the color dropper or the temperature intense sliders i don't even touch those the biggest
challenge is not always fixing incorrect white balance but actually identifying it now with
this video i'm not saying that you should white balance every single clip i often use unbalanced
images as creative choice but if your goal is to get that clean commercial cinematic look you're at
the right place having a calibrated monitor helps but really the best way to spot an incorrect white
balance is to use the built-in scopes in your editor if you're not using scopes yet i really
hope you will start after this because it changed everything for me i'm using examples in davinci
resolve but the language is the same in premiere pro and final cut starting with this grade i did
for bass buzz when you compare the before and after you'll see an improvement in the skin
tone with cleaner blacks and whites i use various tools to white balance depending on the scene but
in this case the waveform is perfect the waveform is not just there to check your exposure but it's
a great way to white balance when you have true white and true black the white guitar will show up
in the highlights indicated at the top and a black shirt in the shadows at the bottom with the RGB
channels turned on you can immediately see the imbalance in your whites and blacks
starting with the highlights you'll see there's a lack of blue and a little bit too much red
when you drag the individual sliders your goal is to pop it into place to appear white
you can do the same in the shadows and here we've got too much green and a lack of red you can
probably do this a little faster using the wheel but i find that the sliders give me finer control
in most cases when your highlights and shadows are balanced the mid tones should be close to perfect
this is where your skin tones lie so you can check it using the qualifier and the vectorscope i'll
dive deeper into the vectorscope further on but for now the most important aspect is to understand
this line over here often referred to as the flesh line this is the only way to confirm if your skin
tones are balanced correctly and because skin tones mostly line the midtones you always make the
biggest changes adjusting it here you can also use RGB parade and the goal here is to line up your
channels where possible i don't use it nearly as much as the waveform but it's the best way to show
you why i don't actually use the temperature and thin sliders adjusting temperature and tint have
a global effect on your color channels which means if you add green you're removing red but using the
individual sliders will give you finer control allowing you to only add green without taking
red away making it easier to fix white balance in a specific area in your image enough of the
studio stuff let's look at an example out in the field here i'm not going to create it from scratch
but i do want to show you the before and after to see how the colors on the waveform
pops into place again our focus is on the black shorts in the shadows and a white snow clearly
indicated on the waveform with this example i also want to show you why i never use the color picker
to white balance in most cases it just won't give you the right result because it doesn't understand
the context of your frame and it only tweaks the temperature and thin sliders now this is where
we start using the vectorscope more extensively but first why does the before image look so green
it's simple since we're surrounded by all this foliage the light is actually bouncing
off and reflecting green everywhere and white balancing for this in camera in the field can
be time consuming or impractical depending on the nature of your shoot for controlled shoots using
a color checker simplifies the process but becomes impractical for undergo shoots another way to nail
the white balance is to focus purely on the skin using the HSL qualifier i'm isolating the skin
tone and putting a mask around the area i want to balance best in this case the face when you move
the wheel you can quickly find a desired spot on the flesh line but in this case i'm also dragging
it up a bit adding more color to the skin when you disable the qualifier and the mask there's a huge
improvement from before to after but looking at the waveform you'll see that the balance is still
a slight bit off in the blacks this is where i want to challenge you to be creative to me
skin tone will always be the most important aspect of the image and it's perfectly fine to go for
cooler blacks and warmer highs or vice versa but your goal should be to retain natural looking skin
so don't get caught up in trying to balance everything perfectly in the after you can see i
also isolated the green and dropped the saturation which in my opinion makes the grade look more
cinematic sometimes balancing just for the skin won't give you the desired result and in this case
it's better to simply isolate the skin with the HSL qualifier and to make individual adjustments
to make it blend into the frame like i did here but what if you don't have any blacks you can't
see the skin tones and your white is irrelevant to the scene here our subject is actually
wearing a navy shirt and backpack and trying to balance for the blacks or for the sky as white
will just throw off the color completely again the vector scope comes through the rescue when the mid
tones are selected you can immediately see that it's off leaning to the green side and an easy
fix is to drag the wheel to the center this method works so well that we can actually use it without
looking at the image in this example when you look at the before and after you can see how radical
the change is and it's all indicated by the vector scope if i disable the previous changes and i
create a new node i can drag the scopes over the image centering around the midtones will almost
instantly fix the image and i can check myself by isolating the skin tones and it's right on the
money without even looking at the image and that's why i love scopes because it not only helps you
to fix the white balance but also to identify it when it's off if you enjoyed this tutorial
please be so kind to leave a like and if you have any more questions drop it in the comments below
and i'll do my best to answer thanks so much for watching and i'll see you in the next one