How I Color Grade My Videos! | S-Log 3 Final Cut Pro X Tutorial

no honey i'm sorry we could have more sex later i've got to go color grade oh hello there everybody and welcome back to a man who believe it or not is not a financial advisor my name is evan edinger and today we're going to be doing a little bit of color grading there's a lot you don't know behind the scenes that goes into making a youtube video one of the most beautiful things in my opinion is the art of color grading you do not have to color grade videos you can just shoot with an automatic setting in your camera but by shooting flat like this and then color grading in post it really allows you to artistically choose what to focus on when you get into the big leagues or just what colors you want to use that look fancy also by the way this video is sponsored by squarespace and i'll be hearing more about them in the middle of the video i think the art of color grading can be very beautiful so hopefully if you're someone that has no experience with this at all you can find this very interesting or if you're someone that does shoot with a flat profile like slog3 as i like to call it slog2 c-log any of those flat gammas well guess what hopefully this video you can learn from me or learn what not to do possibly and if you're someone that just shoots video with a standard normal picture profile well hopefully this inspires you to give it a shot all right now it's time to push me into the corner well well hello and welcome to my nle of choice this is final cut pro x i've been a final cut pro editor way back to when i had final cut pro 7. just an og now a lot of people can be editing and color grading in davinci resolve which has a bit more functionality for this however i've really worked out a great workflow for how i'm able to color grade in final cut pro and i feel like i don't need the benefits that can come to davinci it'll increase too much to my workflow basically and if you're someone else that just wants to stick with this one that's great or if you're someone that uses premiere well hopefully your app didn't crash by the time you got to this part of the video all right so first step what we're going to do here is i made my own custom workspace i've color one and color two usually i use two monitors this one's off right now because i wanted to show you my entire screen i can't record both screens at the same time so here we go using the smaller screen uh color one i just have it with a vector scope here and this one has the luma graph just so i can know what the colors are so the first step here make sure you have a gray card super duper cheap on amazon pick it up it's just so you can really make sure you have the perfect perfect grade so basically if you don't know how to shoot with s-log 3 s-log 3 requires a 41 middle gray so basically middle grade needs to be exposed at 41 how do we check that well i've brought this line here down to 41 and what we want to do is isolate the values in that gray so the first thing i do whenever i start color grading is let's just go to all video and audio go here i'm going to type in mask and then i'm going to delete it and type in draw because it's a draw mask i'm gonna drag one here and actually just because i know i'm gonna use it later i'm gonna drag another one on top all right we go to the first draw mask and we're just going to isolate the gray just because like i said this is a perfect gray card it should be 41 ire so as you can see i shot this well i don't have to really do any tweaking if i wanted to be incredibly nitpicky which you know what i genuinely am there we go the tiniest hair also important to do here is make sure it's properly white balanced you should do that beforehand but sometimes it can be off by a little bit the way to do that is to tell if there's a little tiny dot right in the middle of those crosshairs and you want it to be exactly in the middle the other way of doing it is to click this and go into the rgb overlay and this looks pretty white if anything you might say that the magenta is a little bit overpowering and what you can do in that stead is go this way see how the green separates from the magenta so you kind of want it to be a solid white line you don't want any yellow you don't want any blue you don't want any pink you don't want any green so for this particular clip it looks like it's already properly white balanced but just make sure to tweak these right here if it's not now that we've actually perfectly done that it's already good to go we're going to get rid of that first draw mask next up what we're going to do is we need to apply a transformation lut now you could do this by hand this is a thing you were able to do where you map out the colors perfectly however in this day and age for my personal workflow i find there's so many free professional luts that you can use that their main purpose is to convert the log space into rec 709 or the standard color space now this is the official sony slog 3 lut here bam that's their conversion i find it a bit too contrasty so i found another free one on the internet that i use it's very very similar as you can see but this is just a bit more easy to work with in my opinion now you might just say hey this looks great and for all intents and purposes you could very well upload this video it looks totally fine actually but we can improve upon things always the next step is going to be add another color wheels what we want to do is make sure the darkest of darks the blackest of blacks are all the way very near zero and so because my room is really well lit there's not going to be too many of those but i'm going to go to shadows here and i pull that down there we go so the darkest bits right there are just hitting the zero if anything i could pull it up just a tiny bit there we go and next i want to make sure the highlights don't necessarily hit 100 but just below 100 unless you want any peaking so there we go now i do have this light here is a bit overexposed when i pull it too high but the thing that really is going to make sure this looks amazing is that my skin tones need to be the perfect ir i'll get onto that later at this point i'm going to pull down the mid-tones exposure a little bit that just adds a small amount of contrast in my mid-tones now i'm going to drag that up right here turn on this draw mask and i'm going to select my skin this way i can see what the exposure values are for my skin tones now already it honestly looks if i drag this up like my skin tones are pretty bang on exactly where i want them like i said i've i'm in a studio environment that i can control this if not what you're going to do is really mess with this color wheels too mess with the mid tones or the highlights to bring your skin up to the value that it's supposed to