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Welcome to Tutorial #6. My name is Tom Antos.
And today I'm going to show you another example from the same music video that I used in the
previous tutorial, except now we are going to concentrate mainly on the color correction.
We have a little sequence here. I'll just play it and let you watch it.
So, as you can see, it's two different scenarios, or the same scenario, but different times of the day.
The first is in the middle of the night and then
in the morning, showing this couple waking up. It’s for a music video. I’m going for a stylzed look.
The way that I achieved it is... if you look,
this is the actual rough footage here. I try to get as close to the finished look
that I want to achieve while shooting. Sometimes, we don't have the time,
so we can use color correction to alter the image further.
But I would recommend that you always try to get the colors as close as possible
to what you want them to be in the final product, because when you're color correcting video footage,
you're going to degrade the image.
If you're shooting, let's say, on Red camera or film, it's not as bad.
In those formats you don't have to worry about it as much. But if you're shooting video or
most digital cameras out there, then degrading the image is something you should really be worried about.
So, the way I set up the two scenes is very simple.
For the night version, I basically blacked out
this window that was in the room. And then I basically put in a 1000W tungsten light
with a blue gel on it. That kind of illuminates and creates a rim light that you see up here,
on the character's face, the hair. You can see it reflecting here.
And then, I just put another light that points straight at the actor's face. And that one
was gelled a bit warmer and it was flagged off so that it only illuminates his face and
a little bit on his chest. You can see the shadow here.
And that light was only there to add a little bit of warmth to the scene. Otherwise, everything
would be too blue. And then, for the daylight version,
I opened the windows, took off all the blinds and everything... I tried
to let in as much sunlight as possible. And then I put that 1K tungsten light from
the side to create these nice rims. Then I also added another 1K right above
the camera, pointing in this direction, as a fill light.
And I put diffusion paper on it. It creates these softer shadows and
fills in the dark areas over here. Now, I'm just going to further enhance it
with color correction. So, with this shot, basically, what I'm trying to achieve is...
these pinkish skin tones and these complementing greenish... almost turquoise colors.
This was actually something that was consciously decided on
in preproduction. So, basically, when it comes to the set and the actual set dressing,
you'll notice that these covers have this greenish tint to it,
with some warm patterns to it. The bed, everything in here... it
this two-tone look. It's something that is done in big feature films
and it is a good practice for any artist, whether you're doing cinematography, photography
or even painting. A lot of artists, what they use is basically
a standard color wheel to match colors. To see what goes well together.
There is a really cool online color wheel from Adobe.
You can go to Kuler Adobe and click here. It's an online color wheel.
It has a lot of preset color schemes that you can go through.
But you just go: "Create" your own. Click complementary colors.
And you can pick, for example, if you were to go for these kind of...
skin tones are usually warmer colors, so let's say you have a character and you are going
for these very sunny, yellowish skin tones. Then these would be your complementing colors.
Maybe your costumes or certain set dressing or things like that should have these colors.
And it's just going to make the shot
looj more interesting and nicer. The same thing, if you go, for example, for
something that they have in the new film with Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins
"The Wolfman". In that movie, they have these kind of brownish...
muddy colors for most of the film. And when they do have other kinds of colors,
it's these bleak blue, grey colors that you see up here.
And what I'm going for is sort of something like this.
These are kind of skin tones I want. And these are kind of colors that I want, that will fit.
Just to compare it, this is sort of
what I want to achieve there on the wall and stuff like that.
So, anyways, we'll minimize this. And, the way that I'll go about it is by
using a standard color correction tool that comes with Adobe Premiere. No special plug-ins needed.
If you're using Final Cut Pro, you have the
same kind of tools. Pretty much every editing program out there
has the same set of tools. And in Final Cut Pro, you can go to "Effects",
"Video Filers", then "Color Correction" and pick your three-way color corrector.
And in Adobe Premiere, you go to "Color Correction"... you go to "Video Effect", "Color Correction"
and then pick the three-way color corrector. We'll drag and drop it into the shot.
And then, here you can see the settings for it, so scroll down.
These are basically... again, it looks very similar in Final Cut Pro.
These are shadows, midtones and your highlights. So, this whole shot came out a
little bit too red. So, what I'm going to try to do is take the
midtones... add a bit more purplish, bluish kind of look to it.
Take the shadows, add a lot more purple in there.
Maybe a bit more blue kind of colors. And then in the highlights, I just want to
add this golden glow to it. To simulate the sun.
So, I can go to highlights, make it very yellowish, add some gain up here, by dragging this little tool.
And you can see right away, it's adding this yellowish...
you can add a bit more warmth to it. Make it a bit more golden.
This is without it. You see, it looks flat.
And this is with it. It looks golden.
And I would say this is pretty much it for colors.
So, it's a quick color correction. This is before. This is after.
And then maybe adjust the brightness level of this shot.
And I do that by going to "Video Filters", "Effects" and then "Adjust" and "Levels".
Again, drag and drop it into my shot. Levels is basically the same thing that
you have in Adobe Photoshop. When you're doing... adjusting photos and
stuff like that. It just basically adjusts your brightness.
So, this is your shadows, midtones... and this is your highlights.
So, if I drag the highlights, you know, more to the left,
I'm basically blowing out more and more of the values in this image...
and kind of making them completely white, overexposed pixels.
This is your little preview window that you have to work out of in Premiere. It's not
the best, but it does the trick, I guess. And the image comes up side down because
this whole music video was shot on an M2 adapter. So, everything was up side down.
Anyways, here I'm going to adjust the shadows. I'm going to crash the blacks.
So, I'm basically taking the shadows and I'm pulling them in.
Basically, taking any of the similar values, these kind of grayish, dark pixels that are
almost black and I'm turning them into completely black pixels.
So, that's kind of what I'm doing. And now I'll counter it a little bit by adding
a bit more value to the midtones. And that's it.
So, this is kind of how it looks. It kind of brings more life to the shot.
This is how the shot looked before... washed out and reddish.
And this is with the color correction... and this is with the levels adjusted.
So, I'm pretty happy with this. So, I will go on to the next shot, which we'll continue
in the following tutorial. So, click that button now to go to Tutorial #7