How to do Color Correction with Lumetri Scopes

here's a simple tutorial to lumetri scopes in Premiere Pro first of all color correction and color grading are different things we're going to cover both briefly color correction is simply making things look like real life so if a white is white it should look white in the video this will go across all footage so if you're matching cameras this requires color correction not color grading the second is color grading color grading is a technique to make your footage look artistic or different or specific for a genre think like a crime show like it's all blue or adding certain undertones to make things look like a Marvel film which is teal and orange so with color correction we'll start here this little list here we're gonna find the correct white balance the RGB parade vectorscope luma values that all be within the the lumetri panel which will open up then we'll go to luma values show how to balance those properly and then go to saturation and then there's a tool called HSL secondary which you can look at skin tones with this seems very technical and it's actually very simple once you break it down into steps so we'll start with the first step which - which is to find the luma tree panel someone do this out of the way here now let's go to window within premiere and look for luma tree scopes so there's gonna be a panel here it'll be within this top bar by default I'm if you are lost you can click through these tabs on the Metra scopes is what it's called it may only show up with a singular preset for example the vector scope or a variety of other ones like the RGB parade or perhaps the histogram these are all very technical and require lots of you know studying to get them perfected but we're gonna just focus on the preset here if you go to the right if you right click inside the window and go to presets and then go to a vector scope y UV parade RGB waveform Y C it should be within your version of premiere after I believe 2017 let's go and select on that I still bring up this window that has three different small windows inside of it before we proceed we're going to right click once again we're going to go to waveform type and change it to luma so that's going to be the only change we have to really change and now we have basically found the lumetri panel and we've opened up the RGB parade the vectorscope and the luma values so we're gonna start talking about the RGB parade first so let's move this out of the way again the RGB parade is the image shown here in your program window or the selected clip which is down here in the timeline three times so this is the image here of all the reds all of the greens and all the blues and it's being squished together to show certain values within each one an easy simple way to show how this is working specifically is I can create a mask and I can just I can make the mask smaller don't worry about making a mask on your your computer but as I move it through the screen you should see these values change in this RGB red green blue parade based on what I'm looking at so if I were to go to something that is within the scene or move down the footage you'll see that the parade changes based on what's being shown so you can see I have the Reds here which your lower greens are in the middle and the blues this goes from 0 to 100% zero meaning there's no color 100 meaning it's a 100% saturated there can't be more color added in real life nothing is a hundred percent so you'll never reach that in footage unless it's a cartoon so looking at this footage here if we go to for example the face and the Hat we do see the greens spike a bit more because of the Hat and as we read this chart you can see that we have a very blue shifted image so red thread peaks at about 50 greens peaking at about 60 and blue is hitting about 70 so it looks like we have about 10 10 - attending your increments of 10 going up so that's easy to read what's wrong with your white balance so in order to find that correct white balance as we're looking at here the first thing is to do is to balance balance out the RGB parade so in order to do so we're going to go to the effects tab if you can't find it go here and reopen it and the effects options here and we're going to type in lumetri color this is the easiest way to get started there's also a limitary panel that they've built into premiere I'm you can drag and drop it onto your footage or you can double click if the footage that art is already selected that will make it go into the effects controls or you can see the effect has now been added I'll go ahead and and just remove this mask really quick you scroll down here and here's our lumetri color so everything is listed out let's make things smaller here lumetri color is here we have some masking options then we have these options here below as they go down people get a lot of different techniques to approach color correction I'm color correction is pretty straightforward we're going to first fix our white balance like we'd seen here I want to use these three these three values to do so so the first one is always the RGB parade we can see globally here and the full image shown that our reds greens and blues are all shifting and you can see has the whole environments being shown there's a lot more blue and you're saying that this is the image you can see that she's in the center here and there's there's a lapse of colors there that are common with the street you can see the street here and these points on the loom entry panel here and and there's a very there's variety of things that show it and as you move through the footage you can see the panel change as the camera moves so you can see that it's reading out in real time what we need to fix what we need to change and an off the bat I know my white balance is not balanced because it's too blue and it's too green and there's enough red red so within basic correction you can twirl this down as you come down into the basic correction the first thing you can change are these called input Lots don't use Lutz on color correction color correction is clip by clip it's not meant to be a global change unless you had a controlled studio environment with all the same cameras all shooting in a certain color profile so let's are not what you want to use below that we have white balance do not trust the white balance selector unless you have a color card if you have a official color card go for it and select a white area in your scene if you click on this and select an area that you think should be white if I click right now it'll make the footage look you have the appearance of correctness but it won't be exact it'll be an estimation based on the white that I selected on that bus it does look closer and better this is sometimes a good place to start to get a gauge of what you're working with but you can see the values are not quite balanced so that's just a kind of automatic approach a lot of people like that a technique I I don't tend to go towards that because it does not give you an accurate read so below here we're going to go through and we're going to adjust a few variables to make sure that's easy to do and we're going to just sort are called