How to Color Grade Like a PRO

[Music] I don't want to waste your time so let's Dive Right into how to color grate like a pro let's go so the first thing that I do is I convert the footage to recx 709 using CST to get a good starting point but if you don't have this feature in your software uh you can use a conversion load instead as well now I use St in result but to be honest if you know what you're doing it doesn't really matter which software you're using at least in my workflow so don't feel like you have to use St in here to get a good looking image anyway in the second note I'll add some contrast using the curve and when using the curve I try not to break this s shape whenever possible because say you want to see more details on this part and you bring this up the image breaks apart so just keep in mind that there's a risk of breaking your image when playing with the Curve too much so I personally use the curve to first get my image some contrast and then use the color wheels to dial in those specific areas exposure I think I want to add some more contrast and deeper black a tiny bit brighter highlight now we have a good starting point it's time to be creative and make your own image and looking at the color I've noticed that there's a lot of orange in it and we all know at this point what we need to make the orange stand out blue or till the complimentary color right but see what happens when I add blue in the image now the Orange is kind of gone that's because by adding blue in your image you're basically desaturating or taking out the orange color at the same time but then how do we add blue without affecting our orange that's when the qualifier comes into play try your best to get a clean selection using these tools but as you can see here this is not clean at all and this is when you get those ugly artifacts and we don't want that in our image so I'm going to create a window around our subject and by doing so we can only select certain color inside the window in this case I subject skin tone and the buildings in the background and I'm going to invert the window by creating an outside note and now we can play with the colors without affecting the orange we selected so let me add some blue in the gamma and the gain as well and this is the most important part in my workflow I personally like to have clean black so so whatever I do to my image I pretty much all the time clean the shadow area at the end to get the true black as you can tell looking at the parade there's a lot of blue and green in the shadow area so I'm going to take out some of those colors by adding some red now we have a fairly clean Shadow but we've also lost some of the blue we added earlier by adding the red so I'm just going to go back to the qualifier node and add more blue in the gamma I'll also add some blue in our overall image to just balance it out a little bit a bit of orange in the Highlight as well and this is kind of the secret source for getting a little bit more clean Shadow which is desaturating global saturation in the shadow area using this Loom versus sack curve so when I drop this curve it's desaturating all the colors in the area I've selected without having to add certain color like we did with the color wheels but you got to be really careful when you do this cuz if you go too far it doesn't look natural at all so you just got to find the sweet spot where it giv gives us a clean black but still looking natural next I'm going to darken the edges with a couple of Windows to naturally draw the eye to the center of the image so let me go ahead and quickly create one around our subject and then smooth it out a little bit then invert the window darken the gamma there you go and also on the bottom and the Sid as well this is before and after and this is my favorite part I use a tool called dctl to manipulate colors in my griding and this made my life so much easier so if I just use C in spil in tool to add saturation it'll look something like this but if I use dctl to add saturation it looks so much natural and organic I'll say also I'm not a big fan of this red color on our subject's face so I'm going to ship the red to Yellow so it Blends into the rest of the skin tone but now the overall skin tone looks too yellow so I'm just going to go ahead and shift the yellow to Red look how much cleaner that looks this is how far we came with just two notes and of course you can achieve a similar look with the dentes built-in tools but this is so much easier and it saves me a whole lot of time there are videos of Stefan's YouTube channel explaining how everything works with dctl and there's so much you can learn from his video so yeah anyway this is after some tweaks in dctl and here's the final result okay let's move on to our next [Music] image before we break down the color grading I want to take a moment to talk about something that I'm really proud of in the film which is the sound design let's take a [Music] [Music] listen and here's the exact same video without the sound design there's such a big difference between the two and that's why sound design is a crucial component to film making in the opening SC I wanted to build some tension using sort of like creepy sound effects together with the instrument sound so I went over to epidemic sound and downloaded some sound effects which by itself sounds like this but when I layer them on top of each other this is where the magic [Music] happens so if you're looking for high quality music and sound effects to level off your videos epidemic sound has over 40,000 tracks and 90,000 sound effects and they just keep adding new tracks giving you more options which is incredible and right now we can get a free 30-day trial with the link below so go check them out if you're interested okay back to the video so I used these two images from John Wick as a reference although I didn't try to completely just replicate the look of them they look pretty similar in terms of the contrast level and the overall Vibe I guess I've edit my own grading on top so they look a little bit different but anyway instead of showing the individual node cuz it's basically the same thing as the first breakdown oh my God we did earlier uh I thought I might show you um how you can also try to replicate an image that you like and to do that you have to know how to read image using the Scopes so you can see what's really going on and apply the same thing in your gring I'm going to make it really simple and easy so let's first look it away from forget about this cuz it's the candles in the background and we don't have those in our image so we're just looking at this part in the middle which is our subjects so what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to make this look as close to the this as possible and as you can tell the brightest part is a little bit darker in our image so I'm going to bring up the highlight and a bit of midtone and the shadow as well just play with it until they look similar I usually do this with the Curve but this is a lot quicker and easier in terms of the brightness we're getting there and let's look at the color using the vector scope it's mainly the yellow making this look with a bit of orange but again I think this red and a bit of green come from the background and we don't have those in our image so I'm just going to cut those out so we can focus on this better so that's the reference and this is our image we got to add a lot of yellow to make them look similar there you go we're getting there I'm looking at the parade and if these three waveforms lie on the same level that means the black is clean you can also check this wave form these three RGB circles are perfectly on the same level and looking at our Scopes it's it's actually very close already so I'm just going to leave as it is for now but what I've noticed is that our colors are kind of all over the place in the back to scope whereas this like very straight line so let me go ahead and fix that there you go I narrowed it down towards the yellow and now if you compare the two they're looking very similar and from here I can end my own grading [Music] so there you have it there was a lot of information to take in but uh you just got to practice a lot to level up your gretings and I'm still learning as well but uh if you guys have any questions I'm happy to help so leave questions in the comment below and I'll see you guys in the next one bye so this is my YouTube set up um this is kind of ridiculous but uh yeah I'm bouncing the light off the wall and diffusing it with my random t-shirts and then I can't use my tripod right now cuz a screw got stuck inside I brought one and then you can't attach the uh what do you call the plight tripod plight that's me hi so yeah this is my YouTube setup for now what do you guys think

Channel: Suyorukun

Views: 999,734

Keywords: colorgrading, cinematic, sonya7iv

Id: W1yNgzTyITc

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 14 2023