- Anybody can buy a preset nowadays
and just slap it on their footage, fact.
For example, I sell my CINE LUTS 2.0 pack.
Anybody can buy my LUTs that I use all the time,
put them on their footage.
But the question is, can you make your footage look
consistent and crispy every single time.
(upbeat electronic music)
Let's take a look at how to color correct like a pro.
I'm gonna go through and show you guys some examples
of how to color correct footage.
Footage shot with this guy, the Fujifilm X-T30.
Friendly reminder, if you do want to win this one,
you have a week to enter, I'll link it down below.
But basically, when we're talking about color correcting
we're talking about exposure and contrast
and color balance.
And now we can then add on our look,
our LUT, our preset, or our color grade.
So, color correcting always comes first
and then you add on the look, your preset, your LUT.
And why is color correcting so important?
Well, it basically makes or breaks your grade.
Like I said, anybody can buy and slap on a preset
but can you actually make it consistently look good,
nice and cinematic.
Another massive thing is that all the footage
in your sequence will actually match
and it won't be one clip looking really blue
and then the next clip looking all orange.
You're gonna have really consistent colors, again,
just making your video a lot better and look more cinematic.
I'm gonna warn you guys, this takes a lot of practice,
but it is definitely worth it
and it's actually kind of fun
once you understand what you're doing.
Okay, so this is my work flow,
and I'll show you a little bit of a different work flow also
but this is the way that I do things in Premiere.
First off, I'm gonna add a Colorista,
and then I'm gonna have my Lumetri corrections,
and then I'm gonna have another Colorista.
And Colorista is just a plug-in
basically for color correction.
It's really handy, it's got some color wheels.
You can change the contrast and exposure levels.
There's just a lot of control
that you have within Colorista
and I really like it because you have control
over the shadows, the midtones
and the highlights separately.
And like I said, you can have a different work flow
for color correcting your footage
but this is the way that I really like color correcting
and then color grading.
Also, it's good to know that it makes a massive difference
which order you have these plug-ins.
You should always be color correcting first
and then adding your color grade or your look.
If you're doing it the reverse order,
first adding on your look and then trying to color correct,
you've already manipulated your colors
and your image so much that you can't
color correct your footage anymore.
You need to, first, color correct and then add on your LUT.
Now, we can break down color correcting
basically into two different parts,
exposure or contrast, and your colors.
Exposure has to do with how bright or dark your image is
but also the contrast, how much of a difference is there
between the shadows and the highlights and the midtones.
Now, I rarely actually just change the overall exposure.
I always like to manipulate the image using the shadows,
the midtones and the highlights.
And to make color correcting a little bit easier
in terms of exposure, we're gonna use the waveform scope.
I've talked about this before
but it's basically your image from left to right,
from zero to 100, zero being pure black.
So anything below zero,
there's not gonna be any detail in those shadows
and then 100 being your pure white,
anything above that there's not gonna be any detail
in your highlights.
Now, my first step always in color correcting
is taking the shadows and dropping them
until something hits that zero mark.
As soon as something hits it, that's where I stop.
Now we do the same for the highlights,
we take that and we bring it up until it hits that 100 mark.
Now, where this gets difficult
is if there's nothing in your image
that's supposed to actually be black
or if there's nothing so bright that it should be white.
For example, if you don't have something
like this black boot or the sky in the background
that's supposed to be pretty much white,
where do you put the exposure levels?
Do you always go to zero and 100?
No.
What do we do then?
We look to our old friend Ansel Adams,
he's basically an OG photographer,
and he made this zone system
for where exposure values should lie.
And this is basically the exact same thing
as your waveform from zero to 100,
here we're going from zero to 10, same thing.
We can, for example, look up pale white skin,
Matt's kind of pale, and we can see
that it's supposed to be around 70 in exposure.
So if we take this portrait shot of Matt,
there's nothing crazy bright, there's no bright sky,
there's no light that's super bright.
The brightest thing is actually his skin.
So we shouldn't take it too 100,
we should take it to about 70
and that's gonna be the proper exposure for his skin.
And this is also how we deal with midtones,
we just wanna make sure the exposure values
are lying in a natural place.
And if we want to really zero in on something
and see what exposure value it is right now,
we can just add a mask around it.
For example, as skin tones, we can just make a quick mask.
And now on the waveform
we're only seeing the exposure value for his skin tone,
so we can see exactly where the exposure is on his skin
and then we can tweak it.
Once you're done you can just delete the mask
and then we have the proper exposure values
for the skin tones.
And until you know kind of where the exposure should be,
I would just look it up.
Look at this Ansel Adams zone system
and figure out where things should lie
in their exposure values.
Okay, so that's how we correct our exposure or our contrast,
now let's take a look at colors.
When we're color correcting the colors,
we want them to be balanced and natural.
We don't want, for example, a skin tones to be really warm
or really cool or too magenta or too green.
We want natural looking colors
and colors are a lot harder to deal with
than contrast in my opinion.
It takes a lot more time
to really see colors in their true form.
And even if you're experienced,
your eyes can really play tricks on you with colors.
To help us be a little bit more scientific we can, again,
use a scope, this time we're using the vectorscope.
And this one's basically just a color wheel
and it's showing where on that color wheel
your colors are kind of going toward.
So you can see whether your colors are a little bit too blue
and they're going towards the blue direction
or you can see if they're a little bit too green
and going towards the green direction.
If it's a balanced image, the colors should gravitate
towards the center of the vectorscope.
If they're not in the center, let's tweak them.
How do we do this?
Again, we're gonna take a look at the shadows,
the midtones and the highlights.
