STEAL THE COLOR-GRADING From Any MOVIE or PHOTO!

hey guys what's going on welcome back to another video today I want to show you how to steal the color grade from your favorite Hollywood films so without further ado open up Photoshop open up premier or your editing software and let's jump into it so over in Photoshop as you can see we have got our screen grab from my footage and also opening another tab I've got a screen grab from the film the Martian I love the colours in this I think they absolutely nailed it and it's just it's dope honestly I love it it's great so the very first thing we need to do is extract the colors from our Martian scene luckily Photoshop gives us a super simple way to do this it's honestly amazing and I love it so so much so what you gonna want to do is with this image selected head up to file hit export and hit save for web if you're using an older version of Photoshop safe web might actually be somewhere in this list but in all the newer Creative Cloud versions it is in the export list so I'm gonna go ahead and hit export and hit save for web well that's gonna do is bring up this dialog box now it looks super scary and it looks like there's a whole bunch of options but luckily we're only gonna be playing with a few of them so don't panic too much what you're gonna want to do is make sure that you have the optimized file format set to gif and also the color reduction algorithm needs to be set to custom now if you look a bit further down you'll see there is a color table and this is basically a map that Photoshop can recognize of all 256 colors that make up this image but we don't want 256 we want somewhere between three and five I found three works best for most things so all we need to do to get that is come up to where it says colors and change 256 to three now we want to export this color table into a format that we can load into our swatches in Photoshop so what we want to do is come to the color palette menu hit the little drop down and just hit the save color table that is going to give you the option to save it anywhere on your PC so save it somewhere that you are gonna remember I've made a movie color match file here and I'm sure I call this one the Martian and you'll see it saving as an Adobe color table file so hit save and we're done with this dialog box you can just hit cancel close out [Music] so the next thing we need to do is apply the gradient mask now this is pretty easy to do what you want to do is come down to the adjustment layers icon down here hit that and hit gradient map so let me briefly explain what the gradient map does if I click once to edit the radiant map you can see we've got two handles the first is a dark brown II gray color and the far right is a pure white if I go into the darker color and hit the color icon I can change this to pretty much anything I want so if I change it to a bright orange you can see that all the dark areas of our image have been mapped to Orange obviously I changed this to blue they changed to blue so the left handle controls the darkest areas the white handle in this case the right hand handle controls the brightest areas of the image so if I go ahead and change this to red you can see all of our highlights have been set to red and all of our shadows have been set to blue now we can click anywhere on this line to add more handles and we can adjust the colors in the mid tones to set the mid-tones to green we have a fairly hideous looking image and we can slide these around to get different variations of that image but that definitely doesn't look good so I'm just gonna go ahead and reset it to black and white just for now and okay now we're gonna be applying the three colors that we pulled out into our color table to this gradient map to do that we obviously need the colors come down to the swatches panel and just pull that out and open it up if you don't have the swatches panel you can come up here to window and just click on swatches and it should load in but with it open you can see we've got the generic swatches that Photoshop gives us but we don't want the generic ones we would like to load in our Martian swatch and again that's super easy to do just hit the little drop down and hit replace swatches and that's going to load up the dialog box but as you can see this is where I saved it but it's not here and that's because this is looking for a co files we didn't save it as a co file we saved it as a CT it's a color table so click drop down pick color table and there we have the Martian so I'm gonna go ahead and load these in and you can see we've got our three colors primed and good to go so I'm gonna just go ahead and double click on our gradient icon and load that back up now gonna go ahead click wants to open our gradient map settings and I'm just gonna pick this leftmost handle hit the color box and just pick one of these so I'm gonna pick the first one here now the number you want to pay attention to is this value here which is the brightness value so the brightness value for this color is 97% so I'm going to hit OK and on the location for this slider I'm just going to type in 97 and you can see it's pretty much beige doubt our image which is fine we're going to come back and fix that now but that's the position you want to set it to so I'm going to hit the second handle and do the same thing again hit color box pick the second color and the brightness value for this is 29% so I'm gonna go ahead and set the location to 29 and then as I mentioned a moment ago we need to add a third handle so just click anywhere on the bottom here hit the color box pick your third color and this one is 78% so I'm gonna hit OK and set that one to 78% now you're probably thinking that's not even remotely close to the margin it's just a dirty oranjee color it's doesn't look good so what we're going to do is change the blend mode of our gradient map layer to either soft light or color soft light works best for more subtle effects but in the instance of this Martian scene I'm gonna go ahead and pick color gives it a bit more of a dusty look and just makes it look a bit more interesting and we are gonna make some more tweaks to this but for now I'm happy with the way that looks the next thing we need to do is isolate the tones from the Martian scene so that's the shadows the mid-tones and the highlights from this image now it's super easy to do the first thing you're going to want to do is hit the new layer icon and make sure you grab your brush tool you can grab it from just here or you can just hit B on your keyboard and if you hold down AI it will give you the eyedropper tool and you want to make sure this is set to 3 by 3 or 5 by 5 average and your sample should be set to all layers and all we want to do at this point is sample the brightest areas and the darkest areas so I'm gonna go ahead and use this area here I know it's not necessarily the absolute brightest area that would kind of be the massive great ball of fire in the sky over here but I don't want to use the sky because it's not a true representation of what we've got going on in our image making sure I got my new layer selected I'm just gonna paint a little bit of that highlight color just over there and next up is the darkest areas which I would argue is down here so I'm gonna go ahead and paint in just a bit of that shadow color now for the mid-tones it's a little bit more