Transcripts
1. Intro: Color grading is a
skill that few know, but one that is
crucial to making your projects look high-end
and truly professional. It is a skill that will
make you a better shooter, sharpen your eye for
what makes a good image, and will teach you to look at an image completely differently. This course is for
anyone who has never graded their own videos or has maybe only fumbled
through it and now want a more structured
way of doing things. In this course,
we're starting at the absolute beginning
and I'm going to give you the tools
you need to get started grading your own videos. Also, this is not tailored
strictly for Resolve, but for any image
editing program, which means that
what you'll learn in this course you
can take anywhere. I'm Fred Trevino,
owner and operator at Beambox Studio and a top
teacher here at Skillshare. I've graded over
50 feature films, hundreds of short-form projects, and have worked with
companies like Prada, Versace, HBO, and Under
Armor to name a few. In this course, we're going to take some bad-looking footage, color correct it, simply lay out the steps and
give you a system you can use over and over again
on all of your projects. I'll provide media for you
to download and follow along and if you post it
to the Projects page, I'd be happy to
give you feedback. We'll cover color correction, grading, and merging
your clips together. Now, this course is
for beginners and get straight to the point and
is a crash course of sorts. It's great if you just
want to jump right in and start grading quickly. In this course, we'll go over the basic order
of operations, talk about lift, Gamma, gain, contrast, pivot, saturation,
color temperature, tint, highlights,
shadows, and more. If you're ready,
let's jump right in.
2. Lift, Gamma, Gain, Contrast: The Foundation of an Image: Now, in this first lesson, we are going to go
over the initial steps in doing a color
correction or grade. One thing I'm going
to do is break down all the steps very
simply per lesson. These may be short lessons, but keep moving
and you'll be able to see each step-by-step. By the end, you
should have a nice simple-to-follow node tree here, which you will see at
the end of the course. Keep moving forward
and I think you'll end up with something
that you'll find very useful for all of your future projects.
Let's get started. The first thing we want to do, we can see that I set up a very, very basic sequence
here just so that we can get through all the
basics of color correction. That is it. Very simple. We're just going to color
correct these three shots. The first thing you typically want to do when you're making a color adjustment
and correction is you want to adjust the lift, gamma, and gain, which is what we have down here. Lift, another name for that
might be shadows, gamma, midtones, and another name
for gain may be highlights. This really just depends on the program that you're using. I'd like to add that everything you're learning in this course isn't necessarily DaVinci
Resolve specific. It's really just general guidelines and rules
for all images. Whether you're editing something
and correcting something in Lightroom or Premiere
or any other program, all of these fundamentals
you can take with you really to
any other program. I will go through and let you know how the terminology
might change a little bit, but it's the same
thing, for example, in some programs, they
might call the shadows, midtones, and highlights. But in Resolve, it's called
lift, gamma, and gain. Before we get started with that, I'm just going to do a quick
overview of a waveform. There are different scopes. But for this course, which is really just
going to be a nice, solid crash course, we're really just going
to go over the waveform. The way this work is basically
zero is your shadows. That's telling you how black
or rich your shadows are. Up here is your highlights
or the brighter areas, and then you have everything
else in the middle. If you were to take this here
and lay it over this image, you will see what
I'm talking about. If I just scrub through, you can see how the image is
moving and who's moving it. The people here on the right are moving, they're leaning forward. Which is why if you look
at the waveform really that's where all the
information is moving. Also, another thing we can
see is, let me zoom in. You can tell that this image has pretty washed-out shadows
by looking at it. Her pants are a little not
quite crisp shadow, his hair. This sweater, it's a
washed-out pseudo blend image. Then this whiteboard here
is a little bit bright. This is a bright areas. If we look here, we can
see and confirm that because if the zero line is where your shadows
or blacks should be, or what shows you
that the image has a true rich black black. We can see that, for example, this guy sweater here and this little area
here specifically, it's pretty high up, which means it's
not a true black. That should probably be much closer to the line
if not touching it. Same thing with her pants. This little spot here
is probably her pants. That should also be a bit lower. His hair here is this
little bit here. Then I'm going to bet, you
can see the streaks here, these lines right here. That is probably
these lines here. You can see, again, quick crash course on a
waveform, the basics. If you want to go
a little bit more in-depth with this before
moving forward, however, you can check out in my introduction with a
pro colorist course, I do have about an 8-9
minute video on the scopes. So if you are completely
