Hey guys man name is Dylan and today we're
going to be running through Color Finale 2 which is an incredible plug in for Final Cut
Pro that allows you to create some professional looking color grades. This will be fairly in depth, so if you feel
confident in an area and you want to skip it, I’ve left chapter markers so you can
navigate easier. At the very end of going through everything
you can do in this plug in, I’ll be showing you how to create a commercial look with color
finale so stick around till the end of the video. Okay so press the shortcut command 5 to open
your effects window, find Color Finale Pro, and double click. This corrections tab will always show up open,
but for now, I’m going to close it to go over the sections in the plug in. We have 5 sections, color management, corrections,
image analysis, color chart, and film emulation. Corrections is what you’ll use the most,
but the rest can come in handy. Let’s start with color management. If the color profile you shot in was something
other than a LOG profile, you’ll leave it on assume video. If you shot in LOG, which I recommend you
do if your camera has that option, you have a couple options to choose from. With assume log, Color Finale will analyze
your footage and guess how much contrast and saturation to add to your shot to convert
it to a rec 709 color space. This is useful but not as accurate as clicking
‘use input LUT’ and selecting your specific camera manufacturer log to rec 709 technical
lut. Like I’ve mentioned in some of my previous
color grading videos, you can usually download these for free on your camera manufacturers
website. So if your shooting in LOG, I’d recommend
doing so. I don’t know enough about the ACES color
space to comfortably teach you about it, but from the research I did, it’s essentially
another color space, like Rec 709, except its newer, more suited for our digital cameras
nowadays that can capture significantly more colors, and apparently helps with the consistency
of colors across different sources. This is something I’m going to learn more
about in the coming weeks so I’ll keep you posted. So once your shot is converted to the correct
color space, your corrections tab will come into play. If you watched my video on my favorite features
of the plug in, I showed you how quickly you can get a standard look for your image just
by using this panel and not even opening up your layers. Most of it is self explanatory. Exposure raises or lowers the overall brightness
of your image. For auto exposure, if you have a gray card,
you can select that to get accurate exposure. Usually, I’d just use your exposure slider. This thing can be inaccurate. If you shot in a LOG profile and you still
need to add contrast, just get your shots overall exposure to about center on your luma
waveform (and if you don’t know how to use this, please watch the video I made about
scopes. They’re so important and I know you would
benefit from it). So right about there is a well exposed image. Next we’ll add some contrast. And pivot can only be used if you add contrast. Pivot essentially moves the contrast to a
brighter point or a darker point by pulling from the midtones. This is helpful to make minute adjustments
to help expose skin well and still keep good contrast. For white balance, we can click auto, which
I wouldn’t always recommend. You’ll see here, it doesn’t know what
it’s doing. But if we use this picker and select an area
that’s white or gray, we can balance our shots colors correctly. We can use this RGB value chart that pops
up to find a good selection. So you want to find a place that generally
shows even levels of red, green, and blue. You’ll see that selecting his skin won’t
work but finding something that’s white or gray, will show those values sitting closer
to each other. So we’ll click this white paint and boom. That looks pretty nice. Now you don’t have to use auto or the picker. You can simply drag the temperature slider
and the tint slider to adjust. The temperature slider will make your shot
warmer and cooler essentially. So let me undo here and I’ll bring up my
RGB overlay to basically show you how to color correct. This part right here on the RGB Overlay is
this bright white part. This should be white. And looking at the RGB overlay, red is rising
above the rest. If I just swing the temperature slider to
the left, boom. Done. Now we’ve color corrected our shot. Tint will adjust the amount of green and magenta
in the shot. This was fine as is though so I’ll leave
it. Saturation obviously is the intensity of color
in your image. And as for the plug ins sharpening, it’s
awesome. It’s real quality sharpening. Final Cuts sharpening sucks. If you’re just wanting to bust out footage
with a standard look, this section should work and help you to get it done quickly. But the magic of this plug in lies in this
layers panel and hopefully after you watch this video, you’ll feel more comfortable
with using it. Watch the whole thingk though. I know it’s long, but you won’t regret
it. Let me skip going in depth on the layers panel
for now just to explain these last few things. Recent presets is the same thing that FCP
offers. Saved presets for your color grades. So if you make a grade, you can save all the
