- In this video, we're gonna dig into how you color grade
your footage coming out of your DJI Drone.
Now, DJI Drones have three different color profiles
depending on which drone you're using,
and I'm gonna show you how do you use the standard profile,
the D-Cinelike profile, and the D-Log profile,
and how I'd approach a color grade
for each one of these different looks.
And I'm gonna show you how to do this both completely
manually using all the different tools that you'll find
in any color grading software,
and also using LUTs in both the color correction,
and also the creative color grading step.
But before we dive
into how you color grade your DJI footage,
I just wanna say a special thanks
to MotionVFX for sponsoring this video.
And MotionVFX is where I get all of my plug-ins
to do things like motion graphics,
or different overlays that you see on my videos.
They create plug-ins that are super easy to use,
and that are fully customizable
so that you can change them to make them fit your brand
and the types of videos that you're creating.
You can get plug-ins for Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve,
as well as Premiere Pro, and After Effects.
And if you don't use one of these three softwares,
there's also a lot of stock elements that you can use
in any editing software.
And one of my favorite plug-ins that I personally use
is the mTuber series.
And you'll see I'll add things like a subscribe button,
or a text overlay when I'm doing one of my tutorials,
and also animations like hands or arrows
that point out exactly what I'm talking about.
This kit has a ton of tools, and transitions,
and different overlays that you can use
for your YouTube videos.
Now the best part about using Motion VFX plug-ins
is it saves time.
Super easy to download one of these packs,
and drag and drop these plug-ins on top of my footage,
and just add some customization, like different colors,
different fonts that really fits my brand,
and what I'm doing here on my channel.
And right now, there's a black sale going on
for MotionVFX plugins, which means that you can get 30% off
any of the plugins or templates.
And every week that this sale is going on,
there's gonna be 16 different packs that are 50% off.
So make sure you check back every week
from now until December 4th,
to see which packs have this 50% discount.
So if you want to add some different MotionVFX graphics
to your videos, make sure you head down the description,
I'll include a link to where you can check out
the sale right now.
So let's dig into how you color grade DJI footage.
And to do this,
I have a few different shots that I've pulled to show you
how we do this color grading.
I have some that are in the standard color profile,
that are shot with the DJI Mini 2.
I have a few that are shot with the DJI Mini 3 pro
that are in the D-Cinelike profile.
And then I have a couple shots here that are shot
with the DJI Mavic 3 that are in D-Log.
And the difference between these three profiles
is the amount of contrast and saturation that each one has.
So when you're working with the standard profile
that you'll find on all the drones,
this footage is basically ready to use out of camera.
It has lots of contrast and lots of saturation.
So you don't actually have to color grade this
if you want to use this in your videos.
However, if you do do want to create a creative look,
then you'll modify the colors,
and modify the contrast a little bit,
to make it look different
than what you actually filmed in camera.
Now, D-Log footage is gonna have the least amount
of contrast, and the least amount of saturation.
And the purpose for this is to color grade later.
So you would only shoot in D-Log
if you're intending to color grade your footage.
And when you shoot in D-Log,
the highlights are pulled down and the shadows are lifted
so that you get the super flat image,
which is gonna allow you to get the most dynamic range
out of your camera.
And the dynamic range is the amount of exposure
that you can see from the brightest parts
of your image to the darkest parts of your image.
And so when you're shooting in a standard profile,
you might lose things like your sky,
it might turn bright white,
whereas when you shoot in the Log setting,
you're gonna be preserving those highlights
so you can color grade them,
and actually get some blues outta the sky,
or actually see the clouds
rather than it just being pure white.
D-Cinelike sits right in the middle.
So it's not like standard,
where it has contrast and saturation.
However, it's not super flat like the D-Log,
it's just halfway between.
And so this profile is gonna give you the ability
to color grade,
but you're not gonna have to push your footage that far,
because it does have some contrast,
and it does have some saturation.
Now, you might wanna shoot
with D-Cinelike versus D-Log,
depending on the type of drone that you're using.
So some of DJI's drones only shoot in 8-bit,
which if you shoot a Log footage in 8-bit,
it's gonna be harder to color grade
because there's not as much data as a 10-bit image.
So the new DJI Mini 3 Pro has a 10-bit image,
which is gonna allow you to color grade,
and push it around a little bit further
than if it had an 8-bit image.
And so depending on the drone that you're using,
if it's only shooting an 8-bit,
it would be better to shoot in D-Cinelike
than to shoot in D-Log,
because you have to push your colors and your contrast
further when you're shooting in a Log format.
However, if you have the DJI Mavic 3 Cine,
which has ProRes,
well, you'll wanna shoot in Log
because you're gonna have a lot of flexibility
to be able to move your colors around.
