Speaker 1: In this video, I'm going to take you through a four-step process that's going to give you an unfair advantage over your competition and prove that you don't need to be an expert to make pretty images. So this video idea came from like this, this frustration that I've had with our industry and especially the way color grading is taught. Instructors spend hours trying to like show you what's under the hood and they turn it into like a 80-20 thing. It's like you have to be that much technical and then, you know, the magic is just sort of like the aftermath. I disagree with it 1000%. Like in my experience, in my professional experience, running my own studio, like working in this industry for almost a decade, it doesn't need to be that technical because when you watch content on my channel and majority of the comments are just like, I've learned here more than what I've learned in school for four years. We should be inspired after watching a video that teaches us new skill. We should be inspired to like try that out right away. Now YouTube is an amazing resource and you go online and you just pick up like, I want to figure out like how to do this one thing and you can go watch a video and know exactly how to do that. But it always misses that roadmap. It misses from like A to Z. There's always like those unanswered questions and to fill that gap, I literally put a decade worth of experience and created a paid course. It's my masterclass. I call it Freelance Colorist Masterclass that takes you from a beginner to a pro. And starting August 24th through the 31st, you can get $300 off the masterclass if you sign up right now. Let's see what's inside FCM 267 curated on-demand lessons, 100 gigs worth of professionally shot practice footage, access to exclusive Facebook community, weekly coaching videos with tailor-made feedback. Our students are working with tier one companies such as Nikon, Porsche, Company 3, DJI, Formula 1, and the list goes on. I'm so confident that I'm throwing in a 30-day money back guarantee. So if for some reason it's just not your cup of tea, hit me up, you're going to get your money back. The link is going to be in the description. So go ahead, click on it, sign up for the masterclass. And on that note, let's roll the intro. Watch content with intent or purpose. Most of the time when we're watching TV, it's sort of like a passive entertainment, right? Like it's just happening and we could be zoning out, be on our phone. I don't want you to do that. I want you to do the opposite. I want you to have a notepad right in front of you, pause the frame, go back, rewatch something and then make sure that you dissect it. What's interesting about the frame? You'll be surprised to like how much orange and teal and those kinds of looks that we'll see are not necessarily made just with color grading. A lot of it is done through like costume design and art direction. If you're a content creator, you can start incorporating that kind of stuff in your concept development stage. And if you're just a colorist, then at least you can speak that language and translate that to your director. When somebody is looking for a teal and orange and they shot everything in a monotone fashion, then you can just explain to them like what's really going on and how that's just not realistic. It's not possible. And maybe we can try X, Y, and Z. Second point, think like a cinematographer. As colorists, we are basically cinematographers in post. That's why most colorists work directly with cinematographers, relighting stuff in post and trying to like see what couldn't get done on set and can be done in post. Not all the time, right? Like sometimes we're just making creative choices based on what the director wants. Having that critical eye and always looking at things from that perspective will give you such an unfair advantage. And that's why I personally love photography and I'm getting into it more and more lately. It helps me so much. Like, I'll be in Lightroom and I'm just like playing around with tone curves and then eureka moment and I try to implement it in Resolve on the actual project that I'm working on for a client and they absolutely love it. Number three, I got a challenge for you. Get your hands on some footage, grade something on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and I want you to do that for seven weeks. Create 21 total looks. And I want you to post these on your social media with at the Cosman challenge. And if you do that, I'm going to follow that tag. I'm going to go through those entries and I will be featuring those on my Instagram. So I want to see all of you participate in this competition is going to be so much fun and I promise you at the end of week seven, the growth is going to be exponential. All right, so now we're inside Resolve and this footage is shot on RE Amira and let's start with our project settings. So all I did here, I left this as YRGB and set my timeline color space to DaVinci wide gamut and then I'll show you guys how I'm going to set it up. Okay. So this is all that we need to worry about there. Again, focuses on getting core information and then start creating epic images. Okay. So what we're going to be using as our backbone for our look DNA is going to be this film print emulation 3513 and you can see that it was used on the Lord of the Rings series and tons and tons of other epic movies like I can just keep going and you can just kind of pause and see the list keeps going. Okay. So it goes for pages and pages. So it's a popular film print emulation, not as popular as 2383, but still very unique, very cool. So we're going to build this look based on that. I'm going to go ahead and just like lay out my node tree and then we'll go from there. So let's create, I think this is going to be a simple seven node node tree and you don't even have to worry about seven nodes because the first and the last one is just going to be our color space transform. Okay. So that's what's going to be happening here. So we're going to call this IDT input device transform. I'm going to call this balance and then this could be our look and then this is going to be our shaping our light. Then this one is going to be my