layers and adjustments you made so you can just click that preset for other clips. But weirdly, I actually haven’t been able
to get it to work. I sent a question in to Color Finale about
it recently so I’ll let you know what they say. This is a cool feature. Sync will basically sync all the clips you
have in a group together so if any changes are made to one clip, it will affect all of
them. This is so helpful if you end up making changes
to your grade later so you don’t have to delete all the effects in different clips
and then reapply the new adjustments. Let me show you real quick. I’ll create a group and just name it example. Click update effect. I’ll make sure that the other clips that
I want to have the same grade are clicked as in that group. If I go to a clip and make an adjustment just
to show you, you’ll see that the adjustment affected all of the clips. If you’re like me and you’re never done
tweaking different clips, this feature may come in handy. Maybe you know that in Final Cut if we want
to copy effects on a clip and paste them to another one, we press command C and command
shift V. In Color Finale, just press copy and paste
on any other applied Color Finale on a clip. It’ll even work across different projects. Paste special allows you to choose what you
copy over. Okay so let me close the corrections tab for
now. Next up is image analysis. This helps us, wait for it, analyze our image. False color shows us the exposure levels of
our image. If you see red, your image is overexposed. That’s a no no. The darker parts of the image are going to
show up as purples and blues and the brighter parts are going to show up as yellow and orange. That’s easy to remember. Bright colors mean bright and dark colors
mean dark. The main use of this will be to see if your
subject's skin is the right exposure. If it’s too bright or too dark basically. As a general rule, skin should be pink, light
gray, green, and dark gray. It depends on the complexion of the person’s
skin. Remember, skin tones fall in the midtones,
so that’s what this range represents. If you see your subject's skin is too much
of a color it shouldn’t be, you know that you’ll need to adjust your exposure. Isolate takes away that pain of cropping in
or creating a draw mask on your subjects skin to check that their color and exposure is
accurate. Just click isolate and an option like ellipse
to check quickly. If you don’t know how to use this vectorscope,
this line is where your subject's skin should lie. So here, it appears we’re a little off. I’ll go to my midtones slider since skin
tones are midtones and swing the color wheel until the skin is on the line. Color chart is going to be useful if you have
a color chart to help you balance your colors. I don’t own one, I need to get one though,
but I have this pic from dslrvideoshooter to show you. Click whatever chart you have, so for this
it’s the passport. Once you do that, you’ll click these 4 corners
on the chart, line up your colors, and press match chart. This will color correct your shot for you. If you have multiple shots in the same scene,
you can save that color chart correction as a preset so you can balance the rest of your
shots quickly. Last up we have Film emulation. This adds some pretty quality film grain to
your shot with the click of a button. So amount is how much grain shows up. Size is how big the particles are. Film response I think is how much it shows
in your footage. I’d just leave this at 0. Color variation adds some color for kind of
a tv effect if you’re going for that look. And then grain rate changes how fast the grain
moves. And then we have our standard preset option
if you want to use the same adjustments across different clips. In my opinion, you’ll just need to adjust
the first two sliders nine times out of ten. Okay, here it is, the moment you’ve been
waiting for. In the corrections tab, layers panel! No need to be afraid peeps. Let’s dominate it. I’ll try and break it down in an easy way
to understand. So we have 6 corrections tabs here. These 4 are the most important. Color Wheels, color curves, six vectors, and
HSL curves. The two added in their newest update are shuffle
and filter. Remember, with color grading, either you’re
adjusting the color in your shot, the saturation in your shot, or the brightness in your shot. That’s what all of these do except in different
ways. Filter doesn’t deal with that, but we’ll
go over that in a bit. So open up your color wheels first. These 3 sections give us options to change
what I just mentioned. The hue which is color, saturation which is
the intensity of color, and luma which is exposure of our shot. Unlike Final Cut which has the wheels labeled
shadows, midtones, and highlights, these are labeled lift, gamma, and gain. This may be a dumb example but this is how
you can think of it. Think of lift as being so shadowy and dark
that you want to be lifted out of the darkness. And you can think of gain as you gaining brightness
in only the brightest parts of your beautiful image. Not the greatest example but I hope that’ll
help you remember them now. This will add or subtract different colors
