I wasn't planning on making an
updated color grading tutorial but after I dropped Sounds of the PNW
you guys requested the actual hell out of it so today i want to show you
how i turn this shot into this shot using color grading
in premiere pro. Tt's worth noting that this is just my individual style of
grading. I like to go very moody and punchy and contrasty and you don't
have to do that, but what you can and should do is take
the techniques that i'm talking about in this video and apply them
to create your own style of grading. It's also worth noting that i shoot in log
which is like a very flat profile with very little contrast
in the image, and i always over expose my shots by two stops.
Shooting in your camera's flattest picture profile allows you to retain as
much detail in the highlights and shadows as possible. That gives you a
lot of flexibility when you're color grading but it's also
important when shooting in that flat profile to overexpose your image usually
by about two stops so that you retain as much detail in the
colors as possible and prevent grain from
getting in and having all those colored artifacts
in your image that make your grade appear messier. I'm also using lumetri
color in adobe premiere pro to do all this grading,
but there are similar techniques and effects available in final cut
and davinci resolve as well. The first and actually most
important step in this process is not color grading but color correction=
taking that super flat footage from your camera that might be
off in terms of exposure or color and fixing it so that it's nice and
clean and ready for your grade. To do this you want to make sure that
two scopes are visible- the parade and the vectorscope. The parade shows you
all of the brightness values in your image from
0 which is black all the way up to 100 which is white, and the vectorscope
shows you the colors in your image with the very center being
gray, the hues around the edge, and as colors move out towards the edge
of the circle that means they're more saturated. So it shows you a map of all
the pixels in your image by color and brightness.
This gives you a really concrete way to look at those scopes and see
exactly what the colors in your image are doing. So the first thing i want to
do is take that flat footage from my camera and bring back a realistic
lifelike amount of contrast. So i'm going to start by taking the black point
and dragging it down until something on the parade
hits zero. Then once i've got just those couple of pixels that are technically
black in the image i'm gonna take the white point
and drag it up so that some technically hit
100 so we have a couple of white pixels in the image. So we have that full
contrast from true white to true black. Now, it's worth noting that sometimes
you're not going to have anything completely white
or completely black in your image, so make sure to take a look at what you're
working with beforehand. Like if you have a really
dark frame where there's nothing that's technically white,
if you stretch it all the way that something completely turns white you're
actually going to be losing detail and making the image look worse. Actually
for example with this image, these bags in the back and the shelves
can be completely black. There should be a black pixel in there somewhere for
there to be the right amount of contrast. But
there's nothing in the frame that's completely true white, so if i
stretch that white point all the way out my skin
is gonna be way too bright. And that goes for all the techniques I'm gonna be
talking about in this video. Don't just like press buttons and look at the
scopes and see what it does. Use your eyes. Look
at the footage and see what looks right. So now that
we've corrected the levels throughout the image it's time to adjust the white
balance, and this is something that i'm guilty of
messing up all the time. I'll go out to shoot, have
my camera automatically set to cloudy from the day before,
it's not a cloudy day anymore it's sunny, and the shots are all
way too warm. So i have to fix that in post.
The best thing you can possibly do is just get it right
in camera, but even when you do it's sometimes still just a little bit
off. And if you try to grade without your white balance being corrected first, the
image is going to completely fall apart and you're going to really notice all
those inaccuracies in the color temperature. So let's fix it.