unfamiliar with scopes, and do you want to go a
little bit more in-depth into it before moving
forward, check that out. But if you know the basics, then I'm going to go
ahead and move ahead. But that should give you
enough information to see what's going
on with the image and how we're
making adjustments. You will learn as
I'm going through it to show you exactly
what I'm doing. With that being said, let's
make our first adjustment. As I said, typically the first things that
you want to adjust in an image are the shadows, midtones, and highlights. First thing is the lift. I'm going to lower the
shadows or the lift, and I'm looking at all this
lower end of the waveforms. The first thing you
typically want to do with an image is lower that down. You always wanted to look here and your eyes going back
and forth between the two. Let me reset that. I'm just
going to lower the lift. I'm going to have it just
touched the shadows here. If you hit Command
D, you can see we were here and now we're here. I'll go full screen. We were here and now we're here. In just that alone, you can see what a
difference that makes in the image before, after. That is step one,
lift, gamma, gain, and I'm going to
right-click here and name this Lift Gamma Gain. That is typically
your first step. Option S. I'm going to add
an additional node here. Again, a node is simply,
for this course, we're simply going to use these as different steps
in your grade, which is how you
want to use a node. There are lots of
different types of nodes, parallel, layer,
that kind of thing. But for this course, we're
just going to keep to the basic serial node, which, in another program, they might
be called something like a layer in Photoshop or an
adjustment layer in Premiere. Keep that mindset where the
initial adjustment and lift, gamma, gain will go here. The next one is going to
be on this second node. We're going to
adjust the contrast. There we go. Let me just
adjust the contrast here. You always want to find
a good frame that's sharp and so I'll say
maybe this frame. I'm going to really increase
the contrast. Here we go. One of the things
that contrast does, it really adds a little
depth and pop to your image. A little goes a long way. Here we go, Command D, we were here and now here. You can see the image is taking shape a little bit and then pivot is kind of a bit of a
fine-tuning the contrast. Whereas the contrast here, because it's a more aggressive, harder adjustment, the pivot is, you can think of it as a
fine tune of the contrast. I won't go too deep
into all of the stuff that the pivot actually does
and all the color science, and gamma adjustment, and etc. Because in a nutshell,
this is just you finessing and fine-tuning
your contrast. Again, we were here
before the contrast. Now we're here and
then with the pivot, I'm just going to drag it left and right to see
what it's doing. It's like this
level of contrast. Again, make the image
look how you want. We were here and with the pivot and
contrast, I went here. Even though here, I had also. This is our starting point. Lift, gamma, gain
does look better, but then contrast,
fine-tuning even more, adding a little depth. See here we go,
contrast and pivot. Adding a little depth. The next step here is, and one thing to remember about color is that you're going to be constantly bouncing back and forth as you make
one adjustment, it will influence the
other adjustments and change them a little bit. A very common thing with color correction is
you adjust one thing, and then another, and then
that makes you have to go back and tweak the
one before it. I am now going to go
back to the lift, gamma, and gain. Again, the only thing we'd
adjusted was the lift. Now I'm going to raise the
highlights a little bit. Again, I don't want
this bright spot here, which is probably
this whiteboard. I don't want that
going too high, but I do just want to
raise this a touch. So we have a little bit nicer, brighter image like this. Everyone is a little
bit in shadows still, so I'm going to raise the
gamma just to touch like that. Nothing too major. Again, we're just seeing a little
bit more of the image. I'm going to now add a
touch more contrast, like this, and tweak
the pivot a little bit. I'm just dragging
it to the right. Again, this is all
subjective stuff. Don't think of this
as a precise formula where I say adjust this to 120, adjust this to 327 because the next shot
will be different, your footage might be different. Color is subjective. It's really a matter of
what's the look you want, how are you going to get there, and getting that done. You can see that, again, we've just adjusted
the lift, gamma, gain, which really the
first step was I hit a nice place in the
shadows and then I adjust the contrast to find a good spot for the highlights and shadows
and adjusted the pivot. Then I jumped back here and made a little bit
more of a tweak. That is the first step
where we're going, and we were here,
and now we're here. Again, go through
and whether you downloaded this footage or
are working on your own, go through and adjust
your lift, gamma, gain and finesse your
contrast and pivot. In the next lesson, again, I'm just going to
keep things like this. Very simple, little
tiny bite-sized steps for you so that we
can go through, put them into action
on your footage. Then in the next lesson here, we're going to go
over highlights, and shadows, and saturation, which will be the next
step, the next nodes. I'll actually go ahead
and add those here and say highlights, shadows. I will see you there.
