Introduction to color correction in Nuke

[Music] this video tutorial is brought to you by Ben Q in its professional monitors line hello my name is zu Guetta and welcome to another edition of Yukos desk for those of you that don't know me I'm a director in a visual effects supervisor working in London I have been working in the industry for 17 years worked for the mill for five years as the head of the nuclear Boston Department and currently I'm a director and visual effects supervisor at fired out smoke where I work in trailers and cinematics for many Triple A games in this video I will talk about the basics of color correction engraving I'll be using nuke in this video but this technique can be used on any compositing or grading package most important parts of being a successful artist in my view is to be software agnostic so as much as I love working in nuke this video can be used by any artist doing color correction you can use fusion after effects da Vinci or any other professional visual effects package it's essential to use the best monitors color correction so I will be using the Ben QP v3 200 PT and the Ben QP v3 200 you the first one as my main grading monitor and the second one of my desktop monitor these monitors are technically certified they have 4k resolution with full 10 bit support I will also be using the 4k Scopes to control my color correction but without further ado let's just get started like I said on the introduction this is going to be all about color correction today and it's very soft we're agnostic really so don't be afraid a seeing nuke open in the screen I kind of want to show you the basics of color correction and I think nuke for me because it's the software i've been using for soap for so long i'm more used to nuke but nuke has a really good tendency to be such a complex software that actually it helps you to learn other softwares i can tell you for example from experience that ever since I started using nuke I became a much better after effects artist because nuke kind of allows you to understand under the hood what's actually going on in terms of the mathematical part of compositing because compositing is all about mathematics and color correction is all about mathematics as well it's all about grading of multiplication of pixels and the multiplication division of pixels so in a way it's all a Big Mac puzzle really so but let's just get on with it so as you can see here this sorry about this image this is a shoot that I did a few years ago is where I supervised it directly by period Martin in LA and I was on set supervising it so one of the things that I want to start with is to show you the actual differences between the highlights the mid-tones and the dark areas of the image so I'm going to really quickly just so you guys know this is a QuickTime directly from an Alexa camera so this is a raw not a raw sorry it's a pro res 444 shortened and LX as you can see in here it's with default color space of Alexa v3 log see we'll talk a bit about this in a minute but this is like basically the best quality you can get from the Alexa without using raw so it's a pro res and as you can see it has multiple highlights and multiple dark areas in mid-tones so I'm going to start by just giving you a little basics when you look at the three fundamentals of color correction which is the highlights and it's the mid-tones and the actual darks or shadows those are three fundamentals and they are fundamentals that will work on add the other application so I'm for that matter I'm going to use in nuke node called grade node and in this node you do have these three things so we're going to basically focus on the multiply which is or gain which is the same thing by the way so the multiply of the game is your highlights it's the brightest area at the image and then I'm going to talk about the gamma which is the mid-tones or what we call the skin tones for photography it's usually the skin tones and then the lift which is the darks or basically the shadows now I'm going to show you really quickly what exactly happens on an image that has like that so for example here you can see that the sphere is quite overexposed you can kind of see that when I sample my pixels you can kind of tell that it's v value at the moment and so for example if I lower the exposure on my viewer you can clearly see both on the image and also on the vectorscope that actually all my highlights which looked like they were clamped so you can see here on the vectorscope you can kind of see that there's like a cutting point which is the limit of your highlights you kind of see as I lower my f-stop down you can kind of reveal all that image and this is one of the powerful things of using raw formats on a camera whenever you have the opportunity you should use a raw format you know if you're using a 5d you should use raw on your camera if using an Alexa you should use raw or at least pro res with a log and of course use a black magic camera should use raw as well it will give you more latitude for color correction so as you see here on the on these scopes actually and by the way these scopes that I'm using is the software called scope box you can also use 4k scopes as well have them on the screen so you can have a look at them I use both of them for different things really so as you can see here as I lower my multiplication I am lowering my highlights now as you can notice on the image if you look at the vectorscope I'm only affecting the half top of the image that means that I'm not really affecting the bottom as you can see the shadows in the dark areas or really not changing at all that means I'm actually compressing and basically multiplying these values so I'm basically making it more small and that's why it becomes darker because I'm actually multiplying it by three now why is it called multiplication it's called multiplication because that's exactly what it is if I go here and sample these pixels you see these pixels or 4.8 4.9 43.9 on red green and blue but you see if I go here and do by half you can clearly see that now it's 2.4 2.4 1.9 and if I put by 2 I have now multiply it by 2 so for every pixel that I am selecting in the image so for example if I select one of these blue pixels in my shirt for example normal values is zero zero three zero zero four zero zero eight so if I multiply it by two you see that you get the double of that you so it's like what I was saying in the beginning compositing and color correction is nothing like a mathematical equation so if it's zero three of that pixel if you multiply it by two it becomes zero six and if you multiply it by five it becomes sometimes five if I split it by half then it becomes half of that value this is really important for you to understand because that's why the multiplication in the game controls only affect the highlights because if you multiply a pixel of zero by two you get zero that's the thing like nothing will happen and so multiplying pixels that are dark doesn't really matter because if it's black it's black it doesn't really move that's what you need to keep in mind so on the other hand there is this section of the highlights which I'm affecting now let's talk about the gammas which are the mid-tones now if I start changing the mid-tones you can clearly see in your graphic on the vectorscope here that actually everything moves so I'm basically affecting the middle section of the image because middle tones or mid-tones or anything that is considered that is not black or it's not white so if you think of Y to being pure one that's really a highlight that's pop and then you have blacks which is zero so everything in between is a mid-tone and that's why photographers usually talk about mid-tones and to talk about skin tones because those are likely gray values you know so for example if I change