Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, my name's Simon Cade and I've been calibrating my projects for the last ten years and have really seen the power of color. I can turn footage that looks like this into something more true to life like this. But it's also an important part of the creative process of any film or video project. Calibrating influences where the audience's eyes are focused and it helps bring out the emotion and meaning of a scene. So that's why I calibrate every single bit of footage that I record because I've seen how much of a difference it can make. For example, we could create a shot like this to make it look like this. Or we can go for a completely different vibe like this. So today I'd like to walk you through my color grading process. I've given this a lot of thought as I refine these skills over the past few years. So I'm going to try and do just for things today during this class. We're going to start by quickly getting up to speed with the color grading tools that we have our disposal. From there, we'll go step-by-step through how I process the color for a typical shot. Thirdly, we'll get into some techniques for adapting that foundation grade to work with more challenging for touch. And finally, I'll show you how to create some more expressive looks like the bright commercial look or the famous blockbuster teal and orange look. Now before we get started, I would encourage you to pull up some footage so that you can calibrate along with me. Use your own footage to grade that would be ideal. But I've also provided the footage I'm using today in case you'd like to download it and follow along. Now for software, I'm using DaVinci Resolve Studio. What's great is you can download a free version of resolve, which has 95 percent the features. So you'll be able to follow along with nearly everything I'm doing. However, since color grading is so much to do with your eye and the kind of techniques that you're using more than the software that I really think you could follow along using other software such as Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere. The tools of the universal, just the buttons are in a different place. So I think that's everything. Now let's take some time to go deep into color grading.
2. The Fundamentals of Color: So before we start, I just want to walk you through a few of the tools that we'll be using today. Now if you've got lots of experience using DaVinci Resolve already, then feel free to skip ahead to the next lesson. So here we are individually result. Now it's a really powerful piece of software, but that doesn't mean that a couple of the tools do look a little bit intimidating for a lot of people. Myself included. This idea of using nodes is, it's kind of scary, but I'll show you. It's pretty not too difficult. So like any other color grading tools, it starts with adjusting our shadows, mid tones and highlights. We saw of course them in the primaries, Lift, Gamma and Gain. So lift is our shadows, mostly, gamma is mostly our mid-tones. And so I can add a bit of contrast in just like that by adjusting these wheels. Can even adjust my highlights. And if I wanted to, I could adjust the overall offset, which is like controlling everything at the same time. Now, when we're using notes, it's good to keep them organized. So I'm going to label this contrast. And then if I hit Command or Control D, Then I can toggle this note on enough. Very helpful to be able to see what's going on. Now if I hit Option or Alt S, then I can create a new node and this node, and I toggle it. Nothing's happening yet. So let's go in and change the saturation of this one. So this, we'll call it our saturation note. And it's really helpful to be able to have different nodes for different tasks. But so here we can see very simply. And there's my saturation and there's my contrast and they kinda work independently, which is very useful. For example, if I wanted to just affect the sky, then I could go over to the power windows. Now we've just desaturated the sky. Maybe actually decide I want to increase the saturation of the sky without affecting the buildings. Well, that's now what this node is doing. That's unchanged and that's changing. Very helpful staff. And you can always see what a node is doing by hitting Shift H or clicking on this little highlight tool over here. And so maybe I will go in and just feather this a little bit so that it's a little bit less of a harsh transition between the two areas. Shift H again gets us out of highlight mode. You can see we've got this pretty dramatic look. But maybe that's what we're going for or we could flip it and just very quickly make it so that the, everything except this guy is saturated now, which actually looks pretty terrible. So I'm gonna put that back. So you're gonna see me using a lot of nodes and always totaling them on and off. But one of the best things you can do if nodes it say we wanted to make this overall just a bit less contrasty. If we go over to our key area and look at the key output gain, This is something I use all the time. And essentially right now, this contrast note that selected is at one, which I like to think of as a 100 percent. So if I put it down to 0, then you'll see that this actually not doing anything at all. So halfway between 50% or not quite five, anything that this contrast node is doing will be cut in half essentially. So I'm going to take you through a super-quick grade on their shop. Just I can show you two more very useful techniques that we'll be using a lot during this class. And so there we've done very simple bit of contrast added. And you can see that we've lost a bit of detail in the highlights over here. So if I toggle this on and off, you can see how we've lost this detail over here, and you can even see it in the scopes. The window is too bright. Well, there's a lot of ways we could solve that problem. But I want to show you by hitting Option or Alt L. We can add a layer node. When you first add a layer node, essentially just undoes whatever is on top of it. So we can call this our general node. So now this layer node below it has just totally removed that general nodes. So it's not doing anything at all, but it's still there. So if I were to put a box on this bottom node, then you can see now we could draw a box around the window. And now when we toggle this general note on and off, you can see that the layer note here is making sure the window is unaffected. And if I toggle the layer note on and off, you can see how we've taken that detail and put it back in the shop. So of course, because this is its own node, we can even change the temperature if we wanted to, we could do all kinds of crazy things. It gets really fun when we start using the qualifier. So I'm going to turn off this power window for a second. Instead of just selecting an area like this window, maybe I just want this general node to apply to a specific color. Well, I'm going to hit Shift H and that's going to highlight mode so I can see what I'm doing. But in this case, because we've got a bright window, Why don't we go by luminance. So if I go into highlighted might again and increase until we're just selecting the brightest areas of the image. Then you can see what happens here. We've just created exactly the same effect as what we did with the window, but we didn't have to draw a box and if the camera moves, we'd have to move the box. So we've got a really nice simple way to bring that detail back. Where this layer node is essentially saying anything brighter than this point, it's going to be ignored by the general node. And a good practice anytime we're using a qualifier is to soften things up a bit. That way. It just looks a bit more realistic and natural. So there we go. That's a really quick grade for a shot like this. But I think it's time to get into some proper grading.
