Today, we're going to be discussing
three significantly different looks,
how to achieve them, and the pros and cons of each.
Let's get Undone!
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody?
I'm Gerald Undone and my name is Jeff.
[sharp voice] Jeff!
So, a while back I made those Sony videos about
picture profiles and matching images and using LUTs,
and since then, many of you been requesting that
I make some more videos on quick
and practical correction tips
and about comparing the LUTs that I actually like.
Today, I'm going to try and give that to you
and to keep it general enough that it can be applied
to more cameras than just the Sonys.
Today's images are shot on the Blackmagic Pocket 4k,
but we'll be using LUTs and processes that are available
for most of the popular cameras,
and those include the BUTTERY LUTs,
the Leeming LUTs and FilmConvert.
We'll be doing some of this in Premiere,
and some of it in Resolve, just to mix it up.
And peaking of Resolve, this is the perfect time
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which I'm pretty excited about.
If you want to test it out, many of the courses actually
have free introductory modules and if you sign up,
you'll actually get discounts on industry products like
one of the plugins that we're using today, FilmConvert.
So, go check out MZed using the link in the description below
and when you see how useful it is,
use the coupon code "Gerald20" to save 20% on any purchase.
Alright, so to keep things simple,
let's use this shot of me here because you guys
are probably used to seeing this shot of me,
so it'll be easier for you to spot the differences
than if I just shot some random scene elsewhere.
So, let's start out with how I would usually grade this shot
and then we can move into some alternatives.
So, the first thing I would do is I would jump into
the BRAW plugin for Premiere Pro,
so I can set my Blackmagic RAW configuration,
and I have a preset set for this.
This is a much faster way of doing it
if I just come in here,
I have BRAW settings that I can just drop that on there.
And I even have a grade that I usually use that I'll
just grab, this one, I think, and pop it on there as well.
And then, done that's how I grade my shot.
Hope this video was helpful and I'll catch you in the next one.
Okay, so what I actually do is, obviously,
I just make sure that the raw is all in order
using the BRAW page here, and then over in Lumetri Color--
I'll just switch over to Color Grading,
because it'll be easier to spot--
What I do here is I will apply the Leeming,
this is Leeming LUT Pro,
this is its latest version for Blackmagic.
It's version 1.5, it's outstanding.
It's the LUT that I've had to do the least with ever,
in order to make it exactly how I want.
It's almost like it's getting closer and closer to the way
that I would just naturally grade my stuff,
which is great for me, but you know,
for other people, you might have to do more work.
So drop it in here, and as you can see, it just automatically
spreads everything out to exactly where I'd want it.
The, the whites might be coming in a little bit hot
right now, but I'm okay with a little bit of contrast,
so they're coming all the way up to about 100.
Whites, you want to sit somewhere between
90 and about 100%, that's what this white bar is for.
I highly recommend if you're new to all this and
don't know what you're doing, get a little ColorChecker.
This is the X-Rite ColorChecker video, you can get
the little Passport one, they're fantastic.
And then, the middle grey line, you want to put that between
40 and 50%, that's what you can see right here,
and then this one, this darker grey usually goes
between 20 and 30, and then this is black,
but it's picking up my monitor, so it's not really black.
But this chip is black over here, so we can use that one.
Other than the fact that I've added some contrast,
I have 55 contrast, let's take that away.
Now, without any contrast, it pretty much fills
the waveform exactly how we'd want it to anyway.
I just find the image, eh, is a little bit flat.
This is YouTube, we got to pop it up.
So I put some contrast on, you can do this to taste.
I found that 55 is as much as I would want to go,
like to, you know, make the image punchy
and that's pretty much all I have to do.
The only other thing I did is I lowered the saturation.
Uh, for most of the Leeming LUTs,
the saturation is, it's good,
it's, you might find it a little bit high.
That's to get all the colours really accurate,
and then once you get everything tuned up,
you can roll the saturation down a bit, if you want.
So that's at a 100, I like to drop it down about 87%,
and I find it just makes it a little bit more calm-looking
and then that's pretty much it.
I started sharpening this one a little bit in post.
I have it at 25. I never used to sharpen before,
but with the Blackmagic, it's a lot softer than,
than other looks so I sharpen it just to keep it
a little bit uniform with the YouTube vibe,
and then the only other thing that I do here,
is I shift the Hue Hue curve up a little bit in the orange
and you'll see what that does
on the lights in the background.
If I turn this off, you see the lights are, kind of,
I don't know, a little bit more on the yellow side.