3. Highlights, Shadows, Saturation: Getting More Detailed: Now we're going to keep
fine-tuning our image. This next node that
I created here, I'm going to use that to adjust the highlights
in the shadows. This is where you start
the first adjustments where you could say pretty easy because you saw what
was wrong with the image. It was washed out. They didn't have very rich
blacks and we adjusted the shadows and the mid-tones and the highlights
just to touch. As we add nodes, it's where more and more of your colorist I comes
into play and you start getting pickier and
pickier in seeing all the tiny details and
make all these small, tiny adjustments
that really add up to make a really polished, high-end professional
looking image. We did this lift again contrast. Baby steps here, getting
to a really solid image. Now we're going to go specifically into the
highlights in the shadows. In Resolve, you have
highlights here in shadows. What this refers to is only the very brightest
brights in an image. I would say definitely
the whiteboard here, this piece of paper, the highlights on
the laptop here, and then shadows are
only the darkest darks. His hair, his sweater, maybe her hair, that thing. That's what you want to adjust. In another program,
those might be called whites and blacks. Again, just to keep
things universal across different
programs and images. But in Resolve, we're
going to adjust the highlights in the shadows. My first issue with this clip is that this is maybe
a bit too hot. I'm going to adjust
the highlights here. I'm going to go full screen so you can see what I'm doing. In case you're curious
how to go full screen, It's Command F. There we go. Really I'm just going to
bring them down just a touch. We get a little more
natural organic image, some of these are lost detail
and a little bit about this image or this
file codec is, as is common, this was probably
shot on a digital SLR. You can see here H.264 codec, which is a very
compressed codec. It was also not shot in log and not to go too deep
into log and that thing. Again, I do have
an entire course on just the differences
between long, flat, and different
camera profiles. Check that out later if you like to know a little
bit more about that. But for now, we can tell that
this was not shot in log. It was shot in just a
basic camera profile. In other words, this is the
look that came straight from the camera or as a log or a flat image would be
a lot more washed out, a lot more and less color. It was shot in a
compressed codec, which makes things
much easier to clip and much easier to lose detail in the
shadows, that thing. We are working with
a very limited file. But that's okay
because I know that that's what a lot of
people are working with. Unless you're shooting
on something like a black magic and
raw, that thing. I wanted to intentionally select footage for you that
maybe wasn't perfect, wasn't ideas that we can actually work with
footage that has some limitations and you can see how far you can push
it and that thing. So far what we've adjusted, It's just the highlights and just brought them
down a little bit, the mix looks a little bit
more natural and organic. Now we're going to
adjust the shadows. I'm just going to slightly
raise the shadows. You can see what's
happening there because I want to see a
little bit more detail. This is also look like a little bit brighter office and not so gritty
where we lose detail. Here we go. We were here,
and now we're here. This is simply adjusting the
shadows and highlights very specifically the darkest darks
and the brightest whites. You can see that makes the image look a little bit brighter. You don't necessarily
have to do this with every single image. Here we are getting
a slight bit picky. Very good use for highlights are usually skies like the
clouds that get blown out, reflection to get
really blown out. Then of course the shadows
are very dark areas, normally hair if something's
maybe a little underlit or areas that are maybe
at night, that thing. If you just want to slightly
raise the darkest areas. Again, we're getting down to the fine-tuning aspect of an
image and it's taking shape. Then for the next node here, we're going to jump
into saturation. One of the reasons I went this far along to huge saturation is because a rule of color is as
you increase the contrast, like we did, just increasing
the contrast in an image gives you the illusion that something is getting more vibrant and more saturated. You can see I did not touch
the saturation at all. But just by doing this, it adds more color
and vibrancy to the image you can see in
her shirt, especially. It makes it seem as if I did increase the saturation
