The SECRET to COLOR GRADE LIKE A PRO - Live Demonstration

[Music] what is up guys so finally this is a long overdue video today we are going to be talking color grading and the importance of understanding colors to be able to create the look that you desire in your videos color grading is something that can make or break your videos and bring a whole another aspect of professionality to your creations there are some really cool little tricks and techniques that i want to show you here in premiere these techniques will work across any editing platform that you guys might be using once we're in premiere you can see that i have a bunch of different clips here that i'm going to use as demo clips to show you guys how i would color grade them the last thing that i want to show you guys is actually using this photograph over here and the trick i'm going to show you at the end is something that is literally going to blow your mind and it's such an epic powerful tool that's inside of premiere and no one is talking about it for some reason the first thing we need to understand before we actually start doing any of our color grading is what these tools over here are going to be these are things that are going to be our best friends when we're doing color grading they're going to help us understand what we need to be doing to our footage to make sure it's correct all screens kind of act differently to colors and our eyes can also sometimes play tricks on us but these things are going to be a nice scientific way of helping us to make sure that our colors are doing the things that we want them to be doing so you can see in this first clip here and i'm going to demonstrate a few different ways this first clip i'm going to do the color grade not applying any luts if you guys aren't sure what lots are they're basically like a filter for your video footage and they are an amazing way to speed up your workflow and get consistent looks throughout your footage but for this first one i'm going to be showing you how i would color grade this clip without using any luts let's understand these tools here that we have this first one over here is a vector scope and basically the way that this works is this is a representation of your colors and the saturation that you have in this particular clip you can see that as this flares out from the center that's showing you where your colors are heading and where they're moving out to you can see because of the clip we have here a lot of the colors we have are our skin tones and that falls right between here sort of on this line and that's pulling out towards the oranges the other prominent color here is blue and you can see that this is coming out here towards the blue you can see if i did something if i went to my basic corrections and i made this much warmer for example you can see how all of our colors shift up here to the warm you definitely want to keep your colors inside of this line this is a representation of what might be considered over saturated we're going to put this back to normal because we obviously don't want that the next thing that we're going to focus on is this and this is an rgb parade this is also showing what our colors but more importantly it's showing what our contrast and our exposure is doing in this clip so you can see here down at zero this is pretty much going to represent absolute black that's going to be something that's black on our screen something maybe in hannah's hair over here and right up to the top this hundred is going to be pure pure white sometimes where this can get confusing is when we want to separate this out and make sure our contrast is correct and lower our blacks to be the correct amount of black and raise our whites to be the correct amount of whites it isn't always as simple as making your black zero and making your whites 100 because there isn't always something in that particular clip that is true black or true white there's a really great chart called the ansel adams lighting chart or something along those lines i'll pop it up on the screen here otherwise you guys can do a little google search and find it but it's something that's definitely worth taking a little look at and maybe just seeing where something like or skin tones would fall onto that ansel adams chart now the first thing that we need to do before we actually start doing all of our exciting color grading is we need to do a little bit of color correction and although it's not as exciting it is definitely as important because we need to have a solid foundation to work on and to add all of that creative stylistic preference that we're going to be doing with that color gray so the first thing we need to do before we get to that color grade and something that's nice about premiere is that it's laid out in a way where you can almost work through it in the way that it's laid out here we can open up basic corrections this is going to be our correction obviously before our color grade and we can work through this in the order that it's presented here sort of we can go up and down and do fine tuning the first thing we want to do is select an input lut and this is basically a utility lut this is something that people often oversee and don't do but if you guys are shooting in something like s-log or c-log if you're on a canon whatever the picture profile you guys might be shooting on you need to add a utility lut to bring that footage back to something like rec 709 you can add it back manually here but you can't always get it as well as you could by using a utility latch you can get a utility lot from the website of your camera manufacturer and you can apply