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.
God bless you mod