- Hey guys. My name is Matt Johnson
with whoismatt.com. And today I want to show you how to easily Color Grade SLOG3 footage in Premier Pro. And take it from looking like this, super flat and washed
out low contrast image, to this contrasty and
saturated beautiful image. Now before we jump into this, if you haven't watched my previous video all about how to film with SLOG3, I would highly recommend watching that. Because if you don't
film properly with SLOG3, it's gonna be significantly more difficult to color grade your footage
and make it look its best. Also, if you want to
save time color grading, I've created a set of
video presets for SLOG3, That you can use that will
give you a huge shortcut, and make your footage look awesome. I will link to those presets down below. Welcome to Premier Pro. I'm going to assume that you already know how to import your footage and edit it. So with these three clips on the timeline, we're going to pretend that
I already have them edited and they're ready to be colored. Let's now discuss what I
want to do with these clips. And in a broader sense, what is color grading? At its heart, color grading
is really the process of shifting and modifying
the colors in a film, to create a certain mood. Mood, I like that word, like a cow, mood. The colors you choose in your film, can really affect the emotional response that your audience will
have when they watch it. Speaking generally here, if you color grade your
film darker and more blue, that can make it feel
sadder and more tragic. Alternatively, if you
shift your colors warmer, and boost the saturation, this can make things feel
happier and more energetic. That's just the tip of the iceberg though. And you have virtually unlimited options as far as how you want your film to look. So it's really going to be up to you, and what kind of film
that you want to create. So with that underway, let's now talk about this
video that I'm editing. The first step of color grading is that you're going to
want to find your hero shot. This is going to be the shot that you're going to color grade first. And then you're gonna use
this shot as a baseline for color grading the rest of your clips in your film as well. You ideally want your hero shot to have a good variety
in color and exposure, in this shot which I have
chosen as my hero shot. You'll see that I have the
sun coming in over here, we've got shadows down here on the bottom, and also one of the most important things your hero shots should have is skin. That sounds weird. To clarify, if you have
people in your video, it's very important that your
hero shots include the people. So that way you can get a good idea of what their skin tones
look like as you color grade. You don't wanna end up
with your people having blue skin tones, like Smurfs
or green light the Hulk. Skin tones are really important. Side note, you're probably wondering
what's going on here. There's a couple kissing and there's a, are those donkeys? They are actually called Beer Burrows. And at this wedding that I was filming, the couple had these Burrows
come along for a photo shoot, and they have these little
baskets to carry beer in them. They're pretty awesome. Now let's go up here, and
make sure that you are in the color workspace for premiere, and over here on the right, you should see the Lumetri Color Panel. If you do not see this and
it does not look like this, go up to Window, Workspaces and
click Reset to Saved Layout, which will reload Premiere
back to this layout. Let's click through here and you'll see that you have Basic
Correction in creative curves, color wheels and match,
HSL Secondary, Vignettes. This can all look a little overwhelming but I have good news. We're really only gonna be
using three of these things. Basic Correction ,
Curves and Color wheels. Looking here at Basic Correction , SLOG3 can be intimidating to color grade. Especially if you're starting out. Because you look at it and it's this really flat, low
contrast, washed out image. And you start thinking,
well, here's my corrections, can I fix this? Maybe I can just increase the exposure. Nope. Okay. Let's just make it brighter or darker. Maybe not. Maybe I can bring up the highlights, and then bring down the shadows. And so it's like in looking
a little more contrasty, drop the blacks satin. It just, it doesn't look good. So I would not use the
Basic Correction tab at the start at all. Let's double click on these, which we'll reset them all
back to their defaults. And let's go down here to the Curves tab, which is really gonna be helpful. When it comes to color correction, Curves are one of your biggest friends. If you get one thing from this video, I want you to learn Curves , because they're really, really awesome. Curves will help you
how you're gonna change the contrast of your video clip. How dark and how light it is. And so looking over here,
you'll see we have RGB Curves, and we have a white dot, a
red, green, and a blue dot. RGB, if you've heard of that. This red, green and blue allow
you to change the contrast for these individual colors. But we want to change the contrast for all the colors in this shot. So we're gonna make sure