luma values and those are going to be here in the second point here and illumine ected to the RGB parade so if you see the RGB parade these are colors being represented which are red green and blue which are from your camera sensor down here below we change this waveform preset to luma because luma is going to be showing us whites and blacks to whites so any value of light and the reason this is important is as we adjust the luma values it's going to affect the exposure of the reds greens and blues so first of all now that we understand we're working with we have the red greens and blues are going to balance and we have the luma values we're going to adjust to make sure that the footage looks correct so we'll dive into our balancing and then our luma values okay so if below the eyedropper there's a temperature in tint now temperature is the global setting for the the amount of reds to Blues you're in you're introducing into this footage you can see you could twirl this down you can use a bar I tend to like to do things by dragging and hovering hovering and dragging over this and you get a live readout on the footage as you shift it now as you can see as I drag this left to right if I go down and values I go to more blue if they go right I add more reds and our introduce more res into the scene and you can see them going back and forth and I can see what's occurring here on the monitor one thing to note is your monitor is most likely not color accurate these these values are a hundred percent correct based on what it's showing you your monitor is showing you an interpretation through the software and hardware that's available and you're on your current screen and there are screens that cost you know thousands of dollars apple's released one that has a stand this at thousand dollars and they have very accurate colors nom and you pay for it but if you want to read these scopes this way you can get similar colors and experience with without the huge budget so first of all wording go look at our values here and find a happy medium between the red screens and blues here across the street you can see them here and we're gonna kind of keep playing with this dial until we get them balanced so as I'm watching this I'm not looking at the image I'm watching the values here I want it to fall looks like we have a collection of points here from 40 to 60 and that's pretty pretty standard across all of these as I look here it looks like our Reds are very strong our Blues are very strong our greens are falling a little bit so that is where tint comes in tint plays with the green channels and moves the other channels up and down so it's kind of like a slider that goes on the sides in the middle so as I move tint you can see it moved them back and forth she has it it goes up and down so tint will give us the ability to balance the greens and the Reds even more than what they were before so as I'm moving back and forth here and I and I tweak these ever ever so slightly and I add one to two value the value points for per adjustment you should start to see this becoming more and more level now no no image that has color in the scene and any camera is gonna have a perfectly level um flat profile unless you're shooting in a flat color profile I believe this was on a gh4 shooting in the natural setting and I think it's a rec.709 color space so things he shouldn't have to worry about too much but you can see here my temperature I set to 75 and my tint is negative 6 so I'm going to go ahead and and duplicate this footage really quick by holding option selecting it and moving it and I'm going to look at this really quick and see what happens when I do the eyedropper technique so I'm gonna go ahead and delete I'm gonna reset the elementary color here by clicking the reset effect I'm gonna I drop what I think should be white and look at our values so in this automated clip red major on the right to show a comparison it looks like it's 63 points 67 point three and negative 10.1 we get any if we're getting a very balanced looking image I mean I'd say this is more than acceptable but we do know that it's not perfectly balanced based on based on our RGB parade and the adjustments we've done so if I go over here the other clip it almost looks the same but if we look at our values we're getting 67 point three and negative ten point one and we're interesting a little bit more red and that's due to the K the nature of the cameras sensor that's something that you'll have to learn as you use your camera make sure you're following what looks good on your camera and also it looks good on your final output um to what your device you're sending it to so on this screen I have to trust that it looks good enough based on how I've calibrated it and it will look different on every screen so they move back and forth this footage I couldn't cut I'm close to here so we can kind of see a similar somewhere seen here you can see that the the values are almost the same but this one does look a little bit too blue still so if you look here you can really see let make it fullscreen here you can only see that the colors are starting to look natural they're looking more normal like things that you'd see in real life versus this which does look a little bit more blue you can see that there's a little bit of a haziness to the scene so once again this this sorry this does look balanced you're seeing colors you'd see normally anywhere any day and then this scene looks a little more blueish and that's that automated adjustment so I tend to avoid that that setting apparently LexA wants to get on the video the other thing to do that's nice to show kind of what's happening is you can turn the effect on and off globally and you can see what's occurring with your adjustments so as it's off you can see this very far shift to blue looks very very very like old and looks like this in the morning if I turn on the effect looks like the regular time of day it would have been shot in so you're saying that that's that's shifting a lot of the colors and they're all present still I'm not losing any and they're all within these scopes so now that we've gotten that balanced and the RGB parade the luma values is what we're going to be using next to ensure that the exposures are correct and that's going to be going through these five steps which is exposure White's highlights shadows and then blacks so once again without what we've currently done which is just two adjustments so far which has just been temperature and tint so we've done nothing but temperature and tint to now and that's given us a very acceptable image to work with you never want to start adjusting values of things until you've gotten colors balanced first because they will shift a lot as you adjust luma values which is whites and blacks so and we don't want to give us lots of weird colors at the very end to have to fix and move backwards another fun thing to do with the footage if you wanted to run a mask you can click the mask option it'll create one you can kind of see a little window through what you've what you've done and see how different it looks you can see that as I move this around you can kind of see how the bus goes from this what