And even working with the 10-bit files
out of the Mavic three,
I've noticed that the image will break apart somewhat
when you're pushing the grade too far,
and you'll see things like banding in the sky
when you start pushing those colors too far.
Now there's three tools that we're gonna be using
to color grade in this video,
and you'll find them in most color grading softwares,
that's curves, your color wheels, and your HSL curves.
And to be able to see our exposure and our colors,
we're gonna be using two different scopes.
Now, right now I have pull up what's called a luma waveform.
And so this shows all of your exposure values
from black, at the zero,
to a 100%, which is white at the top.
And so when I scrub through this shot here,
you could see that the sky is overexposing
all the way at the top.
And then these parts in the bushes here are super dark.
That's down here pretty close to zero.
And that's because this shot
was a shot from my DJI Mini 2,
which was shot in the standard profile,
so you have all of that contrast and saturation.
Now the second scope that we're gonna be using
is your vectorscope.
And this shows a color wheel,
and it shows all of your color values
on top of a color wheel.
So you could see in this shot here,
there's a lot of blues and a lot of greens.
And this white part in the middle of the scope
is called your trace,
and it's pulling towards your blues and cyans,
and also towards the greens.
And so when we start playing around with colors,
and we want to create a look out of our footage,
you'll start seeing your vectorscope move around
towards the reds, or the purples,
or the blues, or the greens,
wherever you're trying to push the image.
And we're gonna use these tools
to be able to see color on a graph.
So the process for color grading is fairly simple,
and the first step is getting your footage
to a standard look.
So the footage that you're shooting
in standard is already there.
You might do some fixes in your color
if you shot with the wrong white balance,
but overall, that is the standard look
that you're gonna be pushing your D-Cinelike and your Log to
before you do a creative color grade.
And then step two is once you have that standard look,
is you add a creative color grade on top of that.
So this is where you start tweaking your colors,
you create a look that matches the type of scene
that you're shooting.
And this is also where you're just gonna have fun
and play around with color grading.
So let's go one by one,
and just do a color grade on each one of these shots.
And through the process of seeing how I approach
each one of these shots,
you'll see the whole workflow and how each tool works.
So let's start with this shot of me hiking
with this epic landscape behind me.
Now this was shot using the DJI Mini 2,
so you could see there's lots of contrast and saturation.
On my luma waveform,
you could see that parts are overexposing,
parts are pretty much at zero,
and we switch over to our vectorscope,
and you could see there's a lot of saturation.
So zero is no saturation, which is right in the center.
And then when you move out towards the edges,
that's lots of saturation.
So I'm just gonna first bring up my wheels,
and I'm gonna show you how your adjustments
are gonna affect this shot.
So if I was to add saturation,
you could see that the image becomes super saturated,
and your trace is pulling towards the edges.
Now if we go over to the waveform,
if I was to add exposure into your highlights,
all of this goes white.
And you could see here that,
well, it's over exposing way over a hundred.
And the same if I pull my shadows down.
Now everything is black,
and you could see all of my exposure values
are hitting the bottom line zero.
So let's reset this,
and this is the shot that we've started with.
So for a shot like this,
what I would typically do is maybe do a little tweak
to the highlights and bring them down.
And with DJI footage, I tend to bring my midtones down.
And so when you're working with your color wheels,
you'll have the ability to change your exposure,
and your highlights, your midtones, and your shadows.
And so to get my shot looking
to where I want to start doing a creative color grade,
I'll typically play around with my highlights
and my midtones when I'm working with the standard footage
out of DJI.
Now, this is also where you can change
your color temperature.
So if you shot and it's looking a little bit blue,
well, I might change my color temperature,
and add a little bit of warmth back into this footage.
And you could also do that if it's looking too green,
or too magenta, you can change your tint.
So for this shot, it was looking a little blue,
so I added a little bit more warm tones back into the shot.
And here's what it looks like, that's just a standard look.
Now, I could use this shot as is and start editing.
And a lot of times when I'm working in a quick workflow,
this is what I typically do is I'll just do a few tweaks,
and move on.
But if I wanna create more of a look,
well, from here I'm either gonna do a creative look
on my own, or I'm gonna add a LUT.
So let's first do a creative look.
I'm gonna add my HSL curves,
which is hue, saturation, and luma.
And so these look a little daunting at first,
but they're actually fairly easy
once you understand what each one of these does.
hue vs. hue just changes specific colors.
So if I was to target my sky,
you could see that it's gonna add some dots here,
and I can change the color of the sky
based on how I pull this graph up and down.
And the same thing if I pull here in my greens,
I could change the colors
of the ground and the trees and all of that.
And you can get super precise with this,
or you can make big broad strokes,
and just do a slight change to push your colors
in one way or the other.