when I actually did not. Here's the saturation. I'm going to again go to full screen so you can
see what I'm doing. I'm just going to give
it a little boost to give everyone a little
bit of color and that's it. Just a little pop
goes a long way. We were here and now we're here. You can see because this
image is so heavily made up of just white and gray and
black and beige images. The tough thing of grading
is you've got to get images like this one that may just
be bland right off the bat. You got to make them
look good. I think we're on our way there. But because everything
is such neutral colors, where you see the biggest
impact is in the red. It's basically the
only color that's in this image is the red
notebook, the red shirt, the red shirt, the green plant, and maybe the table and the
skin tones a little bit. There we go. Then
while we're here, I actually want to just
go over very quickly , color boost here. Color boost is, you could call it a
smart saturation or a saturation just increases the vibrancy in all images
uniformly across the board. Color boost will increase the saturation only
in the darker areas. Usually, that's
good to play with. Sometimes you don't
want saturation, sometimes you just
want color boost. But in this case, I'm going
to go to full screen and I'm going to increase
the color bushes to touch and you can see
what that's doing. It's adding a little bit more
to the image there we go. It's again not doing a cranking it uniformly
across the board. A little bit more to their
skin tone like that. Before, after all of that
saturation and color boost. We are building something
together here with the Lift Gamma Gain contrast highlights in shadows
in our saturation. We started here and now we're
here and we're on our way. In the next lesson, we are going to jump into
the white balancing. This is pretty well but
white balanced but we'll talk about color,
temperature, tint, and we'll start doing an
overall adjustment of the look. Let's jump to the next lesson.
4. Color Temperature, Tint and Adjusting the Look: Now we are going to
get started with the color temperature
tint adjustment, or a white balancing, is what we would
typically do here. [NOISE] This image is pretty
nicely white balance, but we still want to
play with it so I'll add another node option S. I'll
just call this node here, color, temp and tint. So color, temperature and tint. There we go. This actually
looks pretty good to me. [NOISE] Let's go into
full screen there. It might be a touch green. Again, I say that because
I'm looking at it. But also just looking here, I see that the greens are
popping a little bit. But regardless, it's
always good to play with it because again, color being a subjective thing, do we want this office to look a little bit more
like on the warm yellows, or do we want it to be cooler looking office
in the blue direction? Let's take this and
maybe just increase the warmth or cool it down. Again, it's just a
stylistic choice. Here's the temperature and
left this cools it off. I'm going to go into full screen and I'm leaning a little towards the
cooler side here. Again, very subtle. Here's the before,
here's the after. Now I'm going to add tint. In a nutshell, tint is
when you're adjusting. If we look at the color wheel, you have greens here and then the magentas on
the opposite spectrum. When you look on this
side of the color wheel, you have the warmer colors
like the orange and reds, and on the opposite
you have the blues. This is color temperature where you're adjusting the cool, blues, and the warm oranges, and yellows, and reds. Tint is the other
part where you're adjusting the greens
and the magentas. I'm going to maybe add
a little magenta to this just to bring a
little color to it, and to take some
of that green out. There we go. Before, after. Here we go. We were before after
before, after. Took a slight green tone
to it. There we go. You can see this image is really starting to get pretty polished. That was again, just a
very soft minor adjustment of color, temperature, and tint. We're at a pretty
good place now. We've come a long way. Step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, step 5, we're
looking pretty good. This is the part
where you would add a node here. There we go. We would do maybe what's
called the look adjustment, where you could say, you can play with
it a little bit. Or if the image is looking too much in one
direction or another, you can do with the
overall adjustments here and you can just
have fun with it. This is where we might
adjust the lift, gamma, gain contrast. Everything we've adjusted
up to this point, we might do it all in one node. I'm pretty happy
with how this looks, but I'll just show
you what I mean. Let's say we just want to