here on my gamma you can kind of see that I can change just the mid-tones and as you can see the highlights stay as they are in the sphere you can kind of see that that they are still very bright in the blacks kind of stay where they are of course there's no pure black on this image last but not least is the lift now the list is what we call the shadows so if you look at the vectorscope here you can clearly see as I move the lift I'm actually compressing the bottom so I'm basically moving my black pixels or gray pixels of bub so I'm basically switching them to become brighter and that's why it gets a compression see the mid-tones in the middle here so you see these on the bottom here or the actual dark pixels it used to be dark and then on the middle there's the mid-tones and then on the top there's the highlights and so that's what the lift does the lift basically is like it name says lifting the shadows lifting the black areas to show you this a bit more in action I'm actually going to open up another type of image it's just to make it a bit fresh so this is a piece of image shot and an Alexis well this was done for a short film that I supervised called the fields and and so this is like a sci-fi a short film of course you can click on the link to actually see the film just like you saw on baby feet as well and so in here we have the same kind of deal so I'm going to put another grade note here and I'm going to show you this in great effect so as you can see here if I multiply down you can see the highlights on these windows are now revealed if I gamma up I can now basically get the image a bit more gray a bit more washed out or I can get the image much more contrasted and then of course the lift is basically giving color to the dark areas so keep in mind that whatever you give on the lift you're basically having color or adding values to the shadows or to the dark areas it's almost like if you would have tinted for example if you wanted to tint the shadows in some kind of light so imagine if it's a sunny day you could tint it with some red tones and as you can see here all the dark areas are now getting relish so that's something you need to keep in mind so this is what we call a color lookup in nuke and the color lookup is nothing more than a curve that you can find in Photoshop or you can find upon any other application and so if you think about it as the values if you look at this kind of square you can kind of see that these values here or set to zero which is the dark black and then you have the middles which is the values you see here from 0 1 to 0-5 I'm actually going to zoom in a little bit here so you guys can see it a bit better as you see here you have basically zero which is pure black then you have zero you know two zero three zero four or five which is pixels of that value and then all the way to one and so you see the curve here doesn't at the moment have any other points for example if I put a point on the middle here and maybe I can even put points on the other two middles as well and now so now you see if I start moving around with the center curve you see what I'm actually doing here am I'm actually moving the gamma so if you look at the vectorscope here you can clearly see that I'm changing the mid-tones of the image so that means that whatever pixel was 0-5 on that area now is 0 6 and so the same way that if I move my actual highlights you can see on the window here I can actually show you you can see that it gets white sari gets much brighter or it gets much darker as well same deal again you can kind of see on the vector scopes that the highlights are actually coming down on that corner you can kind of see them in this area here and so that's kind of how I want you to kind of think about it and of course the dark areas would be here so for example if I lower all the values to 0-2 below 0 of course I get pure black and so keep in mind that the different areas of the image have to do with this curve so now let's jump into another application just see how that could work now most of the people kind of think that applications are all very different but actually they are not the thing to be keep in mind is that these concepts can be used on any application so try to be software agnostic it will always be giving you the biggest chance to actually have working to work on as a visual effects artist or even as a grader or a colorist so you see for example on this photo this is just a photo of my desk of the desk that I'm recording this right now you can kind of see that you have some really bright areas where the dark areas with blacks in the force the mid-tones and just like a nuke in a light room or in on Photoshop you kind of control the light with the exposure note on the exposure note again is like you see I in the Instagram here it's actually affecting highlights only so you can see that my blacks are still black you can kind of still see that it's all black here and as I bring in the highlights you can kind of see that almost nothing else is affected now of course this interpret is normal the same goes for the lift so the kick the lift in Nuuk is what we would call the shadows inside lightroom so see if i improve the shadows i'm basically giving values to the dark areas which is what the lift was and then of course is the same thing with the highlights the highlights or the actual top mid tones of the of your you know at your image so if you think of a highlights being really bright then the highlights on a picture can kind of lower them of course need to be careful especially in here on this area here you can kind of see that you're now bringing it so low that is actually getting clamped and so as you can see both on nuke or in Lightroom or in Photoshop or even After Effects things are very much the same and so that's what I wanted to show you I kind of want to show you that the basics of color correction as long as you know what a highlight is the mid-tone is shadow and dark area is you can kind of get a Ray around any compositing application or any grading application now of course this is just the beginning this is really 101 I mean we're going to go much deeper this is like just the start of it of course keep in mind not always everything is beautiful like you just saw so here's an example of a piece of footage that I recorded last year for sports film that I directed in Sweden with my students a tech show and campus i-12 this is a short film called Oak Lake which we just did a trailer and you can check out the trailer on below now this particular shot was shot on another towel and it was shot with a Blackmagic 4k camera which is an older of a older camera which has a much smaller latitude it only has 12 F stops of latitude against the 15 F stops of the Gusev Pro that I'm actually filming this tutorial web and so the range is really monumental like if you look at for example these values here it looks all good and if you look at the vector scopes you can kind of see that these highlights are there now if I start using the multiply down I can lower some of the highlights but as you can see there is by looking at the actual image here you can clearly see that there is a gap it's almost like it's cut the reason it's cut it's because it's lost all of its dynamic range and so there is no more image here because we've reached the sensor's limit this is still from a short film that I supervised a few years ago it's basically a short film directed by pedal of allsey and it's called Leonard in slow motion and which actually stars Martin Starr which is a very good actor of Fame of Silicon Valley so this image has actually everything it has highlights it has mid-tones it has dark areas and so if you use the grade node you can kind of see that I can lower the highlights of the lamp there you can clearly see that I can recover you