looks like should be the white color to a color that would reflect off of the street and off of the building which was a Remis a beige color not actually that white you're seeing that these these colors are very very accurate really relative to the the initial image we had so I'm gonna delete that mask and the next we're going to do sorry I keep bringing this back in so we can stay on track here is luma values okay so within this down below we have what's called tone so we've gone through basic correction which is two settings you need to worry about temperature intent within tone we have exposure contrast highlights shadows whites and blacks they're not an order of importance or operation they're based on luma values and how they change um the first one that you change to get a global adjustment to get things started is the exposure this is usually what you you set in camera this is basically giving you a shift in this chart here to see how to get it BETT to a more balanced state as you can see we have a zero we have a hundred and then we have values above and below and this is helpful to see if your colors are clipping and clipping colors or losing over exposing your underexposing is something you really want to avoid when you're color correcting footage especially if you're being paid to do it you don't want to lose data cuz all this is data that you could keep so let's go ahead and do exposure whites and highlights first okay so within tone here exposure I tend to only increase exposure by 0.1 to 0.5 percent at a time reason being as I try to move this this pack this big packed groupings of pixels which is represented here of this image up slowly to see until I get to a healthy point in the middle and the middle is 50 so I'm gonna go I'm gonna start shooting for everything to appear towards that 50 range right now it's definitely dark I'm for what I'm trying to do so I'm going to go to exposure 0.2 I'm going to change it again point 5 I'm gonna go 0.6 go to go 0.7 and I like where point-7 s going looks like we've reached the 50 to 60 we have a lot of lot of legroom still and a lot of overhead to work with so our exposure is given us space to start moving these pixels up into that into that value up towards to a hundred so now with without that adjustment if we go back to 0-2 0.7 you're seeing a very very like a very subtle change but it's giving you enough information to start working with the values in between otherwise you'd be stretching the footage much further and giving you a lot more contrast and giving that really ugly video look that's really harsh so now that we have that had a healthy point we're going to be going to the whites and the highlights so we've done exposure now we're doing whites and highlights okay so the whites it's interesting how the whites and the highlights play off each other I'm gonna go ahead and do some extreme changes here by dragging to the right the whites move all the white values in the footage up so they all increase at once you can see that as you go up you can start making them hit that line so see watch this line here as I go up to a hundred and fifty they no longer are being exposed or being clipped and you can see the RGB parade stretching out and becoming more and more and more red let in less green less blue that's because we're exposing more of those whites the tap that's happening in between so what I do with with the highlights with whites as I reset that to zero I generally go up by five at a time so five let's go to ten fifteen twenty twenty-five and generally when you think about highlights think about the range of 70 to 90 that's kind of where those highlights should sit if you break this into thirds from zero to 100 that's how you kind of think about these different values so they kind of occupy one third of this graph each so I'm going to go ahead and give us more I think thirty is a good place to start and that gives us a little bit more spread on the whites now we can start working in the the highlights so highlights is up here and this moves the pixels a little bit further without changing their RGB values as much so if we go to highlights I am simplifying this quite a bit to make this easy I do this by usually 5 at a time as well so go 5 and you can see as I'm moving up I'll do an extreme one here it brings them up together but doesn't stretch them out so that's helpful if you're getting to a point where you're liking the color correction direction you're going so I'm gonna go back down where I was I was it was at 10 to 15 and I'm watching my my luma chart here I'm making sure this is staying on point 25 let's go to 30 okay so it looks like we have pretty good coverage here we have we have some some areas in the footage that are starting to approach that hundred and in this 70 range we have to remember this is the road the road shouldn't be 100% white if we look at our footage here it should be gray it should be amid a mid-tone it's if you look at all the different values in this image you have you have whites on this clock you have Gray's which are middle-of-the-road then you have this black handbag which is dark so now that we've gotten this spread out with the three first steps which is exposure whites and highlights the next thing we're going to work on is shadows and blacks and this is pretty straight forward shadows and blacks shadows is here blacks is here and with shadows I tend to go up or down depending on what is wrong with the footage right now it looks like it's all still pretty and centralized here we're not quite getting a lot of overhead and the mid-tones below the street here and it looks like we have we have some good black values but we're missing a lot of looks like the mid-tones throughout this area so shadows can come up in this case and we're looking at a lot of food a lot of information below so I'm gonna bring it up by five to ten at a time let's do ten fifteen and you're seeing all these middle mid sections which is shadows is all that midsection move up let me go twenty twenty-five thirty and I'm just watching the subtly move forty you never want to do really intense large adjustments at once because you can lose a lot of a lot of good a good color information and information in general now I've gotten this move up to fifty and I look at my chart here I'm seeing a lot of good coverage in the center but our blacks are really lacking it's gonna be a washed out image if you just look at the luma values so see this twenty to twenty to forty here very sparse so you can see that we moved a lot of good values up in the background but the foreground remember this is one plane of color correction we're doing currently we're not doing multiples I'm gonna bring down and compromise a little bit those mid-tones to keep this foreground a little little punchier and better so I'm gonna bring these shadows back down I would say by five to ten times so it's do forty five forty let's do thirty five thirty there we go we're filling in that gap a little more we've got more coverage in here and we're watching those those segments of the image and and since this footage is in a city we can kind of assume what things should look like to to the naked eye this this