3. Working with Nodes: So now I'd like to show you the color grading template that I use for pretty much every shot. This is going to serve as a really good foundation. So later on we can keep everything organized while we're focusing on the creative side. So going back to this city shot the quick grade that we did before, looks like this. But I want to show you how we can add a couple extra notes and do some fun little techniques to make something that looks like this. Let's get into it and start by building up on notes. So every time I'm color grading, I always like to have a node called contrast. And this is where we basically add in contrast. And so we could do something very simple like that just for now. But I want to have a temperature and saturation node before this in the tree. So I can do Shift N in order to add a node beforehand. And I'm going to label this one temp sacked because its temperature and saturation. So here all we're gonna do for now is something I do every single time. Adjust the midtone detail of hair by minus 3, which is a very subtle thing, but it kind of just softens things out there. If I zoom in and talk about, you might be able to see what's happening by just add minus 3 just to kind of take some of the edge off a little bit. And then we'll come back to do the temperature and saturation later. The next node I'm going to add is going to be called log. And this one is going to have a layer mask underneath that, which we'll use later. Then I'm going to have a node called Dehaze. This node is going to have little effect on it. So in reserve we haven't effect called dehaze, but this one is not totally essential surface the software you're using doesn't have this plugin, then it's no big deal already. But that's way too intense. I'm going to drop it down to about no 0.7, which is still very saturated and kind of bold looking. You can, you can see this D Hayes is adding saturation and evening out the luminance of the image as well. That's a really nice tool, but we want to use it sparingly. But because I've already got saturation note, I'm obviously going to counter this saturation boost because I'm really only interested in the luminance adjustments. So if I drop the saturation down to 45 and I'm even going to increase the gamma. So now when I toggle this D Hayes node, you can see it's not affecting the overall image quite as much. It's still adding saturation, but it's not so extreme. So our next node is going to be called Bloom. And this is one of my favorite things, but we'll get to it later. So I'm going to disable it for now. Same thing, I'm going to have a node for relation, which is one of our advanced film effects, but I'm going to save that for later. One thing I can do now is add another note. This is all with Option S and call this one haze. So now we've D Hayes, but now we're going to add some of that hazy look back in, but in a way that we can control. So I'm going to head over and use a glow effect, which is going to look really bad at the beginning. Look at that. But if I configure it so that we extend out the spread, then you can see it's affecting a much greater area. So the spread, I can go way up to 1.8 and then the shine threshold, this controls how much glow, what point in luminance does the image start to glow? So I'm going to be pretty bold with this and go for around nought 0.6 because I'm not actually worried about these highlights disappearing yet. I know we can fix that later. I just want to see this nice, hazy look being added in. So I think that's a good starting point and now I'm just going to kind of back it off a bunch. So if I take that one down and this is probably the most glow I'd ever want to use. And then I can head over to my key output and drop this down until it's nice and subtle. So now you can see when I toggle it on and off, it just take some of those brighter parts of the image and just kind of spreads them out a bit so they bleed into the rest of the image, which I think looks really nice. So just as a little before and after, if I select those two nodes and disable them, you can see how this is the full and this is after. So the next node we're going to add is a vignette. And for this, there's a lot of ways you could do it, but my favorite way is to simply drop the mid-tones down a little bit and then shadows down a bit less two. Then if I add a circle mosque, nice and big, and really soften that out a bunch and invert it. Then we have a nice vignette where the corners are slightly darker than the rest of the image. And I can have it over here to see exactly how much of our image this is affecting. And I think I might go something like that. Sorry, I can, That's probably the most vignette I'd ever want to have in my shots. Because then I know that I can always back it off here by just hitting it down to say 50 percent. And now it's much more subtle. So I'm going to build out a couple of more notes real quick. This is going to be cold fix highlights, which we'll do later. Then we're going to have a node cold, soft, and a second one underneath there called add outside. And this is going to be cold, soft edge. I'm going to turn those both off because we'll use them later. We're almost there, Just two more nodes. The first one is very useful and it's called white reference. So for this one, all I'm going to do is take the left and totally boosted all the way up so that we have a fully white screen. Then if I make a nice books around the majority of the frame and inverts it, then this, I find it's very helpful to be able to color grade, particularly if you're messing with the temperature and saturation, to be able to see a reference of what white looks like. That's very useful. Note that I haven't all of my shots just turned off but ready to go whenever I need it. And similarly, we're going to have a black mask one. And for this one, had ever is the offset and go all the way down. And now we can add another shape. Let's make this one smaller and inverts it. And this one is really useful because I can essentially use it like a light meter or something. So I can see up here this bit of sky is that bright? Or if I went to see the color of something, I can head over to my vector scope. And you can see that this is a little bit of pink. And hey, we've got this orange. That's very useful, particularly for skin tones. So I always have these two sitting on the end of my grades. So this is my note structure that I start with for every shot. And the good thing is we won't ever have to build this complex web of nodes again, we can just copy it over to the other shots we work with.
