What’s happening YouTube?
John Conrad with DroneOneMedia here to do my very first tutorial on color grading
drone footage.
So it’s a little bit unique when you color grade drone footage or any landscape footage
for that matter.
Is a lot of times you are not dealing with skin tones so you have a little bit more flexibility
on how you can color grade.
So I wanted to share kinda how I go through it and my work flow; and let me know what
you think down in the comments below, like I said it’s my first tutorial, I wanted
to walk everyone through how I color grade my drone footage.
So let’s jump right into it.
I’m running Final Cut Pro 10.3, the latest release from Apple, and I’ve got a clip
here, looks like it’s about 22 seconds long.
It’s a waterfall, a clip of a waterfall that I recorded a couple months back and as
you can see, it’s just kinda starting to get into fall so you start to see a little
bit of the different coloration in the foliage so it turned out really nice.
However, when I record from my Phantom 4 I do everything in D-LOG so you get a very kinda
gray uh tone to the footage.
So this enables much more flexibility in post, which is great.
So the first thing I do when I color grade drone footage you want to open up the inspector
which is command 4 or you can just click up here on the new 10.3 they kind of moved a
few buttons around.
And then what I do from here is I go down to this little color icon and show color board
and then command 7 will bring up the waveforms.
So you want to make sure waveform is checked.
And then the first thing I do is I want to go through the exposure, you want to make
sure luma is checked and then you go over to exposure.
Now what this is showing is the exposure range from the minimum level to the maximum level,
and you see here in the middle that this is the part that is most exposed because it is
white.
So that is reflecting the most light; therefore it is going to be peaking at the top here.
So basically what you want to do is you want to adjust the right hand button here which
brings up the maximum exposure.
And you just want to make sure that the maximum exposure does not cross that 100 luma line
that they have setup here because then the image would be considered over-exposed.
And so then once you have that adjusted, so I want to bring that up about right there.
And then you want to adjust the left hand side and bring this minimum exposure level
down to just right at 0.
You don’t want to go below 0 because then the image would be considered under-exposed.
So you can already see, let me go back here and show you.
Just with those two adjustments, you can already see a huge difference.
It’s already bringing out much more contrast in the image, and it already looks much, much
better.
So this was the raw footage, this was after just adjusting those two.
And then what you want to do in the middle, now this is going to be your mid-tones or
gamma as I’ve heard some people say.
And this is sort of you just adjust it to what you think looks best.
So for this, I’m going to leave it right about there.
And if you ever want to get a bigger viewer window of this footage, you can always close
that for a minute, you can close that and then that will bring up um you know you can
take a look at it to make sure it’s where you want it to be.
Let me go back to the color correction here.
Now that I’ve got the exposure kind of where I want it, next I go into the color tab, which
this adjusts the global, the shadows, the mid-tones and the highlights of the image.
And then what I want to do over here is go over to what I use is RGB parade.
Now this shows the maximum and minimum levels of red, green and blue in the image.
So you can see that this definitely has a high blue tone to it, so what I want to do
is whenever you want to adjust the top part of the color, you want to grab the highlights
because that is going to adjust the top part.
So if I want to bring the blue down, I grab the highlight knob and kind of center it in
the blue here and bring that down here.
Not quite that much, bring it back right about there.
Okay, so right about there.
So that’s bringing that blue down to keep it in balance with the red and the green.
Now as you can see down here on the bottom of the graph here you can see the blue is
a little lower than the red and the green.
So you can also adjust that.
Now to adjust the lower part of the color spectrum, you want to grab the shadows and
since its right kind of if I want to adjust the red and the green, I can do that by moving
it right in the middle between them which is yellow.
And then you can adjust it so then the bottom of the color matches up.
So now you can see that these are pretty even, and these are pretty even.
Now the blue is a little bit up, I would just bring that down just a hair.
And then you can see that they are very balanced.
The mid-tones, you can adjust these which adjusts the middle section here.
I would probably…Just play around with this here.
I mean this is kind of up to you how you want to do it, I think this looks pretty good as
is.
Let’s get this out of the way so you can see the difference.
That’s before, that’s the raw, and this is after.
So you can already see a pretty big difference.
So let’s just scan the clip, that looks pretty good.
Um, let’s do before, and after.
So you can already see it really brings out a lot of the color in the clip, a lot of the
details that you didn’t see in the raw images, and you’ll be amazed at how much detail
comes out of your footage just after color correcting.
And you can also do things like sharpen it, and add other effects but this has just been
a tutorial of the basic color correction.
And then the last thing you want to do is the saturation.
Now this is sort of up to you how you want to do it, I normally try not to over-saturate
the images.
This already has pretty good balance of color, I don’t want to over-saturate so I just
kind of add in a little bit which makes it kind of pop, all the colors kind of come out.
So now let’s take a look before, and after.
So this has been a quick tutorial of color grading landscape footage, drone footage,
any footage without skin tones in it.
And I hope you really enjoyed it.
Let me know what you think in the comments below, did you like it?
Did you not like it?
Should I do more of these?
Let me know what you think and don’t forget to hit that like button, it really helps me
out.
I’m a growing channel, and I’m trying to get to 100 subscribers by the end of the
year so if you want to never miss any upcoming videos, make sure you hit that subscribe button.
Alright thanks guys, and we’ll catch you in the next video.What’s happening YouTube?