is not just a science you have to be a little bit artistic about how you make your choices but as you can see we our initial RGB parade gave us a lot of options to fix these colors initially we can now see we're starting to get a shift and that's because we're because we're exaggerating and showing more of the data the luma values and vectorscope are we're gonna be talking about the vectorscope in just a moment here explaining what's doing but the luma values are giving us a lot of information about this image and how its interacting with with the data we have within it the pixels on the luma values specifically we've worked with quite a bit and the exposure White's highlight shadows and blacks you can see we have a pretty acceptable image I would say we're gonna have to go back and fix this shift that's happened with those values being changed and we are seen we're getting almost peaking but we can tell it's not peaked here in the luma values on the Reds so we're gonna go back and do some slight adjustment here on the RGB parade and that's going to be up here and those initial basic Corrections temperature and tint so the more we go towards 100 the more red it gets the less the less red it gets so I'd say 75 is where we are happy with before you want to go down so I'm gonna start bringing it down by five to ten at a time to see what happens as we move it down some ago to 70 and go to 65 and all of a sudden we're seeing our RGB parade red green blues start to line up more looks like 66 I'm gonna bring it up just a tiny bit 62 and it looks like 62 is giving us actually I bet 61 this seems crazy but 61 looks like it's perfect and we're seeing more Reds on this this side of the spectrum here through our blues and that is likely due to the type of background we're working with here but if you look at our road our road is still set fairly balanced these these edges here on these two or so I'm gonna actually bring looks like our tint bring the tint the greens up a little bit so I'm going to go see your dis singular singular in increments of time here so negative 5 let's go 7 definitely negative 5 and as you do these you have to you have to compare values quite a bit I'm to get to a point where the footage looks as good as you can get it negative 3 and it looks like right here I'm getting very good coverage on those 3 and are also getting good coverage on our luma values and I'm gonna do a quick comparison here on and off and you can see how much we've spread out the data and spreading it out think of it like you're spreading jelly on toast or something you're really getting more information across across the plane and and the more you have the more contrast is going to be because more there's more dynamic range between the hundred-percent whites and the zero values of black and you can see that we have a very flat blue image and then we have a very very not high contrast but a balanced image that's looked like it looks like it's sitting around those the range of 60 to 80 with our mid-tones and the 30 to 50 our blacks are down below and you notice I haven't touched blacks yet because that's the very last step I wanted to want to tweak all that's going to do is make our black values a little bit deeper so blacks is here you can see it's the last step of all of them I find it's the easiest to pull down blacks because there there aren't very much many colors in black so doesn't really affect your red greens and blues so I usually go down by singular negative increments at a time negative one and I'm gonna go down I think a second see this approaching zero I'm gonna go down to a negative one point two and that is very close to where I'd like to be negative sorry I did not put it in right didn't even enter that negative one point two two negative one point three okay yeah so I'm gonna expand this you can see it better this has been pretty much perfectly spread out and balanced for this image you can see we have your her standing in the center here this would be this glob of information here then on the left and right we have the streets we have some really good coverage on these scopes also by the way this the number next to number one the key it's called a tilde it makes things fullscreen if you just press it on your keyboard it's a nice trick but we can see our image here is looking pretty nice if I go to full resolution I'm you're seeing that let's just play back resolution but we're seeing that we're getting pretty good coverage on this footage and once again turning it on and off really helps show what you've changed and and one thing that could happen you notice that all the interface in Premiere is gray this is so you can kind of get a neutral gray and reset your eyes and then look at it again as you stare at the image you will start to get your eyes all tweaked and it won't look correct so as crazy as it sounds you have to reset your eyes and then look again you've done your luma adjustments and your red green and blue adjustments so right now if we were to go through and play through the footage this is applying at the entire clip you can see we have what looks like a really good shot of natural lit you know City City footage and this is with and you can see this this luma chart going absolutely bonkers as we move that pan see how it's it's moving we get all these values going but nothing's clipping nothing is leaving the footage it's all being retained and it looks natural know that with it off on off great so now that we found we've found we've done the first steps for correction here witcher's the RGB parade limit values and then vectorscope will get into here in just a second there should be a luma values not Pumbaa values we've done luma values we've done exposure White's highlights shadows and blacks that goes from top to bottom it just gives you the ability to take your footage bring it up and then pull it down makes it a lot easier for the saturation this is where I save saturation for the very end of the correction process for the core correction process and that's the Leslie vector scope so let's go ahead and dive into vector scope here and I should have put that below of luma but whatever okay so within vector scope here this this is one of the most intimidating looking scopes that that I think exists in videos because it's it's a circle and it has these X's through it and it's it's got this weird fence around the vectorscope it's it's fairly old it's just a method for looking at color color values and saturation as you can see on the red green blue parade here these colors mix together to make more colors so in between red and blue is magenta in between blue and green is cyan in between green and red is yellow and that's how you get all the colors you see in a video whenever you're looking at video this this spread here is essentially these luma values being pushed in this three-dimensional 360 not three-dimensional with 360 type of environment and this little line here is what is called broadcast safe or legal to get your colors to a hundred percent so anything past this that's a value like this becomes clipped it won't be shown it won't it won't export really as anything more than a hundred percent so if you exceed