The way that i prefer to correct white balance whenever i can is by having
something that's white in the image and just using the
eyedropper to select it and correct the white
balance that way. In fact for this shot I've got a white piece of paper so that
I can set the white balance when i'm editing. This is a good thing to
do if you have the chance but a lot of the time you don't. You'll
notice in a lot of my vlogs where i'm shooting outside in less of a controlled
environment I'll wear like a white shirt or a white
hoodie. That's actually so that i can set white balance
by using that eyedropper tool on what i'm wearing. So if you can find something
that's completely white in the image that's the way i would go, but if you
can't there are other options. So first if you're shooting a human subject then
you can mask around their skin tone and make sure that it's accurate. So just
draw a mask around something that's just skin, like
on this shot I would select probably just this half of my face. Then
take a look at the vector scope and since you've isolated that skin tone
all of the pixels on the vector scope should be aligning
on this line in the top left. If they're to the left of that line then it means
that your shot has a green cast and you need to add more purple to
make that skin tone accurate. So go over to the tint and drag
it more towards the purple side. Then you
can just delete that mask and you can see that your white balance
should be accurate at that point. Finally if there's not anything
white or a skin tone in the image you can try just adjusting the colors
to have a balanced image which will generally
be more or less correct in terms of white balance. So without masking
anything out to isolate it just take a look at the vector scope for the entire
image and if you see that it's skewing a bit
towards the green side then add in some magenta to push it back
towards the center of the circle. If it's skewing towards blue
add in some yellow in the temperature to get it back to the center of that
map. This is not a perfect method. Like if you're shooting in the forest
you're probably going to have a lot of green
throughout your image and it's going to dominate the vector scope, so
if you correct it to just be in the center then your image is going to
actually have a purple cast and be worse. So like use
your head, but this can be a useful technique for
seeing what could help with your white balance. Now that we've corrected the
colors of our image i'm going to add another lumetri color effect
and start grading. The first thing i'll do is jump into the curves and use a
nice broad s-curve to try and get those deep
shadows in my image. This is just a personal
preference and in fact one that a lot of people
don't like to do themselves, but i like to have
really broad deep shadows where the shadow portions of the image kind of
just blend together into one big gooey dark spot of color.
Then i'll just scroll on down to the hue curves and start adjusting
some colors. This is the hue versus saturation curve. On the x-axis we have
hue and on the y-axis we have saturation. So
you can select a color drag it up and down
to saturate it or desaturate it. I like to start out by marking the reds where
the skin tones are so i know i'm not messing with those skin tones
too dramatically. Then I'll move on and start desaturating purple
and green. A lot of artifacts throughout your image are going to be on the purple
and blue side, so if you start by just desaturating those colors you're
probably going to clean the image up a good bit- not always, but
it generally helps for me. I don't desaturate the green as much as the
purples, but I do drag them down a good bit just to have that moody vibe
in the image. You guys know I like that moody vibe. I'll then bring back some of
the blue if there's actually something that
should be blue in the shot. So for example this shot of the brooklyn bridge
was shot during blue hour so the sky and the reflection
should be blue, but on this shot that we shot in the pacific northwest
this gate and the car behind it look blue on camera but they're actually
gray so i'm just gonna leave the blue completely out of this one
so they're true gray. Then below that the hue versus hue curve. And this is similar
to the hue versus saturation curve we just talked about but instead of
selecting a color and dragging it to adjust its saturation
you can select a color then drag it up and down to actually
change the hue and shift that color you know closer to
another color. So what you can do is just take that entire thing
drag it up a little bit then the blues are going to turn green
and the yellows are going to turn red and you've got like a cliche teal and
orange travel influencer color grade- don't do
that. Instead we're just gonna make some small
tweaks to individual colors here because things can really get
out of hand with this slider. So i'm gonna start by boxing around
the greens and then dragging them down to give them a cooler
tint. I like to have those nice minty greens in my images lately. Then I'm just
going to select the blues and drag them up a little bit to give them a teal tint.