I find that a little bit uglier, and I don't really like
the way that it plays off the highlights in my skin,
so if I shift that a little bit more on the red-y,
magenta side, I find that
it makes the lights just a nicer colour.
It's completely subjective, but it's just something that I do,
and then down at the bottom, you guys might know this
if you've been following along, I put a little bit of purple
in the shadows and then I balance that out by putting
a little bit of green back in the mid-tones just so
the purple doesn't make its way throughout the entire shot.
If I turn this off and on,
you can see that's before and that's after.
It's really subtle, the goal is to keep it subtle,
and then I pop a little vignette on this.
This is off and on, the vignette is to just
make sure that the objects in the scene are a little bit
less distracting than they would otherwise be
and just, kind of, zone in on me.
And that's pretty much all I do.
You can make pretty much this exact same look
in Resolve quite easily. There's just
one minor difference that you have to do,
and that has to do with how contrast is implemented.
It's the same thing, I put the Leeming LUT on the footage.
If we look over curves here, I've bumped that same curve
to affect the lights in the background there,
and the only difference, really, is contrast.
So you can see, rather than setting 55 contrast,
I have the contrast set to 1.17,
which it's normally 1, and the pivot at .68,
and it's normally at .435.
The pivot that I found to be the closest
to what Premiere does is this .685,
and so if you're trying to create a similar contrast to
you would in Premiere, I would set the pivot point at .685
and then you can just adjust your contrast
up and down that way, which you can see,
and I found that 1.17 achieved a similar result
to .55 over in Premiere.
Now, I haven't applied the, uh, to the colour wheels,
I haven't applied the purple yet, but you know,
we could do that right here in the colour wheels
and then also I could apply vignette.
Very easy, and the only difference is the contrast,
the way that it's implemented.
Now, you can also achieve this look,
instead of using contrast and then, you can,
you could have done it with Curves,
and I think we'll save the Curves for the next LUT,
which we're going to cover, which is the BUTTERY LUTs.
Um, now if you want to see, by the way,
how this looks on my skin, I guess,
I could just take this over here and then
-I'll just duplicate the-- -[keys clacking]
--layer and stick it on there and this is what it looks like.
[no audio]
But, you guys have seen this, I don't know,
this is, this is what it looks like.
You're probably looking at it right now for this video.
Now, if we jump over here, this one I'm going to apply
the BUTTERY LUTs to, and there's a couple things
that we're going to notice right away.
Now I've applied the BUTTERY LUTs
and there's no other effects going on here in,
uh, Lumetri whatsoever, but you can see
the image is so much brighter and that's because
different LUTs will have different ways
that they intend for you to expose,
and for the Leeming LUTs, they, he tells you exactly
what he wants to do, expose high to the right
and then bring it down, and the reason
why the image gets darker with the Leeming LUT,
if we look over here and I go before and after.
Let me turn this off, so it was, was brighter,
you can see on the scopes and then,
you turn this on and it, sort of, gets darker.
It's just this question gets asked a lot
on his Facebook group, it's basically the way
that the image is processed it, kind of like, curve,
there's a curve to it in order to squeeze the highlight detail.
In order to bring that back to a more linear look,
which is what you want when you're finishing the image,
you have to bring the mids down to, sort of,
even out that curve into more of a straight line
and that will generally make things darker
because you're bringing stuff down.
But it also makes it more in spec and more accurate,
which is, I think, what people go for
when they look for the Leeming LUTs.
Now, if we jump over here to the BUTTERY LUTs,
we can see that nothing got brought down.
That's not what this LUT is intending to do.
In fact, this LUT's sole purpose, basically,
is to give you that ARRI 709, you know, look
and that you might be used to working within the industry
or make your cameras match that specific skin look,
specific highlights in and around the skin,
that's what they're going for here.
So, that means we're going to have to change our ISO
that we were shooting for, for raw, for this one.
So, I'm going to set the ISO down to, probably,
about 200 on this one,
but the image is still flat and not quite there,
so we're going to have to lift it up as we can see over here
in the scopes, our 90% white
isn't between 90 and 100, and our middle grey,
middle grey is okay actually, so that's good.
I actually exposed this shot for middle grey,
because I wasn't sure exactly how the creator intended it,
for it to be exposed for, so I just went
for putting middle grey pretty much right around there
and so that's what we've got.
But, we still need to bring our shadows down
a little bit and our highlights up.
I'll show you do that with curves now, because it's easy.