that here for this footage in particular i shot it in cine 4 which isn't really required to use a utility light to bring it back to normal the colors should sort of be there already so we're not going to apply one of those the next thing we can move on to is our white balance and make sure that it is correct i'm happy with how it is here the other thing to note is if you had a few different clips here you might want to match their white balance to make sure that they matched each other so as it cuts from each one of those clips the one isn't really warm and then the next one is really cool all of a sudden that's not really going to make sense so you need to match those first but in this instance we don't need to do that the next thing is our exposure i am happy with that our contrast i'm going to put up ever so slightly this clip in particular is filmed in quite harsh sunlight so i'm going to be doing some things like lowering our highlights slightly lifting our shadows just to flatten out that image a bit because i don't want too much of that harsh light and that really harsh contrast you can see on hannah's face here these shadows and lines are really strong and hard and to compensate for some of that we're just gonna lower our highlights we can put our shadows up a little bit now we're gonna raise our whites and we can keep an eye on our parade here we don't really need to do too much we might lower our blacks just make it just clip on that zero you don't want to go too far because you're gonna be crushing those blacks and losing that data then once we've done that very basic correction i am pretty much happy with that we can head over into our creative tab for this one in particular we're not going to be adding a lot a creative lut but this is where you could add one if you were doing that and you could change some certain things here i am going to pump my saturation up to something like 120 for this clip and that should be okay the next thing i'm going to do is head over to my curves and this is where you can start really getting creative and start creating the look that you want for this particular clip the first thing we're going to do is add a basic s-curve here and we can pull down our contrast a little bit more lift our highlights slightly i'm going to slightly take off our highlights and ever so slightly lift our blacks you can see that that's lifted the blacks off at the bottom i can go back here a little bit more contrast in maybe lower my blacks a little bit more that's looking quite good the next thing that we are going to do and this is something that is a really powerful tool within premiere is we can change the individual colors that we want and we can do things like control our skin tones which is something that is so so important when you guys are doing your color grading if you have some crazy colors going on in your video if you've kept your skin tones accurate and realistic you can almost get away with it but as soon as you see a video clip where the skin tones are just completely off they may be way too orange or they wear too way too green it completely throws off that clip and it immediately looks really bad in my opinion our skin tones are looking quite good so far in this one i am going to show you a little example here of how you could change it because i might want to make these a slightly more orange anyway we can grab this picker here and we can grab some different skin tones from hannah's skin here and you can see it selects our huver saturation curve we can change the saturation of hannah's skin if she was way too orange we could lower this and you can see how it takes all of that orange out of our footage otherwise we could lift it up a lot more to bring more orange into hannah's skin if we wanted to make it pop a lot more like i mentioned for this instance in particular i don't feel like that is too necessary right now i'm quite happy with how orange her skin tones actually are turning out the next one we have is hugh versus hugh and we're going to select her skin tones again we can change the tone of her skin so if it was looking a little bit too green we could raise it more into this pinky type of color otherwise we could do the opposite and make it look more green again for this one i'm gonna ever so slightly take it away from the yellows and make it a little bit more red or magenta i feel like that looks a little bit better and the hue vs luma is a great tool for something like if hannah's face was in shade we could select just her orange skin tone and brighten it with the luminance and bring her face up a little bit in exposure to make her stand out from that background a little bit this one we don't need to do that too much so we're gonna leave it the way it is another thing that i like to do with my colors is by dropping off the saturation in the shadows here it just gives a better look to the colors and you don't have any weird tint in your shadows you'll see this a lot more when we get to the studio shot next but you can see that this is already starting to look quite nice if we went here and i showed you before and after you can see it's really looking much more like poppy it's really looking way better it's coming to life that whole clip is looking the way that it should so i'm quite happy with how this is turning out we're going to move on to our next clip here and for this one in particular i'm going to show you guys how i would do this by using a lot and another thing that i'm going to show you guys is how i would do this by using an adjustment layer so something i like to do when i'm doing my color correction is take one adjustment