How to color grade footage for FREE with HitFilm Express | HitFilm Basics Masterclass

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Welcome to another video in our HitFilm Basics Masterclass. If you missed the last tutorials on downloading HitFilm Express and editing video, you can find those in the card on screen. In this video, we're going to show you how to color correct your footage, to fix any issues, and color grade it, to make it look the best it possibly can. Let's go ahead and get started. Inside of HitFilm here, I've got a couple of clips of a guy who just has too much free time. Just by looking at these I can tell that the white balance is off and that's the first thing that we're going to fix. I can tell that because if you look at an area of the video that technically should be white, like his shirt or the wall back here, you can see, if I zoom in, that it has a sort of greenish-yellow kind of tinge to it, and that means that the white balance is off. So to fix that what I'm going to do is come over here to the Effects panel, and if you don't see this you might have to arrow over, and I'll search for White Balance. And what I'll do is drag the White Balance effect directly onto the video in the timeline. It should open up the controls panel automatically but if it doesn't, that's where you'll want to be. The White Balance effect is very easy to use, it just has one setting. What I'm gonna do is come over here and click and drag this eyedropper and then place it over an area of the video that should be white. In this case, I'll use the wall. When I let go, HitFilm will automatically correct all of the other colors to match. It's not a huge difference and it's not like the video looked terrible before, but, when it comes to color grading, you want a base that is the correct color and correct exposure. Then, since I have two clips here, what I can do is right click the White Balance effect, copy it, right-click the clip, and select Paste and this will apply the same effect to that second clip. If you find that your video is looking a little bit fuzzy, you can use the Sharpen effect to quickly add a bit of an edge. If I search for it here in the Effects panel you can see it here, Sharpen. And then again, I'll drag it on to the video. It defaults to 25 so you should see an effect right away but I'll go ahead and zoom in here and then crank it up so that you can really see it. You don't want to go too overboard with the Sharpen effect because it'll start looking a bit crunchy. It's better as a sort of subtle effect to enhance it. Here's before and after. You can see an improvement in the fine details of the image. If you find that your video is too bright or too dark you can use the curves effect to fix it. It's important to note before I do this that when it comes to color correction, if a spot in your video is completely black or completely white, there is literally nothing you can do to fix it. There's no brightening or darkening to get it back that data is completely gone the camera has not captured it. So, in order to color grade, it's best that your entire video is within the acceptable range of color. Let's go ahead and drag the Curves effect on to this video. And you'll see a graph like this. We have a full tutorial on Curves available, that we've done in the past, so be sure to check that out, but for now I'll just go over the essentials of the effect. Basically, the left side of the graph represents the dark areas of the image and the right side represents the bright so if I come over here and raise the right side, what I'm doing is raising the bright areas of the image. Then, if I come over here to the left and bring that down, I'm darkening the dark areas of the image. This will add contrast and it's called an s-curve which is why we have a preset down here for just that, because it's a common adjustment to make to video. I can reset it by selecting this Default preset. For now, I'll just go ahead and darken it a little bit, maybe add some contrast in the mid-tones, and then maybe bring his shirt down just a bit. So it's slightly less flat but it also maintains that sort of contrast between the bright and dark areas of the image. Once again, I'll go ahead and copy and paste that onto the other clip and now we have a good starting point for color grading. The thing about color grading is that it's subjective, there's not exactly a right or wrong way to do it. The difference between color correction and color grading is that correction is to fix your video and bring it up to a good baseline level. So you're fixing the brightness, any sort of black and white level issues, fixing the color, and white balance as well. And color grading is usually to enhance it, to add your own mood or flavor to the video. Speaking of flavor, we have a video of a chef tossing some whatever that is... shrimp, no lobster, I think it's lobster, and it's a pretty good-looking clip. The fire is a little bit overblown but that's pretty hard to prevent anyway. So we're just gonna change the colors a bit to make it a little bit more cinematic. We could use the Curves effect but I'm also gonna introduce you to a new effect called Color Balance. So, I'll search for that in the Effects panel, and drag it on to my video. This effect has three parameter: shadows, mid-tones, and highlights, similar to a Curves effect. What I'll do is decrease the reds and greens in the shadows, and that'll add a very nice teal look which will contrast nicely with the red of the fire. Then I'll come into the highlights and lower the blues, so you can see that has an effect on the metal there. Don't want to overdo it too much, but it adds a nice sort of yellow tinge. If I checkmark Preserve Luminosity, it will not darken the video since we're taking color out of it. Another effect we can add is called Hue, Saturation & Lightness. And this gives you a number of controls, so you have the Master, which is the entire clip, but then you can also isolate specific colors. So, if I go into the red channel and decrease the saturation all the way to zero, the reds in the video will completely go black and white. In this case, this isn't what we want so I'll undo that. But I might just boost the Master controls a little bit. Next, I'm going to add a Glow effect. Because we have a very hot fire in this video, I want to sort of accentuate it but also make it a bit softer as well. So I'll add a Glow effect onto the video and come in here and increase the Threshold. The Threshold is how much of the video is going to be affected. The more I increase it, the less is going to be affected. So I'll increase it pretty high and then increase the radius as well. And you can see that sort of softens the fire, then I can increase or decrease the Intensity depending on what I think looks good. I want to be careful because the fire does flare out quite a bit right here, so I don't want to overblow it. So the techniques used in color grading can be applied to basically any genre that you're filming, whether you're making a music video or a cooking channel and you want to add a little bit of cinematic flair to it, color grading can make the video look the best it possibly can, and it can also give you a way to add in your own style to the video. We have a number of color gradient presets down here in the effects panel. If you come down all the way and go to Presets then Film Looks, we have a couple dozen effects that you can drag and drop onto your video to get a look really quickly. So, for example, things like Basic Warm if you're just wanting to warm things up and make it a bit more sentimental, or maybe he's singing about something sad and you want to add in a cool blue look to it.Now that we've got the basics of editing video, adding text, editing audio, and color grading down, we can move on to some more advanced topics, and that's what we're gonna cover in the next episode. We're gonna be taking a look at some animation and visual effects techniques so, depending on when you watch this, it might already be available in the card on screen. Thanks for watching and we'll see you all in the next video.
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Channel: FXhome
Views: 72,138
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Keywords: HitFilm, filmmaking, VFX, editing, software, video software, video editing, visual effects, how to, color grading, color grading tutorial, color correction, how to color grade, cinematic color grading, color correction tutorial, color grade tutorial, how to color correct footage, how to color grade footage, film look, peter mckinnon, cinematic footage, hitfilm express, hitfilm pro, color correct, how to color correct, color grade, color grade and chill, color grading basics
Id: LnENnCNChf0
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 7min 17sec (437 seconds)
Published: Thu Apr 30 2020
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