can actually see it's really well here on the on the vectorscope you see that's the lamp there so after a while they start recognizing the shapes in the vectorscope I really recommend you to getting a vector scope now don't use nukes fetoscope nooks vector scope is is is is rubbish so as you can see here you can clearly see that this is Leonard here and this is the lamp and this is the sofa you start recognizing the values and the images actually MD and the thing and so see if I start lowering you can kind of clearly see that the lamp now has every single latitude now this piece of footage is from a red Canberra the web cameras have and you know it's a webapp ticket hemp they have an enormous latitude of that interchange so you kind of see that nothing is lost against the footage that you just saw from Oak Lake where you actually have a clipping problem you have a clipping issue and this is the same thing if I would have put a clip here so imagine if I would have put a clamp which is a node that basically clips everything white to black it basically Clips all values one to zero you see here now it has a clip in the lamp so that's what you don't want and as you can see here the the actual resulting image is very bad because instead having all this kind of nice to nullity of orange you lose it and it's all clamped I'm sure you've seen this before when you start doing color correction with GoPro footage or if you start doing color correction with 5d footage you see this immediately so keep that in mind you know your color correction is always only going to be as good as the footage that someone gives you keep that in mind now if we're going to go a step further imagine that we don't want to just call it correct just with the basic basic values at just having lifts multiplies in gammas so in nuclear is another node called a color corrector now the color corrector is basically node that has a lot more values and a lot more ways if you actually doing certain types of color correction it still has a master area which is the saturation contrast gamma gain and offset another color corrector no the nuke is much more used for creative color correction so it's not as much used for something like the grade node which is to basically fix an image and so that's kind of how you should always think about it the grade know to fix something that is not correct that maybe it was a mistake on set and then the color corrector for a creative look and so the color corrector of course is split between master which is the main main color correction then you have shadows mid-tones and highlights so this one is even more deep so imagine when you look at the curve node that I was showing you and the curve tool so in here it's almost like imagining that not only you have you know the grade node you have control over you know the just put the two dots there so you have control over the shadows or lifts you have control over the highlights and you have control over your mid-tones or gamma now this node because it's split between shadows highlights and everything it's almost like we'd have multiple controls everywhere so it's almost like thinking about you know in the shadows you have the gamma the gain and the offset the offset being the left which is the shadows so for example in the shadows which is the dark area which is kind of like down here you now have the possibility of using the mid-tones of shadows of using the darks of the shadows in using the highlights of the shadows now keep in mind that the highlights of the shadows which is the gain of the shadows or very close to the offsets or darks of the mid-tones because the darks are the mid-tones because the mid-tones would be in the middle here that means that the darks of the mid-tones would be down here the actual mid-tones would be at the center and the highlights of the mid-tones would be here which is what we talked about the game and then of course on the top a spectrum we have the darks of the highlights which is basically the highlights of the game at the gamma and then you have the gamma of the highlights and of course the highlights of the highlights so that's what this note does it splits the image in several sections so that you can easily call correct it and so if you look back here the way it works is like this you're going to basically have the color corrector here and as you can see here I can of course through the mid-tones like I was doing with the other image and I can see it in the scopes here can clearly see me moving around and in the mid-tones you can clearly see just the highlights you see now on affecting both mostly the lamp on the back there and then of course I have the offset which is my shadows and now the offsets are basically introducing some kind of gray or some kind of whitewashing in the dark areas now the cool thing with this is that now on my shadows I can control the mid-tones of those shadows and now I can actually control the highlights of those shadows as well so it's much more pronounced it's much more fine detailed color correction now keep in mind of course that you do have the ranges as well the range is if you click testing it's basically giving you the opportunity to select what you think is the myth owns the highlights and the shadows so for example in here you can clearly see that the colors are representing the highlights and the shadows so if I now for example move the highlights down or move the highlights up I'm actually telling you that the highlights are actually bigger range so for example if I do it all the way here that means I'm saying that the highlight starts on 0 to almost it actually has the father there you can kind of see so this is basic giving nukes information of where why highlights start and also where my shadows end so for example Machado's currently are in zero zero eight so every pixel that is below zero right is considered on the shadow area so if I if I increase this now of course I'm going to affect the shadows at zero one that means that when I go in back to my color correction my shadows when I effect the gains the gammas and the offsets I'm actually affecting pixels all the way from zero to zero one and on my highlights I'm affecting all the pixels from zero four to one of course the mid-tones is everything that is in between the mid-tones is everything between zero four and all the way to zero one two zero one nine so keep in mind that this is almost like a keyer to pick the solute to select the areas that you're giving notice to nuke okay this part is this area here all the values from zero to one 9 is shadows all the values from one 9 to 1 4 is mid-tones all the values from zero 4 to 1 is highlights and beyond of course this is of course going to matter for every image like every image is going to be different every image is going to have its own values that you have to kind of set apart so keep that in mind for the color correction now this is called a corrector when we go deeper like this it it I'm actually going to open am going to open Lightroom again to show you and how that could work now for example going back to Lightroom as you can see this is an actual photo that I took at e3 this year at Mario and so the same way we splitted the highlights mid-tones and shadows areas by three sections so what I would have the mid tones of the mid-tones and the I know this is getting a bit confusing I'm sorry about that and of course the highlights of the highlights and the highlights of the shadows the same thing can can be done when you look at the actual Lightroom so in Lightroom basically what happens is that you have the exposure and the contrast that's or basically the full values but then you see here that you actually have a huge division you actually have the highlights so the highlights or basically you know as I lower my exposure you