play with it and maybe I will just make the image
a little brighter. That's something like that. The look adjustment
might be that it can be a very small, you can name that
look adjustment. It's usually just
a very small tweak because as I said
in the beginning, all these images ripple into each other and as
you affect one thing, other things change
along with it. Typically by the time
you get to the end, you want to do a refresh. After all of these
adjustments, for example, maybe the image ended up getting a little darker than you liked, so maybe I'll just
give it a little pop of brightness.You see? Like that. Maybe I think
it's a little too saturated, so maybe I'll desaturate
it just a touch. That's my look adjustment. Again, this is where
you can get creative or a look adjustment might be
something more extreme. I'm like, "You know
what? I want this to be a lower saturation and I want it to be
very cool in tone.'' You're going to go
in this direction. Totally different adjustment. This is where you can
start having fun with it, and creating different
looks for your image. You might turn this one off
and maybe make another one. Maybe I'll call this look 2. If you're working with clients, this might be the
spot where you maybe make multiple looks for them. I'm going to really saturate
this a lot like that and maybe also just
make it warmer. I'm just doing
random things here. You might send the client
this look and say, "Do you want this warmer look, where I boosted the saturation and the color temperature?" Again Command D is to
turn these on and off, or do you want this more matte, low contrast look to it? That's the look
adjustment aspect of it. I'm going to delete
these and this, and I'm going to stay the
course that we've been doing. I'm just going to make
it a little brighter. That's it for our
look adjustment. That's all I'm going
to do. Mainly because it fits the piece, you can see that this is just a corporate video style clip where you would really go into the deep end as if you were
working on a short film, or music video, or a feature
film where you would have different looks here and really start playing
with it possibly. But this, I'm just going to
do that look adjustment. There we go. You can see how much you
can change the image over the course of these steps.These first four I would typically do
in the first node, and then I would maybe add an extra node for
color temperature. But for this course, I intentionally
split these up into little steps like this so that you can visually
see what we're doing. I broke this up
into lift, gamma, gain or shadows, mid
tone highlights, contrast highlights,
shadows, saturation, color temperature,
tint, look adjustment. I broke these up just
for your benefit so you can see what we're
doing exactly. But as you get more
experience and you start grading quicker
and doing things, you'll notice that
you'll start grouping all of these
adjustments here into maybe the first node and
then maybe just separating the color, temperature and
tint and maybe the look. So typically this
would be three nodes, but hopefully this
is helpful for you. Another thing you can do too is, save this entire
node tree and all of these style of adjustments
as a power grade. What a power grade is, it's simply saving
a grade like this, which you can then
save system-wide across all of your
different projects. Let's say for example, if you shoot in a similar space like you shoot in a studio, or you shoot similar
projects all the time, rather than having to
reinvent the wheel, and do all of these
steps every single time, you can simply go to your
power grades, right-click, grab still and now, this will be saved so that you can use it
across any projects. Six months from now, you shoot in this
office again and it's the same lighting
environment and everything, and it's the same employees
or maybe other employees. Rather than redoing all this, you can simply have
this power grade. Let's say I go here and hub row, see how quickly I can
then grab it, drag it. Boom. Look how much
time I just saved. So power grades
are very powerful, and it's something that
you definitely want to do and feel free to create
one of these now and save it. If anything, it's
also great just for you when you're getting started to be able to
look at it and say, "Okay, what do I do next? I did this, next is contrast, next is to highlight some
shadow saturation,etc." It can be a very helpful
learning tool as well. In the next lesson, what I'm going to do is continue fine tuning and we're going
to cover secondary window so that we can start focusing the image and shaping
it a little bit and make things look even
better and better and better. See you soon.
