Today I’m gonna show you guys how to go from this...
to this... using literally just one control.
And if you watch until the end of the video, as a bonus tip,
I’ll even show you how to do that wipe effect where you
can see the before and after.
Let's get Undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He’s crazy ♪
What is happening, Donk Squad?
I’m Gerald Undone, and today we are back
with another Tutorial Tuesday!
That's the name we’re going with.
Remember last time I was like, “Oh, I wanna come up with
a name for it,” and I couldn't really figure out what?
Well, we’re kinda going with Tutorial Tuesday
thanks to one commenter’s suggestion.
I wanted to try something a little different format-wise
for this series, because I understand that your guys’
time is precious, but I also want to make my videos,
like, ten minutes long to appease YouTube’s algorithm.
So for that, what I was thinking we do is we break it down.
The first thing is going to be just the quick and dirty
solution to whatever the video title is about, because you guys
clicked here and you’re like, “what’s that thing?”
I’m gonna show you right away.
And then the second step is gonna be more in-depth,
If you want to know more, you can keep watching.
And then if I have time, or if I have something to talk about
at the end, I’ll throw in a little bonus tip. Like I said,
today I’ll show you how to do that wipe thing
if you want to know. So, with that being said,
let’s jump right into the phase one, quick and dirty,
right to the answer thing of what we're talking about here,
and we're talking about curves today!
[hip-hop music]
Now, there’s a lot of tutorials on curves out there,
from how to colour correct with curves to how to make
your photos pop. And what we’re going to focus on more
today is kind of like one
general-purpose-faded- film-awesome-cinematic-
you know-glowy-kind-of-look- curves.
Just kind of, like, “What is one just cool curve setting I can
put it on that will look cool almost all the time?”
That’s what I’m gonna show you today.
So, let’s open up the intro that I just recorded for this video
so we can kind of take a look at it there. All right, here we go.
So, we’ve got Premiere Pro open, and here is the footage
from the intro that I just recorded,
and we'll just jump in here and look at a spot.
Now, I’m gonna go over these steps for both Premiere Pro,
Photoshop, and Lightroom, in case you guys are just video,
in case you're just photo, in case you want to know
how to do it on everything. But it’s actually
pretty straightforward because the tools are available
on all three platforms by standard,
so it should be pretty easy. But we're gonna do it
in Premiere Pro first because I have a video file
that I want to work with, and then we’ll take out a sample
and we’ll throw it in the other programs. So, for video,
using Premiere Pro, we’re talking about curves, right?
So, the easiest way to do it-- so let’s just grab this sample,
this scene up first, and we’ll save it as “sample”.
That way we can pull that up in the other platforms later on.
So, if we jump over to “Color Grading”--
I have a tab set up here, but basically all it does
is it pops open the “Lumetri Color” panel.
And on the side here, for “Scopes,"
I use the Waveform RGB Scopes, which I’m gonna use
to help explain what’s going on. But like I said, this is
the quick and dirty one, so let’s just jump right into it.
Without giving too much of an explanation about curves,
we're just gonna scroll down here on our controls
until we get to “RGB Curves”. Now, there’s different types
of curves. You can use the luma curves and that kind of thing,
like, whether you’re changing luminosity, whether you’re
changing colour alpha channels, but we’re just basically
talking about the tone. So, that’s the shadows
and the highlights, the lights and darks.
We're talking about a tone curve. So, we’re gonna leave it
on white here, we’re not gonna mess with the colour channels,
we’re gonna leave it on white. And the quickest, easiest way
to get this going is, I want you to place five dots
on the curves bar, and we're gonna use the grid
to know where to place them. So, one in the very centre,
and you know where that is because you use
the centre grid and the-- the top-- -- the horizontal centre
and the vertical centre grid.
And we're gonna put one on the 25% marker down here,
which you use the first and first, and then we'll use
the third and third to put one on 75%.
Now, split the first one, so you have, like, a 12.5%
or an 1/8 dot right there, and split the one up here
as well so that you have sort of a 7/8 dot.
And these are where we're gonna control the curves.
Now, the centre point is just to try to keep everything
kind of fixed so that we can control the darks
and the lights independently. Now, the first thing
that we're gonna do-- and this is kind of the key
of where you get that cool, faded cinematic look--
is we’re going to take the black-most dot that we have
and we're gonna bring it up the side.
Now, if we do an extreme version of this,
you can see what happens. All of the blacks
in the image are getting raised up to where
they’re no longer black, they’re actually in grey.
And if we look over on the scopes over here
at the waveform, we can see that when it's all the way down here,
the blacks are almost resting on the 0 IRE.
What that means basically is that’s the blackest line.
And then as we bring it up, they're coming up.
Now they're at 10 IRE, let's say.
So they’re no longer even on black.
