch of other mumbo-jumbo because it's showing us everything that's in the shots including me and in the background but we just want to make sure that this middle gray is exactly in the middle and I can see that up here I can see this distinctive line and then this middle gray is this distinctive line up here so if I jump I just exposure you can see that line goes up is this kids brighter if you want to kind of you know clean it up so just easier to view you can isolate the shot so I'm premiere you can just go to your effects take the pen tool and let's see we'll just isolate this gray area here and there you have it now when I look at the llama tree it's just showing me that great so I can again kind of go further and adjust the shot and I'll leave it there that's at 50 now the advantage of using you know the x-ray color checkers you also have the other value so I can also see resume put here the highlight which should be more or less than 90 90 of IRI and here the same thing for the shadows it should be around 20 so I can see it's more or less there maybe the the contrast the gamma could be further adjusted I can do that for example here using a standard three way color corrector I can take the highlights just slightly bring them up and let's see the shadows just kind of bring it down a little and as I'm doing this it affected my mid-tones so I can for some people take the mid-tones and pull them up back up a little bit to 50 and right there that's our color grading pretty much our adjustment of our brightness at least and this will delete this and you can see is as before this is after this kind of has the right contrast before the shot was kind of maybe a little too flat but really those kind of tiny adjustments you're going to be doing them basically based on your preference now and when it comes to the color the way you're gonna do it is you're gonna check to vectorscope so here I mean enable the vectorscope and it's gonna make it fullscreen and again you can see all of this kind of mumbo-jumbo and that's because we're seeing the whole shot so we can again now isolate this so just select the gray area here in our gray card and look at the shot now or the Scopes and you can see it's the colors are properly balanced because this gray card or white you know color card it should just be here in the middle here for example is another shot where I just have that white balance card that I was using from X right and again I can look at the scopes and again better to isolate it so take here the little square just basically you want to just look at the white part of the image look at your scopes and you can see it's exactly here in the middle so it doesn't matter whether it's a great card or this white balance card it should be here in a center now what if you have a shot that's badly done for example like this one here before I did my white balance like I said ideally you want to get the right color balance and exposure and all that stuff in camera but let's say you are a little bit off or in the case of this shot I was way off can you fix it in post as they say oh yes you can fix it so here let's look at the waveform first enable it and will disable vectorscope and again I'm gonna just isolate this area here so let's say the gray card or in this case our three different areas here so the highlights I can see there this is this am I'm gonna look at the scopes and I can see definitely the shadows underexposed the highlights are at 70 the mid-tones are at 30 it is a disaster so definitely like I said I can fix it but it's just gonna introduce are there artifacts but let's see if this is the best I can do it and I can adjust it by adjusting the exposure in this case so and if you bring up the exposure so somewhere there so this it's more or less in the middle and I can adjust the highlights now I can go to our three color corrector bring the highlights maybe just a tiny bit down somewhere there and the shadows even we can bring it down a bit but again the mid-tones we got to bring them back up to fifty so I kind of just tweak this the highlights and the shadows till you kind of get it they're more or less so let's say like this now when it comes to the the colors again I can even put just choose this mask to just look at these things here let's see like that just a gray tone and I'm gonna look at the vectorscope and I can see here that these colors are definitely not this basically should be right here in the center so I can go to my basic color correction and I can adjust here the temperature slider so adjust it till this kind of goes in the middle so there I can adjust also my tint because the tint see will push it towards between the magenta and the green so kind of they're more or less that should give it the right kind of white balance so I made my adjustments I can turn off my mask now so it definitely looks better than you know before our adjustments but it's not gonna look as good as this shot where we got the settings right in the camera and now where the colorchecker can come in handy even more is basically when you actually look at the different color charts or the different color squares so let's isolate that area with the pen and there we have it and now I'm going to look at our scopes you can kind of see that these different squares they represent all these different primary colors in our vector scope so we have the green here starting with this one here it goes to green and you should basically be seeing these going more or less to the the you know the appropriate color so the green to green cyan to cyan blue magenta red and then the yellow and as you can see right now because we adjusted the colors it looks correct but for example if I were to reset this again any of the color adjustments you can see the colors are not quite there so we can kind of adjust it like I said again by just pushing and pulling you kind of wanted this to be equally going going to all the different colors so again I'm gonna push this a little bit now towards the warm I just hear this kind of color I can also increase my edges saturation so overall just kind of brings it closer and makes it easier when you're working with these adjustments so make these adjustments further like this see somewhere there you kind of want to find like a good middle ground and bring down the saturation and now we can turn off our mask and we can look at this shot and you can see definitely did a much better job now by basically by using these different colors then just by using a gray card when it comes to white balancing or color balancing this shaft again this is how it looked before underexposed and the colors were not done and this is looking now afterwards how so hopefully this wasn't too confusing for you guys I guess and once you sort of start doing this you can MP know it can become second nature very quickly for sure at least get a middle gray card and like I said you can get the cheap one on Amazon that kind of fold out one for ten bucks so I'll provide the link for that in the description of this video but if you want to get something even better than get something like this from x-rite or their passport version actually is really handy because again fits in your pocket you can throw this over your neck and it's just easier to carry it with you and aside from just having a middle-grade I also have like I said the other values you have your different color checkers up here for making sure your color balances I can be basically fine-tuned to later on and on the other side you actually have fear for your white balance sheet you also I have on the bottom here you have another sheet for focusing so with the converging lines this makes focusing super easy you just have your actor kind of hold it more or less where their eye line is and you just focus in on the center here so definitely a cool little gadget to have or let's say maybe you're looking for some gift ideas for Christmas for somebody in your life was into videography or photography it's gonna work for both again a great gift idea so hopefully you guys enjoyed this video if you did make sure you click thumbs up and if you want information on where you can get this or the other great card man you can just check the links in the description of this video or as always you can go check out my website at Tom Antos films calm and thank you guys and I'll see you next time bye [Music]