Then all that's left is the orange tones, yellow orange and red, and
these it really depends on the shot but what i generally like to do is just play
around with them and i usually end up shifting them up a
little bit to be closer to red without messing up the skin tone. That's
an important part of this because the skin tones
are in that warm range so you don't want to tweak it too much
or you're going to absolutely destroy your skin tones and end up with purple
skin. And boom we're done with the hue curves, and these are what i usually use
to make like the broader adjustments to the large colors
in my shot. But what if you want to make a more fine-tuned adjustment to a really
specific individual color. Well, that's where HSL
secondary comes in. This basically allows you to select an
individual color in the image and tweak it to your liking. You're just
going to scroll down to the hsl secondary tab,
use the eyedropper to select a color, then adjust these sliders based on
hue saturation and lightness to select that individual color. Then you can use
the denoise and blur options to feather that selection out so
you don't have harsh edges and get really weird artifacts when you
use this tool. And this is something that i use really
on a shot by shot basis. I don't use it on every shot and i
don't use it that frequently, just if the individual shot needs a very
specific change. For example in a lot of the
footage we shot in the pacific northwest the dirt in the image appears purple
rather than brown, so I selected that purple color in
the image, added some yellow, and darkened it to
make it look a lot richer. Sometimes when I'm shooting in this room
the walls behind me that are white will kind of appear
a little like purple green or blue on camera, so I can just select them
blur out the selection and then completely desaturate them
so that they're truly white. Next, gradients.
Gradients are a really underrated color grading tool. I rarely see people use
them but they're insanely useful for drawing the eye to the
subject of your shot. These have a bunch of different uses and
there are a lot of creative techniques you can do with these,
but what i usually do is darken the bottom of the frame or brighten
the top of the frame to draw the eye more to the subject
in the center. So let's say i want to darken the bottom of this shot to draw
the eye up to that subject in the center. Well,
I'll just start out by creating a new lumetri color effect
on that shot and then mask it to a specific
area, so select the rectangular mask in this case. Then I'll just scale that
up and drag it down to the very bottom of the frame. Then I'll just feather that
mask out so I don't have a harsh line at the bottom of the image. Then I'll go
into the curves and just drag it down so I can darken that part of the frame
to my liking. Super quick and useful effect
for drawing the eye to the subject of your shot and adding some extra drama
and mood into your visuals. Finally just a couple of very final tweaks. First
some teal shadows to solidify that moody but still punchy vibe that I like to go
for. I'm just gonna add another instance of curves to the image,
go to the red curve, and remove a little bit of red
from the shadows. And when you remove red you add
teal, so we're going to add a bit of a teal tint into those shadows
which I think just adds some more color contrast and gives it
more of that moody but punchy vibe. If you have desaturated
greens in your image this also might add that extra kind of
depth that you need to make those greens look good. A lot of the time if you
desaturate the greens they can look kind of dry and faded,
but this gives them that minor teal tent to have them be desaturated
but still very lively and lush. But when you add teal to the shadows you're
technically adding it to the black pixels in the image, so the
blacks are going to have a minor minor tint to them which is
super subtle but not something you want because it
doesn't look realistic. Pixels that are truly white and true
black shouldn't have any tint to them, they should just be completely
desaturated. To do this i'm going to use the luma v
saturation curve where we have brightness values on the x-axis
from black to white and on the y-axis we have saturation values.
You can select a brightness value in the image and all of the pixels
that are at that brightness value you can saturate them
or desaturate them. And this is almost always completely useless
except for when you want to desaturate the blacks and whites.
So what we're going to do is just select the darkest pixels
and the lightest pixels and drag the saturation down to zero. This is never
gonna like damage your shot, like it's always
going to either do nothing or fix the problem, so it's worth adding
to almost every shot you ever work with. For
example on this one I adjusted the white balance and made it a lot more warm
so we have a bit of a yellow tint and the highlights
and you don't really notice it until you desaturate those white pixels and see
just how much better it looks. It's subtle
but once you see it you can't unsee the difference that it makes. So what I would
do is literally just add this on an adjustment layer
over the entire project because it's either going to help
on some shots or do nothing at all. It's never going to be a mistake.
Finally i like to add this diffused highlights effect to most of my footage,
but i already made a tutorial just on how to do that effect so i'll
just link that right up here. But that's all for today. I hope you learned
everything you wanted to from this video. I hope i answered all of
your burning questions about my color grading. If you enjoyed
this video or learned something new from it do feel free to show your support by
leaving a like on the video sharing it with your friends or even
subscribing to my channel. I upload new videos just like this
every single week. But that's all for now. Keep creating and I'll see you
in the next one.