4. Contrast, Temperature and Saturation: Okay, so now we've finally got everything set up. It's time to get into the fun pop, creating a look. The first place I always go to contrast because this is where we can control our exposure and the kind of main feelings of our image. So in this case, I think because this is a sunset shot, we don't need to be scattered being a little bit dark. So I'm going to drop down the mid tones there. And I think we can even go a bit darker and the shadows. Now, I'm not worried about if we went, for example, this far and we lost some detail in the shadows at this point. I'm just looking at the image overall and thinking what feels right. We can always kind of fix things later. So I reckon around here is good. And then maybe you don't want it to be too crunchy, something like that feels good for me. So next I'm going to turn on my reference here when I'm doing the temperature and saturation. Now, the easiest way to do this would be to grab this little color picker here and choose something that's kinda of grayscale. So probably the best option here would be something like this. And now you can see this is automatically set the temperature and the tint until that is mostly gray. Now it's not a perfect tool. And you can see in this case, because that was in the shade, it's made everything else look very, very warm. But it's good to know if there is something grand the shot that we can use that as time point. Now, I think this looks too warm for me, so I'm going to back it up quite a bit because I still want to capture little bit of the blue in that sky. And I think somewhere around there looks nice for me. And same thing with the red. I think need quite as much. I don't have to go fully green. And I'm always looking back at this white reference point to see, make sure my eyes don't adjust to it. I think somewhere around there. Looks nice. Since it's a sunset. I like being a little bit warm. So now I'm happy with the temperature. Let's look at saturation. Now. I could simply reduce the saturation down here or increase it. But I think for now I'm going to leave that where it is. I'm actually going to get a little bit more specific. Over here we can see luminance versus saturation. So this graph lets us control the saturation based on how bright the image is. Say for example, if I wanted the highlights to be brighter, I could do that. And if I wanted the shadows to be bright, so I could do that. So for my research of super eight film and super 16, I tend to like putting a little bit more of my saturation in the shadows and a little bit less in the highlights. So I pretty much use this kind of shaped curve for everything. Now that I've got this curve, I can then control the overall amount of saturation, knowing that there will be always be a little bit more in the shadows, the nine, the highlights. There we go. I think 48 rule. I'm just doing this by eye. But I think if I put it in my white reference and that looks about right. I'm going to head over to my log. So for me, this login note is where I use the log controls because otherwise it gets a bit confusing between what's on the contrast node and Watson a love note, I like to keep them separate. And the way I use this is I head over to the waveform. And now that I've got the image generally where I want this to be, I think to myself, Well, when I like some of the brightest areas to be darker or brighter. And more than like to happen to the absolute darkest areas of the image. Say for example, I could go over here and type in no 0.3.7. And this time point from my low and high range, these numbers just control how much is being affected. So for example, if I say my low control and walk it waiver to blue and you can see nothing's happening because we've got a layer turned on. So I'm going to turn that off. Now you can see here, if I make the shadow is really blue, then this low range affects how much of that blue comes in. So if we put all the up to one, then it's basically the same as the primaries. But if I just wanted to blue to affect just the very darkest bits, then I would have a nice low range of 0.1. So I like to start with no 0.30.7 and I'm not going to have lots of blue. I'm just going to have a look at my scopes. Maybe zoom into some of the areas. Thanks myself. Should this be higher where we've got more detail coming in? Or should it be lower where we kind of crunch it down? And at no 0.3 on this shot because I think it's already quite a dock shop. It's affecting quite law of the image. So I'm gonna go ahead and drop this down to 1.15. And this way, let me control our shadows. It doesn't actually make that much difference to the overall image. We're just affecting the dopant pots. So to my eye and looking at this waveform, what kind of in the right place often like to have the duck is point's just sitting on the 0 line there. And so by just adding a little bit more back in and told me on and off, you can see it's very subtle, but we do just capture a little bit of subtleties there. And then similarly with the highlights, we could drop this down if we wanted to really take some of the brightness now, the top of the image there, you can see if we take it too far, it looks terrible. But for this particular shot, I think I might just ease off a little bit on that bright area. So now if I bypass the entire grade and you can see this is what we have a beginning and this is where we're at now. But I think we can take this even further.
