Final Cut Pro 10.4 gives you
three different methods of color correcting your video.
We’ve previously looked at color correction
using the color board, and color wheels.
Today, we’re going to take a look
at color correcting your video using color curves.
Hey guys, whats up.
This is Serge, and welcome back to my channel.
Down in my timeline, I have two copies of the same clip.
The first clip is the original clip,
and the second copy
has a color wheels correction applied to it.
We’ll use this later to compare
the two corrected clips to see the difference.
So, lets select our first clip,
and set up for color correction.
First, lets hide our browser by pressing Control Command 1,
and bring up the video scopes by pressing Command 7.
Next, in the Inspector,
select color inspector,
and from the drop down menu select color curves.
Here, we have four curves,
one for the luma, or brightness channel,
and a curve for each color channel,
red, green, and blue.
First, lets switch to lumascope waveform in the video scopes,
and take a look at the luma curve.
Over on the bottom here you have your input values,
with this side being shadows, and this side is highlights.
And on the side is your output values.
When no adjustments are made to the clip,
you have a straight diagonal line here.
Now, first lets bring down the shadows
to bring our waveform down to zero.
Grab the shadows control point,
and drag it over to the right while watching the waveform.
There is some true blacks in the clip,
so drag it over until the waveform traces touch zero.
Now lets grab the highlights control point
and drag it over to the left
until our waveform traces reach one hundred,
maybe even a little more.
Everything in between these two point
is used to control mid-tones.
But instead of just having one control, like in the color wheels,
we can add as many control points as necessary
for more precise adjustments.
To add a control point, simply click on this line,
and drag it up or down to adjust it.
For this clip, lets spread out our dynamic range
by adding two points,
and adjusting them for a gentle S Curve.
Now lets compare this clip to the same clip,
with the same color adjustments made in color wheels.
Notice how the clip adjusted with color wheels
has much more saturated colors.
When you adjust exposure using color wheels,
both exposure and saturation are effected.
But when you adjust it using color curves,
only the luma channel, or exposure is effected,
while color saturation does not change at all.
To adjust saturation using color curves,
you have to adjust each color channel individually.
For example, to give the sky more color,
scroll down to the blue channel.
Most of our sky will be in highlights,
so lets grab the highlights point and drag it over to the left.
But wait, doing this effects the entire line,
so blue is added to everything, not just highlights.
Thats not what we want.
I’ll reset this correction by clicking the hooked arrow up here.
To only adjust the highlights in the blue channel,
we need to lock in our midtones and shadows
by adding another control point.
I’ll add one right here,
and add and drag up another point
to give our sky a little more blue color.
Next, lets adjust our grass to make it a little bit greener.
If you look in the video scopes,
you can see most of the green grass lies in the midtones.
So lets add a control point on the green curve,
and a point on each side to lock our shadows and highlights.
Now grab the middle control point,
and move it up a bit to give the grass a little more color.
And last, lets add a bit more color to our trail.
The last two adjustments were easy,
because we had both blue and green color curves,
but which one do we adjust for the trail color?
Fortunately, you’re not locked down to just the three primary colors.
If you click on the dropdown menu beside the color name,
you can select any color you want,
and thats the hue that will be adjusted.
Alternately, if you’re not one hundred percent sure of the color,
you can use the sampler tool.
Click on the eye dropper in the top right,
and click and drag out a color sample.
Final Cut Pro selects the correct color of your sample area,
with a vertical line indicating the brightness of the selected area.
Lets click on the line to add a control point,
and add another about half way down to lock in the shadows.
Click and drag up the middle control point
to add a bit of orange color to the trail.
Finally, to make this clip a little more vibrant,
it could use an overall increase in saturation.
Doing this will color curves can be very difficult,
but what we can do is combine this color curves correction,
with a color wheels correction.
Click the down arrow beside color curves 1
and select color wheels.
This adds another color correction to your clip,
where you can use the master wheel
to bump up the overall saturation of your clip.
Lets go back to the video inspector,
where we can toggle both these corrections
off and on to see the before
and after.
So, as you can see, using color curves
to correct your clip gives you much more precision and control,
but it’s a very different correction method.
Sometimes it may be necessary to combine
multiple correction methods
to achieve the exact look you’re going for.
Try this out and let me know
what you think in the comments below.
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Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you next week.