Channel: Tom Antos

Views: 370,211

Keywords: filmmaking, film school, tutorials, Tom Antos, cinematography, color correction, color grading, video production, film production, adobe premiere pro, filmmaking tutorial, cinematographer, adobe premiere, premiere pro, film making, videography, adobe, b-roll, cc 2018, premiere pro cc 2018, grading, final cut pro x, exposure, color balance, X-Rite, color checker, gray card, white balance, middle gray, 18% gray, X-Rite Passport Color Checker, chart, zebra, waveform, vectorscope

Id: yNSRrIf8rY8

Length: 19min 8sec (1148 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 23 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Berrabus2]

I didn’t know Rick Grimes went from killing zombies to taking photos of them.

[u/instantpancake]

After the initial euphoria, disappointment will hit /r/filmmakers in two stages:

1. when it turns out that setting your exposure properly on a card will cause everything else in the frame to be completely off the charts unless you actually use lighting to bring it back into a usable range

2. when people discover that a technically perfect exposure is rarely what makes a "cinematic" image anyway.

Don't get me wrong, it's important to understand how this stuff works, but the card is not a magic wand. It's just a tool giving you feedback on your lighting decisions, but you have to make those decisions yourself in the first place, and they will require additional tools.

Edit: Say you place your subject against the background of a room that has daylight coming in through the windows, possibly a bunch of tungsten practicals on the wall too ... and then you blast your talent (and your color checker card) with the good ole $15 Professional "Daylight" Fluorescent Softbox™ from Amazon. You go ahead and adjust your camera until the color chart looks great, perfect white balance, perfect exposure. Guess what, your background suddenly looks like shit, because you just adjusted your camera to a shitty light.

Likewise, if you're using "reasonable" camera settings (like a good old 5600K no-tint WB), and then push and pull your colors in post in order to hit the marks on the vectorscope with the color checker, everything in your frame that's not purely illuminated by the ShittyBox™ will now look bad.

But let's say you do get all of that right, by not using the ShittyBox™ or the ChinaPanel™, but a proper light instead - you will find that all your subjects look like they're here to read the evening news, with those neutral, soft, front-lit 75 IRE skintones they're getting from the lighting you needed to get the color checker to look "right".

[u/buscandopaty]

This is cool & all but I can never understand how wide to set the exposure to make sure the aperture doesn't get blown out, especially when you're filtering day for night in pre-production. And don't even get me started on chroma keying the audio in post.