80% Of COLOUR GRADING BASICS In ONLY 20 Minutes

80% Of COLOUR GRADING BASICS In ONLY 20 Minutes 

80% of color grading in in this video I'm going to show you how things work inin resolve but all the concept and all the things that we're going to do you can do the same in other softwares like final card Pro or premere Pro as well first up is re 709 re 79 is a color space a color space you can see kind of like a language in this case re 79 would be English the most common language understood by all displays these are just examples let's say that you shoot in a lock profile on your camera that could be Spanish let's say that's Sony

Lock 3 this Spanish needs to be converted into English or translated for your display to probably see it and probably understand what to show in terms of the colors if it didn't show it in a lock profile you don't have to do anything in this step you can just progress to step two instead so when you shoot and log you shoot in a format where your camera captures a lot more information in a flat desaturated profile you need to convert it into rexline for your display to properly understand how to show the image this is

the industry standard let me show you a simple way of doing that converting to re 709 we have two options we can either use a lot for example a lot that is meant to convert I can take this slot that takes it from Canon log 3 and cinnamon gamut into re 79 and Gamma 2.4 and that'll convert it into Rec 79 and this is how you would probably do it in premere Pro or Final Cut as well I can also reset this in their resolve and head into the color space trans form add that here and then put in my parameters by myself Canon gamut Canon L 3 re 79

and Gamma 2.4 and that does exactly the same let's call this one re 79 now we want this to be our last step so we're going to pull it over here and then we're going to head to the next step the next step in the line is color correction here we have contrast exposure and color balance step two is to create contrast contrast in this case is basically the difference between the dark areas and the brighter areas so by creating more contrast we are pulling the darker areas and the brighter areas apart by making

dark areas darker and the brighter areas brighter that creates a contrast and a separation between those two that makes it stand out and draws our attention more to the areas that are in between those usually that's the skin tones or subject or just creates a really nice contrast that makes the image more pleasing to look at I'm sure you how that to work with contrast we're going to add another note I can right click here and say add note add serial note before and then I get a new note now we know we're already going to use a few

more notes so I'm just going to create a few with option s and that just creates a few more this one is going to be our contrast and to do that we can take the tone curve that takes us from Pure Black to Pure White up here and then all the tones in between to create some contrast in this image we can take the dark areas in the shadows and pull them down and we can take the brighter areas and pull them up thereby if we turn this off and then on again we can see that we've created a lot more contrast and

separated the dark area and the brighter areas a lot more step three is exposure now you might have shot in a correct exposure already in your camera but after you've changed the contrast a bit around or maybe after you converted into Rex line it doesn't look completely right so the most of the time we have to do a little bit of exposure adjustments now here are some guidelines this is the waveform this helps you to see if things are clipping clipping means that it's touching the top meaning there's Pure

White there's no detail left in the brightest areas or it's clipping in the bottom crushing the blacks there's no detail left in this area it's a common mistake to think that you need to stretch out the entire waveform to touch the bottom and touch the top that's not the case think of your image as the real life if you're looking around the room that you're sitting in now is there anything that's supposed to be completely black meaning that you cannot see any detail in it most of the time the answer is no

unless you're looking in a dark room at night and in that case it makes sense that you can still see some detail and therefore nothing has to to touch the button the same goes for the other way around for the brighter areas if you're looking straight into a light bulb there will be no detail at all so it makes sense that those are touching the top but other than that for the Sun or something else most of the time we don't want that to be clipping now a lot of this happens in camera before we even go

into the color grading but in the color grading we want to adjust these things as well so first rule thumb do not touch the top of the bottom unless it's intentional and second of all skin tones usually lie around the 70 area on this waveform so that means that we want our skin tones or the brightest part of our skin tones to lie around that area to be properly exposed now when we doing our color correction it's perfectly fine to aim for that but it doesn't always have to be that way that's just kind of like

a rule of Thum or guideline that you can follow so let's see how it works if you want to adjust the exposure for the clip that we just worked now we just talked about the fact that if we go a little bit further here we can see the skin tones a little bit better the brightest part of the skin tones we want in our waveform to lie around 70 if we hover over here at the qualifier in the VIN resolve and then use display qualifier Focus we can hover over the skin tones and see on our waveform here where they lie so if we pull up the waveform a