in those 3 exposure values by just moving it around to different colors. So we can add more blue in our shadows by
pulling down in the lift and add more red in our highlights by raising up to red in
the gain. Saturation is adding more intense color in
those luma values, and these master sliders here adjust the exposure of your shadows midtones
and highlights or lift, gamma, and gain. There are two things I wish Color Finale did
with these wheels. First I wish they put the master slider on
the right and put the saturation slider on the left because that’s how it is in Final
Cuts color wheels. And the second thing I wish they did is added
color to the saturation slider so you know it affects color. I like how in FCPs wheels you can tell what
those sliders do just by looking at them. No saturation, saturation. Nevertheless, it says it here. This saturation controls the intensity of
color in the whole image. You have the option to change these to sliders,
but I would just use the color wheels. If you make an adjustment, you can reset it
by hovering over the name and pressing reset or resetting all 3 wheels by pressing reset
all. And don’t worry about these RGB values. You can’t change them, only reset them and
all that does is essentially move your wheel slider a little. I’m going to show you a quick example of
how to use these wheels a little later on, so don’t click off, but for now I want to
make sure you understand what the other sections do so you feel comfortable using them. This next tab is the color curves and if you
watch my color grading tutorials, you know I love my curves. The only difference with these curves and
Final Cuts curves is that they don’t give you the multitude of color options that FCP’s
curves offer. I emailed them and let them know that that’s
something to consider for the next update though. So with the curves you have the highlights
at the top, the midtones, and the shadows at the bottom here. By pushing up on the curve, you’re pushing
more of that color into the shot. So here I’m pushing more red into the highlights
of the shot and decreasing the red in the shadows by making a slight S curve. This master curve adjusts the brightness of
the image but with these options, you can also affect the saturation of the RGB values. So setting it to Master + RGB will allow you
to adjust the brightness and add contrast but this also affects the overall saturation
of your image since it’s the masterrrrr. We can see that by looking at our Vectorscope. Our shot is becoming more saturated just by
adjusting this master curve. There are two other options we can choose
from. If you set it to Luma + RGB, making adjustments
to this luma curve affects only your brightness and not your saturation of the different colors. But with this, you can also end up adjusting
the brightness of your shot by pulling down or up on the RGB curves. Luma preserving is easy to remember because
the name says it all. The luma values or brightness is preserved. So the brightness can be saved while the RGB
values are adjusted. This option is what Final Cuts curves do naturally. Once again you can reset these curves by hovering
over and pressing reset. Six Vectors is a really simple and easy way
to make adjustments to specific colors. They give you 6 options to choose from and
you can change the color of the color you choose, the intensity of that color, and the
brightness of that color. The nice thing about these is that skin generally
lies in this first red color so adjustments can easily be made to skin. For example I can use the image analysis isolation
mask to identify that my subjects skin is off color, use the red vector and hue adjustment
to get that skin color back on track. Quick and easy. It’s also fun to play around with changing
different colors of things in your shots. The next section are the HSL curves. I’m not going to go too in depth on these. Hue vs hue allows you to change the color
of whatever color you choose, hue vs sat allows you to change the saturation of whatever color
you choose, hue vs luma allows you to change the brightness of whatever color you choose. Yes it’s just like six vectors but you have
more flexibility and you can make the adjustments a lot more gradual. As a quick explanation. I’ll change the color of this grass here. So go to hue vs hue so we can change the color
of the green in all this greenery. Click this color picker here, select the green,
and because this makes too fine of a selection, I’m going to widen the colors it picks up. I’ll add two points a little wider by pressing
command and clicking, and I’ll delete these two inner points. You can actually select a point or multiple
points by just dragging and selecting. That really helps speed things up. If I don’t change these outer points to
linear, it wont anchor this point and the adjustment will be made a little to the other
colors. So I’ll need to change to liner either by
right clicking or clicking the liner button on this side panel. That smooth control point does come in handy
though. As an example, I’ll go to my sat vs luma
curve where I can take out the saturation in different brightness values. I can get rid of the saturation from the darkest
areas by selecting the darkest circle here, adding another anchor point and changing this