see that I still have quite a lot of range because this is a shot done with a 5 V Mach 2 so it has a huge latitude it's it's like it's beyond ten bit image ring so you see I can lower my exposures but that is if I basically lowering the entire image now on the highlights would be just the top top top highlights so see if I lower them you can kind of see that I'm basically recovering some of the information that we've lost now you need to be careful as I lower too much you start to do some of that you start basically decorating the image you have to be careful with that the thing goes for the shadows now I have these shadows which allow me to actually basically change basically the dark areas so if I go here down here to this guy I can actually recover most of that image and actually see him of course I'm going to get a lot of grain but I can actually see more of him and the same goes for the black so the black still allow me to even push the darks even further the same way we saw it in Nuuk you can kind of see that there is a curve here as well so this curve is literally the same curve as you saw in ooh but you see here is actually even helps you with this it actually tells you that this area here is the shadows and actually it highlights it there I really love sometimes though with these kind of things and because they're really really user friendly so as you can see here this area here is the shadows which as the dope says it's between 12 you know all the way to the darks which is 22% so you see the shadows or that area in Nuuk that we were talking about if I switch to nuke really quickly and you see the shadows are basically the area that we talked about which is this area here with these nodes here with the shadows going back here and it all goes away all the way to 22 then from 22 we go to the darks which is the dark area all the way to 37 39 and 53 which are now the mid-tones which he considers are the lights and then we go here all the way to the highlights which start some 90% now the difference is that the forcing here I can't really pre select so but you see if I start moving around these curves here I can clearly see that I'm affecting the dark areas only in here if I can darken them up I can actually effect just that area there as well which is the lights you can climate clearly see them on the curve here and of course I have my highlights the top top highlights which are the brightest pixels of the imaging and the shadows which are the darker images as well here which allow me to contrast the image so keep all that in mind I know I'm repeating myself but this is a lot more tricky than you think when you start really thinking about it so just to prove my point how this is also connected just really really quickly then we just go to the Vinci here so this is the Vinci resolve which is free by the way you can go and download it if you want or it comes with the camera just like when I bought the Blackmagic it came with the camera and so once you're in DaVinci Resolve it's the same thing once you have this clip this is exactly the same click the only difference though is that it seems much much darker doesn't it so I'll explain to you in a minute about why that's happening so if I open nuke I'll show you exactly what I mean so you see in a new you can kind of see that the sphere is really really bright compared to the Vinci and so for example if you look at the Vinci it looks much more from washed out the reason for that is because the Vinci is actually does not have a lot system on top of the images and this is of course something that we'll talk about on later episodes but I just wanted to mention to you that's why it looks different because the Vinci you're used to in DaVinci applying let's per clip or applying let's per sequence it doesn't really have a left on the viewer because it's a color correction too and a lot is basically color correction so so keep that in mind and for example if in Newquay you know the problem of this is that problems are happening here is that nukes default lot is going on here so if you look at above here on the top you kind of see that there's a lot of none srgb reference or nine or rec one eight eight six now the vinci works with a none lot so there's no lot applied on top of the image and and of course this is still looks wrong and the reason it looks wrong is because in nuke the lot is being applied by the color space so you're actually importing the color space into the image you physically putting the Alexis v3 Loxy into the image and now what you do need to do is you need to linearize it because in Nuuk everything is linear colour space there is no notion of 8-bit or 16-bit in Nuuk not like in After Effects and whenever you work in Nuuk it's always ready to big float always at all the time because of that you have to linearize your images you have to convert them to linear and the way it works inside of nuke is that for the Alexa footage in specific you would have to put a lot so basically I would have to download and usually what I do is I so this is a software called addy color tool and it provides you lots for all sorts of cameras and basically can export the lot from there I've exported a lot already so I'm basically have the lot and then I can import it back in in using the vector field which is a node that allows you to import lots I have the left already here and so if I apply it to my footage and the only thing I need to do is basically tell them okay color space in is Alexa v3 Loxy color space out is linear so it's linear right so now if you look at my piece of footage it looks almost identical to the Vinci's piece of footage now on da Vinci I would also have to apply the lot from Adi in it as well so we'd have to go here second and so now I have applied an Adi luck to Rex's or mine and now if you look at nuke I have an exact match so now I'm both looking at the image in nuke with the complete image using a conversion from a D to excellence online so that I can actually see the image as it was shot basically this is now matching what I was I saw on set if you did have the monitor set to excellence online I know I'm getting ahead of myself we have plenty of time to talk about this on later episodes of you guys desk so I do promise I will do a lot in a color space tutorial later on I think we're getting ahead of ourselves so let's just go back a notch and go back to the Vinci and just talk about this the reason I went to the Vinci is to just prove my to yourself that it's all the same so you see here same kind of principles lift gamma gain same thing lift includes the lift of nuke or shadows in Adobe Lightroom so you see here if I change sorry if I change the lift you can clearly see the image gets lifted just like in nuke you're lifting the shadows or the dark areas if I go to my gamma I'm affecting the mid-tones at the image so I'm affecting the mid section or the skin tones if I go to gain I'm affecting just the top image so I'm basically brightening or lowering the highlights just like you saw on the lift on the highlights or in in the multiplication inside of nuke now I'm just going to give you a little look before we actually do a little small exercise and this is a piece of footage shot for the homefront revolution trailer that I made last year that I directed last year for 5 out smoke together with willow Connor and and I just wanted to show you why we actually sometimes film these graphs so this is Thomas Wald the VFX supervisor in director and also head of marketing at solar Studios it is having a coffee while he's shooting a gray scale and white card chart for me and why do we do these things and one thing whenever you have a chance to be on set always try to do this because she's going to give you really quickly how that's done so just look at the values of white here the values