5. Secondaries: Finessing the Look: Now, we are in the
secondary windows lesson. Really in most
situations, again, this being just a
quick getting started, crash course, whatever
you want to call it, jumping right in, to
color correction. You could technically,
for most projects, do this here, and then match your
shots together, and then you're good to go. However, something
to think about is, just to keep improving, improving, improving
your project, is a very powerful
tool that we have, are adjustment layers or windows or mats,
that kind of thing. To create one of those, again, you simply go "Option S", and then you can see
all the different kinds of windows that Resolve has. We have squares, circles, linear boxes like
this, pin tools, you can draw your own
like that, and go. I'm going to just delete that, or you can have this
gradient box like this. These are great for just
shaping your image. Let me rename this one, and I'll say [NOISE]
Secondary window. Again, this comes down to experience as you
create more stuff, and you get the experience, you get pickier with images. A lot of people might
look at this image [inaudible] to think it
looks amazing and say, wow, it looks amazing, like we don't do anything, we don't need color correction. You get that thing all the time. Then as you get more experience, you do this and say, that looks so much better. Of course, as we are doing, you get to the point where you start seeing all
of these things, and you notice, we need to just barely
tweak the highlight, and you get more and
more experience. That where windows are most people would
be happy with this. However, we want
it to look great, so I'm just going to
show you a few things that we can do with windows. I might do this one here. Position it. I've
always felt that this is a little
bit hot up here. I'm going to take that, and I want to drop
the gain a little bit up here. That's it. Add another window, and I want this to be a
little bit brighter, because that's been
bugging me as well, and I'm just doing whatever
I feel looks good. I'm going to go full
screen that you can see, maybe his head, a little too in shadow, I just want to bring him
up a touch, like that. Little too awesome detail. I'll add another window here, and something, there we go. I might make a vignette. Shift H shows you what you're
reflecting in a window, so right now we'll be
affecting only the interior. I'm going to take
this, invert it, and also this is to soften
the window like that. You might guess what I'm doing. I'm going to maybe make a
vignette style. There we go. I'm going to get lower the gain, maybe make a slight vignette, because she's the focal point, and you can see three
quick windows that I made. Command D. Bring
that up like that. Full-screen just
brought the bright top of the image down a little, brought more detail
out in his head here, and then a slight vignette. I mean, just little
things like that, we could keep going, and keep making
these adjustments. But you can see how these little adjustments can really transform an
image dramatically. That's just a very quick
introduction to Windows, which is the getting started
part of secondaries, which all of this stuff
that we did first technically is what's called
a primary adjustment. Like shadows, mid-tones, highlights, contrast,
saturation. Those are all just known as
the primary adjustments, things you adjust first. Then once you start getting
into windows and specifics, those are known as
secondary adjustments. When you're
fine-turning things to specific things such
as a window or maybe adjusting just the reds or maybe adjusting just the greens
or just the highlights, maybe could be thought
of as a secondary, depending how you use it. Keying an image, so that would be like using
an eye dropper tool to only select maybe this guy's hair or her shirt, that
kind of thing. DaVinci Resolve is an
extremely powerful tool. For this quick course, we're just hitting the
tip of the iceberg. Definitely, check out
my other courses, if you want to go
deeper into it. This is just jump in and
get started right away. I could easily spend hours
talking about all this stuff. But for this lesson, that's the quick introduction
to using secondaries, specifically the windows
in DaVinci Resolve. In the next lesson, now that we have all
of these adjustments, and we've set our look, we're going to go over, let me reset this,
the hard part, which is then matching the
other shots to the first shot. Next one, matching.