5. Simple Filmic Effects: Now I love the look of celluloid film and I've been lucky enough to on super 16 and super eight film a few times in my career. And I've got to say, it's really hard to beat the organic look and feel of real film footage. So if we want to have any chance of emulating it, you've got to first go back to the original. So let's quickly take a look at some real film footage that I shot. The first thing you might notice with this super great footage, how gradient is giving a shot real sense of energy and nostalgia. Whereas this shot was filmed and super 16. So you can see the footage has more detail and a finer grain. Okay, Let's see what we can do to emulate this beautiful film look. So this footage was shot on a digital camera, which means in general, I think it looks quite kind of pristine and sharp. You can see even if I zoom in, is plenty of detail, not very many imperfections. And so one thing we can do to make off with which look a bit more cinematic is some simple changes to kind of data the image of a little bit. So you've already got a vignette That's just have a think about whether we want it to be a really nice, strong vignette over at one, or maybe more subtle. Um, and I think for this shot, I think around no, 0.3 should be nice. The next one, however, is little more complicated. I want to add a very subtle blur to the image so that it looks a bit more like maybe super 16 film. So if I head over and choose a Gaussian blur effect, if I drop it way down to around 0.125, then you can see how very subtle. Hardly even noticeable depending on what screen you're watching this. But just takes a little bit of the edge off of that digital detail. I'm going to make sure that the edge replicates so we don't have any problems around the edge of the frame. So that's the very subtle softening effect. And I actually just want that to happen in the very middle of the image. So if I turn on my highlight tool, then I can blend this out a lot and just make sure that this is only affecting the very middle of our frame. Now the cool thing is because this next note here is an outside node. That means that this node affects everything that this node doesn't. And if I change this to be more narrow than, this will only affect that area. And so outside nodes are very useful for things like this, where we want to have a different effect happening to a different part of the image. So that would be the most extreme, having the corners really blurry to give it a kind of trippy look. But I think if I drop it down to about 1.6 and that should be plenty. And say now, you can see that the edges here, I've got quite a strong blur. Whereas Center has a much more subtle. And so hopefully that'll help draw the eye towards the center of the frame. And also it's just the kinda thing that happens on older cameras. Now two lenses is they have these imperfections. I like to add those back-end. And if we want this to really look like film, then we can add one more node and call this one grain and hay. If we go to the Effects and choose film grain, then we could choose a preset, maybe one like 500 t. So it's nice and grainy. And then you can see how if we were to turn up the strength a little bit, then we can have a nice cinematic, grainy look. And I can control all those different parameters depending on how set that we want it to be. So those are our simple ways to make digital footage look a bit more like a family. You can see Here's before and here's after, specially nights. But when you play it back.
6. Advanced Filmic Effects: Now it's time for me to show you my favorite aspects of the film luck. So we can take a digital shuttling this and make your luck as more filmic like this. But first we got to take another quick second to study some real film footage. Looking at this show, I'd say the contrast and tones are fairly true to life. But if you look here, you'll notice how the highlights bloom around the brightest parts of the image. So let's emulate that digitally. We're also going to create this red glow effect, which is called collation. And in my opinion, that's one of the most subtle but beautiful imperfections that we get when shooting on real film. So let's jump into resolve and see what we can do. So before we add our more advanced film emulation effects, I'm actually going to just turn off these three simple ones because the softening and the grain kinda does use up a lot of processing power. I'm just gonna turn them off for now and we'll turn them back on by the end of the show. So first up, let's create the bloom effect. So this bloom effect is centered around quite similar to the haze effect we did earlier. We're going to use a glow. Now this time, I'm not going to spread it out quite as much because I want this to be a bit more of a tight effect. So I think somewhere around that looks about right. And then for the threshold, I don't want it to be too intense. I don't want to affect the whole image. Just wanted to take the bright parts and let it kinda of spillover. Now, once again, we're getting a lot of lost detail, but I'm really not worried about that. I'm looking over here. And so when we toggle this, you can see how this bit in the shadows here. That's what I'm really looking at when I'm adjusting these parameters. And then I'm gonna take my spread and where to drop it down. Quite a law so that it's nice and subtle. So that is just blooming out a little bit. Now, this looks pretty terrible at the moment. So we're going to use a good old layer node. And the layer node as ever, totally removes what we've just done. But what we wanna do here is protects the highlights. And so qualifying by luminance is the perfect tool for this. So if I jump into highlighted mode and then think about, okay, what is it that I want to protect? Well, I want to make sure that we retain detail in this area. And the thing I want to bleed into is this dog skyline. So I could go right around there and then just to make sure that there's no noise or problems with that, I'm going to blur it out a little bit so that there are no harsh edges. And now we've got a nice mosque such that when I go out of highlighted mode and 10, the blue one enough, you can see the dark blue is now only affecting the darker parts of the image. And it gives it this really nice kind of hazy look that we're going for. So just to refresh it now this is without the layer node. There's just protecting the highlights, giving us a nice bit of glow. And we can even see over here, we get a nice little glow anywhere. There's a nice highlight we should have. But if that bleed now, dilation and although it's going for a similar effect is a little bit more complicated, so it's going to require some extra notes. So let's add a second node. And then this one is actually going to be a layer note and put the little mix the way down there. So let's just tidy this up a bit. So now we've got four notes and I'm going to, just to tidy it up, I'm going to create a compound node with these. So this is going to be a relation. And then I'm actually going to