to linear so it locks down, and changing this to smooth. Now it’ll make a nice gradual decrease in
saturation in the darkest parts of our image. This side panel luma value selection is really
really helpful and something which I’ll show you how to use in my future color grading
tutorials more focused on the color grading process. In their newest update one of the things they
added was this section called shuffle. This tab is a trip. To be honest, I don’t foresee myself using
this much though, but maybe you will. It gives you the ability to make some creative
color decisions easily. I just find that they’re just a little bit
too out there. It could be cool for music videos possibly. The only combo I found that works with some
shots is switching the blue channel to green. It gives sort of a light teal and orange look
with certain shots. The last section is called filter and this
has options for blur and for sharpening. This will usually be used in tandem with the
masking features of the plug in. So take this shot. Say I want to give it a shallower depth of
field by adding some blur. I’ll click the mask button down here. I’ll click the mask button again here, and
since this is the perfect shot and angle to show a fake macro tight focus, I’ll use
the rectangle to create a mask that will make it look like a narrow plane of focus. I’ll adjust it and feather it. And then track the clip by pressing this right
arrow track button. Like I mentioned in my previous videoa about
the plug in, it’s not crazy fast, but oh well. While this is tracking, let me explain some
things. You won’t have to worry about this section. Tracking will take care of the position and
rotation for the most part. So forget about this. By changing the display to a composite mask,
you can see what will be affected when you make adjustments. So this is showing that when we add the blur,
anything under the white part will be blurred. Remember that. White is what will be affected. Since we don’t want his eye to be blurry,
we’ll press invert. This just flips the mask. If we choose this other display option, you’ll
see that it gives us a preview of our shot, and whatever has pink on it is what will be
affected by any changes we make. So let’s press the mask button again, and
we’ll make changes to the part of our shot that was just covered with pink. Disc blur is aimed to look the most like out
of focus blur, so I’ll select that, and adjust. Pretty cool right? The same goes for sharpening. So if I want to sharpen her eyes. Mask button, I’ll use an ellipse shape to
create circles over her eyes, and track. Because her hair was in the way on this other
eye, I’m going to start where the eye can be fully seen, and track forward. Then I’ll go back to that point and track
backwards. If I need to stop the track and adjust the
mask, I can. I’ll add a bit of feather on both. You can see if we choose one of the other
display options that we’ll be affecting her eyes and nothing else so this is good. That’s what we want. Click the mask button again, and adjust the
sharpening to taste. Since I showed you some of the shape masks
and how to use them, let me introduce the others. Just a note, you can use these masks on any
one of these sections. Color wheels, curves, shuffle, etc. And If you’re still unsure about what a
mask does, it allows you to make adjustments to specific sections of your clip. I think the best way for me to explain this
is to show you an example real quick. Let’s pretend we want to make this pizza
pop more, both in contrast and saturation, but we don't want it to affect the rest of
the shot like it would if we just adjusted the exposure and the saturation in the color
wheels. So press the mask button and I’ll run through
the rest of these. This option gives a very gradual adjustment
to the mask. It’s a gradient mask essentially. You can see what I mean here. It makes a soft gradual adjustment with a
straight line that is feathered. These two, allow you to draw the mask around
whatever you want. The B-spline path gives you a path that’s
smooth and wavy and the bezier path is like your linear draw mask. Just straight lines. Something that’s odd about the plug in and
maybe I’m just doing it wrong., when you press the bezier mask, it creates a small
line and then doesn’t allow you to press any points to make a mask. You have to go to the bezier button up here
and click it to actually make a bezier mask. Could be a bug, but it’s probably a user
error on my part. Now with this mask, as far as I know, it allows
you to select luma values, so dark and light parts of your image. So if I swing this to the right, you’ll
see that only the bright parts of my image are being selected. A feature you can find in both this mask option
and this next HSL mask is this blur slider. And to be honest, this right here, is worth
the cost of the plug in. Let me show you why. I’m going to make a crazy adjustment here
and you’ll notice that we’re starting to see artifacts pop up. Our colors are breaking apart. This is something that would happen when you
would push colors too much when using the HSL masks in Final Cut’s native color grading
tools. But watch this. Look at that. A simple blur can help to blend those colors
