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Hello guys, and welcome to our Color Correction slash...
Grading tutorial...
Today we're going to teach you to how to take your shot footage and make it look more
professional by applying first color correction...
and color grading.
So, let's get started with
shooting your footage properly.
Here's the things you need
preferrably a camera that allows you to set the aperture, white balance and ISO
settings.
Editing software.
I'll be using Adobe After Effects, but any editing program that allows you to
do color correction should do fine.
Also, i'm going to use some of Red Giant's Color Correction plugins,
like Colorista II
and MagicBullet Looks.
You don't need to use these,
but it will most certainly make color correction and grading
much easier.
In case you have noisy footage or would like to clean video up
I also recommend; Neat Video...
a noise reduction plugin.
Let's get started with shooting footage that will be fun and easy to color grade.
Before you actually hit that record button
make sure you set your white balance.
if your camera allows you to.
We shoot with a Canon DSLR
and on these cameras it's as easy as holding something up completely white
in front of the thing you're trying to shoot.
You can also use a grey card or something simple like a piece of white paper.
Then you just snap a picture.
head over to the menu,
select custom white balance,
seleet your picture and press 'set'.
Now when you set your white balance to 'custom'
the image will be properly balance for your current light set-up.
Remember every time you change your light setup, you will have to reset your white balance.
It only takes like fifteen seconds and it's totally worth it.
Next: we're always shooting with a flat picture profile. We use the 'Cinestyle Picture
profile'
and what this allows you to do is to turn down your sharpening and contrast
on your camera further and it
allows you to correct and grade it later on in post.
If you let your camera do this for you
your image probably has way too much contrast to grade it properly later on.
Film Riot has done an episode on picture styles
and we'll also leave a link to that in the description below.
Then there's correctly exposing your footage.
You want to make sure you don't overexpose or under expose your image.
In case your camera does not have enough dynamic range to capture both your shadows and
your highlights properly
we recommend making sure your highlights are not over exposed.
It's easier later on to boost your shadows a little bit and get rid of the noise,
because when your image is overexposed there is absolutely no data to work with.
Lastly,
in order to make sure you image is sharp,
we use the digital zoom function to focus on his nose or eyes,
focus and zoom back out.
That way
you're always sure that your shot is one hundred percent sharp
and in focus.
Now that you shot all your footage properly,
we're going to color correct it.
Ok. Let's first get the confusion out the way between color correction
and color grading.
It is often referred to as the same thing,
and although it both has to do with adjusting color in your image,
it does not serve the same purpose.
Color correction is correcting the colors in your image.
It sounds obvious,
because it is!
The goal of color correction is to make sure it all the shots that follow each
other in the scene or in a video match up.
That means the the white balance has to be the same, the exposure, your greens, your blues, reds, everything.
Let's look at an example.
This is a shot from our most recent video; Snowly.
As you can see the shots are at the same angle, the same location yet they've
totally different colors.
The left shot is very orange and feels very warm,
while the shot on the right feels much colder and has more grey.
No worries. That's what color correction is for.
Personally I like the warm feel of the left shot a little more
so, I'm going to adjust the right shot to match the left one.
Before we do that however,
I am quickly going to correct the left shot first.
I'm going to add levels to the shot and make sure the blacks are as dark as
possible and make sure the whites are as white as they can be before they blow out.
The good thing about levels is that you can see where the colors actually start to
clip.
By just bringing your arrows a little to the middle and make sure that they don't
clip.
You can see if they clip when they pass over one of the lines.
Now you can use the middle arrow and push it in any direction
to get either more or less contrast.
Now if you click the drop down menu
you can select either of the three primary colors.
Let's select red
and make sure the snow isn't orange, but white.
To get the most proffesional look
you want to make sure that your whites are white and your blacks are black,
unless you're going for a very stylized grade, of course.
There; we messed around with the primary colors a little bit
and the image now seems well balanced.
This is a good base that we can grade.
But first;
let's correct the other shot
to match up
with this one.
We're starting the same.
We're pushing the shadows down a little bit and pull the highlights up a little bit.
Now we'll go in the red channel
and pull the red highlights quite a bit up.
Also, the midtones of the red should go up a little bit.
Now we're going to do the exact same for the greens.
Lastly; we notice that the blues pop a little bit more in the first shot so let's push
these down a little bit as well.
The first shot seems to be a little bit more saturated,
so let's add Colorista II,
push the saturation to about five (5)
and give the midtones a little bit of an orange hue.
And there... Now the shots are quite well balanced.
We can't get them exactly right because the sunshine seems to have moved around
a little bit as well,
but once were done grading it and have another shot in between.
no one will notice.
Although this was quite an extreme case
you want to make sure that you color correct each shot and that expecially shots that follow
each other are well matched
and the color's aren't off.
Let's take another quick look at another example.
This is a clip from 'Scratch'. An upcoming little three part webseries that we've
been working on for quite a while.