I'm having is zero four zero five zero four now I can clearly see that because we are in a green-screen stage you can clearly see and actually in my vector scope here you can clearly see that there is a huge tenth of green clearly see of course that's normal because there is green on this image you know like it's a green screen but there is an offset in the middle here you can kind of see that there's almost no values on actual pure white and you can kind of see that on even on black and white it's kind of like matching the greens pretty much and the reason for that is because red green and blue or actually not matching and as they should with whites you know so one little trick to do is when you use the grid node you see that there's the two these two things here the black point and the white point now the black point in the white point or literally ways for you to tell the grade node what is the whitest point what is the blackest point and then it basically compresses the image until it kind of gets correct and this is really important because when you have an image that has tints you want to correct them before you do your creative color correction and so the cool the beauty thing about having charts is that I can literally just color pick something this chart doesn't have blacks unfortunately I don't think I have the footage for that anymore and she's going to show you with the white so if I call it pick just the white you see immediately I get a color corrected image with pure white and so now if I look the values much closer zero one zero one zero like one zero one zero zero nine is a little bit of blue there and as you can see when I disable my grade nodes you can clearly see that the center image there that is now much more in pure white realms and so keep that in mind when you're doing a color correction now if I have two pure black I could have sampled the black as well I don't have pure black but I can actually figure it out because if I increase my gamma or even increase my Abbe stop I can kind of find out what's the darkest area so you see the darkest area in this images under is shirt here so I now can actually color pic under that section there and that will give you me the black points and so if I now look at the image now my black point is also corrected so now I have pure blacks and pure whites all the way to 1 0 into 1 and so now this is a color corrected image and now it's a much bigger much better image for you to start it's a very common practice when you're using the venture using base lights for you to actually bake make the images flat and make the images like bays white and black so that they have proper color correction so shooting a shot on set really allows you to have automatic color correction pretty much from every tint in case the black point and the balance of your Campbell was not set correctly so before we apply some of the concepts who've been talking about I wanted to just take this opportunity to give you a little tip so if you guys want to know more about compositing and color correction you should definitely get a run Brickman's book the art and science of digital compositing this book is truly amazing and it has entire chapters dedicated for color correction and it's a very technical book it's really good for you guys to have a look if you guys want to check out you can also check out the visual effects society handbook this book also has a lot of really good pipelines it actually gives you insight of how companies work in terms of film color correction and grading entire chapters it's like quite a big book don't try to read it all in one go it's very very dense but it's a really good book and last but not least my good friend Steve Wright he has a really good book on compositing you guys have a new addition you should check it out on Amazon and again he's the master of compositing and II will give you and guide you through color correction Lots graving very in very in-depth inside this book she should definitely check it out but without further ado let's just go on with this so this is an it's a really short sequence you know I'm just want to give you some examples of how to do color correction inside of nuke or any other application and now this is from the fields I didn't do the grading on this film I only did the visual effects I was a supervisor and lead composer on it but I am going to imply some of the color correction techniques that I use these days when I direct my own projects so for the beginning I'm going to actually look at this and start assessing what's going on as you can see I have two sections here which is a primary color correction and a secondary color correction now the idea behind that is primary primary color correction is for you to actually fix problems you know making sure white balance is correct making sure blacks are correct and then once you move on you move on to secondary color correction which gives you the opportunity to do creative compositing creative color correction and also to put masks in of course this is a very old-fashioned way of working but I'm really used to color correcting like this from back in the day when I used to use color from Apple to do color correction I was very used to this kind of methodology but if you look at da Vinci it kind of works this way as well and base light as well so as you can see on the vector scopes here you can clearly see that there's a really big highlight on the windows so I'm going to if I lower my f-stop so you can clearly see because if this is an Alexa piece of footage it's very it still has a lot of detail it's quite a huge dynamic range there so I need to fix that before I even start the color correction always try to fix your footage first and then do the color correction trying to make the footage flat trying to make the footage correct and this of course goes between shots as well if you had 20 shots in this corridor you would want to make sure that all your primary color correction is the same throughout all the shots the other thing that you also happens you clearly see not only the window in this area here is very bright and then you can see that there is a small bright area on the actual you know the actual wall here you can kind of see these points and then you have of course his head and the hand which are of course much darker now if you look at the vector scope you can clearly see that there is an offset of magenta in Reds it's kind of like off-centered and that's because the image is not fully white and black you need to kind of color corrected it back into its place the way I'm going to do this is I'm going to put a great note here I'm going to start by effectively telling Anouk where the black point in the white point is I'm going to start with the white with the black point not frits first see the black point literally you just have to increase the exposure to maxim and that kind of provides you an hint sight of what's the darkest on the image so in this case I'm going to color pick and I'm actually going to color pick some something like this a few pixels here now there's a lot of noise on this image so of course you need to pick a bunch of pixels otherwise you're going to pick a specific color so need to be careful with that and so that's the black point and then the white point you're basically going to basically lower your gamma so try to see the saturation now there is one thing you cannot do you cannot pick the white point from the window remember the window is being affected by the Sun which has a different temperature and then inside the corridor we have the temperature of the lamps of the corridor so you have to be careful so you want to kind of affect the light inside this room because that's where your action is happening you can always call a quick the window separately so you see the