that are breaking apart to make them appear buttery smooth. Like they were actually meant to be next to
each other. This is what made me so excited about the
plug in and this is one of the things that can help to make your grades look more professional. Last, but definitely not least, this mask
option allows you to select specific hues, saturation values, and luma values to create
a mask. This is something that’s in Final Cut’s
native color grading arsenal, but it doesn’t have the blur option. So as an example I’ll select the color picker
and select the red of the tomato sauce. Let’s use the mask input display to see
what we’re doing. If you remember, hue is color. So we want to work with this and try and get
a good selection here. Now let’s play with saturation. Too much and we’ll get the hands, so let’s
leave that out. And last one is luma which are the brightness
values. Whenever you’re creating a mask from an
HSL mask, just play around with it. You’ll find out what works just by trial
and error. Let’s give it a 2% blur. Not too much. I’ll invert it, so the adjustment is made
to anything outside of that tomato sauce, and just as an example, I’ll decrease the
saturation a lot. The nice thing about Color Finale’s new
update is we can group and exclude parts of masks by creating other masks together. So here, I’ll get rid of this tomato sauce
to the right because it’s distracting and not the focus of the shot. I’ll add an ellipse mask, fit it over the
bowl and track it. Maybe I don’t want this desaturating adjustment
to affect the bowl at all. So basically I want to leave it untouched. I’ll click subtract, to take it out of the
mask adjustment, and add a bit of feathering. If I change to composite mask, you’ll see
what’s affected. Remember, anything that’s white in the mask
will be adjusted when you use the wheels, curves, etc. Now, if you know you'll be making adjustments
to not only the inside of the mask, but also the outside, let me show you how to go about
doing that. Create a group by pressing this button that
looks like a folder and add two color wheels. Or whatever correction you’ll be using. For one of them, right click and click ‘invert
parent mask’. So you can understand better, I’ll rename
them ‘outside mask’ and ‘inside mask’ by right clicking and hitting rename. This feature of renaming and grouping is so
helpful to staying organized and knowing what correction is what. After this, I’ll select the group and create
a mask on the whole group. Now you can make adjustments to the outside
and inside of the mask by going into each color wheel respectively. That brings us to the final few things and
then I’ll tie everything together by showing you how to get the commercial look with this
plug in. Don’t click off because I know you will
enjoy that. Down here we have the mix, which is available
on most adjustments in Color Finale, and it just lets you change how much of an adjustment
you want to play a role in your shot. Basically the opacity of those layers. This gives you all of the blend modes that
you have in Final Cut and these can actually come in handy when trying to get different
looks. They’re worth playing around with when you’re
color grading. For example here, if I select ‘soft light’
and then reduce the mix, I now have an image with high contrast where our red pizza pops. Cool right? This folder here allows you to quickly make
groups, like we did earlier, and this folder lets you see every LUT you have on your harddrive
and on your computer automatically. Yes, these automatically show up and are organized. You don’t have to search folders or anything. Not only that, it shows you what that LUT
would look like on your footage. I know what you’re thinking, and the answer
is, yes, you should definitely buy the plug in right now. Okay so let me take you through grading this
clip. I’m going to skip this basic area since
I think the majority of you might have that down. So generally the first thing you’d do is
make sure your clip is converted to a Rec 709 color space if you shot in a LOG profile. For this shot I’m going to manually convert
this to Rec 709, but I could use assume LOG since I don’t know what camera this was
shot with. So I’ll open my layers and bring up my color
wheels. I’ll raise my exposure in my highlights
and lower my shadows a bit, making sure to not go above 100 IRE or below 0 IRE on the
luma waveform. I’ll add some saturation back into my image
and I’ll label this correction ‘contrast/sat’. After converting to Rec 709 and adding contrast
and saturation, you’ll color correct your shot if need be. Let’s use our white balance picker and select
the white of her towel. Looking pretty good there. You’ll notice on our rgb overlay that our
blue is oversaturating our highlights, and we can see that by bringing up our range check
by going to view and heading down to range check. We’re not overexposed, because if we look
at our luma waveform it’s showing we’re okay, but we do have too much color in the
brightest parts of our shot. We’ll take care of that later. First, Let’s check to make sure our subject's
skin is accurate. Exposure looks good and skin color is okay,