that white is selected, and down here we're gonna see there's this nice diagonal bar. And the way this bar works is that it lets you change the contrast, in darker and lighter
parts of your video clip. So going down here on this
bottom left part of the bar, you have your shadows, in the middle of the bar
you have your mid-tones and at the top you have your highlights. Don't worry. Here comes
some examples for you. Because once you see this,
you'll totally get it. Let's go here to the middle now, to our mid-tones right here in the center. And you'll notice that
whenever I mouse over it gives me a plus. So let's click here and
a little point appears, and I'm gonna start to drag this point up and as you'll see, the
image is getting brighter. Now let's go down here, to these shadows and I'm gonna click again and I'm gonna drag down, look we're bringing down the shadows, but these mid-tones here
are still staying up high. So the mid-tones are still brighter, but the shadows are getting darker. Let's go pretty dark here. And then let's go over
here to our highlights. We're gonna click again
and make another point. And if I bring the highlights up, you're gonna see the we're
starting to blow out things. Suddenly we're losing some sky detail, so let's dial this back
a bit down to about here. 'Cause I still wanna
see some of these clouds over here in the distance. Now with that done, I can go over here to my
effects controls here, and turn this off and on. We've already made this image
significantly more contrasty. Okay. We're making progress here. This is really awesome. Now how do you know when your
contrast is at a good point? Do you just eyeball it and say,
"Yeah, I think that's good?" No, you can get scientific about this. Go up here to the top left
to the Lumetri Scopes tab. What is all this Matt? There's colors. It's red. It's a rainbow? - What's happening with these waves? I don't know what's going on. Okay. Check this out. If I go over here and turn off the curves, by pressing this checkbox, suddenly these scopes
get squished down here. This scope is known as a Wave Form. And this is one of the ways that Premiere can tell how bright or
how dark your image is. On the left over here, you have numbers from zero up to 100, and you can think of zero as being the absolute pitch-black
darkest color that you can get. And 100 being super bright white where things start to get overexposed. Because I filmed this clip in SLOG3, all of the bright and
dark parts of this image, are all squished together to the middle. But let's go over here, and I'm gonna check this box again, and you'll see that this all spreads out. And as a visual example, if I go over here to
my point on the curves that controls my shadows, and I drag the shadows down, you'll see that these lines on
the left are getting darker, and they're getting really close to zero. If I drag them down too far you'll see that we're
losing all this visual data, that starts to look really videoy, and this poor Beer Burrow
here is completely dark. So if you're using this wave form scope, instead of you just eyeballing, hoping that your footage looks good. No, you can look at it here and say, "Oh this is getting too dark, I need to brighten it up a little bit." Or, "Oh, it's getting too bright, I need to darken it down." In this case, it's telling me that we're pretty good, but if I start to bring it up, you'll see that we're about to clip and I don't want my highlights to clip. So I'm gonna keep them down here just a little bit darker. If I drag the middle, you'll see that I'm adjusting
the middle of the scopes here. And I want things to be pretty bright about there looks good. All right. At this point, we've added the
contrast back into our image, but what about these colors? Everything's looking at early
blue and still washed out. Let's adjust that now. Close the Curves tab, and let's go down here
to color wheels and match and open that up. And what is this here? We have three circles, and it says shadows
mid-tones and highlights. That sounds familiar almost
like our curves had shadows, mid-tones and highlights. It's all connected. Go back here to color
wheels and match now. And let's start adjusting these colors. Just like with the curves, these color wheels are going to enable you to change the colors of
different parts of your image. In this case, let's
start with the mid-tone. So I'm gonna go over here to this plus, and I'm gonna click and
I'm gonna start to drag up and to the left. And you'll see here, if I let go, we have this
nice red up here, blue, green. So wherever I drag around, I got over to green suddenly Oh man, we're looking
super green and Hulk like. If I go up here to purple, we're looking more purple, Blue we're looking more blue. It's very easy to get carried away here. Key word with color grading is subtlety. So I'm gonna double
click to erase all that. I'm gonna drag up here to the left a bit, make this a bit warmer, we've got the sun coming in, we want that warmth. And then for our highlights,
if I adjust these, you're gonna see the highlights effect all of this white spot up here, the white donkey, et cetera. This was sunset. We want that golden sunset coming in. So I'm gonna go over here. I'm gonna bring these
colors up to about here. It's at this point that