Now the bottom line is some sort of grey, and that’s about
as black as it gets, is a form of grey. And you can see that
in the shadows of the image here, that when we bring it down
and we bring it up, that’s what happens.
Now, we don't need to go all the way up, but I just wanted
to show you what it looks like.
You can do this to taste, but if we want one that applies to--
you can make it a preset and just put it on all your images
or all your videos, we don't want to go that hard with it.
So, I’d say maybe something kind of about here, maybe,
would be a decent one.
Now we're gonna go over to the 1/4 one here, the one
that’s right in between the middle and the zero,
and we're gonna bring it down to about, I don't know, here.
We’re just trying to bring it down a little bit in order
to add a little bit of darkness back,
now that we’ve raised up the black point.
So, if we go back and forth a little bit, you’ll be able
to see you go from here to here.
And now the other point that we placed in here, this is just to
give you some more control about how smooth it is,
because one of the biggest things about any kind of
adjustments-- whether you're adding colour, whether
you're changing the exposure, whether you're messing with
the shadows and highlights-- is you want it to be
kind of a transition. I mean, unless it's either
the look that you're going for, generally it will look worse
or it’ll look like less-- --less time was taken,
less well done if you have stark changes
that don’t have a rolloff.
So, we always want to roll everything over.
And so this point here lets you
kind of control the roll for that.
So I’m just gonna bring it until it makes sort of a smooth...
... as smooth of a shape as I think it can make.
And this is kind of following the same concepts of an S-curve.
You know, generally when it came to curves, they would tell you,
“Just make an S-curve if you want to add a little bit of pop,
little bit of contrast.” Basically, you take the darks
and you bring them down, you take the lights
and you bring them up, and it just kind of makes an “S”.
So, we’re doing kind of like an “S” with flares on the end
in order to clip and crush the highs and lows respectively.
Now we're gonna do the same thing on the lights.
A little rule of thumb that you can use if you want to know
how much to apply the lights is, I like to do about half
as much on the lights as I did on the darks, because I like
kind of darker, contrastier, kind of moody images.
You can do as much as you want, like I said, this is always
to taste, but if you want that sort of, “What’s the one step?”
thing, because I said it’s just one general principle
you can apply, I would go about half.
So, if we see how much we lifted up this dot here, then we’re
gonna want to lower this one down the right side
instead of the left side, about half as much as we did here.
And the same thing with this dot. We’re gonna raise it
up to this point, but we’re only gonna raise it up
about half as much as we lowered the dark point.
And then this one, we're gonna do the same thing.
We’re just gonna try and find a shape for it
where it rolls off nice and smooth.
Now, let’s take a look at the image.
Now, this image has nothing done to it.
There's no colour correction, there's no exposure done.
All I basically did was add the curves,
‘cause that's what I was trying to say is,
“Look what you can do by just adding curves.”
So, let’s disable it and enable it and take a look at it.
So, before... and after. So, we only did one step,
and as you can see, the colours are more rich,
there’s more contrast in the image.
When you do the curves like this, where you lower
the whites and you raise the blacks and you kind of
smooth it through like that, it gives everything
kind of like a glowy, kind of, like, softer look.
And I don’t mean “softer” as in less sharp or out of focus.
Just kind of, like, you know, easier to look at.
And I think that’s part of the “cinematic” look
that I’m referring to. If you think of, like,
film being flashed onto a screen,
it kind of has, like, a glowy, kind of bloomy thing to it.
Doing this kind of curve creates sort of a similar effect.
♪
So, that’s basically it for the quick and dirty version.
I'll pop this image open in Photoshop as well.
Let’s do that now so that you can see
how to do it in Photoshop.
It's exactly the same thing, so here we go.
We've got the image open in Photoshop.
You can go into “Curves” up in “Image,”
or you can just click on the “Curves Adjustment Layer.”
And we’ll do the same thing. Just do this real quick.
Add the five points, which makes seven points total,
because you have the two at the start and the beginning.
And this one might be a little bit sloppier,
but we're gonna do it the same way,
so we’re gonna raise it up the side a little bit,
we're going to lower this point down to bring some of
that punchiness back, and then we'll use this
to smooth off that shape. Up in the top end,
we're gonna bring this down only about halfway
of what we did before. We're gonna raise this up
about half as much as we lowered the darks,
and we're gonna use this to smooth it out.
And then let’s enable and disable that layer,
and there you go. Exact same sort of effect.
Immediately makes it look more cinematic.
If you look at the way the light kind of rolls off
the skin versus here...
I don’t know. You can see different--
There’s, like, different layers of light, and then now it is--
you gave it, like, a roll, and that just makes it look
more polished, makes it look better.
You can do this exact same thing in Lightroom.
Just go over to “Develop” on the photo, scroll down
a little bit and you've got your “Tone Curve.” I find
the Lightroom controls to be a little bit harder
to get to do exactly what you want.
