(dubstep music)
- Hey guys, how's it going?
Welcome to another tutorial, and this one's
gonna be all about color grading.
I get a ton of comments and questions
saying that they like the color grades that I do,
asking how I do color grades and I've been
trying to figure out how can I show more of that?
How can I give you guys more, 'cause at least for me,
I love seeing other people's workflow.
What do they do, what plug-ins do they use,
how they do they manipulate things.
I really like seeing what other people do
so then I can take some of those things
into my own workflow and learn from them.
And I put a lot of work into color grading,
I don't leave a single clip untouched.
Every single clip has some sort of color grade to it.
I always color grade, and the reason for that is
it's a free, easy way to make your footage look way better.
It just takes time and practice,
but it's a free way of making your footage
just look so much better.
So why wouldn't you tap into that
and just take your footage to the next level?
That being said, it is also super hard,
it takes a ton of practice and just training of the eye
in order to get really cool color grades.
But the only way to get better at it is to just practice
and to start doing it, it is 100% doable.
Don't get discouraged, don't get scared,
there's a lot of things going on,
but it's actually fairly simple once you get used to it.
So here's how you can get a really cinematic
color grade straight in Premier,
and a lot of these same principles apply
to the other programs but I'm just gonna
show you guys how to do it in Premier.
Now my first step is to always start with a LUT.
Technically, you should be color correcting
and color balancing all your clips first
and then adding a LUT or color grade to it.
But I find that this just saves
a lot of time, especially for YouTube,
I just don't have time to be going back and forth,
color correcting and then grading and then correcting again.
So I recommend finding a LUT that you like
and then using that as kind of your foundation
right away and then just get into it.
It saves so much time using a LUT
instead of starting from scratch
or doing the exact same things over and over again.
Just use a LUT and you have a great
foundation to start from.
Not to mention it can be really hard
to actually make a cool look.
And there's all sorts of LUT's out there,
they're super good and some of them aren't so good,
but I like seeing what other people's LUT's do,
it's a good learning process.
So sometimes I'll just get other people's LUT's
and test them out to see what kind of stuff
they're doing to their footage.
So we're gonna go into the creative tab
and then we're gonna choose a LUT,
and I'm gonna be using the Cinema LUT
from my Cine Luts 2.0 pack,
these are the LUTs that I'm using
exclusively for all of my videos.
So if you're interested in them or you don't have any LUT's,
you can check them out down below.
Best 20 bucks you've ever spent.
I'm just kidding, no pressure,
there's tons of good LUT's out there
but these are the ones that I'm gonna
be using for this example.
Now right off the bat, this looks terrible,
it's way too strong and that's done on purpose
so you can dial it down and tweak it to your liking.
In this case I'm gonna choose around 47%.
And this is the biggest key to making
a really cinematic color grade is to keep things subtle,
never go too far with the color grade,
it should never be distracting.
The audience should never realize
that this is color graded really heavy,
it should look natural but still cinematic at the same time,
especially skin tones, you need to be really careful
and treat them in a very subtle way.
Skin tones are really tricky if they're not spot on,
our eyes can immediately see that.
Next we start the tweaking process
and this is where all the fun happens.
First off the temperature's a little bit off,
I think it's a little bit too blue,
so we're gonna bring it up to about 18 or 19.
I also prefer a little bit more green in my image,
I don't know why I just hate magenta for some reason
and so I'm gonna bring it down to around minus six.
Then let's play around with the contrast a little bit,
and this is where you can really experiment
and see what works for your image.
For example here, I don't really like how bright the sky is,
it was a much more moody feel when we were filming,
so I'm gonna bring down the highlights.
Around minus 55 is good and this just affecting
the brighter portions of the image for the most part.
Then we're gonna go up on the shadows a little bit,
this is kind of the darker areas of the image,
just to get some of that detail out,
We're gonna bring it up to around 20.
And then to get a little bit more contrast,
we're gonna bring up the whites
which is just the very brightest portion of your image,
basically just the sky here, we're gonna bring it up to 10.
And keeping in line with being subtle,
I feel like this is just a little bit too saturated,
so we're gonna bring it down just a little bit to around 95.
Then we're gonna go into the three-way color correctors
and this is where I like to get a little bit more creative
with the contrast and the colors.
Basically just adding to the color grade
or tweaking it a little bit.
And for the most part, I like what's going on,
I'm just gonna drop the shadows a little bit
to get a little bit more of that moody look,
and then we're gonna raise the mid-tones
so we're not losing detail there.
And then one thing I think we're missing here
is a little bit of color contrast,
the sky was this nice orange,
so we're gonna add a little bit of orange
to the highlights so we can get some color contrast going on
in this image between the blue in the sky
being a little bit more orange.
So take the highlights wheel,
and drag it toward the orange area.
Be really subtle about this.
But you can really see how it makes the sky pop now
in contrast to the rest of the image.
Now that looks really cool already,
but again it's the subtle little things,
and for me the skin tones could be
a little bit better in this image,
I feel like they're a little bit too dark,
a little bit green, and maybe a little bit too saturated.
But I don't want to affect the whole image,
I just want to be touching up the skin tones.
So we can go into the HSL secondary
and here we can choose just the color of the skin tones.
We can use this eyedropper to actually
select only a part of the image,
and here we're going by color,
so we're gonna choose the color of the skin tones,
and you can check this little box here
to see what's being selected.
And if it didn't work out properly
you can adjust the hue, saturation,
and also the luminance of your selection
to really refine it.
Then I like to de-noise that selection,
around 15 works well here,
and also blur it a little bit so it just blends in better.
I'm gonna choose around five here.
This is really important so it's not super obvious
that you're just changing the colors in the skin tones.
If you have no blur or no de-noising
you can get some really funny-looking stuff
and it just looks really weird.
All right, so first off, we're gonna get rid
of some of this green in the skin tones.
We're gonna go in to the three-way color correcter,
and we're gonna move the mid-tones to the opposite direction
of green to get rid of that green which is the magenta area.
Now remember, stay subtle, don't go too far with it,
otherwise you're gonna end up with magenta skin tones.
Then we're gonna bring up the exposure a little bit
just to brighten up the skin tones
so they pop a little bit more,
so you can just bring up the shadows,
the mid-tones and highlights,
and just play around to see what works best for you.
Then we're gonna sharpen a little bit
just to make that face really pop, around 20 is good here.
And then we're gonna de-saturate, take it down to around 80.
An over-saturated face can be really distracting.
And now, I don't know how exactly
these colors are gonna turn out in YouTube,
but this is a great way to tweak exactly what you need,
more specifically, especially with skin tones.
All right, we're all done so here's the before,
and here's the after.
So you can see there's definitely a big change,
but it's a really subtle look,
it's not over the top, it's nice and subtle,
nice and cinematic, and that is the biggest key
with getting a really cinematic look,
do not go over the top with it.
All right, I hope you guys enjoyed seeing
a little bit of my workflow and how I would do things,
and if you like this kind of video
make sure to comment down below
and I'm gonna try to think of different ways that I can
bring more color grading onto the channel,
because I feel like it's a really
important thing that we can all do.
It's super accessible and completely free
unless you need some sort of plug-ins,
but everybody can be doing this.
All right, that's it for this tutorial,
I hope you guys enjoyed it,
hit that like button, subscribe the channel,
I love having you guys here, all right see ya!
(light electronic music)