create, just like with the bloom note, I'm going to put a layer node behind it. This relation is going to mess up our highlights too. And so because I know what's going to happen, I'm going to actually copy this. So this layer node is now going to protect our highlights so that it makes sure that dilation doesn't cause any trouble up there. So now if we jump into our compound node, this is going to be where we add the dilation effect. So for the relation effect to work, we're going to start by changing this to a add mixer. And now there's a bunch of math behind each of these kind of compositing methods. But the best way to think of it is that this note is going to be brightening up some parts of the image. So if we were to completely drop the exposure down to nothing, then you can see this is what the node looks like. You're adding nothing to it. Nothing changes. So therefore, if we take this area and we just want to affect the highlights, we could do something like this. So this curve shape means that we're just dealing with these bright spots of the image. So then when we go over to the black area, we can blur this out and see how we can now get that red blood highlights effect. Well, to make sure it's red, let's unlink these channels so that we can Blair just the red channel more than anything. And then we can kind of depends what color we want, but I'm going to go red because that's why I usually see. And now when I go out, I've highlighted mode. You can see that what we've essentially done is created a little red blur. And so there's some tweaking we could do. If we went up higher on this graph, then we could have more or less red depending on what we're going for. This is kind of controlling the strength of it. And this is kind of controlling where the brightness comes in. And then we could blur it less if we want it to be a small amount of blur or more if you want it to be a kind of wider radius. And so I think that's a good place to start. But then as ever, we can always go to c0 output of this compound node and take it down to 0%, or maybe call it 50 percent depending on how stuff that we want it to be. I think. Yeah, right about there looks nice to me. Maybe a bit less. Maybe it's cooling it. No, 0.3. Okay. So it's a subtle effect. But it just takes those highlights and adds a little red rim around them. So now we can turn on our remaining nodes. And now we have this as our cinematic look. Here's before and here's the after. And even we can compare it to a quick grade. And I think it's just looking a lot more kind of organic with all these kind of haziness and blends in the blooms and relations. Now I'll admit it took quite a long time, but unfortunately we can copy this entire grade over to another shop. So let's say I wanted to grade this shop. Well, I can simply apply the grade. Then I can do a very quick white balance to tidy things up, fix all levels and saturation. And you can see just like that, we've automatically got the bloom happening over here. And we might even have a little bit of dilation, although I think on this one is going to be very subtle because of the parameters. So you can see how it does work quickly, but we might just need to go in and customize a little bit. So you might think that's a bit too much. We drop that one down to 50 percent. Now it's not quite so crazy. And dilation maybe in this one we actually increase it a bit and say, we want more. Myles have to adjust, qualifies a little bit, soften them up, make sure they're not jumping into anywhere they're not supposed to be. And if we really want to get into the weeds, then we could look like and really make sure we get a little bit red happening like that. And so that we got and a matter of seconds, we can copy a grade from the last shot over to a new one because we've built out this nice structure.
7. Solving Common Problems: So we've got a good starting point off degrading our city skyline shot. But I'll be honest, that wasn't really the most challenging footage. It's a low contrast sunset shot without any people in it. So let's take a look at what it would take to grade a shot like this, adapting our typical grading template to make something that looks like this. Let's stop from scratch, but we're not going to completely start from scratch. Make things a lot more efficient. And so I've already got my softening and green turned off, but let's also turn off the bloom inhalation. Then I'm going to reset the temperature back to 0. And I'm gonna take my contrast wheels and reset them as well. And the last thing I'm gonna do, so we have a nice clean slate, is head over to our luck note. And I'm going to set these back to your 0.3.7 and reset the wheels. So now we've got most of our nodes reset and I'm just going to turn off the haze note as well. And now we have a truly, kind of really simple neutral place with which we can start from. So because they don't have to build this again in the future, I'm going to right-click and hit graph still. Now in our gallery, we can call this foundation. And so now if I wanted to jump over with my arrow keys to a different shot, say like this one which is also completely ungraded. And all I need to do is apply the grade. And boom, we've got all of our nodes in and we can now start jumping into wheels, dynamic a ton on our bloom, down on collation. Try some haze. And so we could get a very quick grade, as quick as that. So let's create the shop from scratch. But using our foundation, I'm going to apply the grade. And then as ever, the first place I'm going to go, It's the contrast. Now, I underexpose this shot little bit when we were shooting because I wanted to protect the highlights. So I'm going to start by just using the offset to kind of generally increase the brightness of this Shop. Now we've lost the days hell, but it's okay. We can always get it back later. Next thing is the shutters. Let's crunch these down a little bit. And same thing with the midtones. I'm really just looking at skin tones at this point. I'm not worried about losing detail in the darkest parts of the image or these in detail in the highest pots at them. Maybe just thinking, how do I want in the short to feel? Sorry? And that puts us in a good position. Now at this point I can see that the white balance is a little off. So I'm going to head over to our white reference, turn that on and just going to back off a little bit into the cool temperatures. And once again, I'm not worried about these highlights going blue. That's to be expected anytime you set the white balance wrong. So I'm really just looking at the face. And to do a more precise version, actually, I can turn on my black mask and select the face. So now I can see on the vector scope exactly what we're dealing with. And if you can't see this skin tone line, then you can just turn on the skin to indicate two right there. And now I can adjust. And you can see here this is the red skin tones is still go to green and we just want them to sit kind of right on that line nicely. Finally, I'll backup and make sure that I'm happy while looking