brightness thing is actually this wall so I'm going to pick up the white point and I'm going to sample a section of that wall I bring back my viewer tool as it should and look through the viewer you can kind of see that now I used to have an image it was very much in the Scopes here you can kind of see that that we have like tonality of you know very much leaning into reds and now we have much more centered color of course it's brighter that's the issue we have to deal with as well it's a bit too bright but now whiter whites blacks or blacks they don't have any tinge it's very important for you to color correct without any tinting whatsoever the tints could come from the camera maybe the white balance is not correct or it could come from bad treatment of the footage it could come from wrong color spaces I've gotten things from all sorts of types of things and so with that in mind I'm actually going to lower the multiplication a little bit just to write so that I can lower as it was if I look at my vector scopes you can see that before we had basically arranged between the values of the highlights there so I'm going to going to try to lower my multiplication so that I have a similar tonality of what I had before and it doesn't need to be perfect but as you see here by looking at the vector scopes it's very close now you know it's just a little bit brighter but it does really matter and so it's just a bit bit less bright and of course now instead of having this tint of red it actually is wiped so this is now my primary color question done the other thing that I'm going to fix is this window here I could try to fix the window with a color correctors because I can pinpoint that highlight and so if I go to the ranges I could go in here and say that my highlights are a bit bigger my shadows are a bit smaller so I have a bigger range and then in here I could try to recover that window by using the gamma only on the highlights could do that and making sure that I don't affect anything else on the image and so I'm just going to look into this so you see I'm kind of recovering just the window but the problem with the color corrector is that it's very harsh so you see as soon as I start harshing too much start getting these edges which is not good so getting these really bad edges because that's of course you're reaching the limit of the dynamic range of the image you have to be careful with that I'm not going to lower this much so I'm gonna just make make it a bit more subtle so maybe I'm going to lower just 20% in here and then I'm going to put a great note here and then I'm going to use a radial you'll see that I use radials a lot I like radials radios are a great way for you to pinpoint a mask without having to do masks so I'm basically going to just select that area of the image there and then I'm going to attach it to that grade node of course this radial will have to be animated or tracked and that's simple I just put a tracker and again we can do this on the Vinci we can do this in After Effects it doesn't really need to be done here but if I attach the tracker and basically it's only 40 frames I'm going to just put a tracker here attach it to one of these corners here you know so I'm just gonna put a tracking marker there that should be enough it doesn't need to be perfect track anyway and then I just track the whole thing when tracking don't forget to put the little lamps so you can kind of see the quality of your track you can see that there's a slip at the middle section so I'm going to just go back a bit and I'm going to track it again from there and so now I have a much greener track it doesn't really matter if it's not perfect so once this track is done now I can attach it to my so this I'm just going to keep making sure that I know what I'm doing here so this is the rabiul of the window so that's going to be that track and I'm going to leave it up there up here now the thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to transfer the tracking data so a couple of ways of tracking transferring the data you can actually express it or you can copy it over or you could just literally just go to the first frame copy the tracker place the tracker into the radio and then basically say you want a current frame and basically you want to do a match move and now your radial should move with your image now be careful with the fact that the radial is being cropped at a moment and so I want to make sure my radial is all inside the image I'm just making sure it's not cropped so that I don't have an image that it's cropped in tracking and then I track it and now it should move with the image it's all good now I'm only I'm only going to actually just move the radial so if I now start lowering my multiplication kind of see that I'm affecting the radial there which is the wrong place I'm only I'm only going to really quickly just put a transform node and just move the radial to the window so it doesn't get cropped so I'm going to put it just right there and of course the grade node can't be this harsh this is a bit too much so the whole point here is that you see because I've done a great node with a radial I don't get these weird artifacts that I was getting with a color corrector so the grade node made a much better image and as you can see if you look at the Scopes now you can clearly see that I have now salvaged that section and recover that quality so that's now good so for me and in terms of primary color correction this is now done I have done an image that has white good white balance one thing I'm going to do is because you see that you can kind of see the props of the lights there this was supposed to be done as a 2:35 aspect ratio image anyway so I'm going to put the bar so that I don't have to look at that so it's it's a much more cinematic look so if you have recovered that I've recovered the white balance there's still a few things to do but now I'm going to start doing some creative color correction creative choices so first off I tend to do one thing when I do these kind of projects I tend to focus on you know just like a color corrector with doing base light on DaVinci usually colorist or grade artists they can to fixate on the language of the actor and they try to fix it on the actual message that is being told so with that in mind I'm going to put a great note and I'm going to again use another radial and I'm going to try to recover some of the face so I'm going to make sure that this grade note actually says face so again secondary color correction is basically when you start using masks so I'm going to put this radial right on his face I'm going to start putting up some gamma up so that I can actually have a bit more face and visible in the image and I also losing a bit of contrast so I'm going to actually put a color corrector here as well attached to the same mask and I'm just going to contrast it a little bit so I recover the contrast so of course this now needs to be animated you don't really need to track it you could track it of course but you know sometimes it's faster to just animate it by hand especially on a sequence that's short so I'm probably just going to fixate it on his nose and just kind of animate in between frames here again this can be done in After Effects or DaVinci you don't really need to do this in Nuuk I'm basically trying to teach you some techniques that you can use on any application by keeping and sticking to your principles of multiplication highlights gamma and mid-tones so in here what I did on his face was I basically improved the highlights and the mid-tones and then I made a bit of contour and I already had out of the bath you can kind of see that this was on my original image and this is my new image so as you can see now the spectator was looking at the window now the spectator is not looking at the