little bit larger we can see now that our skin tones are lying around the 60 Mark right here so if we take the offset and just try and pull that up until we get those skin tones to lie around 70 Mark instead now they're probably exposed now our footage look a little bit more washed out again so we could go back to our contrast and try and a little bit more or we could do something like pulling down the lift that's sort of equal to pulling down the shadows and pull out the gain to stretch those out a

little bit more and do that until we feel like we have a good contrast and at the same time we have our skin tones lying in the correct place I feel like this is a pretty good spot we went from this to this it looks a little bit better the next step on the last and final step in our color correction of this simple workflow is color balance now this means that sometimes when you shoot the white balance might be off there might be some colors in the image that are influencing the sensor of our camera to not properly capture the

colors the way they're supposed to often that looks a little bit too green or a little bit too magenta it can also look too warm or too cool so to fix that there's a few different methods that we can work with either the temperature and Tin slider that's the most common used or we use something like the offset interventive resolve where we can drag around the different parameters the red green and blue channels to compensate for that mistake or that error we had in our camera when we captured the footage

now again with the color correction our aim is to get the footage to look as close as possible to what it did in real life what we saw with our eyes when we actually captured the footage in the first place let me show you how we can balance this clip that we've been working with already now we want to use our balance and for our balance we want to make sure that we are on the vector scope which shows us the red magenta blue cyan green and yellow colors out here and then we have a blob of color here that shows us where our colors lie

again we can use the qualify here to see that these green tones are lying somewhere around the Green in the yellow area the skin tones are lying up here around the red area but we do have what's called skin tone line indicator here we can turn that on by switching on dials here and then turning on the skin tone indicator you have a similar thing in Final Cut Pro and premere pro and what we can do from here is that we can take the tint for example when we hover over here now you see the skin tones lying more towards the magenta tone than

the green tones when we are comparing it to this line so we could just add a bit more green by pulling the tint to the left and by that changing up the temperature or the tint a lot more you can see it already looks a lot better another thing that we can do inside of the M result is that we can use the offset where we have the red the green and the blue channels so if I add a bit more green we're sort of doing the same as we did before but here we have one more dial compared to the temperature that's just blue and orange where we can

just if we move it up a little bit to watchs the red now we're moving the blob up and then moving it a little bit away from the blue which is over here towards the yellow now we're getting a lot more control over what we're doing and now we might actually end up seeing that we have a little bit too much green we went from this to this that looks a lot more natural than this magenta Hue and tone that we had before to this one that looks a lot more natural maybe a little bit on the green side but we can treat

that later on as well I'm pretty satisfied with how this looks now that we're done with our color correction and hopefully have an image that looks as close as possible to what it look like in real life we can progress to the most objective area of color grading which is the actual color grading where we put a look on or we change the colors to fit the emotions the vibe the mood or the overall feel of the story that we're trying to tell with the video the first step in this for me is to create or

develop a look now the most popular looks in Hollywood are teal and orange desaturated on muted tones this very high contrast with crushed dark look the teal and orange are seen in something like map Max Fury Road the muted or desaturated tones seen in something like the gold with the Dragon Tattoo and the last one is seen in something like The Dark Knight so these are popular Styles looks that you can try to implement into your videos if you want to create a specific style or mood or vibe in your video to do this we can usually use the

color wheels to enhance or Implement color that wasn't already there into the scene itself now some of this also sometimes happens in camera when it's shut for example Hollywood will implement the lighting and as much as they can in camera so it's easier to colorr afterwards but we can also do it in post if we want to so using color wheels if you are in Premier Pro or Final Cut you usually have the shadows midtones and highlights which are the areas that you can then implement this color into for example in the teal and

orange you can put teal into the shadows and orange into the highlights and see and work with how you can develop that look if you're working in the Vint resolve you also have the lift gamma and gain that are in some ways similar to Shadow midtone and highlights but are different in the way that they work things but you also have the other tools in the Vintage resolve as well so let's jump into the Vintage resolve where I'm going to use the lift gamma and gain to just apply a little bit of color and