be my skin looks properly exposed anywhere between 68 to 75 ire and that's pretty much bang on for what we've got right here so i think that looks pretty great if anything i'm going to turn the highlights down just a little bit so it adds a bit more of a natural look our next step if you can believe it add another color wheels all right i do love a good color wheel the next color wheels is just to deal with saturation you might think well this looks pretty good this is up to your taste for me i always like to add just a little bit more and so right around there that is just the little bit of extra saturation i enjoy it doesn't look too over the top it doesn't look too under the bottom don't know what that even means but that's an important step you might sometimes get come into issues where your skin is slightly green or slightly magenta this is the sign that someone has not color corrected the greatest so next we're gonna do is select our skin tone there he is and then we're gonna go down to hue slash saturation curves so for this one we're gonna use this eyedropper tool select the skin tone right there you want these skin tones to be right on this orange line honestly i've never had a video this perfect this sounds like i set this up in fact maybe i should have messed up a bit so that i could have had more to work with but it looks like my skin tones are exactly on that line sometimes and we'll do this just for the example here sometimes you'll find this is what your skin looks like and as you can see it's a bit off to the left and if i turn off the draw mask you'll see right there yeah you might get this a lot depending on what you're shooting with it's just slightly greenish or you might find the opposite it's slightly too magenta every camera manufacturer has a different color science and so you are going to run up against those issues however as we've just seen for the most part it's pretty spot-on see look at that it's a bit too magenta look at me hello i'm thanos i'm here to snap for you i'm go what was that impression so at this point let's uh bring that back down and there we go that looks perfect maybe there's a tiny tweak in there i hope so that looks like a really nice skin tone and here's where you can actually stop this is a properly color corrected shot and for all intents and purposes this video is now good to go you can upload this if you want but you can now start grading adding a bit more of your style on top for me personally what i like to do if you can believe it we're going for the color wheels alright add another color wheel to the party for this one specifically we're also going to be adding here a color mask so on this i've eye dropped my skin tone we're just going to select skin tones click view masks and basically the white is what i've selected so you really just want to have fun and finagle around with this hsl slider until you get just your skin selected you can have some in the background depending on how nitpicky you are but there we go that looks good and this one is the gradual increase or decrease here all right i'm pretty happy with that depending if your subject is moving you can also add here a shape mask and this just makes sure that for instance this color correction that i'm going to be doing is only applying to what is inside of the shape and the color mask so therefore as you can see we're actually stopping it from the left and right there right now we're selecting inside of the color mask so everything like i said that is white and what we're going to do is take those tones and just make them a little bit more orange on the skin tone line so that way you don't look too weird and then we're going to click outside and we're just going to drag it the opposite direction into that teal i do not do this a lot you can go really wild with this if you want personally i try and make it so subtle that it's barely even noticeable but it just adds a small amount of color contrast because orange and teal are separate colors on the old color wheel there and so your skin tone will now pop out from the background just a little bit more it's a tiny little bit of detail that will add that extra spice that makes the video look that much better so here it is before and here it is after you might be like evan there's nothing done like i said this is done to taste i like to do it incredibly subtly now we can actually do one more color wheel because why not all right we really want the viewer's eyes to be looking at the subject wherever the subject is in the frame for me when i'm doing a vlog like this i'm sitting in the middle and so we're going to add one more color wheel all right just one more uh for this one what i like to do is create a shape mask so for this shape mask here we go we're gonna be making basically a vignette all right so for this i'm going to be selecting everything outside of the vignette so that is clicking this outside button here and just grab the shadows and very lightly pull them down just a tad so here's before and here's after it's really subtle but it really makes your eyes punch in right to what you're actually looking for sometimes i'll actually go in and i'll add a color curve what you can do is eye drop all right looks like that's the edge of my skin tone there and i want to put another one right there so wow quite a contrast as long as i increase this a little bit and then pull this down a little bit there we go what we can do is artificially increase the contrast as well as what we've already done and then before after before after at this point we do have one more step in this entire process you don't have to do any of this you could just shoot standard but this final step is very important i shoot with my sony a7s 3 with the detail at negative 7 because adding detail in the camera means that you can't really tweak it as much like it's a bit noisier and so i make it a bit soft in camera and then add it back in post and so to do that i'm going to search for sharpen tool there we go drag and drop and now it's applied a sharpening to the clip of 2.5 and always make sure to have this at the end of your grade otherwise you're going to be adding colors to the sharpness and i i just don't think that's a good idea if you want to make sure your videos are extra crisp just check the sharpness in post and add the sharpen tool accordingly especially if you're using a lut that you downloaded on the internet because you can't actually add sharpness to a lut it doesn't quite work like that all right and the cool part of the video let's see each of these effects applied one by one so here's what i look like when i am flat shot straight out of camera then i white balance it and make sure to balance 41 ire for the gray then i apply a conversion lut that's what's just been done then we apply a