layer and drag it out over all of my footage so that i don't have to individually color grade each and every clip i can have this adjustment layer and apply it to just the adjustment layer and it will work over all of the clips i'm gonna keep it just for this one in particular now for this one i'm gonna head to my basic corrections and i'm gonna keep an eye right here i want to lift my contrast let's take these shadows down a little bit highlights could come down ever so slightly our whites could come up but not too much and our blacks could come down just so they're touching at the bottom here this is a much easier clip to work with because the light is nice and flat and it's an even exposure because it's a controlled environment and i have this nice soft light coming onto my face and it's not doing anything too crazy the next thing that i can do is head over into my creative tab and i can apply a lot i am going to be applying my lot to this clip in particular i use pretty much the same lut in every single one of my videos and you guys can pick them up i'm going to be linking them down in the description if you want to get them you absolutely don't need them for color grading you can do it yourself as we just demonstrated or you can use anybody's luts that you like the look of if you do want to use my luts they are going to be linked down in the description and the one i use is this skin cine skin lut and i put it on almost every single one of my clips the first thing you're going to notice when i apply this slide is it's way too strong way way way too strong this is crazy looking we don't want that and lots are made to be way too strong so we're going to be turning down the intensity i usually turn it down to somewhere around 40. i'm going to keep it just about there at 40 and something else i'm going to do is just lift my vibrance up a little bit and maybe my saturation ever so slightly i think i'm gonna take this down even more to around 35 that is starting to look good for me got my crazy face on don't know what i was doing in this clip but it's a fine example the next thing that we are going to be going to is these curves and we're going to take some of the color out of our shadows and this just is a stylistic thing as most color grading is but if you look over here you can see there's quite a strong blue cast in this wall this is a white wall there isn't actually any blue in it but sometimes when doing things like applying luts or other color corrections further up you can cast weird colors into your shadows so what we can do here is just pull those out and you can see how the blue has been taken away in that shadow and in my opinion i much prefer how that looks the other thing is my skin might be looking ever so slightly yellow so we might make it just a little more orange we'll take our color picker select my skin and we can just change the hue very sensitive to be slightly more pink that looks a little bit better in my opinion subtle something really important about color grading is it's all the very subtle fine adjustments that all add up to a much better image at the end of it you don't want to do anything crazy and do these dramatic movements in anything here you're going to end up with a really weird looking image something else that i can notice here is that these highlights are actually a little bit overexposed in my opinion so i'm going to go back to my basic corrections and just lower these highlights a little bit like that this clip is just focused on me the subject right in the center of frame you shouldn't be paying too much attention to anything else in that frame and to further push that i can add a little bit of a vignette and you don't want to go too far with this i can just make it very subtle and nice it's just going to make the focus a little bit more onto me and not the background here and it just draws that attention in a little bit more so this clip is starting to look really nice now and you can see if we turn off our color grade it looks washed out and gray and when we turn it back on it's looking poppy and nice i'm really happy with how this turned out you can take this a lot further and go way more in detail into it but i think this is definitely a nice point to be at and something that i would be happy to be done with and render out we are going to work through these next clips relatively quickly because otherwise this video is going to end up being hours long i'm going to throw another adjustment there right here head back over into our color tab the first thing we're going to do head to our basic corrections this was quite nice low light so we have some nice light to work with nothing too crazy it's kind of an even exposure and we can just bring out our things like this i'm going to warm this clip up ever so slightly just to give more of that summer feeling on the beach really make it feel like the nice warm day that it was next thing i'm going to do is apply my cine skin lot because it's the best light ever just kidding and i'm going to turn down the intensity to somewhere around 35 so that it's nothing too crazy i'm going to put my vibrance up really make these colors pop take the saturation down ever so slightly and that may seem like something that's kind of weird to do because the vibrance is bringing those colors up and then you're taking the saturation down again afterwards but they affect your colors slightly differently and by doing that in my opinion it creates a really nice cool look i want to show you guys something a little different for this clip in particular and something that is super powerful in premiere pro that i haven't shown