I want you to think about what sort of color grades you want. Do you want to go darker and moodier? Do you want happier and brighter? You can do whatever you want. In this case because it's a wedding film, because I want to show this
couple being happy and vibrant, I'm gonna go for brighter colors. I'm gonna go for more saturation. I'm gonna go for more of a happy vibe. Speaking of saturation though, here this is still looking
a little de-saturated. So let's tweak that now, we're gonna close Color Wheels and we're going to go up here
to Basic Correction again. Remember Basic Correction, we tried it and it was terrible. Well, I love using Basic Correction as I'm reaching the end of
the color grading process, because now is the point where
I can make some little tweaks and really make the image pop. So let's go over here and
you'll see temperature. If I wanna make the
whole scene just slightly warm early out. Let's bump it up just to smudge, and still feeling washed out though. So let's go under the saturation and remember because
this was filmed in SLOG3. It is definitely de-saturated. So don't be afraid to go down here, and crank up your saturation to, don't want to go too crazy
or like that's like popping. No, we don't go that crazy. I find that 120 usually looks good. You can definitely go higher if you want. But I don't want to be overwhelming. I still want more of a
softer film, like look. So I think this looks good. Key thing to remember,
make subtle changes. Don't go super crazy. Subtlety is key and you'll get there. Well, let's play the shot back
here, and see how it looks. Not bad. Look at those little Burrows, love them all properly colored. So what's next? Well, you'll notice here that I have two other shots on the timeline. We finished the hero shot, but the great thing is that you
can now apply this hero shot to other shots on your timeline, and greatly speed up the
color grading process. So we're gonna go over
here to effect controls. I'm gonna click on Lumetri Color, I'm gonna press control
C because I'm on PC. You can press command C if you're on a Mac to copy the Lumetri Color. And let's go over here
to this second clip, you'll see it's the groom, he's getting dressed for the wedding day. With this new clip selected
I'm gonna press control V and he's looking real orange. Don't worry. We're gonna fix this. Here's the good news. This shot is already very contrasty and turning it off and on here. It's already making a significant step in the right direction. But we're going way too warm. So I'm gonna look over here
with the curves section, and let's pull up our scopes here too. And you're gonna see that over here on the bottom of this scope, we are way too deep in the shadows, mostly due to his jacket. So I wanna bring these
shadows up just a little bit. So we don't lose all of that data. That's one great thing about a SLOG3. As long as you film with it correctly, you can pull things and push
things as much as you want. So I'm gonna go to about right here, 'cause this is where I
start to see on the scopes, that the blacks are starting
to get crushed to it. So we still have a nice shadow roll-off on the groom's jacket. With that let's also look
over here with the mid-tones, which are going to cover his skin tones, and let's make him a little bit brighter. And then for the highlights, I think the highlights
look good where they are. They're getting pretty
close to being overexposed. It's at a good level. Now let's do something
about these warmer colors. Notice that whenever I
brought up the mid tones, some of those warmer colors went away. Because whenever you brighten the image, colors are gonna get more washed out. So let's go over here to
Basic Correction first, because remember I had
changed the color temperature. I'm gonna double click on this, and that's gonna cool it off
a bit, helping things out. Let's go down here to
color wheels and match. And remember the last shot was the sunset. So we don't need to go quite so warm. Double-click to reset that, double-click to reset this, and we're back to the stock colors. I don't love how this looks either though. Main issue is that the groom was standing
next to this window, and so we had the green grass again blasting up through the window. For being reflected by the
sun directly onto his skin. So we need to offset that a bit. So I'm gonna go back
over to the mid-tones, which are gonna control most of his skin, and I'm gonna bring him up warmer but also into the magenta. And so you'll see that his skin
tone is getting a healthier, more reddish tone. The trick is you don't want to go too far. 'Cause if you go too far, you
start getting really purple, and then the wall starts turning purple, and we don't want that. So we're gonna tone it back here. Everything's a balance. You have your complimentary colors. If your shots too green,
turn it a bit more red. If you're shuts to red, turn it green. If it's too blue, turn it
orange, et cetera, et cetera. So let's go by right
there for the mid-tones. Are you feeling better about that? Let's look at our highlights. Now let's go a little into the red with the highlights too. Maybe more vertical too into more red than magenta. There we go. Okay. Healthy skin