bit of exposure mapping making sure that the highest whites and the lowest blacks are within that zero to 100 then we apply a bit more saturation oh time to fix the skin tones luckily mine were shot alright then adding a little bit more orange and teal hello and then lastly the sharpen all right what do you think not bad right and one of the greatest parts of a color grade like this is if you like the way that you shot this and that you graded this you can just copy the settings over to another clip and then mess with the color wheels accordingly for instance here's a shot the other day i took and this time we're at night time so if i copy the settings over bam oh you can see that the blacks are a bit crushed just looking here look how low those are and so all i would have to do is go down to color wheels 2 and mess with the shadows a bit pull that up and i just saved it quite a lot at this point we've got quite contrast on this so maybe for this one specifically i'd also need to make sure that gray card is in the right spot possibly pull this up the mid-tones seem a bit high so as long as you've got a good grade you can just go in and tweak anything you want even if it's a shot in a non-controlled environment for instance here's the shot i've got of my friend dodie she's singing along i can just go bish bash bosh pop now here is the shot that i've just graded from in my bedroom however it looks freaking great already in this spot but there are some things we could tweak as you can see the sun is a bit high and i think the shadows could use a bit of crushing so we're going to do here is go into color wheels 2 yet again we're going to pull down those highlights just a little bit there we go right onto the hundred and possibly pull those shadows down whoop not too much just a little and add a bit of contrast to her face the skin tones there mid-tones down there we go so that looks like a finished look except you always want to make sure you're checking out those masks that you've done yeah her skin has been selected with my standard one but also so is literally everything else i shot this at sunset personally this is the type of shot where i wouldn't really want to orange and teal it the sunset's doing that enough so i'm just going to turn that one off bam and there we go i have a finished grade already and i've not done much work now depending on where you are in your color grading journey let's just say you've just started this has inspired you a bit but you don't want to have to take all the time to learn how to do all of this you can just buy a lut can you believe i'm actually selling one if you like this exact look of how i color grade you can now get this exact lut to make your footage look great as long as you're shooting with a flat log profile or i also made some luts if you shoot with standard profile let's just say you don't want to do this at all and you want to make sure it looks good either way but i've got you covered you see here's a clip here i've got for you that's just me shot with the standard picture profile this looks good for all intents and purposes but it's still a bit flat as you can see with the standard picture profile we've got a nice amount of color but you don't want to have to take the time to color grade yourself so what you can do is go down and find yourself a custom lut drag that across bish bash bosh there's me and go to your recently purchased e-squared lut i've got the s-log three ones for more advanced users and i've also got the all-rounder pack which is a standard grade bam look at that looks i think personally way better obviously i made it myself bish bash wow amazing or if you want i've also made an orange and teal one to make yourself pop out just that amount more bam look at that now like i said this is quite over the top but depending on what you're shooting at maybe you want that like crazy color contrast to look like you've really spent a lot of time in the grade because hey i did so now you get my benefits and like i said i do have a lot available for s-log 3 as well if that's what you're editing in and you just want something that will make your clips look pretty good i've spent a lot of time on them my favorite is ot whispers because it's a very subtle orange teal bam look at that or i have one that's a standard good color correction which is the standard slog three savior and then there's the more hardcore orange and teal orange and teal but as i said before do not forget regardless of which lut you apply do make sure to apply sharpening in post if you've removed it from your camera so there we go bam and that is what the clip looks like amazing now if you're wondering well evan where can i buy these luts i'd like to know where i can get them you can actually get them on my website evaneedinger.com which i built with today's video sponsor squarespace thank you so much i never thought i'd be able to make a website but it was just so incredibly easy not only do i have an incredibly great looking portfolio of all the photos i've taken but i have my own web store everything's just dealt with completely and when i had a problem where i wanted to do some more advanced css i was able to talk to customer service and they helped me out immediately not because i'm evan edinger they don't know who i am i'm just some guy they just message me just because they've got good customer support so if you want a website with your own portfolio web store if you want to buy my luts we'll buy my luts and then also sign up to squarespace with my code evan edinger at checkout you get 10 off your own website please do it supports the channel and supports you making a cool website thanks squarespace and without further ado uh basically this is the end of the video thank you guys so much for watching i hope you have enjoyed this because this is one of my favorite aspects of video editing and even when i get an editor to edit some of my videos i always color grade my own videos and i send them the lot that i make just because i love it so much so hopefully either i've inspired you to start color grading or maybe to get my luts or anyway just to be more interested in the behind the scenes of making youtube videos i hope you've enjoyed this and other than that i guess i will see you on the next one goodbye can't really fly back in the chair now can we you

Channel: Evan Edinger

Views: 11,474

Keywords: How to colour grade, how I colour grade, s-log3, slog3, Flat, FCPX, final cut, final cut pro, final cut pro x, premiere pro, lumetri, resolve, LUTs, Evan Edinger, 2021, Sony, a7siii, A7s iii, Colourgrade, colour grade, color grade, color grading, color correction, NLE, white balance, skin tones, Tutorial, Workflow

Id: S1BwucBj1R4

Length: 17min 22sec (1042 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021