in the other clip so far and that is this hsl secondary and basically what you can do here is it's another way of isolating colors and editing colors individually so you could do this again for a clip like this where you might want to just control my skin tones but you can also do it for something like this where we have the sky now sky is such a funny thing people change the color of their sky so many people make it really teal other people go more towards the purple and like a much deeper blue i don't know it's just a preference thing you guys can put it wherever you like but this is a great way of controlling that and making that sky the way you like we can take this picture again we can select our sky and that's gonna add these colors in here to match the tone of the sky we can select it again to broaden this because you can see here that our sky has quite a gradient to it so we've broadened what it's actually targeting and what we're going to be affecting now you can click on this to show what you've actually selected and if you want to select everything but that you can actually click this to invert it and now you might be able to edit everything except for the sky which is also very useful for example we might want to take down all of our saturation but we want to still have that blue sky that's going to be how you do it for this example that's not what we're doing i'm going to put that saturation back up and i'm going to switch it back to be editing the sky only the blues now we could change our blues to be the blue that we might want them to be you can actually move this around you can change them to be that way more purple deep blue or we can go way more towards the green and we have this like tropical a lot of people do this for tropical stuff and you can see that's like a little bit too far obviously but for the purpose of this demonstration you can see how powerful this tool can be and you can do the same thing like i mentioned for your skin tones or anything else this is really amazing and something that you guys can experiment with right now i'm going to reset it back because we aren't going to be doing that to this clip in particular i'm actually quite happy with how this clip turned out before we did any of this and just by using that lut and our basic correction that clip is looking great you can see the before and after here very nice really coming to life and popping this clip in particular this is one of my favorite drone shots i've ever got by the way but aside from that this is quite a overcast day obviously you can see that we are literally in the clouds the light is much more even there's less contrast in that clip in particular and what we can do in that you can see here in our rgb parade that this is so far away from where it needs to be so we in our basic corrections let me quickly throw an adjustment layer on here don't really need to be using the adjustment layer for each individual clip the way that we're doing it but let me keep it there anyway we're going to head back to color and we are going to first things we're going to do is we're just going to start correcting this so we can bring our contrast up a bunch that's going to start spreading out our parade here we can bring our highlights up because we don't have to worry about protecting them too much like i mentioned it was a very overcast day we can bring these shadows way down somewhere there we can put our whites up but not too much you can see we're quite high over here already this is probably this and this is actually going to be almost true white in this clip in particular we can bring our blacks down really pull those blacks down to about there we're still not crushing any blacks we can bring our shadows down a little bit more and we could even put our contrast up a little bit more the next thing what we're gonna do is we're gonna add a little bit of warmth it was overcast often when it's overcast it can give a very blue image and your white balance can make it look very blue let's add in my lut skinny skin and that is looking so nice let's turn it down to something like 50 we can put our vibrance up and we can put our saturation down you can see now that this clip it looks amazing it looks amazing and you can see that without that color grade it's actually really just looking flat washed out and nothing really to it so that looks epic super happy with that here is our last clip that we are going to be doing before i show you guys that one more bonus trick that is going to blow your minds i guarantee it but let's have a look at this one this is an interesting one because as you can see it is really really warm the sun was very low in the sky just before sunset and it's really lighting up hannah's face very nicely but it is also incredibly warm on hannah's face so let's throw this pointless adjustment layer on and then head back to our color tab and we'll head to our basic directions a little bit of contrast not too much because it's a shot of a face and i don't want some really hard contrast on there might take our highlights down ever so slightly and our shadows down a little bit as well let's put these whites up a little bit don't need them anything too crazy i might actually leave them at zero and take our highlights down a little bit more and then let's bring our blacks down to just as they touch the bottom that's looking good don't want too much saturation it's quite saturated already just purely because of how golden this light is coming off of that low sunset let us add another lut and you guys really don't need to be using my luts only like i said you can use anybody's lights you