window anymore now they're looking at him in the window is a secondary section which is really what you want except if there was an actor there then it would have been different but the main shot here is to look at him so I've improved the actual quality of course now we're getting into too much saturation but we have to deal with that as well I'm going to put a so that I can see it on my black magic out here I'm actually going to put 245 aspect ratio on the back there so I can actually see it on my scopes and I can actually see it on my black on my bank you monitor as well so so as I said on the beginning of this video I'll show you in a bit in a bit but I'm using the BenQ Technicolor approved monitor for color correction and then I have of course the BenQ another band q4k monitor here to do my desktop in its fully calibrated they're both matching and have a perfect match between the two of them this fir'd monitor here of course is just for the scopes and so put this in mind now that i have done a bit of creativity I'm gonna actually do a more harsh color correction I'm going to put a color corrector here I'm actually going to call this creative grade I'm going to go into my ranges I'm gonna make sure my mid-tones or my darks are a bit smaller and my mittens are a bit wider because the image is not as strong and I'm going to now start doing some color correction now this is a sci-fi film so I'm going to go into the cliche of going into my mid-tones which is just the skin tones and the grey areas of the image and I'm going to go into my mid-tones and just start fiddling around with some color so I'm going to basically introduce some green tint just like the matrix you know I know it's a bit 90s but just gives it a bit of a green tint it might be a little bit too much but I'll go back to that then as well I'm going to remove some saturation from my image just a little bit so that I have a bit less saturated image I'm basically taking about percent of saturation then I'm going to push the contrast a little bit further so as you know probably contrast is always by crunching the you know if you look at the Scopes here you can kind of see what contrast does and you see contrast with level like that what happens when I start contrasting a lot I start sliding this value here you can kind of see what happens is my highlights go all the way up my black scroll all the way out so basically what contrast is doing is basically extending the mid-tones and compressing the blacks and the whites that's what contrast is doing it's like a a constantine effect on the image and so it you always have to be bit careful with contrast I'm just going to contrast a little bit of course now I have of course created problems here with the window create the problems with the glove since you don't see it anymore so now I'm going to push up the highlights a bit and then I'm going to go into my mid-tones remember I'm going to go into my mid-tones and control the highlights of my mid-tones by lowering because I want to lower this window here so I'm going to just lower a little bit so now you see I've recovered just the highlights of the mid-tones without affecting him so this is actually basically the highlights of the myth of the mid-tones then I'm actually going to increase the overall mid-tones to get a more cohesive image and I'm going to go to my highlights and it's just lower by like 10% a little bit and then on my shadows I'm going to actually increase my shadows a little bit more and push a bit more highlights on the shadows so that I can recover the love a little bit now this is a bit too much so I'm just going to keep it like that so now as you can see already we have and of course keep keep in mind guys that this is a creative process what I'm doing here is a gray that I like you know I'm kind of and of course I'm doing a fast grade it's a quick grade it's like a 10-minute grade so you guys might have other visions on this you know you might want to do it as a 70's look or you might want it to do it as either add a blue tint so it's not about the final color correction this tutorial is to just give you pipeline and so now that I have that I'm just going to look at my channel and result so you see before we looked at the window he was very red it was all very tinted red now we look at him we don't look at the window anymore and we have a bit more contrast now the only thing I'm going to now start doing is I'm going to go into the face again and I'm just going to increase a bit more life on his face I just think I lost that kind of punch on its face and and then the other thing that I want to do is I think I want to recover some of his physical love so I'm going to do another secondary color correction here I'm going to put a grade note here I'm going to actually put a roto shape this time not a not a radial it doesn't need to be a roto shape but it's kind of good if I you show you several types I'm just going to basically do a roto shape on this area here and again you might be thinking why are you doing these roto shapes in these really awkward shapes but if you guys have ever sitted on a color correction session in a great sweet onlays light on da Vinci you know that this is how it works and they track masks all the time that's really how colorists work and just want to try to give you some hints I've come to that kind of world now of course this needs to be animated so that we follow his hand I'm just going to do some keyframes here by hand I'm not even gonna track it again it's a very short shot there's no point of view tracking it it's so you know it takes longer to track than actually to do the animation so as long as you look at it and you can kind of see that it kind of works so it goes a bit down here so I need to go a bit higher high here so good it goes a bit too fast and then it goes there it goes high again yeah should be more than enough and so now and of course then at the end don't forget that the hand goes away so the mask needs to go all the way down with the hands so that it kind of synchronizes with the hand and you don't want to make sure you want to make sure it's actually controlled so now that I have that I'm going to just call this grade node the hand and now I'm actually going to go in here and I'm going to push my highlights so that I have a nicer tone and I'm not going to push my gamma probably not the guy I'm not the mid-tones I'm actually going to lift so I'm going to get those black areas of the love and just do it a bit more now be careful with the mask the mask of course needs to be much more diffused so I'm gonna just pick it up and actually and make much bigger fallout so I'm going to just select the whole thing hit the ripple effect and I'm actually going to improve my mask by making it much much bigger and actually much smaller in size so you don't notice it so much that's the trick here is to make all these color Corrections without anyone noticing it so you see here this is already kind of looking much better I'm actually just gonna go in here put a blur node here I'm just going to blur that mask even more and you see blurring the mask allows me to remove that kind of black edge that I had around it and and so now you see the hand is much more visible so now you know as before we were looking at him and the window and now we're looking at the hand in his face now as a final final thing I'm basically going to just get a bit more contrast into it I'm going to just lower the gamma a little bit more so we have a bit more contrast and now I think I'm going to actually just sharpen the image a little bit because it would be nice if I have a bit more sharp and a bit more crunch look so I'm going to put a lint log video note here converting it to log then I'm going to put a sharpen nodes the reason I'm putting a lock tool in is because I