look into the footage that we already working to develop our look if you are in Premier Pro or Final Cut you will probably see Shadow midtone and highlights in the Vint result we're going to work with the lift gam and gain as just mentioned but but they work sort of similar we're not going to go in depth what these are today but in this case we're going to try and create a more teal and orange look I'm going to use my Vector scope again just to pull this up and make sure that I'm on the look note in this case and I'm just

going to see if I can pull some teal in here in this area in between the cyan and the blue and add a little bit more to the skin tones here that are orange so by doing this I can take my lift here and I can try and pull that towards the area that I wanted to be pulled because you can see that the wheel here depicts the same as the vector scope dust up here so by pulling this down towards cyan we're getting something that looks a lot more cyan overall now I can take my gain and I can pull it the opposite

way something like this and what I want to make sure is that the skin tone stay sort of the same so if I turn this off and on again I can see this blob moving a little bit so if I move this and make sure that it's staying sort of the same area this part up here that's the skin tone now we can see that the skin tone is not changing that much but now we have a nice contrast between the teal Shadows here and the brighter Orange in the highlights here so if we turn this down again now we are with this image so

far now that we got the basic look set down we can work with curves to dial it in even further the curves are usually used as Hue versus Hue Hue versus saturation and Hue versus luminance these are the three parameters that we want to work with Hue versus Hue controls different colors and you can tweak the colors say that you want the red tones to be more orange or the green tones to be more teal that's something you can can do in Hue versus Hue in Hue versus saturation you can take specific Hues saying green and desaturate them if

you want that more desaturated tropical green kind of feel and look and lastly we have the Hue versus luminance which lets you control the overall brightness of a specific color personally I mostly use Hue versus Hue and Hue versus saturation and try to do everything else around luminance with other tools but that's completely up to you let's jump in and see how we can the colors just a little bit using the curves to use the curves we're going to head into the curves here and we're going to have

the Hue versus Hue and the Hue versus saturation now we're going to make a few tweaks here so I'm going to pull up Vector scope again so we can see what we're doing in terms of this and we're going to look at the image at the same time first up we're going to try and draw on the skin tones here to get a nice selection of that and I can already see that they're lying a little bit too far to the left they are getting selected probably because we added some teal in here so I'm going to draw it over a little bit because we actually know exactly where the skin tones are lying they're lying somewhere here between theed red and the yellow but a little bit more towards the red than the yellow so this selection is pretty good we have almost all the way to the red and not as close to the yellow here and then dragging this side up you can see if you turn it off and turn it on we're narrowing in the scope here now this is a personal preference for me but this is just to make sure that the skin tones are actually lying on the line here and it's not making a massive difference if you're looking at it from a broader perspective but it does just dilate in a little bit now another thing I want to do is I want to try and see if our cyan colors here can be a little bit more opposite of our skin tones so I'm going to take a point here somewhere and around the teal I'm going to try and tweak them around so they get just about opposite of the skin tone line here going to drag this up a little bit and going to try and pull this further down now we can see they're recreating more of a direct contrast between the two so we're getting a more blue cyan magenta kind of feel in the background that stands out a lot better and contrasty towards the skin tones that we have here so here everything Blends a little bit more together here we have more contrast but it might have been become a little bit too blue now so we might want to loosen up a little bit on our selection here just to make sure that we're not overdoing it too much and then I want to make my greens a little bit more to the yellow side as well to make sure that that looks nice too and we might want to turn this up just a little bit too and by doing that we're getting softer more yellow greens than the greens that we had before and everything is standing out a little bit more in the background in terms of that blue cyan tone that we have so this is a way that you can treat the Hue versus hue and then if we wanted to come in here and say we want to protect the skin tones those are lying in here we're going to lock those off then we want to desaturate everything that's not the skin tones just a little bit so we don't have as much as we did before you see now all the colors are exploding a little bit and now with all our adjustments it's looking a little bit more desaturated and maybe that was a tad too much so we can always just pull it back up a little bit and then see where a nice Middle Ground is I think this looks pretty good for this tutorial so we're just going to stay with that last on the list is is masking masking is the final step that we want to get to step number seven in this case which allows us to select specific areas of the footage the clip the image whatever you want to call it and tweak that specific area to our liking now often you will see a mask as a circular or rectangular mask and you kind of crop out a portion of the clip that you then adjust you can also use something like a qualifier that allows you to select specific Hues meaning specific colors or specific ranges of brightness that you then want to select and tweak to your liking in this video we're simply just going to add a little bit of contrast to our subject in the middle and then lower the exposure overall around her just to make sure it looks a little bit better and she stands out in the middle a little bit more so let's see how that works and we're going to do two masks so we're going to do a focus mask and in this case I'm just going to do both manually and we're going to do an outside mask what we want to do here in our Focus mask is we want to find our window tool whatever software using in the resolve it's a power window I'm going to draw it around our subject here in the middle maybe a little bit smaller and then I want to make sure that the softening is pretty large click shift H in the v resolve I can see all the gray is what I haven't selected and all the green here is what all the color in here is what I have selected now I can go into my tone curve again and just add a tiny bit of contrast in the middle here something like that that just makes her stand out even more in the middle now if I turn it on and off it's pretty obvious that it's here but because we've soften it out it Blends pretty well now if we were to try and make a similar mask out here we going to drag one out maybe make it a little bit bigger this time because we want to select everything that's around her and we want to make something like 50% again but this time we're going to invert the mask by clicking here and now you can see the gray in the middle means that we don't have her selected and then we can go into our curves here again and just drag down a little bit on the Shadows here this creates much darker area around her making her stand out a lot more but also blending our original mask quite a bit more so with these two mask we've just gone from this to this that looks a lot better already as well now that we have all seven steps in place let's just quickly go over it one more time so re