In this scene it is supposed to be night.
There's some light creeping in from the hallway, but only that would not be
enough to properly light our shots.
In order to keep the ISO low and the shutter speed a little higher we just lit the scene
lot more than you need for darkness.
The original shot doesn't look like it's dark at all.
So we simply played with the levels a little bit. That way we keep details in our shadows
We lost some of the light as we make sure the highs and lows don't pop as much
and with our final color grade it already looks way more convincing.
So. With all your footage properly balanced it's now time for some color grading.
Back to our initial two shots from 'Snownly'.
First I am going to pre-compose the layers I have applied my color correction to.
Then I am going to apply 'Magic Bullet Looks',
a great plug-in by Red Giant Software.
I highly recommend getting this one.
I'm going to select a preset that the plugin came with called 'Bistro City'.
With that open I'm going to turn off some of the corrections this pre-set came
with.
I am shutting off some of the diffusion filters and make sure there is a lot
less contrast.
Next, I'm going to play around with the lift/gamma/gain a little bit
I'd rather have a little greener shadow instead of blue
and I really want the skin tones to pop a little bit more.
Speaking of pop,
I also add a pop filter.
This allows me to make the natural color contrast in
the image pop a little bit more.
Finally, I am also going add a three-way color wheel
and push my highlights a little bit to the blue side,
my midtones up a little bit and the shadow a tad to the green side.
I also want to make sure that I don't lose too much detail in the jacket
so I will pull the dark tones up a little bit.
I am also going to saturate my image a little bit more.
About a hundred five percent (105%) should be fine.
Still feels a little bit too dark for a sunny, snowy day.
So I'm adding another levels filter to boost the midtones and highlights up a
little bit,
Since we did our color correction properly, we can simply copy/paste (ctrl+c, ctrl+v)
our grading to the other shot and immediately we've graded our second shot as well.
I want to boost my saturation on this shot just a little bit more, and there
we go.
We are done with our first grade.
Since we toyed around with the colors quite a lot of I notice a little
grain on the jacket however.
This is where the 'Neat Video' plug-in come in.
I just added it at the top of our grading chain, click options.
The plugin works fully automatic if you want it to.
To make sure the image does not look so faded,
I just add an unsharp mask filter and that should look very clean.
We shot this with a 50 millimeter lens without image stabilisation.
I do notice a few minor shakes in the shot. Not to worry.
I'll just add a 'warp stabilizer' and put the smoothness to about two percent (2%).
That is more than enough to take out the minor shakes.
Let's also grade our day for night shot.
I'm going to yet again for pre-compose our correction
and add 'Magic Bullet Looks'.
I am then adding a very little pre-set I made.
It's just a pop filter and a lift/gamma/gain filter.
It makes the shadows a little bit more greener and the highlights a little bit more orange,
I feel that the mask fades away in the darkness a little bit,
so we have to do something about that.
I want it to pop and look a little bit more scary.
Let's duplicate our layer and duplicate it on the project file as well.
Now let's take away our color correction and our color grading.
Now the mask is much more white.
We'll then just make a quick little mask around the skull mask
and fade it out to about fifty (50) pixels and expand it inwards fifteen (15) pixels.
Now let's quickly go through the clip and make sure the masks stays with the skull mask.
You can also do this with the faces of your characters to make their skin tones pop
a little bit more.
This type of color grading is a little bit more advanced,
but you can get some great looking footage with it.
All it takes is a little masking.
With the masking of the way
the skull mask looks like it pops way more than befor and it looks much more
intimidating.
I have one more example of specific color grading.
Here we have a clip from our Monday Challenge: Star Wars video from
some time ago.
The normal clip looks
pretty bland, so let's quickly turn on the color correction for it.
I increased the exposure a little bit,
I pushed the shadows a little bit to the dark side...
I mean... I mean.. the blue side.
I pushed the midtones a little bit to the orange side
and made the highlights a little bit more blue.
I also increased the saturation to forty (40).
Here's what I did to the eyes.
I simply masked around them individually
and applied a different color grading to it
to make sure they pop way more
and are a little bit more green and bright.
We then apply our final color grade to that.
In this case I applied my color grade to an adjustment layer
to grade all the footage at once.
If I think the grade is a little bit too strong
I just take down the opacity of the (adjustment) layer a little bit.
In this case about sixty percent (60%) or so.
Finally I added some film grain, sharpened the image a little bit and there's our
final shot.
So guys,
I hope you learned something about color correction and color grading today
and that with it
you can really move your videos to the next level.
There is really no limit
to what you can do with good color correction and color grading.
You can even make your image look more cool...
Or way more warm.
If you have any questions
about anything or regarding this video
pleave us a private message or contact us on Facebook or Twitter.
And don't forget to subscribe while you're at it.
We'd really appreciate it.
Thank you for watching!
And have fun color correcting and...
Color grading, of course.