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- Hey guys, what's going on?
Welcome to Travel Feels, my name is Matti
and today we're gonna talk all about color grading.
I always say this,
color grading is one of the easiest ways
to really set yourself apart
from all of the rest of the guys.
Some people don't even bother to color grade,
so right away you have a step up on them.
And then you can also form your own looks
so when people see your work,
they know right away that's Travel Feels,
or that's Peter McKinnon, or whoever.
But a lot of people take this opportunity to just go wild,
and their color grades are just all over the place.
And in the process,
they end up making some big mistakes
that right away signal, I'm an amateur filmmaker.
And the hard part is,
that color grading takes years to master,
it's a really hard area to get really good at.
I know when I started color grading,
I had no idea what I was doing
and I'd just be all over the place.
And when I thought something looked good,
it actually didn't look very good at all.
And a lot of this has to do with training your eye,
you need to be able to see colors in a more accurate way
and that takes years of practice.
You need to watch films, watch TV shows,
and pay attention to their color grades,
and then try to emulate some of those things.
There's a reason why all Hollywood films
and high-end commercials,
all kind of fit the same patterns in color grading.
For example, teal and orange,
which is something that I've made a whole video about,
you can check it out down below if you haven't seen it.
There's patterns that all the
really high-end films kind of follow.
So color grading is tough,
but here are the top five mistakes
that I see a lot of people making
and that you should be avoiding.
Number one, your starting place sucks.
So this has more to do with your shooting
than your color grading.
But if your clips from the beginning,
aren't exposed that well,
then it's gonna be really hard to color grade those shots
and make them look good.
So you wanna make sure that you're nailing your exposures
and that your footage looks good.
It really helps to shooting things like vlogs,
so you have a lot of information to work with,
and you can color grade it to whatever look you want.
So make sure your starting point is good
cause that's gonna go a long way.
Number two is choosing weird colors.
A lot of people, when they're starting out,
they'd start color grading
and they don't really understand the way colors work yet.
So they just try and use weird colors
that just don't work and look super unnatural.
For example, doing something like
putting magenta into the shadows,
or putting magenta into the midtones,
it just doesn't look natural at all.
And you're really making it look amateur right away.
As soon as you look at this,
you think amateur and not professional.
Try and use colors that work naturally with skin tones
like teal, or blue in the shadows.
Those automatically work really well with skin tones
so they're gonna look really natural.
You're not the first to try some weird colors,
and you're not a genius for trying to use weird colors.
Keep your color grade natural
and don't let it be distracting to the viewer.
Number three is going umpa lumpa,
and if you haven't seen
Willy Wonka or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
you have no idea what I'm talking about.
But what I mean by this is that it's great to use a LUT
but don't go overboard with the LUT.
A lot of LUTs are meant to be really overpowering
in the beginning,
and you need to dial those down
to make them look more natural.
You do not want super saturated and really orange faces,
and just over the top colors.
You wanna keep it natural,
so again, it's not distracting the viewers.
So definitely use LUTs,
they're a great starting point.
But dial them down, don't go overboard with them.
Number four is skipping color correcting.
You can't just stick a LUT on your footage
and that's it, you're good to go.
You need to color correct your shots.
It's really rare that a clip is perfectly color balanced,
has the perfect contrast, perfect saturation.
Those are all things that you need to dial in
in color correction.
So yes, you need to go through each clip
and color correct those shots,
so that when you stick on that LUT
over top all your footage,
the LUT is gonna be at its optimal
and it's gonna look really good for all of those shots.
I like to use three-way color correctors
to do my correcting.
I just find it's the easiest and fastest way to do it,
and it's just an intuitive way
because all your colors are laid out there.
You could do it using things like curves,
but it's much harder, I find.
So make sure the contrast is right,
the colors are balanced,
and the saturation looks good.
Don't get lazy on this one,
make sure you're color correcting.
It's really, really important.
And then we have number five,
which is forgetting to match your shots.
You need to be going from one shot to the next
and comparing the colors so they match.
You wanna have the same amount of contrast, saturation.
The color tones should be the same,
you shouldn't have one clip from the same scene
that's really warm,
and then the next one's gonna be really cool.
They should all look the same
if they're from the same sequence.
And this applies to all your clips,
but especially within one sequence.
So for example, if you have one location,
all those clips should have the same color grade look.
And then if you go to another location,
you can change the color grade up,
but I would recommend sticking to a similar look
for the whole video.
Most of the time, I'm using the same LUT for the whole video
and I'm just color correcting through,
and making sure all the shots look the same.
To match shots really accurately,
you need to be using scopes like vectorscope and waveform.
Scopes give you a scientific way
of looking at colors and contrast,
so that your eyes aren't tricking you into thinking
that these two clips are matched when they're not.
The vectorscope is perfect for looking at colors,
and the waveform is really good for contrast and exposure.
It's a dead giveaway of an amateur color grading job
if one shot looks totally different from the next.
So there we go, five easy things
that you can avoid in your color grading process
so you don't look like an amateur,
because that's one of the things that people see right away,
and it says so much about your filmmaking work.
So you don't wanna put a whole bunch of time and effort
into editing this really cool video or vlog,
or whatever it is,
but your color grade sucks so people are right away
turned off and not even watching the whole video.
Don't make these mistakes
and set yourself apart from the rest of the guys.
And hey, if you wanna learn more about color grading,
you wanna be checking out the
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If you wanna be learning more
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there's nothing stopping you from learning more.
Alright, that's it for me today, guys.
I hope you enjoyed this video.
Hit that like button because it really does matter,
the algorithms, all that.
I really appreciate every single like,
every single comment on the videos.
And guys, subscribe to the channel if you haven't,
join this community,
and let's keep learning
and just going forwards in our craft.
Guys, enjoy the filmmaking process
and go get some of those Travel Feels.
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