I wasn’t planning on making an updated color grading tutorial but after I dropped Sounds of the PNW you guys requested the actual hell out of it so today i want to show you how i turn this shot into this shot using color grading in alight Motion. Tt’s worth noting that this is just my individual style of grading. I like to go very moody and punchy and contrasty and you don’t have to do that, but what you can and should do is take the techniques that i’m talking about in this video and apply them to create your own style of grading.
t’s also worth noting that i shoot in log which is like a very flat profile with very little contrast in the image, and i always over expose my shots by two stops. Shooting in your camera’s flattest picture profile allows you to retain as much detail in the highlights and shadows as possible. That gives you a lot of flexibility when you’re color grading but it’s also important when shooting in that flat profile to overexpose your image usually by about two stops so that you retain as much detail in the colors as possible and prevent grain from getting in and having all those colored artifacts in your image that make your grade appear messier. I’m also using lumetri color in adobe premiere pro to do all this grading, but there are similar techniques and effects available in final cut and davinci resolve as well.
The first and actually most important step in this process is not color grading but color correction= taking that super flat footage from your camera that might be off in terms of exposure or color and fixing it so that it’s nice and clean and ready for your grade. To do this you want to make sure that two scopes are visible- the parade and the vectorscope. The parade shows you all of the brightness values in your image from 0 which is black all the way up to 100 which is white, and the vectorscope shows you the colors in your image with the very center being gray, the hues around the edge, and as colors move out towards the edge of the circle that means they’re more saturated. So it shows you a map of all the pixels in your image by color and brightness.
This gives you a really concrete way to look at those scopes and see exactly what the colors in your image are doing. So the first thing i want to do is take that flat footage from my camera and bring back a realistic lifelike amount of contrast.
So i’m going to start by taking the black point and dragging it down until something on the parade hits zero. Then once i’ve got just those couple of pixels that are technically black in the image i’m gonna take the white point and drag it up so that some technically hit 100 so we have a couple of white pixels in the image. So we have that full contrast from true white to true black.
Now, it’s worth noting that sometimes you’re not going to have anything completely white or completely black in your image, so make sure to take a look at what you’re working with beforehand. Like if you have a really dark frame where there’s nothing that’s technically white, if you stretch it all the way that something completely turns white you’re actually going to be losing detail and making the image look worse. Actually for example with this image, these bags in the back and the shelves can be completely black. There should be a black pixel in there somewhere for there to be the right amount of contrast. But there’s nothing in the frame that’s completely true white, so if i stretch that white point all the way out my skin is gonna be way too bright. And that goes for all the techniques I’m gonna be talking about in this video. Don’t just like press buttons and look at the scopes and see what it does. Use your eyes. Look at the footage and see what looks right.
So now that we’ve corrected the levels throughout the image it’s time to adjust the white balance, and this is something that i’m guilty of messing up all the time. I’ll go out to shoot, have my camera automatically set to cloudy from the day before, it’s not a cloudy day anymore it’s sunny, and the shots are all way too warm. So i have to fix that in post. The best thing you can possibly do is just get it right in camera, but even when you do it’s sometimes still just a little bit off. And if you try to grade without your white balance being corrected first, the image is going to completely fall apart and you’re going to really notice all those inaccuracies in the color temperature. So let’s fix it. The way that i prefer to correct white balance whenever i can is by having something that’s white in the image and just using the eyedropper to select it and correct the white balance that way.
In fact for this shot I’ve got a white piece of paper so that I can set the white balance when i’m editing. This is a good thing to do if you have the chance but a lot of the time you don’t. You’ll notice in a lot of my vlogs where i’m shooting outside in less of a controlled environment I’ll wear like a white shirt or a white hoodie. That’s actually so that i can set white balance by using that eyedropper tool on what i’m wearing. So if you can find something that’s completely white in the image that’s the way i would go, but if you can’t there are other options. So first if you’re shooting a human subject then you can mask around their skin tone and make sure that it’s accurate.