at the reference. I know these rules out totally whites. I don't need them to totally match, but the skin tones they look about, right? Okay, that's looking a lot more natural. It also feels a bit too saturated, so I'm going to back up the saturation a little bit. And now it's looking much more natural, which is my goal at this point. Next up, I can see that we've lost some detail in the shadows and highlights. So head over to the waveform, we can confirm that see this detail that has really lost. So if I use my local wheels, then I can start to bring back some of that detail. And I might even zoom into the area. Now, if I go that much, then I think we kind of lose some of the nice contrast in their face. So what I'm going to do is adjust the range down and all this stuff. You can see when you're looking at the waveform. The range controls how much of the shadows we are manipulating. So if I drop the low range down to around here, then you can see when I toggle it on and off, that we're just catching and restoring some of the detail back without affecting the overall image. Now we could do the same thing with the highlights. We could check off scopes and drop the highlights down to bring that detail back. I'm gonna be careful not to go too far us it kind of gets squished, but that's where we could, if we wanted to drop down the range. Looking at that window, this looks a lot better, but we've caused some problems with the skin tones so that we've brought the detail back, but we've messed up our skin tones. So this is why we could use the layer node and we can say, okay, let's use this layer to protect the skin tones for this kind of thing. I'd like to just draw a little line over the skin tones. You can see here what's going on. And then if I denoise it a bunch and that'll kind of clean up the little mosque we've made. And I can even Blair out plenty. And now you can see before and after the mosque was added and before and after the lock was added. So that's a quick way to protect those highlights and bring some of the emphasis back to her face. So we don't have this distracting bright window. But generally I didn't like to use the local wheels for such a big job. For me, the local wheels at that for small adjustments. So I'm going to actually remove this highlights and I'm gonna do a different technique for bringing the detail back to that window. So I'm going to add a node right at the very beginning. And I'm going to call this one how it went. And this one I'm going to use the primary wheels and I'm going to just say, what can I do to make this window look as good as possible? Like a drop the highlights down. And then we could use a power window. The nice feather on it, to simply darken that area. And so that's brought the detail back, but it looks a bit fake because that window is supposed to be bright. So let's try lifting up the shadows to kind of counter that and even joke the mid-tones down. So we've still got a bright window now, but there's plenty of detail retain. So he's a little before and after. And for me that is a major improvement. And so now we can jump into a local rules if we went to two and just take the very highest of the highlights and drop those down just to touch so that we bring back the detail here. So if I call this a nought 0.8 range and just drop it a little bit. Then. Now you can see I lug wheels are doing a much more subtle job here, just bringing the detail back there and into the shadows while our power window does the heavy lifting. So now that I've got the image generally balanced, we can look into some of those effects. Start with the haze note. In fact, I might make it a little more subtle down to about 40 percent. Then we can check ball bloom note to make sure that it's not doing anything unexpected way for them. I think we all using a bit of detail in the highlights. I'm just going to adjust my highlight protection. Maybe if I soften this little bit and drop it down a little bit lower, then how is that looking? Yeah, there we go. Now we've got the detail and we're getting a nice bit of glare. I'm going to copy that over to the relation. And now you can see we've got quite an extreme elation looks. I'm going to back that off. And the key output maybe 250 percent, so it's not so dramatic. And there we go. Next, I'm gonna check my vignettes, which is currently sitting at 30 percent nothing. I might drop it down to 25. So it's a little more subtle. And now we're going to use this note to fix our highlights. Said simplest way to do that is to use a qualifier. We've done this before once, but I'm going to grab my Luminance and I'm just going to select the areas that are considered highlights. I'm going to soften this plenty. Something like that. And in this case, just to make sure it avoids any skin tones, I'm even going to draw a little sack around here and invert that so that we make sure we're just dealing with the highlights and nothing else. So now I've selected those highlights. I can jump into my vector scope and see what's going on. And clearly we've got a lot of blue happening and some more yellow areas. So I think looking at the shop overall, this doesn't look a little bit too blue. If I use my white reference. There's no reason why that window should be blue. This is a problem caused by me saying the white balance from camera. So let's take the blue areas of our shot, which means going to head over and select the whole kind of blue range and then soften it up a bunch as ever. And we're going to de-noise this blur out plenty. So this is a nice broad selection. We don't want to be doing anything too fine tuned. And now we can take this area and simply adjust the color temperature so we could make it more blue or we could make it warmer. And all I want to do is just adjust it until it looks like it's blending in with our white reference. And so now if I go to around 300 and a little bit of magenta as well, then I can use my scopes and see that we're now in a much kind of more central position. So now check before and after. And that's a subtle thing, but just makes the whole image look a lot more neutral. So finally, I'm going to turn on softening and grain nodes. And now that I kind of look at the image of rule, I might have taken that window down a little bit too much. So I'm just going to back this up to 80 percent, just to give it a slightly more realistic look. Because windows are supposed to be off drawn an ongoing for a naturalistic look. And so now we've taken a shot that looked like this and we tend to into this. And just for reference, this is what the shot look like when I was trying to use the local note to protect our highlights. You can see this looks a lot more naturalistic and a lot more realistic, I think. And this is what we started with. Let me just copy down with the grade from the previous shot. See how the eye doesn't get drawn to the face so much because this is much brighter. We took it from this to this. This was the quick grade. And this is what happens when we start with a foundation and gradually built up from that.