Now, usually I start with the highlights
because I find that this fixes a lot
of the color balance issues right away.
So let's take a look at the highlights,
the brightest parts of our image.
Do they look too blue?
Do they look too magenta or green?
What's going on with the colors in the highlights?
For example, here we can see that
they're a little bit too magenta
and we can also see that in the vectorscope
that it's pushing towards the magenta area.
So to fix this, we're just gonna take the highlights
towards the opposite direction of magenta which is green.
Again, if you want to be more specific,
you can just do a mask around the highlights
and we can really see where are those colors going towards
especially if it's, for example, the sky.
It should be pretty balanced white right in the middle.
It shouldn't be going in any direction,
so you can really quickly see what direction
you should be taking those highlights.
And then we just do the same
for the midtones and the shadows,
paying special attention to the midtones
because that's where the skin tones lie.
You really want your skin tones to look natural
and that's probably the most important thing
about color balancing or color correcting your footage.
Just like with waveforms, we can use a quick mask
to see the exact specific color of a certain area.
Now, this is where it gets a little bit tricky.
I said that the color should be around the center
but a specific color, for example,
skin tones here shouldn't be in the center,
they should be going towards
the orange section of the vectorscope.
Not towards yellow or magenta
but somewhere in the orange section.
That's where they're gonna look natural.
So overall, the colors should lie
around the center of the vectorscope
but specific colors will go in the direction of that color.
For example, a pink sign will not be
in the center of the circle and that is okay.
The center of the circle is like a neutral gray no color.
So if your skin tones are looking too blue,
take that mid one wheel and drag it
towards the opposite direction which is orange.
Now that we fixed the skin tones,
the whole image looks a little bit too warm
and since the skin tones are good
we're just gonna add a little bit of blue to the shadows
to cancel out some of that warmth.
And this is what color correction is all about
with colors and with exposure also,
you're gonna tweak one thing
and then you're gonna have to change another setting
because they all kind of affect each other a little bit.
In this case, we changed up the skin tones a little bit
and that affected the shadows in the whole image,
so we need to correct for that in the shadows area.
Also, adding a whole bunch of saturation
can really help you see what's going on with the colors
so just add a bunch of saturation,
check out the colors, fix it a little bit more,
and then take off that saturation.
Once the colors are balanced,
we just need to take a look at saturation.
And in that vectorscope, the further away the points are
from the middle, the more saturated your image will be.
The closer they are to the middle,
the less saturated your image will be.
And saturation is a little bit hard.
There's no exact standard
for how much saturation there should be,
but I just basically eyeball it,
but don't go overboard with saturation.
Once you add too much, it really just kills
that cinematic look completely.
More importantly, you want to make sure
that each of your clips has the same amount of saturation.
So each clip, the colors should be going out
from the middle of the vectorscope about the same amount.
Once the color correcting is done, we go into the Lumetri,
we add in our preset, our LUT.
In this case, I'm gonna use the Cinema LUT,
which is part of my CINE LUTS 2.0 pack.
Bring it way down as usual with LUTs.
And then that last Colorista
is just tweaking the look a little bit.
If I want the shadows to be a little bit more blue
or if I want ray shadows or dropped highlights,
this is where you tweak that part.
You do not do this part in the color correcting.
The color correcting should make your image look natural
and then later on you change the look.
So, on that last Colorista
is where I would really dial in the look.
Whether I want it to be low contrast, high contrast,
saturated or not saturated,
really teal and orange or not so much.
This is where you would manipulate
the final look of your footage.
Color correction is to make your footage look right,
and then color grading is making that final look.
Okay, let's just do one example,
all in Lumetri if you don't have Colorista,
which a lot of people don't have.
You can do all of this in Lumetri
but you don't have quite as much control over it.
So again, we start with the exposure.
We're gonna take the blacks,
we're gonna drag them down until we hit that zero level
and then we're gonna do the same with the highlights
until they hit the 100 level.
Then, we can tweak the midtones
and that looks about right for exposure.
Let's take a look at the colors.
In this case, we're just gonna use the Tint slider
and the Temperature slider.
So if your footage looks a little bit too magenta,
we're just gonna drag it towards green
and if it looks too blue, then we're gonna drag it
a little bit more towards the warm direction.
Remember, when you're trying to cancel out colors,
you want to add in the opposite of the color
that you have in your image.
Then we have the Cinema LUT,
and then we tweak the look to get it just right
in the creative section using the color wheels
and whatever other tools you want.
The reason why I don't do everything in Lumetri is
I want those color wheels before I add in the LUT,
not just after, I want them before the color correct
and then after to change the look.
Plus, with Colorista you have a lot of
fine tuning abilities using the HSL section.
So, yeah, I think it's a worthwhile investment
to buy Colorista.
I've been using it a ton ever since I started filmmaking.
But everyone has their own work flow,
so you just need to figure out what works best for you.
Maybe you color correct using curves.
I do not suggest this,
but some people are really good with curves
and that's their most comfortable way
of color correcting and color grading their footage.
Whatever works for you, that's the best method.
As long as you're color correcting,
I don't care how you do it but color correcting
will always make your videos so much better.
It'll make your footage look way more cinematic,
way more consistent and just have
that nice consistent crispiness every single time,
not just when you add your LUT or your preset
and you get lucky and it looks good.
And lastly, remember small tweaks
go a long way with color correction.
So, yup, that's how I color correct all of my footage.
That is my process.
I hope you learned something
and I hope you can take something for your own workflow.
Okay, I'll see you guys later, bye.
(energetic electronic music)