See you there.
6. Matching Your Shots: Here we are, we're approaching
the end of this course. We are now going to take
this look that we've created and simply
apply it here. Very easy way to do this. A lot of different ways,
I'll show you a few. One, if you want to
save this right-click, grab still, you
can save it there, or which it will then let you actually take this
and apply over. That's one way to do
it or you could also just go to a shot, Select it, Right-click, hit Apply
Grade. There we go. Not that this will work
every single time. It really depends how
well shot something is. In this case, it seems to
be working pretty well, but you still have to go through and make some adjustments. Because there's
certain things such as these windows which may not be needed
in the other shots. But yeah, so saving
a still is one way. Again, you could easily drag this over and
save it as a power grade or just simply right-clicking and applying the grade over. Apply grade, and then
you can do that. Let's see how this looks. I simply applied the first
adjustments to the other two. Let's play it through. Go full screen and
see how it's looking. I think it's actually,
you're working very well. But every shot is different. I think it actually
worked very well. If something is
not shot too well, then this will be
horribly wrong. Now, again, it's just a lot of people would be
happy with this. But hopefully, we're not happy with this. We can keep going. My first issue is we cut over to her close-up.
Looks good here. This is too bright and then the highlights on
her face or too bright, those are the issues
I'm having with it. I'll maybe stop it here and
let's see what's going on. I actually like
this little thing. That's probably
why it's too hot. It's simply as deleting that. I like the vignette. Let's see how this is affected. This is the original. You can see because
it's all shot, the shadows match the
other ones pretty good. The contrast, this might be where the hot forehead
is coming in. That's where pivot
might come into effect. I'm going to adjust the
pivot touch like that. It's not as hot. Then saturation. That looks good. It's nice, vibrant. Here we go. This is the color temperature, tint, the look adjustment
made it a little brighter. You can see this
work and then the windows and the vignette. Let's watch those. It worked pretty well in this situation. If it doesn't, it's just as
simple as like what I did. You go through and
you tweak the nodes, you might make new nodes. This close-up works fine. You make new nodes. The only thing I might adjust
here, like that, exactly. It was that it seemed a
little hot over there. I'm going to delete this. I like this vignette
because it focuses the attention on her. Again, option D, to turn everything off. This is where this clip started. First adjustment. Shadows look good. Contrast, good. Highlights and shadows, good. Saturation. The color, temperature,
white balance. I like how it affects those
skin tones on her hand. Look adjustment. Again, this worked out pretty well because
this is pretty well shot. One last little thing
that I want to do is we're going to
make a new window. Put it on her face here. Shift H and then shrink it down, really shape it, maybe on
this side of her face. Rotate it, softened down here. This is what we're getting
into the pickier area. This is a little bonus
that I'm showing you. I don't like this shadow
in her eye right here. Her face, this is ugly office lighting or it's probably fluorescence and it's just dropping down from the top, creating all these
shadows all over her face turn out very
flattering on anyone. What I'm going to do
is I put this window here and I'm going
to raise the Gamma. Just to add a little
bit more information and see a little bit
more in her face. About there and see. But then as I do that, again, it's all a balancing act. I don't have to adjust the contrast because it gets washed out a little
bit and then have to, little bit more contrast. It is what it is,
that's how it was shot. We can't completely
make it perfect. But I think going from this
to this makes a difference. See little things like
that come along way. That's the bonus,
but the other bonus, I'll show you this
quick little tool here, which is Command T, where as she's moving, obviously we want that
window to follow her. I'm going to hit Command T. I'm going into the tracker window. You could also just hit this button here and track
forward and reverse. There we go. It's that simple, okay, and not to go too
far into the deep end. But you can see that this
window moving around. This is where it locks. Again, the adjustments we're
making on that window, here's a very easy
way to fix that, because we're simply
going to start this. For the tracker here, you can see it's a
flat line and then all of this information
as it's changing, this is telling you what
the tracker is doing. You can see it's following her. Here at the
beginning, we want to actually put it here and I will track it
from that position. Good. Then once we
get about here, if we click on Frame, this lets you manually adjust it and I'm going to put
it on the left side of her face and then track forward. Here we go. Now that's kind of back up a
touch, full screen. This just needs to be softened. Right now you're really
getting into the nitty-gritty of what it's like to be a colorist when you start
doing all these things. That just needs to be softened. A lot of it is about
finessing windows. Here's something we can see
because we know it's there, but I think that's one
of those things where most people probably
wouldn't notice. I want to go to the tracker, go back to frame, and maybe move it back in here. That's the window. I think we're good there. You get the picture. Great. There we go. We went over the matching. Then also you've got
the little bonus of adding a window to her face, tracking it, and modifying
the tracker. That's great. Here we are approaching the end. In the next lessons, I just
have some tips I want to give you that it'll help you on your journey in
color correction. I'll see you there. Hopefully, you've learned a ton
up to this point. I think you definitely
have a lot of great tools. I'll see you in the next lesson.