8. Tips for Grading Cheap Footage: Now my pet peeve with calibrating tutorials is when people only use footage shot with really expensive cinema cameras for their demonstrations. Because the truth is most people don't have access to those kinda cameras. So today I've got my hands on a Canon see 70 cinema camera, and I've set it up next to a smartphone filming with the regular camera app. So I can show you that these principles apply to footage from any camera. This is footage from a currency 70. And you can see I've used my same node structure, just adjusted things and it works really nicely for log footage. This is filmed in C loc2. Any lumps or anything, just using the same techniques that we were using before. And then at the very same time, on the very same day, I shot this with a smart phone. And so I'm going to see just how closely we can match this shop, which is eight bits smartphone footage, to the high-quality 10-bit 42 to footage from a cinema camera. So you'll see that the process is pretty similar to usual. I'm going to apply the grade. And now we have all our notes in there. And because we're trying to match two shots, I'm going to select the smart phone footage and also the other one. And then it, hey, I can do a split screen. And if I do selected clips, then we get a nice view of both of them at the same time. So let's start with our contrast node. And I'm going to drop the gain down because clearly this is a much brighter shot. Can use waveform to help her. I reckon somewhere around there should be good because it also going to bring down our mid-tones little bit. So now we're getting much closer in terms of the exposure and contrast. But let's try a little bit in the shadows to now is still a long way off a perfect match. But I think the main problem here is saturation. Well, if anything, and that's really common when you use a camera that's not very expensive. Often, they seem to put a lot of the saturation into the highlights. So I'm going to do an extreme version of this curve in our luma versus saturation. Now I'm going to reset it. This is something I've noticed time and time again working with GoPro footage. Or if I'm working with footage from just any kind of cheaper camera where it's not shooting in log. Often, I end up with some kind of shaped like this where we've got a lot more saturation in the shadows and the highlights. So already I think that's making a big difference. You can see this is before and this is after. So I'm going to take a little bit more saturation out. And now I can control the overall saturation with our regular slider. And I recommend somewhere around, that should be good. So now we're a lot closer. I can see this one overall feels warmer. So let's take just a little bit of worn out, right? So and then I'm really just looking at the skin tones here. And I think this looks a lot more straw like someone takes some of the magenta out just to touch. So although this white wall isn't quite matched, I think the skin times are looking about the same. So that's my priority is getting their skin tones, right? We're going to warm up just a tiny bit minus 25. And you can see now that comparing the skin times, I think we've got a pretty close much. This point I went time on the haze node, which isn't really doing much. And because this is smart phone footage, looking at the midtone detail, if we increase that up to a 100, you can really see what that does minus a 100. It's really smoothing things out. Usually I just leave that minus three. But because this is smart phone footage, I think they often kind of overshot but things a bit. So if I knock that down to minus 20 and it's a very subtle change. But I think that will just help make it look a bit more organic and natural. So now I reckon we are most of the way. But just because we've got this side-by-side, I want to see if I can get an even closer match. So I'm going to add an extra note up here. And this one, I just wanna deal with this white wall because it seems like the shirt is pretty nicely matched. The red over here is pretty nicely matched. So I'm gonna go over to my qualifier and I'm going to select just this area in the background here. And with the highlight of view, we can tweak this selection, make sure we're not getting any skin tones in there. So take some saturation out, soften everything of course, bringing in. And then we can probably isolate a little bit more of the hues. There we go. Now I go just a little bit less skin tone. And finally we denoise it, bunch, clean out the blacks and blair it, so it's nice and subtle. Okay, so now we've isolated the white wall. We can go back into a joule view. And what does it need? It looks to me not cold enough. So let's start with that. If we back it off to maybe somewhere around there. But good. And now you can see it's not got enough magenta, so we're going to add just a little bit. So now you can see much closer before and after and yet we're not affecting the skin tone, so the rest of the image. So from here, it's pretty simple. We can add our bloom back in and alkylation or that, that's not doing huge amount right now. Then we can also add it are softening. This is very important when we're dealing with smart phone footage. It's often over sharpened and make it add some grain two. And now you really wouldn't necessarily know that that was shot on a smartphone. The last thing is this area here you can see this is a little dark, so that's just really go for it here. And we'll use this note to fix our highlights. I'm going to draw a power window. Make sure we've got our window selected. And now I can go back into the multi-view. And let's look at the waveform here to try and match those. I'm going to take this and just pump up the brightness a little bit, looking at the fabric first and then take the log to bring down those highlights. Now you can see we've got a much closer match here between what we had before, the dot Curtin, what we've got now. And so this is the cinema camera and smart phone with no color grading. And this is how it looks when I calibrate them to match.