this parameter here it will it will according to your color space which you're working in and will change the shape of this so I think this is rec.709 color space so it looks not perfectly circular because these screens that show it aren't giving you all 100% of the equal values of these colors if you have a higher-end screen it would be larger and it showed different values I'm so we're gonna bring this back down as we look at the footage here we can see that we have the saturation varying quite a bit inside the vectorscope so as we watch this these core these core values here are kind of moving back and forth you can see things moving in out here and down here inside the luma tree panel you have saturation as the last step and depending on how you shot your footage your camera will interpret color differently this was shot in what's called natural on the Lumix gh4 it's supposed to give you close to normal saturation levels if you shoot in a log format or like a V log or s log or or flat cine DS what they call it and pin lumic's you're gonna have to add quite a bit of saturation to bring these values here towards that fence and you don't want them to quite reach the fence and be going spilling over let's say we're almost in a lot of areas going too far after we've adjusted our luma values so I would say we can bring this down by five or ten at a time so being this 90 you can see that this is starting to look less cartoony and more film like and that's that's not because I'm making it flatter it's because I'm bringing it down to what looks like real life or look looks like reality so if I bring it to a tea you can start seeing it's getting kind of a washed out filtered look and these aren't things we want to do in color correction this is not what we want to do we don't want to bring things into this creative space this is all about getting things right so you're bringing down to 50 that's half the saturation we have a very very few levels here being shown beyond the 50% range so that means that at a hundred percent that it was left at and this particular shot it's fine where it is if you were to add up go up five at a time you start seeing it balloon out as you're watching the vectorscope here as they bring this up you can see it start to move into this really unnatural space it kind of bloats out and as it mushrooms out like that you can see how terrible the footage starts to look and it's just showing you how how far beyond the normal values the eyes would see and the screen would show are being pushed to so this is like where that a pop filter and Instagram comes from is they're they're pushing the saturation beyond what the luma values should be allowing it to be so illumines blacks and whites but the reds greens and blues become far too exposed you start getting this cartoony footage right and sometimes introducing a little more saturation can bring out the for example this looks a little kind of dark and gloomy if we brought it to let's say 110 saturation we probably have a nice saturated image or even 112 that would give us a little more in a visual interest and dynamic colors here to work with and not be too too cheesy looking so it is a fine line the saturation dial do not go more than five increments at a time because you really can make your footage look far worse and do not trust your monitor this is going to tell you the truth like if I trust my monitor here and look at this I feel like it looks good here but it looks like it's a little too far here I can take the chance I could try export see how it looks if I'm clipping a few Reds which maybe the bikes looks like and a couple other things back here the lights those don't have much information there anyways so I would leave it you can see where it's clipping on the Reds and the greens here which is right here so use caution with the saturation because it does get out of control superfast and more saturation doesn't mean better footage and less doesn't mean more more artsy we're going for correct footage color correction okay so the last thing we're going over here is called HSL secondary this is a more advanced approach to color correction DaVinci Resolve obviously better color correction but if you don't have you know training in it if you haven't learned it yet or if your employer makes you use Lumet tree scopes you know this is easy to use for the most part so HSL secondary is down here below and and before we get that really quick I didn't adjust contrast because we should be able to adjust most of our values with the luma adjustments with the exposure so let me pull that back up here with these exposures we did so with the exposure White's highlight shadows and blacks that naturally pulls your footage out into an healthy spread if you do saturation first which is the lazy way of doing it you would get a very different look and I'm gonna go and duplicate this really quick just to show you what happens when you when you push when you do the automated approach so I'm gonna reset this back to what we had before I'm going to do the lazy select something that's kind of white I'm not I'm going to just take my contrast it's my exposure I'm just gonna go up by 0.5 at a time oh I'm getting pretty close this is normally what happens in color correction you get you get to a point where you feel good about it you all go down to 1.1 again right there and I need to make this spread out quite a bit because I don't have enough data so you start adding five on this ten and you get up to you give to twenty and thirty you look at 30 you're starting to see that I've got all this nice crispy saturation and this is where people start selling like nuts that look really really um like gritty and they don't look good this is not color correction this is not the way to get your footage to look correct and as you keep going up five oh one point one I got it um these start becoming irrelevant you start looking at these other values you go why do I have to shift this what is this doing I don't know and you start going like this and just kind of going up and down and watching the image and not watching your scopes you get a really really different looking and this is not correct so you get a very different looking shot here that looks vastly vastly different way more video looking and less natural than the actual correct image and if you were giving this to somebody to do post work with they would not be happy with this if you gave somebody on this footage to work with to do more post-production with they would have to go in and swish it back down and fix it so it's not so punchy and and the difference here is pretty stark as you start looking at you know the ways blacks are being interpreted in and naturally the eye is drawn to higher contrast but we're not going for what's called color grading we're going for color correction and that's that's the key difference here is you're seeing the bus being a proper exposure you're not seeing things being clipped that shouldn't be clipped and if you're not doing colorist work don't don't try doing it in your correction so make sure this is correct don't do this just just try to stay away from getting into looks and feels and focus on the Scopes and