- Hey guys, Travel Feels.
Today we're gonna talk about color grading.
I'm gonna reveal all my color grading workflow secrets.
Let's get into it.
(inspirational music)
Happy Black Friday guys.
That sounds like and oxymoron.
I hope you guys are enjoying it
and all you Americans stay safe out there.
It gets a little wild,
because we all know Black Friday means sales.
We all love a good sale,
but I have something new to release to you guys.
I've been working on this for a while now,
perfecting it, tweaking it, making it extra good.
I was inspired by my trip to Norway
and then my trip to Iceland
and I mad a new pack of LUTs based on those two trips,
so I'm happy to announce the CINE LUTS 2.0,
bigger and better and not only do you get the normal LUTs,
but you also get a log version of each LUTs.
So I made two versions of each LUT,
one for just normal footage and another one for log footage,
so it's gonna speed up your process even more.
That way you don't have to do as much
tweaking and color correcting.
It's gonna look better, right off the bat,
as soon as you add that LUT onto that log footage.
There's some really cool new looks that I created,
for example Singularity, I really like this one,
or Emerald, it has more of a green tint to it,
kind of a fight club look.
And then there's this one that's totally different
from all the other look, it's called Autumn.
It has this really nice orange vibe to it.
And normally the Cine LUTs 2.0 pack will come with 12 LUTs,
but this weekend and this weekend only,
there's gonna be an exclusive 3 extra LUTs in the pack.
So from today, Black Friday, all the way to Cyber Monday,
you're gonna get exclusive extra 3 LUTs
that aren't gonna be available after this weekend.
In top of that, of course we have to do some sales,
so the Cine LUTs version 1 are gonna be down to $10,
they're gonna be on sale
and the light group presets are gonna go from $20 to $10,
but only this weekend.
But that's not all.
I'm starting to sound like an infomercial.
All my courses, I have three different courses
that kind of go more in depth on a certain subject,
like wedding videography and color grading
and the business side of film making.
They're all gonna be on sale for $20 each also,
so make sure you check out those, if you haven't already
and you've been scoping them out,
eyeing them out.
They're gonna be on sale this weekend.
Boom, you gotta love a good sale.
And in honor of the new Cine LUTs 2.0,
I wanted to show you guys my color grading workflow
and reveal some of the secrets that I use
to really make my footage shine.
I have a few different workflows,
depending on the scale and size of the project.
If I really wanna go hard on the color grade,
I'm gonna use a bit of a different workflow,
but this is the workflow that I use
for most of my YouTube videos, when I don't have
a ton of time, but I still wanna make it look good,
this is the process that I'm using.
Let's get into it.
Here's our little edit and we're ready
to go and color grade.
A quick pro tip here is to save your project.
Make a copy of your project,
because you never know what can happen
during the color grading process,
especially if you're doing a lot of
different adjustment layers.
Funny stuff can happen and I've had Premiere crash
a few times, where as soon as I open it, it crashes again,
so I was completely screwed and I had to
go with some old save, so make sure
you're doing a copy at this time.
First off we wanna hit color,
because we're color grading now
and we wanna get our scopes out.
If you don't have the scopes out,
go to Window and choose Lumetri Scopes
and then you can right click on there
and then choose the right ones.
I like to use the Vectorscope YUV
and then the Waveform Luma version.
Step one is to denoise.
This is a step that I sometimes skip,
depending on how quick my deadline is coming up.
If I don't have a lot of time,
I'll actually skip this step, but if you want
the best quality out of your footage,
you need to denoise it.
And the reason for this is that all footage
has some amount of noise in it.
And then when you add a LUT and you add a grade onto it,
because of that noise, the grade
starts to fall apart a little bit
and you get this weird, ugly color noise.
So what you need to do is first denoise
and then color grade your footage
and it's gonna stick a lot better.
The crappy thing is that
there's no built in noise reduction,
so you're gonna have to use another plugin.
I like to use Neat Video,
but you can also use Red Giant's Denoiser.
And remember, don't go too far with this
otherwise your footage will end up looking
a little bit plasticy and a little bit fake.
Step number two is to choose a LUT.
A LUT is basically just a preset, like an Instagram filter,
and it gives you a really good starting place
to start grading your footage.
And professionals would say to
first color correct your footage
and then add the LUT or the grade,
but for the sake of time ...
Usually I just don't have that much time.
I like to add the LUT first, so I don't have to
keep going back and forth, correct,
then add the LUT and then go back again and correct.
