My Beginner Colour Grading Process in Final Cut Pro | Final Cut Tutorial

so if you're just getting started in color grading you might have found that it's kind of a confusing topic i know i found it super confusing when i first started looking into color grading my raw footage but over the last couple of years of making youtube videos i've learned a little bit about color grading and i've even released my own lut so currently this is what my footage looks like when it's ungraded just straight out of the camera and then this is what it looks like when it's been graded so in today's video i just wanted to share my personal color grading process in the hopes that it might help you learn the basics of color grading now i'm definitely not an expert color grader but my process involves four main steps the first step is always making sure that i nail the exposure and the white balance in my actual camera body now i won't go into heaps of detail in terms of settings because your camera might be different to mine but i use the exposure meter on my preview screen to make sure that my exposure is correct and then i also use the auto white balance feature which enables me to just hold up a white sheet of paper or a white object in front of the camera hit auto white balance and then it sets it correctly so whatever you need to do with your camera settings to make sure that you can nail both of those settings will make the post editing color grading process so much easier so once i've got those settings correct and i've shot my video i'll then import my footage onto my computer and bring it into final cut and we'll jump onto my macbook to go through step two alright so here we are on my macbook in final cut i've imported the footage as you can see so step two is converting your raw footage to rec 709 which is a standard color space so basically the way i understand it is raw footage has like a really wide color space it has lots of color information but you want to narrow that color information down so it's easier to grade basically now you can get conversion luts from all sorts of different places camera manufacturers usually will have conversion nuts on their website so for example i use a sony camera and on the sony website there's conversion nuts for all the different types of cameras that sony sells so just download one of these lights and you can use that to convert your footage i've used a conversion lot that i bought from a youtuber i'll leave a link in the description but in order to apply our conversion on that i'll show you how to do it so i use adjustment layers you don't have to use adjustment lines but they just make it a little bit easier but you can pretty much do everything i'm doing with adjustment layers directly on the clip you just have to do all the effects i'm doing on adjustment layers directly onto your clip it's a little bit more complicated so i recommend using adjustment layers if you can so once we've got our adjustment layer ready to go we'll go to our effects tab and search for lut so we've got our custom lut effect here so we'll just drag and drop that onto the gray the adjustment layer and that hasn't changed anything up here yet because we haven't selected which light we want to use so to select the lut we will just hide this and go to our effects tab video effects tab and then in the custom lut section we will choose our conversion line so wherever you've downloaded it from you can import your custom lut this is the conversion lab that i use and as you can see that has already changed the footage a little bit it's added some contrast back in and changed the color a little bit the second step is correcting your white balance and your exposure now i know we already did that in the camera but you have to also correct it again with your raw footage in order to do that we'll get another adjustment layer and drag that on and this time instead of getting a custom lut what we'll get is we'll go to the color in the effects tab and then add color wheels now the next thing you want to bring up in your final cut workspace is your scopes so to get scopes go command 7 on your mac and it will probably come up with a waveform view like this as default but i use this dual view and then select the top one to be a vector scope and then the bottom one to be a waveform with rgb overlay don't worry about all the terms as long as you've got these up it will make sense so the first thing we want to do is just bring some color back in it's looking a bit desaturated so i'll bump up the saturation here and make the colors look a little bit more normal and the correct saturation so that's looking pretty good to me but what you'll notice over here in the rgb overlay is that one of the colors is more dominant than the others and that's red if you look over here you can actually kind of notice it particularly in the highlights there's this kind of red tinge in the overall image we want to get rid of that we want the image to be as neutral as possible so it's ready for our custom light so to get rid of this dominant red we just go over to the highlights and just play around with it a little bit as you can see that moves what color is dominant in the highlights but we don't want any color to be dominant we want them all to be pretty much the same so we just move this around until they're all in line with each other and they're pretty much white here which is what you want to see so that's looking a lot better already and then we'll do the same thing for the shadows shadows are already pretty good so i have to do too much and then the mid tones same deal with them they were already pretty good but just a little bit of a tweak you can play with this forever so just do it to the best of your ability that's looking pretty good so overall what else our rgb overlays looking pretty white overall there's no hugely dominant color which is what we want i'll just show you what it looks like before and after we did that so that's after and that's before so as you can see obviously it brings the saturation back in but if you look closely particularly in these highlights you can really see where that red tinge was which we've taken out which makes our overall image nice and neutral which is what we want so once that's done bring up your scopes again and we want to make our image a bit more contrasty and generally i find when it comes to raw footage darkening your mid tones a bit always helps bring out color a little bit so i'll darken that a little bit and then pump up the highlights a touch so i generally find my skin tone which is around this sort of red area here i want it to be between 75 and 100 so that's looking pretty good there in terms of overall exposure a little bit higher and then plug the shadows a little bit so i want my shadows to be just touching black which is zero so that's looking pretty good i might move my mid tones again a little bit just until it looks okay to me that's looking pretty good and there you go so that's the overall image exposure and white balance corrected and you'll notice up here the reason i had this vector scope up is basically because this line here which you can select here is the skin tone indicator so you can turn that on and off i always have the skin tone indicator turned on and that shows you where your skin tone should be lying in terms of color so it's looking pretty good here if it was incorrect so that would look more yellow so you can see my skin looks looks more yellow there and it's moved off that skin tone indicator line and same in the opposite direction it's starting to look more purple so it's moved off that line but we want it to be bang on this line here which is where it is that means your skin color is correct so that is that step three done so if you had all that this is before and this is after so you can see there's a huge difference completely different so that's pretty much how you color correct um your image to make it look normal but then the color grading is after that that's the last step the actual color grading itself is the very last step so in order to do that i'll add another adjustment layer i'll just call it a gray layer it's the same thing and then we have to do is add a our custom light onto this gray layer so i'll go into the effects get the custom light effect drag and drop it and then same deal go to the video effects custom light and select your light so you can import it i've already imported mine so in the canal 001 rec 709 select that and there you go you can see my lut adds some blues to the shadows which i quite like but tries to keep their skin tone still quite warm so once you've applied that you can adjust the mix which is basically just the intensity of your light so i'll usually um have my lap between 0.7 and 1 so i'll just play with it until it looks good i actually kind of like it quite high today i think i'll leave it at the one and there you go so that is that is after and that is before so you can see the law actually makes a pretty big difference but i think the thing that a lot of people don't really realize is you can't just put a lot like that straight onto raw footage i'll show you what that looks like so if i turn off our correction layers and conversion that that's what the light will look like if i put it directly onto my raw footage which is obviously not what i want which is why you have to do the first two steps before you put your actual custom light or do your color grading so this is what the footage looks like completely ungraded and then this is what the footage looks like created so as you can see there's a really big difference i'm pretty happy with how that looks and that is essentially my color grading process don't forget if you want to buy my custom light you can do that there's a link in the description if you're interested in seeing more video editing type of content then be sure to leave me a comment also make sure you check out my creative tech playlist for more creative tech stuff and other than that i'll have an amazing day today and i'll see you very soon in the next video [Music]

Channel: Nick Kendall

Views: 328

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Id: JroNoKaS0v4

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2021