7. A Few Tips: As we're nearing the end, I just wanted to
spend a little bit of time and have a
lesson in which I just give you a few
tips as a colorist. One thing to
remember about color correction grading is that, I know that it can be very overwhelming learning
all the terms, colored temperature,
shadows, what's lived, what's long, what's flat, all of these different terms. But an important
thing to remember is that so much in
color is subjective. We all see colors differently. We all think of what
a sunset looks like, what sunrise looks like, what gritty, what
dark, what romantic. Everyone has a
different viewpoint. Everyone has a different
way of seeing the world. When you're color correcting, it's important to
express that viewpoint. It's very important to trust
yourself, trust your taste. I always like to say
that half of what you're doing as a colorist is
developing good taste. Your first grades aren't
going to be perfect. It might be overwhelming, you might get frustrated
that shots aren't matching. But really what you're doing is you're just
getting better and better every time you
work on something new. When I started out I would spend 20,30,40 minutes
sometimes on a couple of shots and they would
never look right. A tip I have for you is to also learn to walk
away from shots, look at things with fresh eyes, study images, look
at movies you love, and then try to incorporate those looks into your
very own projects, and before you know it, you'll get to the point where
you'll look at an image, you'll know exactly how
the image will show, you'll know what kind
of lighting was to use. You'll know what needs to
be done to make it better, you'll know what
was done to make that image looks so
good and you'll start getting involved in tiny
details that matter a ton and it's those tiny
details that make people look at your image
and say things like, I don't know what you
did to this image, but it looks amazing. I can't describe
what I'm seeing, but I love everything you did. When I hear that from my client, I know I did the right thing. With that being said, let's move on to
the final lesson and just remember that
practice makes perfect, so it's important
to keep practicing, keep moving forward, and before you know it, you'll be a very good colorist, editor, filmmaker, or whatever you're
trying to specialize. Let's jump into
the final lesson.
8. Final Thoughts: That's the course. Hopefully, by now you feel you learned
a new skill that you can take with you to
all of your projects. We covered all the
basic steps in color correcting and
grading your image. We talked about Lift Gamma
Gain, color temperature, power windows, and we even got a little
tracking in there. Definitely publish
your project to the projects page if
you followed along. I would love to
see what you did. Also, I'm creating a discussions
page in case you have any questions about
color correcting or anything else
about this course. If you want to
learn more and dive deeper into color correction, definitely check out
my other courses. I cover everything from
what's the difference between flat log images, raw images, how to create
a cinematic grade. Introduction to a
pro colorist is probably the course I'd
suggest to take next. Also, I always loved to
hear what you want to learn next so if you
have any requests, definitely put those in
the discussions page. Again, thank you
so much for taking my course and I wish
you the best of luck.
Fred Trevino, Colorist & Top Teacher