I know some of you are watching this you might think,
"Ugh, this is really rudimentary."
Apologies to you, I'm trying to make a video that could be,
beneficial to everybody, so we'll cover a few different
things here for those that don't have much experience
at all with colour correcting and for dealing with exposure,
hopefully, you can appreciate some of this
more rudimentary stuff with curves.
So, the way that I like to do this when it comes to using
a curve to get the image, about where I want it.
Uh, first of all, switch the scope over to Luma,
because it makes it easier to see the clean levels
on the chart, and get a chart if you want to do this.
It's so much easier, I keep saying that.
Okay, so let's start by raising the highlights up
to get them, just above 90%,
get them in that 90 to 100% zone to make a match,
so we'll put a point up here and we'll bring this
up a little bit until we're, you know, just above 90%.
And then ,we'll choose another point lower down,
because now our middle grey is sitting around
the 60 to 70, that's too high.
So, I'll put a point, you know, I don't know, halfway down.
I'll bring this down until we get our middle grey
in that 40 to 50% zone, but as you can see,
we have an intense amount of contrast now,
and that's because our darker grey tone is all the way down
here around 15, we want that more about 25-30.
Now, you could just grab another point here
and start to correct that up until that sits
between 20 and 30%, and then
you're going to want to deal at this point,
because as you can see we've got that weird,
you know, grey haze going on.
So we need to, kind of, balance this point out
to make it smoother, to make it, kind of,
you know roll a little bit smoother in the shot
and then now, we can bring our highlights
back down a little bit.
And, I'm doing this really, kind of, sloppy-jalopy,
but that's, I don't know, about... even I would say,
I could probably tune it a little bit more precisely,
as you can see, we've got all the way down to zero.
We're all the way up to 100, and we're occupying
about where we want our points to be,
and if I turn the curves off,
that's what it looked like before.
That's what it looks like now,
and a lot of it just came to life.
Some of the saturation, everything came back
a lot of curves does that, when you punch up certain areas,
you're going to get some saturation and everything,
and what I like about this LUT is that
it is kind of simple to achieve a pleasing look.
I think that we have a nice skin tone, we have a nice,
as you call it, like, a roll off on the highlights
in the skin, and I think that the lights are handled nicely
and I think that the contrast is nice
just from putting a little subtle curve on it.
So, I like the BUTTERY LUTs for that purpose and, I think,
for some people, this is going to be a good
starting point if they want to grade it further,
where again, accuracy isn't the most important thing but maybe
this is your baseline for going with an artistic direction.
But to talk a little bit more about the accuracy thing
because it is important to some people,
if we jump over to this one,
we can look at the, a different scope over here.
Let's put on the vectorscope and we'll hide
the waveform so we can see.
Now, these little dots that are appearing here,
this is going to tell you if these colours are in spec.
Now, the skin tone did well as we can see this--
this is a skin tone line here
and we're falling on that quite nicely,
but the other colours are shifted, you know, quite a bit.
I've seen much worse than this, I would say that
this is moderately accurate, the, you know,
the green, and the cyan positions in the blue,
it's only off by a little bit but it is off.
If colour accuracy is important to you, this is not the one,
but it's better than a lot that are out there.
But, if we jump over to the Leeming LUT here,
we can see that everything is really, really good.
Saturation levels are all even, like,
you get an even length of the star points.
Our skin line, like, look at that, it's like
a razor blade right along the skin line.
The accuracy is terrific.
It also gives you, sort of, a more polished,
not polished, but like, more finished right out the gate.
It's, like, "I don't want to do much work,
I just want to expose to the right,
drop this on, and then maybe just adjust
my contrast and saturation to taste."
That's what the Leeming LUT is for.
The BUTTERY LUTs, on the other hand,
are good if you want to,
like I said, have, sort of, more of, like,
an industry base, like I want the more of the ARRI 709.
I want to match it to some other cameras,
I want to get all my cameras on ARRI 709 and then
I want to put a similar grade on them or...
That's what this one's good for, or if you just focused on, like,
let me just get some nice skin tones
and I'll worry about the rest later on,
then the BUTTERY LUTs are good, but you will have to massage
the BUTTERY LUTs a little bit more,
if you like a more intense grade.
The Leeming LUT is available for more cameras
than the BUTTERY LUTs are available for,
but the BUTTERY LUTS still have Panasonic,
Blackmagic and Sony,
but the Leeming LUTs have a lot more than that.