So just draw a mask around something that’s just skin, like on this shot I would select probably just this half of my face. Then take a look at the vector scope and since you’ve isolated that skin tone all of the pixels on the vector scope should be aligning on this line in the top left. If they’re to the left of that line then it means that your shot has a green cast and you need to add more purple to make that skin tone accurate. So go over to the tint and drag it more towards the purple side. Then you can just delete that mask and you can see that your white balance should be accurate at that point. Finally if there’s not anything white or a skin tone in the image you can try just adjusting the colors to have a balanced image which will generally be more or less correct in terms of white balance. So without masking anything out to isolate it just take a look at the vector scope for the entire image and if you see that it’s skewing a bit towards the green side then add in some magenta to push it back towards the center of the circle. If it’s skewing towards blue add in some yellow in the temperature to get it back to the center of that map. This is not a perfect method. Like if you’re shooting in the forest you’re probably going to have a lot of green throughout your image and it’s going to dominate the vector scope, so if you correct it to just be in the center then your image is going to actually have a purple cast and be worse. So like use your head, but this can be a useful technique for seeing what could help with your white balance. Now that we’ve corrected the colors of our image i’m going to add another lumetri color effect and start grading. The first thing i’ll do is jump into the curves and use a nice broad s-curve to try and get those deep shadows in my image. This is just a personal preference and in fact one that a lot of people don’t like to do themselves, but i like to have really broad deep shadows where the shadow portions of the image kind of just blend together into one big gooey dark spot of color. Then i’ll just scroll on down to the hue curves and start adjusting some colors. This is the hue versus saturation curve. On the x-axis we have hue and on the y-axis we have saturation. So you can select a color drag it up and down to saturate it or desaturate it. I like to start out by marking the reds where the skin tones are so i know i’m not messing with those skin tones too dramatically. Then I’ll move on and start desaturating purple and green.
A lot of artifacts throughout your image are going to be on the purple and blue side, so if you start by just desaturating those colors you’re probably going to clean the image up a good bit- not always, but it generally helps for me. I don’t desaturate the green as much as the purples, but I do drag them down a good bit just to have that moody vibe in the image. You guys know I like that moody vibe. I’ll then bring back some of the blue if there’s actually something that should be blue in the shot. So for example this shot of the brooklyn bridge was shot during blue hour so the sky and the reflection should be blue, but on this shot that we shot in the pacific northwest this gate and the car behind it look blue on camera but they’re actually gray so i’m just gonna leave the blue completely out of this one so they’re true gray. Then below that the hue versus hue curve. And this is similar to the hue versus saturation curve we just talked about but instead of selecting a color and dragging it to adjust its saturation you can select a color then drag it up and down to actually change the hue and shift that color you know closer to another color. So what you can do is just take that entire thing drag it up a little bit then the blues are going to turn green and the yellows are going to turn red and you’ve got like a cliche teal and orange travel influencer color grade- don’t do that. Instead we’re just gonna make some small tweaks to individual colors here because things can really get out of hand with this slider. So i’m gonna start by boxing around the greens and then dragging them down to give them a cooler tint. I like to have those nice minty greens in my images lately. Then I’m just going to select the blues and drag them up a little bit to give them a teal tint. Then all that’s left is the orange tones, yellow orange and red, and these it really depends on the shot but what i generally like to do is just play around with them and i usually end up shifting them up a little bit to be closer to red without messing up the skin tone. That’s an important part of this because the skin tones are in that warm range so you don’t want to tweak it too much or you’re going to absolutely destroy your skin tones and end up with purple skin. And boom we’re done with the hue curves, and these are what i usually use to make like the broader adjustments to the large colors in my shot. But what if you want to make a more fine-tuned adjustment to a really specific individual color. Well, that’s where HSL secondary comes in. This basically allows you to select an individual color in the image and tweak it to your liking.
And when you remove red you add teal, so we’re going to add a bit of a teal tint into those shadows which I think just adds some more color contrast and gives it more of that moody but punchy vibe. If you have desaturated greens in your image this also might add that extra kind of depth that you need to make those greens look good. A lot of the time if you desaturate the greens they can look kind of dry and faded, but this gives them that minor teal tent to have them be this is almost always completely useless except for when you want to desaturate the blacks and whites.
So what we’re going to do is just select the darkest pixels and the lightest pixels and drag the saturation down to zero. This is never gonna like damage your shot, like it’s always going to either do nothing or fix the problem, so it’s worth adding to almost every shot you ever work with. For example on this one I adjusted the white balance and made it a lot more warm so we have a bit of a yellow tint and the highlights and you don’t really notice it until you desaturate those white pixels and see just how much better it looks. It’s subtle but once you see it you can’t unsee the difference that it makes. So what I would do is literally just add this on an adjustment layer over the entire project because it’s either going to help on some shots or do nothing at all. It’s never going to be a mistake. Finally i like to add this diffused highlights effect to most of my footage, but i already made a tutorial just on how to do that effect so i’ll just link that right up here. But that’s all for today. I hope you learned everything you wanted to from this video. I hope i answered all of your burning questions about my color grading. If you enjoyed this video or learned something new from it do feel free to show your support by leaving a like on the video sharing it with your friends or even subscribing to my channel. I upload new videos just like this every single week. But that’s all for now. Keep creating and I’ll see you in the next one.