the vectorscope and the luma values stay and stay inside the inside the lanes stay in the box and that'll make your your post-production process easier so now we have that figured out I'm gonna go and bring this down to where we have some skin tones so this isn't always a step for color correction but usually more often than not you're shooting people or images of people and that requires skin to be at the right value and and it's hard to know when skin is at the right value or not so I'm going to bring this back so you can kind of see where it is so within the Lulu metric color panel I'm going to come down and open up HSL secondary this is just simply a sampling it's a king tool it's lumetri scopes and unless you key certain colors to figure out what's going on with them and tweak just those colors um it's what resolves really don't well-known for adobe making an attempt to make it possible which is which is nice so if you select the select colored eyedropper this is this is where you do want to do an eyedropper because you don't know what color you're looking for so if you select it and go for a general skintone I'll I think um generally well-exposed so I think like cheeks Chin's for heads noses tend to have a lot of shine so I tend to go for the cheek right here you just kind of select you can see as you drag and click and drag it starts looking on these bars here below on the left of the screen what color you're selecting yeah so you move it across you can see it moving to different values off of the skin that you can select any color you want but since we're trying to make sure the skin tones are correct we're just staying on the skin tones I'm gonna leave it there and you can add a color um this can add a little bit more skin tone if you click and drag and just kind of refine around it you can add some more of those neutral less Pink's looks like we have some White's in there and now we've selected it looks like all these crazy sliders on these three channels which is H s and L here and it's creating what's called a mask a mask is a is basically something hiding footage behind it and revealing only what's being affected so right now we don't know what's being affected if you click on show mask it will show you what's being affected it kind of gives you this weird effect where it removes everything else and it shows on the luma values on the vectorscope on the RGB parade only the colors you have selected and as you can see where we we're getting a good coverage of the skin tones but looks like we're missing a little bit here inside here in these refinements these were finding tools right here they have a general setting and they a fine adjustment setting I generally tend to go with the outer setting first and I go out and in just to see what kind of spread we get on the skin tone and generally you want to get as much skin as possible and little of the environment as possible so as you move it forward and back you can I have to just play with each one and this is a little bit harder to teach and there are better ways to do it but this is a fast way to get your colors correct especially skin tones before moving on to color grading we're getting we're getting pretty good values here I'd say those other values in the background are essential components there are ways to mask these and not do them with multiple layers of this effect we're just keeping it simple today looks like this is pretty close to what I want to work with the hair is not skin but it is in that yellow and that Reds that red range you can see the Reds being pretty high up here okay let's bring that back a tiny bit let's read this out and then back and as you as you refine it you will find that you can get much closer to what is ideal as you keep shifting the the the sliders and this does take quite a bit of time to get it just right this is where DaVinci Resolve is is much more powerful but yeah this is good enough all right so after you've refined those those parameters you can see we have the skin selected if you go to denoise increments of five at a time tends to get you close to what you need to be at to get rid of speckle in the footage and this is where if you have a 10-bit camera or a 12-bit camera like at black magic I'm camera you have a lot more options for color correction um we have an 8 bit we have 8 bit footage here so it's going to have less information and that makes it a little bit harder to get rid of noise and things like that so and most of us do have 8 pit cameras because they're the only ones most people can afford and then blur here I tend to go up by increments of 1 because the blur can make things look better or worse pretty fast looks like that's too much so let's go back down to 3 - yes - 1.3 doing for that one good okay so that's that's been unmasked out you can see that we have the skin tones we do have some noise here that's from the 8 bit compressed footage it's not it's not the highest quality of footage so we're not seeing the highest quality of mask selection here once again you can do more with with more advanced software if you need to now this right here now that we have this selected and we can see our skin tones the vectorscope shows what's called the skin tone line that's between the yellow and the red every human being on the planet shares this line because your blood pumps through your veins light bounces through it and off back to you to the camera and that's that's what this line represents is skin tones there are going to be very various amounts of different types of skin but they're all going to be approaching this line and usually they stay more towards line than away from it so I'd say as we look at this right now we know for the fact that the values and the red greens and blues are shifted very far to the red and these shouldn't be balanced it should be cascading down which means we need less red and less blue and we'd have it be kind of like a stair set coming down so I'd like to see this come down this come down and that come down and our luma values looks like it's is the overall exposure of the face within that that's 60 range 50 to 70 is a safe place to keep it you can see that we have 50 to 70 here and that's where the face currently is so it's exposed in a very very healthy position if you moved it up is start lookin too bright so let's go back to our view here as we scroll down past these we have these correction dials or wheels this represents the vectorscope in in a in a tangible sense so you can see this here and I can move this dot from the center it'll move these values so they move this you can see the the values change real time as I move the dot around so you can see I can move it around in circle on the vectorscope because I'm following the same same exact parameters that are above its meters and Myriam edges of sorts so if I want to bring this closer as a global adjustment towards the skintone I just bring it over towards the line and that's introducing more greens and looks like less Reds and then more blues as I come down so you can see that gets us fairly close and this is more of an adjustment less of a scientific readout but that that feels better just with a global adjustment if you're