can make your own nuts um but for this one let's try a different lot this one is looking quite nice it's quite harsh let's turn it down quite a lot and it's introducing some more contrast so i'm going to take this contrast down a little bit and i'm going to take these highlights down ever so slightly something i want to do here is add a little bit more magenta into this because of how warm it is from that sun it's really golden and it's making hannah look in my opinion almost a little bit too orange so by adding this in we can balance that out and we can also lower this white balance just a little bit we still want that nice warm color in there but we can just lower it slightly it's good to take a check every now and then see what you're doing how you're affecting your image your eyes start to adapt after a while and you can't even really see what's going on this is an interesting one because you can see here how all of our colors are really leaning towards this orange warm tone because that's all we really have in this clip something we can do about that is we can actually head over to our color wheels and we can introduce a little bit of blue to balance that out i might want to put some into our shadows and you can see how this is just evening it out from that almost too yellow image we don't want it to be just orange and washed out something else that i would like to do is even though we introduced that blue into our shadows i'm still going gonna lower how much tint is affecting our shadows and i'm just constantly checking what i'm doing and how it's affecting my image and making sure that i'm doing the things that i want to be doing this is looking really nice in my opinion hannah's skin is nice and soft it's not looking too contrasty could boost our shadows up a little bit take these highlights down even more put these shadows up and put in a little bit more contrast and that in my opinion looks really really great and you can see by this one and without it that is much more of an appealing image to me now let's get into the final bonus tip that i want to show you guys here you can see here i have this photo it can be any photo but i want to use it as an example for this scenario and i'm going to leave this color grade all for this clip so that it's back to normal now in premiere you can see when you head over to color wheels and match there is actually a tool here that you can match colors to a different piece of footage or photo anything that you can load into premiere as a reference so that might even be something that for example you have someone that you follow on instagram and you really like the tones and their colors in the photos that they upload onto instagram you can go and get that photo put it into your premiere use it as a reference photo and use this color matching tool to apply that same color tonal edit to the clips that you guys actually have in your premiere it doesn't always work exactly how you want it to work if you took something from like a direct sunlight broad daylight clip and you applied it to a sunset clip like this one for example it probably wouldn't work that well because it's not really designed to do that if you have a number of clips that you filmed in the same scene the same location but maybe your white balance has been changing between those clips because you're in all your white balance maybe and your one is rarely blue the next one is really warm by using this color match tool you can match all of those clips by literally the click of a button and make sure that your white balance is accurate between all of them how you want to use this basically is you can click on comparison view and that's going to bring up this second window and what we can do is scrub along to what we want to use as our reference clip which is going to be this photo here right at the end and then we want to have our scrub bar above the clip that we want to actually affect now we want to match these colors kind of we want to get this color grade onto here so what we're going to do is we're going to click apply match and you can see that this has adapted this new clip to match our old clip now this won't affect your contrast and your exposure and things like that what this is going to be affecting is these color wheels right here so we can still head back to our color correction we can put our contrast way up we can put our highlights down our shadows down whites up our blacks way down maybe a little more of that and a little bit more of our highlights and that is going to be the same color tones as the other one yeah so that is a super powerful tool and for some reason people just aren't talking about it i don't know why it gets no attention i've never really heard anyone mention it and it's something that can definitely be beneficial for you guys to check out and experiment with at the least so have a look at it and mess around with it and see what results you can get out of it that is pretty much going to be it for this one guys i'm really happy with how our clips have turned out i hope you are going to be happy with how your clips turn out after all of your new color grading knowledge remember if you do want to check out my luts they're going to be linked down in the description and they are still 25 off other than that i will see you guys in next week's video [Music] peace [Music] you

Channel: Sean Kitching

Views: 199,413

Keywords: how to, color, colour, grade, like a pro, cinematic, correct, my footage, video, best, way, tips, premiere, pro, adobe, sean kitching

Id: MMgL1HHrXnI

Length: 29min 7sec (1747 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020