You have to shoot log files with your drones to get the best quality footage out of them.
They are very flat and desaturated files and grading those could be tough sometimes
so in this video, I'm showing 2 methods to color correct and
color grade your drone's log file.
For this Tutorial, I'm using a Mavic 2 Pro DLOG-M file but you
can use this technique on any log file as well.
What's going on guys?
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so without further ado lets jump into it.
We need to divide our process into two different steps.
The first step is color correcting that we will deal with the contrast and saturation
of the footage and the second one is color grading to add
any cinematic look we want by using LUTs.
Go to the color tab and Select Color Wheels.
In here we have 4 different Wheels to work with
but we mostly need the first three of them.
Lift is for working on shadows, Gamma is for the Midtones and the Gain will
affect the highlights.
The main idea here is to drop the shadows next to the zero levels and increase the highlights
to the top.
First, turn the Lift wheel to the left to make the shadows darker
then turn the Gain wheel to the right to increase the highlight levels.
Be careful to not clipping the highlight otherwise, you'll miss some of their details.
Now its time to bring some detail to the midtones so let's turn the Gamma wheel to the right
to make the midtones pop up a little.
For Correcting the saturation first choose the Vectorscope,
let's increase the vectorscope brightness to see everything better.
We have some room to increase the saturation so let's lift the saturation until you get
satisfied with the result.
It' good enough now.
As you can see the vectorscope is more towards the yellow,
it's normal for this shot cause we have lots of trees in it
but for those footages that shot with a wrong White Ballance,
you may fix it by moving this dot, for example, if your image is too yellow you should go
the opposite side that is blue,
you've got the idea.
The first part of color correction is done so let's rename the node to something like Color Wheels
and let's add a new Serial Node and go to
the Curves section.
In this part, we are going to add more contrast to the image
but you cannot add a typical S curve, you have to make small changes on every parts
base on your shot so I'm going to make some changes until I feel it's enough.
Be careful and make small changes unless you'll lose some details on shadows
or highlights.
This is before and after our curves adjustments.
Let's rename the node and see what we've done until now.
In the first step, we worked on shadows and highlights
and also add some saturation to the footage and in the second step,
we enhanced the contrast and add more depth to the footage
by working with Curves
and this is before and after both steps.
The color correction phase is done, to add some cinematic look
or any color grading, first add another serial node,
open the LUT panel and add any LUT you want to the footage.
Make sure your selected LUT is designed for Rec709 color space
cause in the previous steps we convert our log file into a Rec709 file.
If you apply these LUTs to a log file it won't give you the result you want,
this is why color correcting part is important in the process.
You can change how much your LUT will apply to the footage
by going to the Key tab and in the Key Output section,
decrease the Gain amount.
The second way to color grade a LOG footage is by using a LOG to Rec709 conversion LUT.
I Created 3 Dlog-M to Rec709 LUTs for you to download and use for free.
You can find the download link in the description section.
Let's add a new version of our footage to check the differences later.
I'm resetting all the adjustments for this version,
you can move between the versions by hitting the COMMAND/CTRL + N.
After installing my LUTs you'll have these three versions to work with.
Each of them works well in some situations so check them out and find the best one to
apply to your footage. for this footage, I think the High will gives
us a better color correction.
Let's add another node and apply the exact color grading LUT
that we used before to it, also, decrease the gain level like the other one.
As you can see in the first version we have more details on the highlights
but somehow I personally like the second version more,
it has more depth and contrast.
Doing the color correction part by yourself gives you more flexibility for sure
but having these LUTs could save you some time
and also gives you a good enough grading level.
I hope you enjoyed this video and I can't wait to see your results
so please share them with me in the comment section.
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Press the like button and I'll catch you guys in the next video.