- [Narrator] This is a lesson from our
Editing Foundations course.
To get the full course,
go to bloopanimation.com/editingfoundations.
- [Instructor] In post production,
processing color has a couple of similar sounding
but very different stages.
Color correction is the stage where we focus
on making sure that all of our footage
has consistent color, contrast, and brightness.
The goal is to balance these technical aspects
and make them match from shot to shot.
Individual shots can be unbalanced for various reasons
such as lighting issues, environment, and shadows.
Color grading is the more artistic part.
This is where you push and pull the colors,
temperature, and contrast
to give them a certain mood or tone.
In this video, we'll be focusing
on the color correction aspect.
To start off, let's go into the color workspace.
Here, we can see a couple of windows
that we don't have in the other workspaces.
First, we have the Lumetri scopes window.
If we click on this wrench icon down here,
this window can show you a few different monitors
but we'll just be using the waveform monitor.
The waveform monitor shows us a representation
of the colors and brightness values in our image.
If we move our playhead along
we can see that the waveform changes to match.
The brightness of our image is represented vertically
so the brightest point will be at the top here
and the shadows will be down on the bottom here.
This waveform monitor is in RGB mode.
So we have separate signals for red, green,
and blue color channels
laid over the top of each other.
Over here, we have a window called Lumetri Color.
Lumetri Color is a video effect
that allows us to do both color correction
and color grading on a clip.
When we adjust the parameters on this,
the Lumetri Color effect will be automatically applied
to our selected clip in the timeline
as we work on it.
If you want, we can just add it like a normal video effect
by searching for Lumetri Color in the effects window.
Having this dedicated panel in the color workspace
is just a bit more convenient.
The Lumetri Color effect is broken up
into several stages here,
but we'll just be sticking to this first basic
correction stage in this tutorial.
The first setting is the Input LUT.
LUT stands for Lookup Table.
This is like a pre-made color adjustment
that can do some color correction
and grading work for us.
We won't be using lookup tables in this tutorial.
Next, we have the white balance section.
If the white balance of our image
looks overall a bit too yellow,
this is where we can add some blue to counteract that.
Or, if our image looks too magenta or green
we can push the tint in the opposite direction
to counter this as well.
The most straight forward way to correct white balance
is just to use this white balance selector tool.
As long as we have a section in our image
that we know should be white,
we can just select this tool,
click on that section
and the Lumetri effect will automatically apply
an appropriate correction.
If you want to reset any of these parameters
you can just double click on them.
Next, we have the tone section.
Exposure affects the overall brightness of the image
and we can see the brightness values
being dragged up and down in the waveform monitor
as we adjust this.
Contrast affects the overall contrast
between light and dark.
When we adjust this, we can see
the center of the waveform stays the same
but everything else is pushed outwards.
The darker parts become darker
and the brighter parts become brighter.
Highlights will just change the contrast
in the lighter parts of the footage
and shadows will affect the contrast
in the darker parts of the image.
All while keeping the absolute
upper and lower limits the same.
The whites and blacks settings
allow us to adjust those upper and lower limits.
The whites setting controls how bright
the brightest part in our image can be.
The blacks setting allows us to adjust
the very darkest point of the image.
Finally, we have saturation.
This is how much color is in the final image.
If we decrease the saturation completely
we'll have a fully black and white image.
If we push it to 100, the colors will be a lot stronger
and vibrant.
While we're making adjustments in both correction
and grading, we need to be able to directly compare
different shots to each other.
This is where we can use the comparison view
in the viewer window.
We can activate the comparison view
with this button here.
Now, if we scrub through the timeline with our playhead
we'll be shown our current frame
in the right side of the viewer.
If we scrub through this little timeline
on the left side of the viewer,
this allows us to see two parts of the timeline
at the same time.
So we can use it to compare different clips.
We can change the way this comparison is laid out
with these buttons.
So, we have a side by side comparison,
a vertical split comparison
and a horizontal split comparison.
You can click and drag on the dividing line
to change where the frame is split.
Now, let's apply some color correction to our shots.
For some projects, we may need to apply
color correction to every shot before grading.
For the most part here though,
the shots we have are pretty even
so we only need to make a couple of minor adjustments.
To make things a bit easier,
make sure to toggle the track targeting for this layer.
This means that the playhead will automatically select
any video clips that it passes over
so we can start working on them
with the Lumetri Color window straightaway.
This shot here is slightly over-exposed
meaning it's brighter than it should be.
If we compare this to a similar shot
earlier on in the film, we can see this issue
more apparently.
To adjust for this, I can just lower the exposure level
in the Lumetri Color effect.
This shot here has a bit of a blue color cast to it
so we'll need to white balance it.
I can just use the eyedropper tool
on this small white highlight to fix this.
This shot here is a bit less contrasty
than it should be,
so again, I can use the comparison view
and adjust our contrast to counteract this.
If we compare these two shots
from different parts in the film
we can actually see a bit of a continuity error
in the colors.
In particular, these shadows in the background
are pretty washed out in this second frame.
I'll lower the exposure a little bit
and then we can up the contrast a whole bunch
to help smooth this out.
We can see that we've actually lowered the whites level
of this second shot, so I'll adjust this to compensate.
Whilst we can't quite get an exact match
between these two shots, this should help a little bit.
And with that, we should be wrapped up
with our color correction stage.