unhappy with with where it's going and gets all spread out you'll want to keep those really that really close together you want a really wide fan I'm you have finer adjustments here and shadows and highlights which can further adjust the luma values within those to basically get the skin tone to be almost exactly where you want to be and this is we're having a really really nice monitor on the $40,000 monitors they give you 100% accurate colors you can sit there and stare at it and really decide what looks best and use your vector scope to make sure it's lining up and once again since we have cheap footage and cheap monitor we have to kind of trust the spectroscopes giving us a good read these these don't matter quite as much if you do are getting more if you are getting more advanced into looks and feels with certain colors bouncing off walls and lights like fluorescents this is where you can go in and remove ugly greens from fluorescent lights and add blues no sorts of things um we still need a little more blue down I believe based on what I'm seeing here so as we come into this area the temperature once again is a fine adjustment it's a very basic adjustment I'm you can add blue or remove blue by going up or down so if I go towards blue that's left if I go towards red that's right I'm like a hundred percent would be really red if I reset it I go negative 100 sorry here negative 100 he goes very blue and that's where you get these a really crazy skin color things and if I turned off the mask to show you what's happening here it's like a zombie right and that's that's not what you want so I'm gonna turn it back on bring it back to zero and I'm going to bring it down based on what I'm seeing on the vectorscope here and only bring it down by you know negative point negative 5 point 5 negative 1 that looks pretty close here these tint contrast tint is also for green I'm just like it was above this is a this is a fine tuning adjustment here you can go up if I move it back and forth you can see the values begin to shift even more and that's more just to line up your as you see the vectorscope to see how it's fanning out here you don't want it to fan you want to be a line of skin tone and that's we can see it's almost like a three-dimensional object fanning forward and back if you get it lined up straight it's usually as correct as you can get it so that's at 11 I'd say 10 9 let's do 8 7 7 right there ok and then saturation and sharpening you have to be careful with those I don't recommend you use those on 8-bit footage even 10 bit scary with with these cheaper easier tools to use I would say saturation if the skin looks weird and still way too saturated moving towards that line you don't want it to go up to the line if you have saturation saturated skin that's over 100 it starts looking like a pumpkin or starts looking like a ghost so you can see that moving up to 100 and back down it's very nice to see that happening on on the skintone line though which means you are getting proper skin tones even at these crazy values so um generally having it 100 maybe adding a little bit if you feel like the skin is not standing out enough 5 increments at a time just to give an example if I turn off the mask you can see that the skin tone and I can change this so it's active and not active right here and this this little tab we're going from a very pink and bluish color to a very correct orangish yellowish color and that's that's just correcting skin tones that is dependent on makeup and lighting environments but generally speaking you can get that pretty perfect by doing these small adjustments here there's very slight adjustments and now if we go through and play this footage you can see any at any point if I turn the mask on to show what's happening here you can see you can see the mask basically showing only the skin tones and how they were adjusted and that's it's a really really handy to have especially if you have footage shot indoors with florescent lights because then you can fix most the skin tones and the white balance with this tool so if we start from beginning here we played through the footage we're getting very very good values on our watching it in real time here now this looks I think as good as it can get with this camera and these these tools we've tweaked here so if I go ahead and just drop this in this mask and give us a good split so we can kind of see like a this is just more of a demonstration here and I know this is a long long video but it's kind of helpful to kind of follow along and not be rushed through you know rush through the steps so here we go this is really sloppy but we're just gonna watch it with the hard hard line here you can see the difference in the footage in real time I count how much that changed as we come back here I can kind of I can even use this as an example here on the skin tones right here and the environment let's go ahead and select that mask and move around and show you just how much and you'll see this in behind the scenes footage they have a color correction past as where it comes through and it shows before and then after you know they kind of keyframe it in but this is giving us you can see that the Loomis copes how much moves out and spreads out that footage it just makes it nice and rich it gives you those colors that you think you always ask how are people getting these colors out of their cameras well it's all usually in the data as long as it's exposed properly that's a whole different type of video but it's nice nice to have these colors at the right value so it looks like real life and that can completely change how good something looks just by perceiving how good it was corrected and your camera is only a tool and so is premiere or any color correction software but doing doing these things will give you way higher better results than buying a brand new camera brand new lens which which do contribute to the footage and make it look better but this is really where where you separate yourself from amateur you know hobbyists to professional working professionals in the in the industry and not saying this is an industry standard but this is definitely a start to get you into the right direction so you can see that we have the before and the after here really giving you a nice split and how much that can that could change and this footage is not the best footage and that's that's what I'm intending is basically showing that this is noisy it's not it's not 6k it's just 4k but it is giving you these really nice you know if you could the bus right here there is so much change happening even in the building it's it just it's really it's really reassuring to see that it's it's correct and then using our scopes to see that it is indeed correct is also helpful to to verify things look right so I turn this off here we have that correct okay there we go and that is color corrected footage so generally when I finished Clarke correcting I'll rename the effect like shot a or whatever it is you've done if you if you have more scenes that were shot with the camera in this environment in this color and need to change the settings on the camera you could copy and paste this let's say I had more footage