I find they’re a little bit more touchy.
Like, see how many things I've set already?
But the same idea.
You bring the side up a little bit, bring this one down--
I’m gonna do this one super quick-- and bring this one
down, bring this up just a little bit, and this up.
OK. So, that one was super sloppy
and super quick, but same idea.
Let’s turn that off and on, and you can see
the exact same effect. So, that’s it.
That is the faded cinematic curve effect that you can apply
to videos, to photos, in Lightroom,
Photoshop, Premiere Pro.
Anywhere that really has a tone curve adjustment,
you can drop this on there and immediately
get some improvement. Now, for those of you
that want to know more, let's get into a little bit more
of how you can control and expand upon this a little bit.
♪
Let’s jump back over into Premiere Pro,
and we’re gonna disable the curves that we made.
We’re gonna keep this shape. I’m still happy with it,
but we’re gonna disable it for now
so that we can do a couple other things.
Generally, you want to use a workflow.
So, in Lumetri Color, I like to go from top-down.
Same with in Lightroom, you go from top-down.
In Photoshop, you go from bottom-up, but that's ’cause of
the base layer and you build layers, but....
So, in Lumetri Color we’re gonna work top-down, which means
first we want to start with a neutral grey image and we want
it to be exposed properly, and we want to set our--
we want to use our scopes to get our image sort of in-spec.
And the other thing that we want to do is adjust
the saturation a little bit.
What we're going for here is to make your image
almost good-looking already-- so the amount of contrast,
the amount of exposure and saturation that you want--
but then do a little bit less. So, make it a little bit
less contrasty than you think you would want, make it
a little bit less saturated than you think you’d want.
Then when we put that curves on, it’s just gonna finish it.
So, it’s gonna be a finishing curves.
All right, so we want to start with a neutral grey image.
Now, if you have a grey card like this in one of your shots,
you can just use the “White Balance Selector”
and click on it, and then it will neutralise the greys
as best as the program is able to, just like this.
All right, so now that we have our white balance, we can move
on to toning the image with exposure and contrast
and shadows and highlights and all that stuff,
but remember, do it a little bit less contrasty, a little bit
less than you think the finished image will be.
Do it 90% of finished, OK?
I'm gonna bump up the exposure a little bit here.
I’m also going to bump up the shadows just a tad,
and then I will bring the blacks down until they rest down
around 0 IRE, and then I will lower the highlights just a tad.
And raise my white point.
And I think we can still go just a tad more exposure.
OK, and then I'll add a little bit of contrast,
but like I said, I'll leave the image looking about 90% done,
and that's where I feel like we are now.
Now, when it comes to the saturation, you want to roll
back on the saturation just a little bit, because the curves,
the finishing curves that we have,
they punch up the saturation a little bit.
So, somewhere between 90 and 95 saturation
is usually pretty good, so let’s try it at, I don’t know, 92,
just for fun. So, we’ll put it at 92 saturation.
That flattens out the colour a little bit in that image.
And now when we jump down to the curves and we enable it,
we get a more finished look.
Now, if we turn off the basic corrections up here,
this is what it looked like with just the curves.
And now with the basic corrections, looks like that.
And without the curves, it looks like that.
So, they’re three completely different looks,
but together is when they look best.
So, as you can see, when you put the curves back on,
it still does that nice glowy thing
and smooths out the lights and darks transitions.
And if we look over on the scopes here on the waveform,
we can actually see what it's doing.
So, before we have the curves on, it looks like this.
Now, we tried to get the image to take up the full waveform.
So, from the bottom to the top. That means we have
our data spread out nicely throughout the entire image.
That’s generally what you want to do, because you want
to capitalise on your dynamic range.
But in that, we didn’t push it too far to the limits.
Because like I said, you want to aim-- leave yourself
about a 10% window before you put the curves on.
If you’re not gonna use the curves, then get the image
looking as good as you can with the basic tone corrections,
and then you're done, right?
So, if we look here, these peaks are only coming up to about 90%.
The lights-- that’s what these three--
On both sides, there’s three dips like that.
These are the lights in the shot, so they go all
the way up. That’s where we set our brightest point.
And then these lines that are resting down here,
that’s our blacks. That’s probably the bottoms
of the curtains and down here on the storage racks,
and they can actually be seen in the scopes here on the waveform.
The storage racks can be seen right there,
and then I'm in the middle, this red blob in the middle.
So, we didn’t go all the way, but we went most of the way.
So, look what happens up here to the lights
when we put the curves on. They come down a little.
That's because of this droop right here.
We took the whites and we said, “No, you can’t be as high.”
And then look what happens to the black bags
on the bookshelf and the shadow down here.
They're really, really black here, and they're resting
all the way down on the 0 IRE line.