custom curves or tone mapping is going to take place there. And then this one is going to be our CST. And then finally we're going to have our FBE, which is film print emulation. Okay. So that is the setup. And now what we're going to do is we're going to start off with our IDT. So we have to transform the image from log to rec seven or nine. So I'm going to bring in color space transform and I'm going to drop another one over here. Okay. So the first one we're going to just say, Hey, this is shot on Alexa. So RE wide gamut three and then RE log C three. Okay. And then here I'm going to say, I want to keep everything in DaVinci wide gamut. Okay. And I want to keep the most amount of dynamic range in here. And if you want to learn more about that, then you should definitely, definitely check out my course link is in the description. We have a full module taking you through color management fundamentals. Okay. And then now, now what we're going to do is I'm going to go here and I'm going to say the input color space is DaVinci wide gamut and the input gamma is DaVinci intermediate, my color space is going to be rec seven or nine. My output gamma is going to be Cineon. Why am I doing that? Because that's what I need to do to properly convert my film print emulation that I'm going to bring in, which by the way is available in DaVinci resolve for free. So the one that we're going to be using is the 3513 and I'm going to go with the warmer flavor. If you go down to 65, it gets cooler. 60 is sort of like a neutral zone and 55 is warmer. And that's what I'm going to start with. Okay. So this is rec seven or nine, and then this is where we are. And you can see like even a gentle contrast and how much detail we have in the eyes and all that. It looks really cool. But by applying this, you can already see that grading is never as easy as like, Hey, drop a lot and you're done. Right. And that's something that I want to make sure that comes across when we build this look. So the next step, what I'm going to do is this, I want to go into my gallery and I want to show you guys this still right here. So we're going to use this as sort of like a mood board, not necessarily our one-to-one match or anything like that. But when we look at something like this, and this is where developing the taste thing comes from, right? Like when I'm saying take notes, build your own reference gallery. So like, look at all these cool images that I have here. They're from bond to different shows I'm watching and stuff that I'm like really paying attention to and then going, all right, I got to bring this in because this just looks so good. So if we go back to our, this shot right here, it's from a music video and by Post Malone and I can look at this and go, okay, this looks really cool. Now we just got to kind of mimic that. Like I said, we just have to kind of get that feel with our own flair. So how do we go there? Because this, this is not going to be easy. I mean, look at this, right? So we've got to go there. I'm going to start off with my custom curve. Okay. So I'm going to do the tone mapping here and I just want it to be very, very gentle. So I'm going to raise this up a little bit. I'm going to pull this down quite a bit like this, and then we're going to start creating a very simple two-point curve. So I'm going to do something like this, and then I'm going to grab another point here and I'm going to raise it up to something like that. And I'm just kind of focusing on her eyes and I'm going to pull this out because I want it to be again, kind of gentle. And I don't want to lose too much detail. And then I'm going to take the top and I'm going to soften it a little bit. So even if I leave it somewhere around here, like before and after, just look at the difference that we created. How much more information we got, the eyes are still popping. It's looking really good. Now, if I need to make any changes, I'm going to come back and make those changes. But for now, what I want to do is I want to go balance my image. Okay. So this key is like way, way, way too much red and we can see it in our scopes. Everything is living in that quadrant. We can even see it in our colorized waveform. So I'm going to go into color. I'm going to make sure my printer light keys are turned on and I'm going to be using my full printer lights. I'm going to tell you what I'm doing and you're going to see the change happen right here. Okay. So I'm going to go ahead and subtract one red. And as soon as I do that, like look at the difference that it made. Pretty big difference. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to subtract some yellow. So as soon as I do that, like look at what's happening. I'm going to subtract one more yellow and that pretty much puts us in the ballpark and you can even see it in the waveform right here. You see like how much it cleans up and then you can see it in the parade right here. Like look at how the reds are lifted and then boom. Okay. So they're really, really getting in there. I'm going to do a plus one cyan and that kind of starts taking us into our, maybe we'll leave that as is because this is like really balancing. So I just want to balance my image. And if I hover over her skin, like look at the skin tones or right in the skin indicator line, like check this out. Boom. Okay. So everything is looking good. And if you're wondering like how the little circle is showing up here, if you go down here and just turn on display qualifier focus, that can happen very easily. And just make sure that qualifier is turned on here too. And then when you hover over, it's going to mimic that on your waveform, like what's happening. So this is where we're at with our balance right now. Everything is looking good. Now what we're going to do is we're just going to pop this open next to it. And then this is where we're just going to kind of roughly dial in the look. And again, like I said, I'm just using it as a mood board. I'm not going one-to-one. So here, what I need to do is like, okay, there's way too much red still. So I'm going to do plus one cyan, plus two cyan and see what happens. And all of a sudden we start seeing something very interesting, like I kind of like