79 is the conversion from a lock profile or a different profile than rec79 the standard profile into rec79 this is so that most displays that we will export to can see properly what we graded and what we created inside our software we want this step to be the first thing that happens so we can see it in re line as well but if possible we want the software to do this as the last step interin result that means making it as the last note and then when we grade before that everything that we do is essentially in lock but it's live being translated into Rec 79 and thereby we can take advantage of all the other information that we have if you're working in premere Pro or Final Cut a way to do that could be to add an adjustment layer on top of your clip add the rec 79 conversion there with a lot or with the color space transform that me Resolve and then grade on the clip underneath that's a way that you can go about it then we want to do our color correction steps it's crucial that we get the foundation right before we start tweaking the colors and making it stylistic so that's the contrast exposure and balance the reason why I'm going backwards when I'm doing it like you just saw is because then we don't have to go back and forth as much if I first do the contrast and then adjust the exposure before that in the note tree I'm essentially still having all the range of the brightness and the information available and then it's been translated into the contrast and so on to the next note and then the color balance you can place that where you want in the color correction I like to have it as a first step because then I'm moving backwards then when we get to the color grading we move forward so with the color balance as well out of the way tweet things so they look as they're supposed to we can head on with our look where we create something like the teal and orange style or or we go into something like the muted and desaturated or something completely different if that's what you want here we can apply colors into for example the shadows and highlights to separate them and also create color contrast in this case you can TW that even further with the curves by dialing in the Hues and the saturation to get the colors just how you want them and then finally we can jump into the masking where we selectively can choose where we want to make adjustments for example by adding a little bit more contrast to our subject and just overall lowering the exposure outside to really pull in the focus and our attention to the subject in our video so this is pretty much 90% of the basics of color grating if you're nailing this you can get a really really good image now there are other tools for more Advanced Techniques and other things you can do and that's the last 20% but if you make sure that you nail these tools whatever software you're using I ensure you you can get really good grades when you've locked down a good workflow and when you've started to really understand how these things work I have a lot of other tutorials on list and I just released a free guide on what we've just covered today so if you want to read through it and have that available you can find the link down below and you can download that for yourself also have a lot pack for easier grading and I have a course if you want to dive even further into how to color grade creating your own lots and really dial in looks and styles so with that said that's what I have for you today I hope you enjoyed it I hope you learned something leave a comment down below if you did.

Have a great day!