And then when we check it off, some of that gets lifted
back up and spread out between 0 and 20, and now we can
kind of see-- I don’t know if it’s more detailed
necessarily, but less complete black down there.
And then the body of it-- I now go up and I hit 90 up here,
and some of the stuff dips below ten,
but before that it was spread out.
So, we’re basically just kind of like--
It’s what contrast does, but we’re setting the confines
and then spreading them within it. So, we’re taking an image
that was kind of spread out this far, and we’re saying,
“Well, if we only made the image this far,
how would you spread it out?” And it makes for--
the information that you have allows it to fill in the gaps
a little better and you get smoother transitions,
which gives it a more polished look.
So, that is the faded cinematic curves look a little bit more
in-depth, talking about the waveform and stuff like that.
And again, it works exactly the same
if you're doing it in Lightroom or Photoshop.
Let's jump over to, say, Lightroom, and we'll pop open
this image in “Develop” again. So, it’s the same idea.
You want to go through the top-down workflow, you want
to set your white balance point, you want to go through
and do your exposure and your contrast,
your highlights and shadows first.
Get all that stuff 90% of the way there,
then put your curves on. With Photoshop,
it works the opposite, because you work at the bottom.
Get your exposure, get your white balance right, and then
add the curves in on top if you’re using them
as finishing curves. If you're using curves for white balance
and all that stuff, well, then use them right away,
but you can make multiple levels of curves in Photoshop
and call them different things. This could be
your white balance curves, this could be your luminosity curves,
this could be your colour curves.
But still, you build your way from the bottom-up.
So, I think this is a great little trick.
It doesn't take a whole lot.
Like I said, you can just pop the curves on pretty much
any image and it’ll give you a little bit better of a look.
A bit smoother, bloomier, faded, fun kind of look.
But if you have the extra time to do your white balance
and your exposure first, you're obviously
gonna get better results out of it.
Just don't go too far, because any time that you do
something to the full limits and then you pop curves on it,
it always looks too extreme.
So, just tone it back a little bit
and then put the curves on it. Now for the bonus tip!
♪
Let’s jump back into Premiere Pro, and I will show you how
to do the wipey thing that is fun like that.
So, let’s take this image here, and we’re gonna jump back
over to the Assembly, where we can actually build our thing.
Now, I put the Lumetri Color right on the clip.
That's not gonna work if you want to do a transition
where you show the different levels.
You're gonna want to use an adjustment layer.
So, let’s right click over here in the project.
And choose “New Item”, “Adjustment Layer”.
And it should default to the right size.
And we’ll just drop that on,
and you can make it a little bigger.
Now, if we place that over where we are and we go into
the adjustment layer, let's just copy our exact settings.
So, we're gonna click on this clip, copy it,
and we’ll put it on the adjustment layer. There.
So, that’s doubled down and we gotta get rid of the first one.
So, now our colour settings are only on the adjustment layer,
they're not on the main clip. So, if we hide
the adjustment layer, we go back to the ungraded look,
and then if we put the adjustment layer back on,
we get to see our tone curve and our exposure settings.
Now, if we want to swipe this thing, it's pretty much
how you would do any kind of animation.
You’re gonna use keyframes. So, make sure
you have the right layer selected, jump up over here
into the “Effect Controls”, and click
the little stopwatch next to “Position”,
which will toggle the animation and set a keyframe.
And you’re gonna start off by putting the position
outside of your frames.
So, let’s say you want it to come in from the right.
Just click and hold on the position number
for the horizontal,
which is the first number. And just move it
all the way over to the right.
You can already see what we're gonna create here.
So, put it out there, now it’s outside the box.
And then just move forward a little bit in your timeline
to here, let’s say. And then if you want,
you can just hit “Reset Parameter” over here,
which is gonna put it right back to being perfectly balanced,
and then that animates the two between those two keyframes.
So, let’s go back and we’ll watch it.
So, this is very slow, but you can see it
slide in very slowly across the image.
If you want it to be faster, just move
the keyframes a little bit closer together,
and now it’ll come in faster.
And that’s pretty much all there is to it if you want
to animate my before-and-after look or something like that.
And you can apply text layers as well if you wanted.
You could put a text layer on the adjustment layer
that said “after” and have a text layer on the base layer
that said “before”, so that as the “after” slides over,
it comes over and replaces “before”. But I mean, I think
just the single line showing the colour change,
or whatever it is, is enough to sell the idea
and keep it nice and clean.
All right, guys, that's gonna be it for me.
I hope you liked the tutorial and three stages idea.
And I hope you found this video entertaining and informative.
And if you did, make sure you go ahead and drop it a like.
And if you did not find it entertaining
or informative, go ahead and hit the dislike button twice.
And if you know somebody for whom this information
would be useful, make sure you go and share with them.
Alright... I'm done.
[electronic music]
♪