want to make sure my sharpen doesn't get broken you know because if I disabled I've already talked about this on other Yukos tasks but if I start sharpening you for example if I put a five sharpen here you can kind of see that you start seeing black edges around the edges and so now if I put my lock tool in conversions here you see the black edges are gone so you don't have this problem anymore of really harsh edges on the contrast and so that's a good trick to do that of course I've revealed a lot of noise but this is of course a is just an example of what you could do like I said and I'm not doing a creative comp I'm just showing this the examples of what I would do and so now if I play this back you see that it's looking quite nice so you see the ramp attaches to the window the mask attaches to the hand and to the face and now we basically focus on him and much better now one of the things that I'm kind of seeing is that we having a huge bright area in the middle there I think that could be fixed by just either putting a mask there I think I managed to just going to do a mask there because I think I'm just going to compensate it or I could use the mask I already have now I'm going to put a mask there so if I put a great note again no actually if I go to this color corrector yeah that's right because I go to the main color corrector we had on the primary color correction I think that is coming from here so if I lower yeah there you go if I lower the gamma on my color corrector here I can kind of lower that section there and it looks much much better now and I actually also think that maybe the window needs to be a bit lower as well the window is not as important I'm also going to actually put a saturation node here and disable the saturation a lot on the window so we don't look at it more and I actually think that for me to focus even more on him I would probably put a ramp as well and ramps are really good tools for color correction because it's a really good way for you to do a harsh color correction on a very big piece of image so I'm just going to put the ramp quite where he is all the way to the to the window where it's white and I'm actually going to just do that and then this will give me an opportunity to lower that entire corridor a bit more so that we don't look at it so much I'm also going to put a color corrector there and I'm not actually going to lower the saturation of that entire thing and that's it so I don't want to spend much more time on this but you can kind of see that even looking at what we've done here it's looking much better you see I would noise I would be noise the image actually by the way before I would do this because I think the color correction is really breaking the noise a bit so I would probably de noise the image and then I would kind of actually put the noise back I think that would be the best way but you see we had a window which is broken the face wasn't really relevant and now it is and now it looks kind of like you know a badass matrix shot of course it's on my taste it's not on your taste but I think you see how quickly we can kind of put this together of course this is a really small introduction but just to recap you can kind of see primary color correction where I basically you know go and I this is the image I have I start by making sure whites and blacks are correct I start by fixing some of the highlight issues with the windows in the walls I didn't have a pinpointed mask just for the window I then have some saturation because the window is a bit too much red most likely because there's a brick wall on the back there and then on my secondary color correction I have a color correction on the face to bring back the highlights and the mid-tones then have some contrast added into the face if I have the time I also would fix some of his acne by using a glow and by using a blur I would mask that I can maybe that's a topic for another you goes desk someday so I can show you how to actually do a cleaner skin on the top there and then I actually have a color corrector pinpointing just for the hand so that we actually can see the hand better and then I have a ramp that allows me to actually lower the whole thing with the alleyway because it's not as important and then of course my creative grey which is a bit of contrast a bit of green tint a bit of mid-tones highlights and then some sharpen which is a bit too much it's going to lower a little bit more and again I from now on from here I would potentially would use a glow to just do a bit of a diffuse to make it a bit more cinematic so and the issues would be you know it would be literally using a glow again we can we can dive into this a bit more on the next episode of you guys ask but give you a little idea of what I was talking about if I put a glow here for the skins I could put it before the colour correction as well but I usually tend to use my glows as merges at screen so that I don't affect the highlights and so I'm going to just put the glow there so you see what I'm going to do is I'm going to put the glow as effect only I'm actually going to tolerate the glow much less because what I want is the glow coming from the window and from the wall I'm going to brighten to the glow much less as well so it's less powerful desaturate the glow a lot more and see what that gives me and so that as you can see gives me a little just a little bit diffused under is ears so I get a bit of a like rap going on here especially the window here gets a bit more diffused and the lights get a bit more diffused and and that's it and then it kind of goes back to here so as you can see I'm going to just go back to before and after and so that's my final image and so that was the original plate we had kind of see that there's a lot of issues on the scopes there as well and now this is the final color correction we've made on the same image let's let it just process and so before after I think it's quite successful for like a 15 minutes long grade so this is it for me really and the cool thing that I really want to emphasize is that because you have this system as long as you label everything you could potentially use this as a pipeline you could now move into another shot if you have the same actor and make sure that the radial would be attached to his face then make sure that they're happy if you have another if you have another window you make sure that that radio was attached to the window and making sure this roto is attached to the hand so as long as you would reanimate the hand in the two radials to the new shot potentially you could get away with having the same color correction as long as the camera would have the same lighting on that shot of course it's always a shot shot basis when you do color correction but that is it for me today and I hope you've enjoyed this video and and just this a little glimpse of introduction to call a correction and please keep in mind that all these techniques can easily be done in after-effects fusion or DaVinci so keep that in mind to be software agnostic and that is it for today sorry for the long tutorial but there was a lot to talk about I hope you've enjoyed this video a follow up will come shortly in the next few weeks if you want check out my videos at Ugo's desk follow us in twitter at you gos desk or follow me personally at you go see again as always support my channel in patreon and thank you so much for watching [Music]

Channel: Hugo's Desk

Views: 69,097

Rating: 4.9558654 out of 5

Keywords: Grading, Colour, Photographers, Photo, Lightroom, After Effects, Foundry, Hugo Guerra, Hugo's Desk, Nuke, 4K, BenQ, Visual Effects, VFX, CG, CGI, 2D, 3D, FXPHD, Escape Studios, Adobe, Da Vinci, Blackmagic, Learning, Training, UHD

Id: LFjwvJHvWnU

Length: 64min 21sec (3861 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2017