So we go into the creative corrections, not the basic,
because you wanna be able to change the intensity
of the LUT that you're adding on.
We're gonna use Singularity,
from the new Cine LUTs 2.0 pack.
And then we're gonna take down
the intensity of the LUT a little bit
and we can adjust this later on also.
A little note here too is that some people
are emailing me saying that LUTs don't work in Premiere,
when you open up they don't work.
That's because you have to actually use Lumetri
to add them to your footage.
You can't just import them like normal video clips.
And then you also wanna make sure that your LUT
or your preset fits your footage or your project.
For example, if you have snowy cold looking footage,
you don't wanna use a LUT like Autumn,
which is gonna really warm up the footage.
It's just not gonna look right.
So make sure you're choosing a LUT that enhances your story.
Step three is to color correct.
We have to go through each shot and color correct it,
so the exposure looks good, the contrast is right,
the saturation looks good
and that the color balance isn't off.
I like to choose a hero shot, which is usually
the best shot with a face in it, and start with that.
And then I can kinda work from there.
I like to use Colorista from Red Giant
and that's just because I've gotten used to it
and it has a little bit more options
that the Lumetri color panel.
I just find it works a little bit better,
but you can totally do the same process
right inside the Lumetri color panel.
One of the big things that Colorista has is HSL,
so you can actually go through each color
and change the saturation of it, the hue of it
and also the luminesce.
So you have a lot more control with this.
And the key to color correcting is understanding
a little bit of the science behind color.
If, for example, your highlights,
which is the brightest parts of your image,
are feeling a little bit too warm,
they're a little bit too orange,
how are you gonna correct that
is actually take your color wheel,
in the highlight section, and drag it
to the opposite direction from that color.
So if it's a little orange, you're gonna
go towards the teal area to fix that warmness
in the highlights.
And that's why I like using color wheels.
They're just so intuitive
when you can see all the colors right there.
When I go through, first I would adjust the contrast
and I would use the Waveform
to kind of make sure the contrast levels are good
and then I would go through and change the colors,
using the Vectorscope as a reference,
to see that the saturation and color balance is good.
The waveform is gonna be a really good tool for contrast,
showing where your shadows are, where your highlights are
and then the vector scope is gonna be the tool for colors,
showing how much saturation there is
and then also which way it's shifting.
So you need to go through and do this
for each of your shots in your edit.
Step number for is to match your shots.
Once you've done your color correction,
you wanna look through and make sure
that your shots look the same.
You wanna have the same amount of contrast.
You wanna have the same amount of saturation
and also the colors should look the same.
So one shot shouldn't look really warm
and then the next one really cold.
They should look the same.
And again, scopes are gonna be your best friend here.
For example, here we can right away see
that the highlights are way lower
on this shot than the next one.
In this example, we can see that the Vectorscope
is telling us that this shot is much more saturated
and much more blue, so it's shifting towards the blue areas.
So we're just gonna bring it back a little bit more
towards the orange and we're gonna desaturate this clip
a little bit.
Now we can see that the shots match much better.
And you need to do this with all your footage.
Make sure that all the clips match each other.
Step number five is to add some sharpening
and this is your last step.
Once you're color graded and you're done,
you're gonna add some sharpening.
You can add it in and adjustment layer over top
or you can add it to each individual clip if you like.
I would use the unsharp plugin.
It's a built in plugin.
And I would put it to around 70 or 80 with one pixel radius.
Don't go overboard with this, it will ruin your footage.
Don't oversharpen.
And then you're ready to export.
That is my color grading process, my color grading workflow
and this is the workflow that I'm using right now
for probably 90% of my videos,
especially anything that's going up on YouTube.
And when you take it step by step,
it's actually not too bad,
but it does take a lot practice to train your eyes
so that you can, right away,
see what's wrong with this image
and then start correcting it from there.
So with practice and hard work,
you guys can definitely get it done.
Alright guys, make sure and check out the Black Friday sale
and especially the Cine LUTS 2.0 exclusive LUTs,
only available this weekend.
After that you can still buy the Cine LUTs 2.0 pack,
but you're not gonna have 3 extra exclusive LUTs.
Alright guys, enjoy Black Friday,
enjoy the sales, enjoy the weekend,
Cyber Monday, all of that.
Hit that like button, subscribe to the channel,
be part of this community and enjoy the filmmaking process
and go get some of those travel feels.
(upbeat music)