- This shot has a major problem.
If you look into the sky, you see all of this banding.
Now this shot is from an adventure film
that I just finished, and I posted a few days ago
all around my trip to Death Valley.
And in this project,
I had a lot of really complicated color grades,
because out in Death Valley, you have this stark contrast
between the super bright highlights and super dark shadows.
And so when you start pushing your colors around
and doing a color grade,
parts of the image will break apart.
Now, this shot was filmed on the DJI Mavic 3,
and I don't have the Cine version,
so I'm not using Apple ProRes.
And you're limited.
Even with a 10-bit camera,
you can still push the image too far,
and you'll have issues like this,
where the sky has this crazy banding in it.
So in this video,
I'm gonna teach you how to fix a problem like this
in your color grades.
And if you're new here to this channel,
my name is Jeven Dovey.
And on this channel,
I'm gonna teach you how to make better videos.
And one of my passions is making adventure films like this.
So make sure you hit that Subscribe button
and turn on those bell notifications
so you don't don't miss any of these videos.
Now, let's take a look at this shot.
So I have this sequence here
where we're traveling across the desert,
and we get to the Trona Pinnacles.
And the Trona Pinnacles
is this really interesting place in California.
And I wanted to have this super strong contrast
to show the shadows and the highlights
when we were in this space.
And you'll see at this moment
where the problem is happening.
I have an adjustment layer,
and on this adjustment layer, I have a custom LUT
that is my Mavic 3 conversion.
Now, this takes my footage from log to a standard look.
It's still not perfect,
because with every shot, you do have to do modifications
when you're converting it from log to a color grade.
And also, in this adjustment layer,
I added some saturation with this plugin.
Now, the reason I'm using an adjustment layer
is because I'm trying to affect all of these clips
that I used for this part of the sequence.
They're all shot in log,
and they're all shot from the Mavic 3
at around the same timeframe.
So I'm using an adjustment layer
with the base conversion and some saturation,
that's just going to affect all the clips.
Now from here, each shot I have to go in
and color grade independently.
So on this specific shot, I added a color curve,
and I added a pretty strong S curve.
Now, an S curve will make the highlights brighter
and the shadows darker.
And a lot of times, if you just want that cinematic look,
adding an S curve makes a huge difference.
So when I added that S curve,
it started causing issues in the highlights,
and that's where I have all this banding.
So we need to fix this banding.
And what we're gonna do is mask off this section
and add a blur.
Now, one thing I wanna mention
is that using this method
only works on areas of your footage
where it's not the focus
because we are gonna be blurring part of your image.
This is gonna help
when you have things like banding in the sky
or tons of noise in your shadows,
basically areas that are not the main focus of the video.
If you have a crazy issue like banding, or noise,
or color blocking happening on your subject,
well this isn't really gonna help you fix it,
but this will help in a lot of situations
where there is an issue in the sky,
and it's just completely distracting for the viewer
who's watching the video.
So I'm gonna use what's called a mask.
So we're gonna add this to a different timeline
just so we can see this by itself.
And I wanna duplicate this shot and add it on top.
And the reason is,
we are gonna use a mask
and only affect a certain part of the image.
So in final cut, I have all of these different mask options.
And depending on which color grading program
you're working in,
you'll just have to find where the mask option is.
So this is where you can select part of the image,
and the rest of the shot is not affected.
So an easy way to do this
is turn off the shot that's underneath,
and let's just adjust the shot that's on top.
So I'm gonna draw a mask around the problem area
by just using these control points.
And I want to just select this one area.
Now, what I'm gonna do is feather it,
because I don't want the edges to be super harsh.
We wanna blend this into the rest of the footage.
Now I'm gonna zoom in
so we could see the issue that's happening
up here in the sky.
Really close, and you can see
that we have all this banding going on.
So I'm gonna pull up an effect.
I'm gonna use a Gaussian blur,
and I'm gonna add it to this shot.
Now, as you can see, when I added that Gaussian blur,
it completely removed all the banding.
So I'm gonna take off this blur
until I start seeing those bands.
And then I'm gonna bring the blur back up
until they're completely gone.
I only want this effect to be as strong
as it absolutely has to be.
I don't want it to completely blur the image,
because effectively what we're doing
is we're creating a little bit of blur
in this problem section,
and it makes things like noise or banding go away
so you don't see it.
However, if you put this on too strong,
it'll just look like you blurred the image.
So let's zoom back out to 25%.
Let's turn on this bottom shot,
and let's play this back,
and we can play this back.
And it looks like there's still
a little bit of a banding issue.
So I'm gonna turn up the Gaussian blur
just a little bit more.
And now some of these edges do look a little blurred
around the clouds, so I'm gonna readjust my mask.
I'm gonna go back in here,
grab the mask, and just readjust this
so that I don't see those clouds blurred,
because when you have a shot
where everything's super clear,
but then you have this weird blurring
happening on edges around the problem area,
it'll be noticeable.
When you're doing a cleanup like this,
you wanna make it hidden so people don't notice
that you fixed that part of the image.
And so once we've cleaned up
all these control points,
we can readjust the Gaussian blur if we need to.
And now we have a shot
where we fixed the banding in the sky.
Now, if you wanna learn my complete step-by-step process
on how I do creative color grades,
I just released a new class over on Skillshare.
If you've never signed up for Skillshare before,
you can get 30 days for free
using the link down below in the description.
And this class goes through everything about color grading,
what tools to use, what things to look for,
and how to create creative color grades
that are gonna look better on your footage.
Now, if you haven't seen this video
that I shot on my trip through Death Valley,
well, check it out right here.
It was a crazy trip.
My brakes broke down in the middle of Death Valley,
but it was still a ton of fun to make.
So I'll catch you on the next video.