I'm going to put links to all the LUTs and processes
that we discuss in the description below,
and if i scrounge up any coupon codes for any of them,
I'll put them in the description as well.
Alright, so we've talked about correcting using
the Lumetri Color Panel or if you want to use Resolve
just using the basic tools,
and then we've also talked about using curves
to correct with the BUTTERY LUTS, now let's talk about
FilmConvert, which is a whole 'nother animal.
I like FilmConvert for artistic projects,
where accuracy isn't very important,
because the exposure principles are quite a bit different
than exposing by the numbers,
like we did for the other LUTs, and the colours aren't accurate
at all because, instead it's striving
to emulate certain specific film stocks.
But it does make for a unique and interesting look
with a very nice interface.
So, let's jump over here to Premiere,
because I've already got it set up,
but you can do this also in Resolve
using the OFX plugin installation.
So here I've got FilmConvert in a side panel
and what's great about it is that you can pick the camera.
You have to download the different camera inputs for it,
but once you have them downloaded,
you can cycle through it, so right now it looks crazy
because it's set for a Panasonic GH5,
but if we switch through this until we get to Blackmagic
and then come up to the Pocket 4k
and then set it to film,
and then we choose our film stock.
Now, you know you can choose whatever you like.
They got, you know, all kinds of ones in here,
some black-and-white ones, some ones you might be
familiar with, but let's go with the Fujifilm Velvia,
just a fan of that one then, if we go on down here,
we've got a few different sliders that we can control,
but the main ones you need to know about are Film Color,
which is basically the intensity
of how the film stock is being applied,
and then Curve, which is going to affect,
in a sense, that contrast, it's the intensity of the curve,
so if we slide it all the way down
it's going to look really wacky.
It's almost inverting the curve now.
Most of these things, you can choke them back a little bit
and it doesn't really have that crazy in effect,
so we put both of these at, like, 80%,
you might just think that's just a mildly graded image.
But anyway, let's jack them all the way up and then grain,
you can control, obviously how much grain
you have in the image because,
it's an important part of film emulation.
And then we've got Color Wheels down here, so again
we can control our shadows, midtones, and highlights
by increasing and lowering them,
and we also have the ability to position these,
like again, if you wanted to put that purple
in the shadows and green in the midtones thing.
you can do that here as well.
But, what I think is that main selling feature
of FilmConvert is how easy it is to give
a very punchy, distinct look to your footage.
Now, when you look at my shot here, you might think,
"That's too much, that's crazy over the top,"
but if you shot something completely different
that you didn't already have an attachment to a certain look
and then you pop FilmConvert on it, you might be, like,
"Ooh, that's punchy and cool and contrasty
and looks neat, I really like it."
So FilmConvert's a really fun, easy way to just blast out
a cool look, just immediately gives you,
basically, a finished image and without setting
too much of the settings, actually,
I don't think I really changed anything at all,
if we look over here, our middle grey is maybe
a little bit higher than it should be, but pretty close.
Our white is at, like, really close to the numbers,
so I would say the image is just a little bit bright.
So, let's just bring down the exposure just a touch,
until we get everything back to where we have the other...
...the other scenes, maybe something like that.
That puts it in similar spec, as far as the chart
is concerned, and then if we thought we wanted to,
you know, we can increase the shadows a little bit,
if we thought that it was a little bit too dark in there.
It does give a convincing film look.
I really like what it does with the lights in the back here,
and I really like how the skin has a bit of that
halation that you would, almost, expect to see from,
from film, and I think it's a great little plugin.
Again, this is not what you would go for with accuracy,
if we look at the chart on the vectorscope over here,
we can-- [chuckling] see that they're nowhere at all
where they're supposed to be, like the magenta is doing
some weird hook thing here, the cyan's pretty much gone,
so the colours aren't accurate at all.
That's not what this is for,
this is just for an artistic look
or for emulating a specific film stock
that you might be aware of in your head and looking for.
So, it's pretty much all I wanted to talk about today,
just three different ways to achieve a potentially
great look that I recommend and that I like and that I use
on the regular, that you might also find handy
or easy enough to use and that work on a plethora of different
camera systems so they can be universally applied.
I can definitely do more videos like this if you're interested.
If you want me to hone in on specific topics,
just let me know in the comments below.
But that's going to be it for me, I hope you found
this video helpful or at least entertaining, and if you did
make sure you leave it the old thumbs up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already.
But, if you did not find this video helpful or entertaining,
feel free to hit the dislike button twice.
Alright... I'm done.