but it’s a little off. We’ll take care of that in a second. After color correction, we’ll start with
creating the look. Let’s pretend this is a toothpaste commercial. That means bright and punchy. Commercials are normally very saturated and
they make you want to feel like their life is way better because of that product. You know if you don’t have that toothpaste
you suck. Your life sucks. One way they do that is through lively colors
and contrast. So let’s create a group and add two color
wheels in it. One will be for our background mask and one
will be for her. I’ll invert one of these and label these
so we stay organized. I’ll rename this group and press the mask
button. Let’s use the HSL mask. I’ll click the picker, and select her skin. Let’s fine tune it. I’ll add a bit of that magical blur, and
let’s start adjusting. Let’s go to the outside mask and we’ll
start to introduce some teal and blue into the shot. We’ll go with a complimentary color look. Two colors, opposite on the color wheel that
contrast each other and help each other pop. Here, it’ll be the color of her skin that
pops with our background teal. I’ll start to push a little teal into the
midtones and maybe just a little darker blue for the shadows. For her skin, let’s first make sure the
color is accurate and on the skin tone line. Isolate. Ellipse. And since skintones are midtones, I’ll move
the gamma wheel since that’s the midtones wheel, so her skin lines up with the skin
tone line on the vectorscope. So there’s our look. Let’s do some secondary corrections now. I’ll make her a bit brighter and give her
more contrast by adding a color curves and creating a vignette by using a shape mask. This will help to make her more of a focus
in the shot. I’ll feather it a bunch, and track. Once that’s done, I’ll go back into the
curves and raise the overall brightness inside the mask and create contrast by lowering the
shadows a bit. Because I don’t want to increase saturation,
I’ll change this to luma + RGB. The reason Im choosing this over luma preserving
is because im not going to be adjusting the RGB curves so I don’t have to worry about
them affecting the brightness. Because her towel is so bright, I want to
kind of help motivate that by shaping some light above her. I’ll add another curves, add a mask, and
use the edge mask. Then I’ll raise the exposure by using the
luma curve and just bring the whole thing up by pulling from my midtones. Now let’s take care of our overly saturated
highlights and shadows. I’ll bring up the HSL curves, go to sat
vs luma, select the darkest circle and lower the saturation. And select the brightest circle and lower
the saturation. If I take off range check so the zebras go
away, you can see what an adjustment that makes. Final steps here. I’m going to make it punchier since we’re
going for a commercial look so let’s open six vectors and I’m going to add a bit more
saturation into her skin by going into the red vector and I’ll add some brightening
as well. I’ll head to the teal vector and lets make
her stand out even more by lowering the brightness of this color so it adds more contrast and
then add a bit more saturation for more umph. I may actually decrease the saturation on
this towel color a little. Final adjustment because I’m not liking
that very faint tint of blue I see in her hair, I’ll open a color wheels and name
it hair adjustment, and push my lift wheel away from teal. That’s a slight adjustment but it makes
a difference. And because this is a commercial and I want
her skin to look magnifique, I’ll add a cool plug in called beauty box. This is a plug in by Digital Anarchy and all
this does is find the exact color of a person's skin and intelligently smooth it over. In the past I made a tutorial about how to
do this for free, but there’s no comparing that free technique with this plug in. Look at that. So in review, we added contrast and saturation. Then we color corrected slightly, but that’s
not shown in the layers, we added our stylized look, we shaped our light and helped guide
our eyes into our subject and helped the scene appear to be more happy and lively. We took out saturation from the brightest
parts of our image and the darkest, we helped really define our look by using six vectors
and making her skin more saturated and brighter and lowering brightness and raising saturation
in our teal color. Last thing we did, we pushed away from teal
with our lift color wheel to get our hair looking a little more natural. And then we threw on Beauty Box. And boom, I think we’re commercial ready. What do you think? And that is my in depth run through on Color
Finale and if you have not picked it up yet, do that when you can. I promise you you won’t regret it. I will leave a link down below you can use
to buy it. Stay tuned because I’m going to be doing
a lot more color grading tutorials with this plug in, so make sure you subscribe if you
haven’t already and press the notification button so you can get notified when I post
those. If you found anything useful in this video,
help me out by pressing the thumbs up button and leaving a comment below. A put a lot of time into these videos, so
support is always appreciated. Have a great week and I will see you in the
next one.