John Conrad here with DroneOneMedia here to do my very first tutorial on color grading
drone footage.
So it’s a little bit unique when you color grade drone footage or any landscape footage
for that matter.
Is a lot of times you are not dealing with skin tones so you have a little bit more flexibility
on how you can color grade.
So I wanted to share kinda how I go through it and my work flow; and let me know what
you think down in the comments below, like I said it’s my first tutorial, I wanted
to walk everyone through how I color grade my drone footage.
So let’s jump right into it.
I’m running Final Cut Pro 10.3, the latest release from Apple, and I’ve got a clip
here, looks like it’s about 22 seconds long.
It’s a waterfall, a clip of a waterfall that I recorded a couple months back and as
you can see, it’s just kinda starting to get into fall so you start to see a little
bit of the different coloration in the foliage so it turned out really nice.
However, when I record from my Phantom 4 I do everything in D-LOG so you get a very kinda
gray uh tone to the footage.
So this enables much more flexibility in post, which is great.
So the first thing I do when I color grade drone footage you want to open up the inspector
which is command 4 or you can just click up here on the new 10.3 they kind of moved a
few buttons around.
And then what I do from here is I go down to this little color icon and show color board
and then command 7 will bring up the waveforms.
So you want to make sure waveform is checked.
And then the first thing I do is I want to go through the exposure, you want to make
sure luma is checked and then you go over to exposure.
Now what this is showing is the exposure range from the minimum level to the maximum level,
and you see here in the middle that this is the part that is most exposed because it is
white.
So that is reflecting the most light; therefore it is going to be peaking at the top here.
So basically what you want to do is you want to adjust the right hand button here which
brings up the maximum exposure.
And you just want to make sure that the maximum exposure does not cross that 100 luma line
that they have setup here because then the image would be considered over-exposed.
And so then once you have that adjusted, so I want to bring that up about right there.
And then you want to adjust the left hand side and bring this minimum exposure level
down to just right at 0.
You don’t want to go below 0 because then the image would be considered under-exposed.
So you can already see, let me go back here and show you.
Just with those two adjustments, you can already see a huge difference.
It’s already bringing out much more contrast in the image, and it already looks much, much
better.
So this was the raw footage, this was after just adjusting those two.
And then what you want to do in the middle, now this is going to be your mid-tones or
gamma as I’ve heard some people say.
And this is sort of you just adjust it to what you think looks best.
So for this, I’m going to leave it right about there.
And if you ever want to get a bigger viewer window of this footage, you can always close
that for a minute, you can close that and then that will bring up um you know you can
take a look at it to make sure it’s where you want it to be.
Let me go back to the color correction here.
Now that I’ve got the exposure kind of where I want it, next I go into the color tab, which
this adjusts the global, the shadows, the mid-tones and the highlights of the image.
And then what I want to do over here is go over to what I use is RGB parade.
Now this shows the maximum and minimum levels of red, green and blue in the image.
So you can see that this definitely has a high blue tone to it, so what I want to do
is whenever you want to adjust the top part of the color, you want to grab the highlights
because that is going to adjust the top part.
So if I want to bring the blue down, I grab the highlight knob and kind of center it in
the blue here and bring that down here.
Not quite that much, bring it back right about there.
Okay, so right about there.
So that’s bringing that blue down to keep it in balance with the red and the green.
Now as you can see down here on the bottom of the graph here you can see the blue is
a little lower than the red and the green.
So you can also adjust that.
Now to adjust the lower part of the color spectrum, you want to grab the shadows and
since its right kind of if I want to adjust the red and the green, I can do that by moving
it right in the middle between them which is yellow.
And then you can adjust it so then the bottom of the color matches up.
So now you can see that these are pretty even, and these are pretty even.
Now the blue is a little bit up, I would just bring that down just a hair.
And then you can see that they are very balanced.
The mid-tones, you can adjust these which adjusts the middle section here.
I would probably…Just play around with this here.
I mean this is kind of up to you how you want to do it, I think this looks pretty good as
is.
Let’s get this out of the way so you can see the difference.
That’s before, that’s the raw, and this is after.
So you can already see a pretty big difference.
So let’s just scan the clip, that looks pretty good.
Um, let’s do before, and after.
So you can already see it really brings out a lot of the color in the clip, a lot of the
details that you didn’t see in the raw images, and you’ll be amazed at how much detail
comes out of your footage just after color correcting.
And you can also do things like sharpen it, and add other effects but this has just been
a tutorial of the basic color correction.
And then the last thing you want to do is the saturation.
Now this is sort of up to you how you want to do it, I normally try not to over-saturate
the images.
This already has pretty good balance of color, I don’t want to over-saturate so I just
kind of add in a little bit which makes it kind of pop, all the colors kind of come out.
So now let’s take a look before, and after.
So this has been a quick tutorial of color grading landscape footage, drone footage,
any footage without skin tones in it.
And I hope you really enjoyed it.
Let me know what you think in the comments below, did you like it?
Did you not like it?
Should I do more of these?
Let me know what you think and don’t forget to hit that like button, it really helps me
out.
I’m a growing channel, and I’m trying to get to 100 subscribers by the end of the
year so if you want to never miss any upcoming videos, make sure you hit that subscribe button.
Alright thanks guys, and we’ll catch you in the next video.