Now the same thing with your hue vs. saturation.
However, what you're affecting is your saturation.
So if you grab your sky and pull this up,
you're gonna add a ton of saturation.
Or if you pull this down,
you're gonna add little saturation.
So if you're taking a shot,
and you want to desaturate your sky,
but keep your foreground saturated,
you'll go in and target just the sky,
and pull down that color.
And the hue vs. luma does the same thing.
However, this is for exposure.
So if you want to grab your sky and make it darker,
you pull down, and it's gonna make all your blues darker.
And when you start messing with them too much
you're gonna see the image will break apart,
especially on 8-bit footage.
On 10-bit footage, you'll have a little bit more room,
and ProRes footage, you'll have even more.
But you'll start seeing the footage break apart
when you're using these graphs.
So you wanna do subtle motions.
It's all about coming up with an idea
of what you want to grade,
and then create some subtle looks out of that.
So for this shot here,
I wanna take out the saturation in the sky.
I've pulled up my vectorscope just so I could see my colors
on a graph.
I'm gonna go through it, and I'm gonna start pulling down
all the colors that are in the sky, the blues and cyans.
And you can see over here on the vectorscope when I do that,
it goes more towards the center.
And so now my shot has all my saturation in my yellows,
reds, and greens,
but not a lot in blues, cyans, and magentas.
And also, I wanna change the color of this foreground.
So I'm gonna go to hue vs. hue.
I want to grab this section here, which is my reds,
and let's make that a little bit more green.
So I'm gonna add a point here,
and I'm just gonna target this a little bit more.
And now the last part is I wanna make the sky
slightly darker.
It's a little bright for my taste on the shot,
so I'm gonna add hue vs. luma, the sky,
it's gonna make those clouds pop a little bit more.
And then I'm gonna add one more point here in the reds,
and I'm just gonna add a little bump to that.
And so now here is the before and after of the shot,
and you can see that I've created a different look
out of this footage.
And creative color grading really comes down to
what you are going for.
There's no right or wrong way.
And one of the things that you're gonna want to do
when you're coming up with your creative color grades,
just look at other creators work, look at films,
look at what you like watching on YouTube,
and see how they color grade,
and start figuring out where's their contrast,
or where's their saturation, or what colors pop.
You'll start noticing
that different creators have different styles that they use,
and you'll start being able to see color,
and see contrast in a different way,
now that you know how all these tools work.
All right, so I took off the HSL curve, this footage is back
to where it was, and now I'm gonna add a LUT.
And in Final Cut, I just add a LUT by dragging and dropping,
and I have this custom LUT function.
Different softwares are gonna have different abilities
but a LUT is a .cube file that you add on top
of your footage that gives you a specific look.
And I'm gonna use one of my LUTs that I have
called Hollywood, which creates an orange teal look.
And you'll see immediately on the vectorscope,
all of the colors are pulled towards the red, yellow,
which orange, which is right here, and also the cyan.
And the orange teal look is your typical Hollywood look
that you'll see in a lot of motion pictures,
which you'll see behind me, teal, orange.
And so this LUT that I've built basically creates this look
in your shot.
However, it's a little bit too extreme.
And so when I add LUTs, I could bring it down to zero,
which is adding none of the LUT onto it,
or up to a hundred, which is 100%.
And when I add LUTs, I'll add like 50% on the shot.
And I might even tweak it further from here
by going to my original color grade,
which is this color wheels, and just doing a few tweaks.
So for this shot, I might just bring up the midtones a bit
to bring up this foreground,
and then bring down the saturation of these highlights,
because it's a little bit extreme.
And now I have a shot that has a different look
than the original, and I did it much quicker
just using a LUT and doing some minor tweaks.
And this is the process that you're gonna go through
for all of the footage.
So now let's look at a D-Cinelike shot.
So I have this shot of me kayaking in Alaska.
I'm gonna bring this down to my timeline,
and we're gonna do the same thing,
however, there's gonna be a little bit more work
on the front end to get this shot looking to standard.
So let's pull up our waveform and look at our exposure,
and then we're gonna add on curves.
And I'm gonna show you just a different way
to play with exposure than your color wheels.
And so on curves, your highlights are over here
in the upper right-hand corner,
and your blacks are down here in the lower left-hand corner.
And so you can see as I raised my blacks in this image,
it becomes super washed out,
whereas if I bring down my highlights, it gets super dark.
So you're gonna use this to control your contrast
of this shot.
And you could just add points on this graph.
And then what I would do is bring down the darker parts
of my image,
and might bring up slightly some of the highlights.
And I'd play around with my mids
to get them them where I like them,
that shot's looking better.
And then I'm gonna go to my color wheels,
and just add some saturation to the shot.
I'll pull up my vectorscope to see what I'm doing,
and just add some saturation.