tones looking way better than how they looked earlier. And then let's go over to the shadows, because we haven't messed
with the shadows much. Typically I am not a huge fan of changing my shadow colors
unless I really need to, because if you start
shifting your shadows, thanks can look really
weird really quickly. Like if I changed the blue, all the shadows are turning blue. It looks really funky and washed out. Double clicked to fix that. Let's drag this down into the
blue just a little bit though. So that way we're getting some of this blue back on his jacket, and that's helping remove some of the warmth that we're getting
from the shadows over here. Cooling off a little bit. Okay. Now remember we're
going for a warmer vibe, with this color grade. So now that I've looked at it here, thinking what else can I do? Let's go back up here to
our Basic Correction . Do I wanna add a bit more warmth now just to the entire image
with this temperature slider? Maybe I think about there. Yeah, we'll go, we don't
want to go super crazy, but there's already a pretty cool shot. So let's bring it up to about six. Looking good. Do we want add a bit more contrast? It's nice. 'Cause you can just play with these little sliders
now that we're so close. All right. I think the
shot is looking great. It's time to move on to
the third and final shot. And this one is gonna
be a little different. You're gonna like that. Because what's this? We have reception dancing shot. Darker, how are we gonna make this work? Well, let's go back over here, to our hero shot that we love. I'm gonna go up here to effect controls. I'm gonna press control C or command C if you're on Mac to copy this, gonna go over here to this last clip, select it, press control
we need to paste it. And we are very warm. Not quite as warm as the
groom getting ready shot, but we are quite warm. So let's go on to that and tweak that. Here's a life hack for you. If you don't like how your
hero shots look pasted, let's go over here to this
groom getting ready shot. Which we know isn't quite as warm. So let's actually delete
this Lumetri Color shot from the third clip. Go over here to the groom getting ready, press control C to copy
that and paste that. Okay. Okay. That's a little close to what we want. Definitely heavy on the magenta
and the skin tones though. This dress should be white. So let's tweak that. Go over here to the temperature, turn that down, cool it off. Turn on the contrast too, so we'd have to worry about that. Go here to our color wheels, again and let's back off this magenta. Hello there. Skin tones already looking better. Just little tweaks. Like you can see I'm barely
moving the mouse here. We're going to real subtle. I still want the highlights
to be a little warmer, but little subtle tweaks. Very subtle, go a little warmer here. All right. Remember this, we changed
the shadows to cooler. So if I bring those back to regular, we definitely want the shadows
to go a little cooler too. Let's go a little warmer, a little further up into the red, and keep that warm, happy vibe. Let's go back over here to our curves now, where am I scopes at? Where are my scopes go? Okay. We're pretty close to shadows here. Can we go a little darker? Okay. That's pretty dark. I don't really care if
the band's visible or not. I really want the focus
to be on this couple. I think that's looking real good. Go to mid tones. Bring the mid-tones up
just a slight bit more so the couple of pops a bit. So as you can see, curves are your friend,
color wheels are your friend. Once you know those two things, color grading SLOG3 is pretty simple. And you do not need to
be intimidated by it. When in doubt, add more contrast. Because SLOG3 is super flat. All right. Now let's see how all these
clips play back to back. Check it out. Oh yes. There's those pretty sunset colors, for the hero shot, groom getting ready, looking good great colors for him. Nice and warm. And we have this reception, which is under tungsten lighting, which is traditionally very warm, but we cooled it off a little bit. With that I hope you enjoyed this video all about color grading SLOG3 footage. I have another video that I'm working on. That's gonna be coming up very soon. That's all about how to
color grade using LUTS. So if you've ever wanted to use LUTS if you don't even know what a LUT is, this next video is gonna
help you out with that. Also, if you want to save time
and color grade even faster, I would love if you would
check out my color presets. They work with log footage like SLOG3, as well as standard footage. And I've tested them with many cameras to make
sure they work across a wide variety of camera
manufacturers and models. I will link to those
color presets down below. Thank you so much for watching. Lastly, if you happen to be
a wedding filmmaker like me, which you probably saw that whenever you were seeing
all these wedding couples, you probably want to book more couples and film more weddings.
To help you out with that, I've created a free guide
that's gonna walk you through some practical
steps that you can take right now in your business
to book more couples and film more weddings. It's a completely free gift to you. You can download it at the link down in the video description. Thanks so much for watching
and have a great day.