complicated so all you want to do is come up to the select and hit color range mine's already set to mid-tones but when you load it in it's gonna be set to sampled colors so you gonna want to come to the drop-down hit mid tones and the fuzziness will be set around 40 so you just want to drop that to zero maybe expand the range just a little bit and then hit OK come down and make sure you have your bottom layer selected not along with your brushes on and hit control J that's gonna copy the averaged area to a new layer which we're then gonna use the blur to get an average color from so you can head up to filter with this layer selected hit blur and then hit average and as you can see that's averaged it out all the colors that were originally in this mid-tone selection and giving us this nice kind of murky brown color so I'm gonna go ahead pick that and making sure I've got my brush layer selected I'm just gonna add that as my mid-tone color between the other two [Music] so to really really nail this effect home we're not quite there yet what we're gonna do is we're gonna map these highlights shadows and mid-tones to our image here and it's super easy to do we're gonna be using the curves adjustment layer so you can want to go ahead select your gradient map hit the adjustment layer icon and pick curves that's gonna load up this dialog box and it's pretty straight forward curves gives you the option to set your black point your white point and your gray point which is your neutral point and we're gonna be using these to map these it's literally the how straightforward come back up double click on this icon again and we should be able to pick a highlight color so I'm gonna go ahead and hit OK it's going to ask us if we want to save the new target colors as defaults we don't we only want to use these once so I'm gonna go ahead hit no and then proceed to select the brightest part of my image now this might take a little bit of clicking around to find the brightest part that looks the best in my case I think it's probably gonna be around over here somewhere to get the best kind of orange I'm happy with roughly about there so we're gonna go ahead and do the same thing with the black point I'm going to pick my darkest color here and then I'm gonna pick the darkest point in the image which is probably this area just in here roughly there looks pretty good and then last thing when you see the same thing with the grays so I'm gonna go ahead double click the icon select our mid-tone kind of brown color and then all I have to do is select something that in my original image would normally be gray so I know that these pebbles here gray this pebble here is gray so I'm just gonna go ahead and pick the last thing I might do while I'm here is go ahead and just add a levels adjustment and maybe just bump the dark areas to make them a little bit darker and just give it a little bit more contrast something around there looks pretty good and yeah I'm pretty happy with that all we need to do now is export it as a lot now to export a lot from Photoshop super simple I know I've said that a bunch of times but Photoshop does make all of this stuff really really easy all you have to do is come up to file hit export and go down to color lookup tables which is a lot click on that and give it a name so I'm just going to name this one Martian or would if I could spell set your quality I tend to stick with high I've never had any problems with high then you want to pick the formats that you're exporting in obviously I'm working with a cube file because I am working in Premiere so I'm happy with all of this I'm just gonna go ahead and hit OK it's going to ask me where I want to save it and I'm gonna go ahead and give it a name cuz the name doesn't transfer across for some reason so go ahead call that Martian save it in my movie color match file hit save that Photoshop kind of do its magic and that's pretty much it we have our exported all I want to do now is jump back over into Premiere and apply my luck to this footage so what I've got to do to do that is come to down to the effects browser and add a Luo metric color panel so we can go ahead and add blue metree color and then in the creative tab you can hit look it custom and then we've got our Martian cube hit open and give it a couple of seconds and there you have it you go from having what looks like clay or silt I don't really know what that material is on a beach to having a very very Martian looking landscape that roughly matches original scene from the film obviously this was shot and has a Matt Damon in it and this just doesn't but you get the idea it's it's pretty accurate from here you can go and adjust the intensity obviously if you don't want it to look very Martian II at all and then I would probably just dial in a little bit more in the shadows and maybe a little bit more the highlights and the mid-tones if I was going for kind of a more dramatic effect and there you go you have gone from having a kind of beach scene I call that beach scene it's not very nice beach scene but kind of just a rocky normal-looking scene to having something that looks like it was shot on Mars alright guys that is pretty much it from me I really hope you guys liked the tutorial it's a super super handy trick and when you're not listening to me try and ramble and explain it it is much much quicker once you know what you're doing go ahead have fun with it as I say my one tip would be try and match your scene that you're trying to grade as closely to the scene from the movie as you can because the colors are just going to be much much more accurate if you have skin tones in that scene make sure you always sample the skin tones as your highlights because that's gonna give you the most accurate representation of color when you kind of transfer that across to your own footage where you again have skin tones but I'm gonna wrap things up here guys if you liked the video please go ahead hit the like button subscribe if you haven't already and leave me some comments let me know what some of your favorite color grades are movies like I know a lot of people are into Skyfall I love that looks dope but let me know some of your favorites down in the comments take it easy and I will see you in the next video course [Music]

Channel: Mason Summers

Views: 684,048

Keywords: How, to, steal, the, color, grading, colour grading, colour, from, any, movie, or, photo, hollywood, photoshop, premiere pro, tutorial, cinematic, photoshop color grading, color grading, how to, create lut, photoshop cc, cinematic look photoshop

Id: OGaaNAU3i_o

Length: 13min 24sec (804 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 24 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Sir_Phil_McKraken]

Very helpful, will be giving this a go over the weekend! I would have liked to have seen you do the Mad Max shot though lol.

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How would you go about this when you have the brown sand and blue sky like MM?

[u/Imposter12345]

Cool tutorial...Photoshop is a program I just don't understand... but I'm skeptical this would actually work once you introduce skin tones.

[u/Drekomir]

Cool tutorial, but stolen step by step from the Piximperfect YouTube channel. Sad.

https://youtu.be/epPOrHG6SnE

[u/atomsofstardust]

That’s a really good tutorial! Very informative and well presented! Great job!