And now this shot is looking much more standard
than the original, which had a more flat look.
Now from here, you could do the exact same process
of going through and using your HSL curves,
or if you don't want to target specific colors,
and you just wanna target, say, the highlights,
well, you can do that here in the color wheels.
So you had highlights, midtones, and shadows,
and then full global effects here.
And if you want your highlights to be less blue,
well, blue's here on the color wheel,
and you could pull away from your blue,
and add some color into all the highlights.
Now, obviously you can make this extreme,
which that doesn't look very good, but if you wanted to,
say, add just a little bit more warmth into this shot
and take out some of those blues,
I just adjusted my highlights over to more yellows,
and oranges, and greens.
And same with midtones,
I could play around with these,
maybe you take a little bit of green out,
and just push it more towards magenta.
And then for shadows,
maybe I'll just pull out the saturation.
So now I'm tweaking this shot based on just my color wheels
versus using the HSL curves.
There's a lot of different ways that you can go through
and do your color grade.
You either could do broad strokes,
like what you're seeing with the color wheels,
or you do more targeted and specific changes,
which is what I'd use the HSL curves for.
Now, I'm gonna pull up this other shot where I'm hiking
through the forest,
and instead of using my curve to change my exposure,
I'm gonna use the color wheels.
And so we'll pull up our waveform.
You see there's a gap here between 75 and 100,
so we can pull our highlights up to add more highlights
to the shot.
Bring our shadows down, maybe bring the midtones down,
and add a little bit of saturation to the shot.
And now we have more of a standard look.
I would even bring the shadows down further with this,
and just tweak it to my liking.
And then from here, I'll do a creative color grade on this.
So let's add a LUT to this shot, hiking through the forest.
I'm gonna pick one of my LUTs that I've made
for drone footage called Orizaba,
it's gonna change the colors,
and it's gonna change the exposure slightly.
And I'm gonna just put this at 75%.
So this is the before and after for a D-Cinelike shot.
And you could see how quickly you could go through,
do some slight adjustments, get it to a standard look,
and then create a creative color grade.
Now the last thing I wanna show you is D-Log,
because D-Log takes a little bit more work to get it
to that standard look.
So I have this shot here,
which is in a crazy state park in Utah.
I'm gonna add this in,
and I'm gonna pull up my waveform so you can see
all of your exposures.
This is a very flat image,
so you can see all of your exposure values are here
in the middle, not stretching out to 100 and zero.
So I'm gonna pull up first, my curves,
and I'm just gonna add adjustments to get my contrast
looking where I want.
So I'm gonna pull my shadows down, pull my midtones down,
and keep tweaking this until I'm happy
with the way this looks.
And now this shot has contrast,
so you can see there's dark elements,
and there's bright elements, but we haven't lost the sky,
and we haven't lost any information in the shadows.
So I'm just gonna pull up my color wheels,
and add some saturation to this.
And you could see that this shot now looks more standard,
and ready to start doing some tweaking
to create a creative look.
Now if you're working with D-Log or D-Cinelike,
you could also use a LUT to get to the standard look.
And these are called conversion LUTs.
So let me pull up another shot that's shot in D-Log.
This is from when I was overlanding out in Utah.
We have a lot of contrast in the shot,
and when I pull up my waveform,
you'll be able to see that even the sun,
it's the brightest part in the image,
it's pulled really far down.
So we need to add a lot of contrast to this.
So I'm just gonna add first a LUT,
and I'm gonna use a conversion LUT.
So I'm gonna go to my LUTs.
I have some different conversion LUTs
that I personally have built that I like,
and instantly it adds contrast and saturation,
and I could just use that and walk away,
and this shot could be ready to use.
And so sometimes if you're working in a fast workflow,
you might just use a conversion LUT
to go from zero to a standard look,
and you might just be happy with that.
But from here is where you could tweak,
and do more creative looks.
So I'll add another LUT on this.
I'm gonna use my LUT that's called Yucca.
It's gonna change the colors,
make it a little bit more yellow,
'cause I've built this for desert landscapes,
and I'm gonna dial that to like 70%.
So now I've added a conversion LUT,
and then a creative color grade,
and the shot's ready to go, and I can use it as is.
So a lot of different workflows that you could fit
into how you want to color grade your footage.
If you want to get my LUTs that I've built
specifically for DJI drones,
I'll include those down below in the description.
Now if you want to dig deeper into color grading,
I have a full course on creative color grading
over on my platform, the Creator Film School,
and I'll include a link to that down below
in the description.
You can get it as part of my membership
or you can buy it as a standalone course.
But next, you should check out this video right here,
which goes through a ton of tips
on how you're gonna get better drone shots
when you're out filming.
I'll see you over there.