9. Creative Look: Commercial: So when I think about creative color grading, I try not to jump into thinking about what kind of movies I want to emulate. There's nothing wrong with doing that, of course. But for me, I like to go back to the fundamentals before I start thinking about that kind of thing. Because I think a lot of the decisions that we have to make when it comes to color grading can be informed by the footage itself and by the story. And so thinking about what can motivate our color choices. I find this a lot of creativity in just asking to simple questions. One, how warm should this NB and to how dark should this thing be? My goal is usually to accentuate and complete the work that's been done during filming. Rather than trying to completely change the look and feel. That said, if I did have to choose two distinctive looks that I'd be most likely to employ when I'm color grading. It would be these two. Number one, the commercial look, and number two, the blockbuster look. So let's see how we can build each of those looks. So let's take our default grade and adapt it into the commercial look. The first thing is to turn off any of these film emulation nodes because we're going for a much cleaner look. And I'm going to turn on my white reference and add a couple extra notes just so that we can easily copy this look onto other shots from the same scene. The first thing I'm gonna do is go into gamma and just take up these mid-tones. I find it's one of the best ways to make a short film brighter and lighter. You can almost use this gamma will as a control of the time of day from dusk to nice mid morning. I think we can even push the highlights just a touch, just so that we've really got this shot as bright as possible for that really pristine look, I can see that our shadows, we've got a bit washed out on the scopes to so I'm just going to take the shadows down a touch. And then on this next node, I'm going to go ahead and just increase the saturation a little bit to give it that kind of colorful, happy vibe. And if I'm going for the commercial that this still feels a little bit warm to me. So I'm just going to back it off so that it feels even more kind of neutral. So I'm gonna go back to maybe around 200. And then something that I definitely associate with this kind of pristine commercial look is making sure that anything in the highlights is totally white. So here we've definitely got some blue happening. So I can copy this node over here that was fixing our highlights and use the highlight feature and our vector scope. Maybe take down the saturation a little and really make sure this is as neutral as possible. So there we go. We've taken a shot that was a bit darker, in my opinion, a bit more expressive, and kind of made it look like your typical pristine shot that you might expect in a slightly boring TV commercial. But despite that, I do often use this kind of luck if I'm doing something that's totally nonfiction, where I don't want to be to express it with color grading. Or I might use this kind of look as a foundation to build on, since it gives us such a neutral place to start from.
10. Creative Look: Blockbuster: Now the teal and orange blockbuster look is probably the most popular color grading style. And people like to sell lots that claim to give you that effect really quickly. But I'm a little skeptical of those. One size fits all solutions because I think color grading is really about adapting and reacting to the footage that we have. So let's try the teal and orange lack of Gaia duplicate of the clip. And when I play a great from before, now I'm going to add two more nodes. This first one is going to be cold primaries. And the second one is kinda be cooled. Look fix. And so if this firstNode, I'm just going to add a really strong teal look. And at this point, I really don't need it to be subtle. I'm just trying to get the right kind of tone. So this would be more of a blue. And as we head towards green a little bit, then we get that classic blockbuster teal. And then all I'm gonna do is take a little bit of orange into the highlights just to counter that. And said to my eye, this is way too much burden on purpose so that I can back it off to maybe 50 percent or even 30%. Now this doesn't look bad. But anytime I'm doing a teal and orange, I like to protect my skin times. So I'm going to label this one is skin and the land node, we're going to make sure that it just isolates the skin tones as much as possible. So let's broaden this out a bit to noise and Blair as always. And now you can see how our primary is just adding that teal to the shadows without affecting our skin tones too much. Now, a few years ago, I would have just stopped here and I would have figured that this was as close as I can get. But something I've learned more recently is to really pay attention to the shadows. If we're going to add a bunch of tail to the shadows, we can still make sure that the darkest part of the image are true black. And so that's where the slope fixed node comes in. So I'm going to switch into locomote and I'm actually going to highlight it and just take a look at the shadows. So now I can see on my vector scope, even in the darkest parts of the image, we've got quite a lot of blue and green going on. So I'm going to do then is take my luck wheel and send it in the other direction until we're sitting right in the center. Scopes and safety check out here. That's what we had before and that's what we've got now. Now I can turn off the qualified because I do want this to affect the whole image. And then I can use my low range to decide how much of this warmth I want to bring in. So at 0, this node is now doing nothing. But if I bring it up, then I can decide just how far I want to go with this kind of fix. So this was on neutral look. And this is what we've got at the moment. So you can see all this does is just cleans up the very darkest parts of the image and just takes that blew out of those shadows while still retaining the color contrast that we added. So here's the full looks very neutral. And his afterwards we're just a little bit of the teal and orange color contrast. If we went to more extreme look, you can always increase this. And then we'll probably have to fix our shadows again. And that would be a more extreme teal and orange look. But to be honest, I prefer it at 30 percent. So it's nice and tasteful. And that's all there is to it. A nice, simple teal and orange look. And just to show you how versatile this look is, if I copy this grade over to an empty shot into the layer night and everything primaries in and ask him to infix, then I can actually grab a still of this. Now, this is teal and orange, and I can now just take any shot that's already been graded like this one. And I could just say append the node graph and this will just put it right at the end. It's quite a bit of a mess, but tidy up these nodes that a little bit. Then you can see how just as quick as that, we've taken a plane neutral shot. And just given some of that too and shutters.
11. Wrapping Up: And there you have it. That's my color grading process. I pretty much mix and match these techniques depending on how the raw footage looks and what results I'm aiming for. I hope you can practice these techniques and train your eye to notice things like the detail in the shadows or train your eye to be able to match two similar shots. But beyond that, I really hope you can use these techniques and ideas to experiment and to express your creativity since there are no rules in filmmaking after all. So thanks for joining me on this class. And if you'd like to learn more about filmmaking, and please do have a look at my other two classes that I have here on Skillshare. I hope this has been useful to you and I'll see you soon.