and it was a different different part of the scene let's say it's like down here and I'll just turn off the warp stabilize here because I was working with it currently the effects on let's say this was a different shot from the same camera I could take this effect and copy it select the other clip I want to fix I can paste it and that will give me the same exact values that were I'd use to fix the footage previously so now you're seeing that this footage here has also been you know proper exposed and corrected and let's turn on the masks you can kind of see you know the different values here and they've scopes and then if you go to the metri scopes trying to mask you can see how much it changes the footage as you look at it and this this being closer to the camera you know we're see we're seeing a lot more light bouncing back towards us now and that is changing our exposure quite a bit so we're seeing that more skin tones and you know they do look a little bit red I'm wouldn't she's closer so that's something where even if you have a base to start from you'd want you go in and even make it so I take that and I would back towards the blue more so I go 50 and then maybe 45 48 I'm so very very minor adjustment there to get and no it's because you're so close to the camera that's that's what's causing that that variance in color correction um it's just the physical distance from the camera changes changes the exposure so if that off we don't have two Clips here that look like they're correct if you look at this then you have that right there everything's been color corrected as good as I can get it and it was better people out there that are better at it but this really is like a tried and true way of getting your colors pretty much spot-on proper exposure does help if you have terrible values of color here and you can't install clipped off in the top at the bottom you will have a harder time getting things back because it doesn't exist so it is nice to know that's possible and then nobody have these two I'm gonna show just really quick I swear this is almost over but I'm gonna show you that the right here color grading so we've gone through all these steps one through four if you follow these in order you'll always get a good exposure and a good color correct image color grading it requires an adjustment layer it goes over all the footage you've corrected to what you want to be and there really aren't any rules like I say there's loose and people will teach you techniques now this is kind of like painting I'm you can paint properly or you can paint incorrectly this is the painting of the video world so if you create an adjustment layer which isn't here make it the same size as the video bring it into a track above all the footage extend it so it's above all the footage and it keeps going beyond or ends at your final last clip you can add a limit riaf echt to this layer and it will not affect these clips this acts as think of it like um putting like red or green or any color of plastic a clear plastic wrap over a sheet of paper the sheet of paper is white you're putting something over the paper and it's making it a different color but that's not its true color so the color corrected image is always right and the the color grading is always wrong on purpose so if you go into here and do the effects controls we've added the effect here the metric color this is where you can go into things like creative and you can do faded looks you can do all these different you can basically go in here and just try to break the footage you can sharpen it you can add a faded feel you can make it more contrast II a lot of people like to make things look like from the 90s or something or or whatever is going on whatever is popular at the time and you know this is looking more like a Instagram filter now the more I push it you have lots of tools in here that can be used within your color correction process but it can be used in color grading to to give you just these really interesting different looks that people sell and call Lots so like oh by my left pack that's they're basically just making something kind of like this that goes in something like this and then I want to make sure that the Reds don't show up at all or though so it's a that's a the greens I'm just I'm just basically showing you that you can tweak so many things in here and you can really pull really really interesting where you only have like one color showing I would stray away from this if you're learning I would just stick to only color correction because this is basically like photoshopping your footage it's really destructive if you're gonna export this and make this your final final correction now let's make it more let's make it warmer and you can see how much you can do you can push highlights a certain color and shadows a different direction and now this has been so vastly changed and just randomness to it you can see how different that looks at the filter you can see they degrade the the color grading is now bluish warmish bluish color and you can see how far the vectorscope has twisted and turned to get there and how it's added a slight saturation by the proper exposure so now if you look at this you know it looks it looks like some Instagram filtered video you know I do some dream sequence of some kind with lots of greens so definitely not not what I ever go for I like to get things correct and then just do very slight color grading adjustments um if it's a creative or narrative film more often that I'm trying to get footage to a proper adjustment and then maybe adding a little bit of flare and post and that that can all be dialed back with you notice at the overall saturation the stuff can be vastly less that's just a given example of color grading and obviously I'm not an expert at color grading I tend to focus on correct balanced images so now thanks for checking it out it's supposed to be helpful I know people are learning this all the time and it's hard if you don't if you're not being explained what's going on but make sure you just follow these steps in this order I'll put vectorscope below luma because it's it really is after that happens so if you follow these in this order um you will get to a very balanced image like we see here on the right that was shot incorrectly and it's been fixed and that's that's the intent with color correction color grading you can have fun with that but figure this out first and then figure out oh how to break it without breaking it so have fun with it and if you have questions I'll try to help you out as best I can some footage is not savable if you've shot it poorly so alright thanks for checking in

Channel: Jordan Gibby

Views: 45,381

Rating: 4.9528561 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: LRCgWKJHQ6E

Length: 62min 46sec (3766 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 06 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/CagSwag]

This is the shit I like.

Really want to improve my knowledge on color and audio as a videographer.

[u/leirtaedem]

Watching it right now, left a commment, this is really interesting ! Do you know any other tutorial for color correction, or did you learn by yourself ?