what's happening here. Like I really, really do. And then in this node, we're just going to kind of let loose and do a bunch of different things in here because this is our look node. So I can just go in here and, or actually, you know what, I want to, I want to go back in my curve and now I want to start adjusting it even more. So I can just grab it from here and start pulling it down. And you can kind of see like how it creates like this film curve, right? Like just look at how much of a difference like this curve makes. And we're only using two points, but what it's doing to the footage, like, I mean, this just looks so thin and then everything that's happening here is absolutely out of control. And at this point, what I want to do is one more thing. Remember I said, we're going to be reshaping light. We're going to be playing the cinematographer role in here. Let's do that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go under vignette. I'm going to just have like a circular window and the window is going to be something like this, not too crazy. And I'm going to rotate it, something like that. So it mimics kind of like this light that we're getting here and I'm going to leave it somewhere around here and I'm going to feather it quite a bit. Okay. Like I'm just, I'm going nuts. Like I'm going to go up to like something like 70 ish. And if I do shift H and you can see what's happening, I'm going to invert it. So I just don't affect anything in here, but everything outside of it. And now I'm going to go pretty aggressive. So I'm going to go under my gamma and I'm going to take my gamma and I'm going to pull it down quite a bit. And then I'm going to start going back like where it just feels kind of realistic. And I'm going to feather it out even more. And now I'm going to do before and after, and I'm going to take my gamma and pull it down even more. And this is what I meant by like relighting it, right? Like, so shaping light, that's what we're doing here. So it's very gentle. It doesn't feel like a vignette and yet we're creating like this really cool spotlight, if you will. Okay. And now if we go back here, what do we feel like? So I can go in here. What happens if we do plus one, like green? It's kind of cool. Again, we're creating a very, very stylized look. Okay. One more thing that I can do, I can go in my log wheels here and I can just take my shadows. I can go under my shadows and just add a little bit more magenta. And that's going to clean up the blacks a little bit, right? So like if I do before, and then if I do after, now that depends, right? Like you don't want to take away the personality of like what you're going after, but still it is kind of cool what it does. So this is before, this is after. I kind of want to split the difference because honestly I don't want to overdo it. I do like the little bit of green in there. So guys, just look at it, right? You saw how easy it was and how we created this. The only necessary information we needed was like right here. Hey, we're going to use a film print emulation. Where was it used before? I went to shot on what.com, looked it up. Okay. This is cool because I like how the Lord of the Rings movies look and all the other movies in here. So let's go ahead and try create something like this. So this that we created is simple five nodes where the action happened. And then two nodes, like I said, they're just playing as like a input device transform and output device transform. We ended up with such an incredible look because this is our rec 709. Okay. So this is our log. This is our rec 709. That's what we ended up with. And again, we went for style, we went for drama, and that's what I want you to do. I want you to push the envelope for the next seven weeks and create looks that you couldn't even imagine before. And obviously do your homework. Okay. Collect data, like collect these stills, study them, bring them in, look at it. Okay. Like, look at that. I'm breaking them up as cool. I'm going into push. Okay. These are push looks. Then we can look at warm and these are all like really cool, warm looks from different movies. And you'll probably recognize a lot of these. Okay. So I'm just going through and kind of seeing like, all right, what I like and what I don't like. And all right, let's try it out. Like maybe let's go for this look. So whatever it is, build that library, study it. And then once you keep practicing for seven weeks, you're going to become a tastemaker. You're going to get to a point where you will literally smoke the hell out of 99.9% of the so-called experts. So let's do a quick breakdown. We started with our IDT and then dropped on our LUT film print emulation. And look at this, okay, like how much of a difference was made after the LUT was applied. So the LUT was, if somebody, again, goes, you just drop on a LUT and you're done, like color grading is like dropping on a filter. It's not, it's far from it. Okay. Then we went ahead and created a custom curve. Okay. Balanced our image, created a really fun look, and then dropped on a vignette. And that is our final look. What we can do is we can go in our vignette and kind of, what we can do is first adjust it like that. And now let's check out the final look in full screen. Honestly this was a lot of fun for me and I hope the same for you. And guys, if you really want to take your color grading game to the next level, I promise you this is the best course out there on color grading. You're going to get full access to me. You're going to get full access to 5,000 plus students that are in this course. So check it out. Link is in the description. I want you to click on it. Just go through the site. See if that's something that interests you. Take advantage of the 30% off. It is massive. I want to see you guys inside FCM. Once you do join, let me know so I can know you personally. And on that note, guys, if you're enjoying the content, it will mean the world to me if you subscribe to this channel, hit the bell icon so you can be notified when we drop new content. Make sure to hit a thumbs up if you enjoyed this video so we can reach more awesome people like yourself. And I will see you guys in the next video. Love you all.