Speaker 1: For as long as I can remember, getting this cinematic look is something that has always fascinated me. As filmmakers we spend years dreaming of making films look like the ones we love and admire. But then there's this gap between what we see and what we actually get. So what is the difference and what are we missing? It makes sense that if we want to achieve a certain big budget look, we need to understand the 7 elements that gets this cinematic look in the color grading. For example, how does a film like The Joker, shot digitally, look as though it was captured on film and yet people rave about its color grading? Or what makes images in the Revenant pop with so much rich contrast? How does this image from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood not look dull although half of it is a plain sky with no detail? Or how does No Time to Die manage to make Bond stand out in each scene with only color separation? In this video I'm going to break down the 7 fundamental elements you need to know and start doing to get the filmic or cinematic look in the color grade. Now, whether you're a beginner and you're just starting out or the cinematic look has continued to be elusive to you, you're going to be able to see the 7 steps in the most popular editing programs of Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve. And at the end I'm going to reveal a cool shortcut for implementing these 7 steps effortlessly. Now before we get to the first step, you'll need to have your base correction done. So if your footage is in log or if there are exposure or color bounce issues, you'll need to address those first. Alright step number one, getting the tone contrast of film. The foundation of what makes the cinematic look is getting the tonal contrast of film with its rich contrast. But more than just cranking up the contrast knob or slider, there is an optimal way to do it. The best way to do it is with the curves tool. This gives more granular control over the overtones and undertones, the areas here and here. The midtones in the middle are left alone and the deepest blacks and brightest whites remain the same. This lets us dial in just the right amount of density or tonality in the shadows and highlights and gives us the signature S tone curve of film. Step number two, gentle roll off in the highlights. When you look at video, you most often see the highlights are stretched to the top of the waveform making them look harsh and even sometimes blown out. Film on the other hand has a nice organic transition or roll off in the highlights. When we examine a frame from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in the waveform, we see that the trace doesn't extend to the top of the waveform yet still retains some texture and tonality. When we compare it to a similar scene with the same context, the highlights go to the top of the scope and looks more characteristic of video and less filming. So how do we create this effect? Using the curves tool, we'll bring down the top highlights point creating a nice curve like a shoulder easing the brightest parts into a gentle roll off. Step three, milky black look. Have you ever noticed in films how the shadows, no matter how dark they are, are elevated and never pitch black? There's a certain grayish quality to them. To see this, let's take another shot from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and we can see this in the tonal range in the waveform. This makes a lot of sense as Quentin Tarantino is a big advocate of film and certain film stocks exhibit milky or elevated blacks. To achieve this look, we'd pretty much go about it the same way we did when creating a gentle roll off in the highlights though this time instead we're going to bring the shadow point down a bit and bring up the very bottom point from absolute black compressing the tonal range and creating a knee between the undertones and the shadows. Now when we compare it to the scene from Once Upon a Time, we're getting those beautiful milky blacks. Step four, teal and orange look. The teal and orange look is iconic and for a very good reason. First you get a mild teal and orange look out of certain film stocks but the real reason why it's so appealing is because of the separation it creates between our talent and everything else. Skin tones pop because they're in the orange range while everything else is tinted teal. It makes it look as though the characters are jumping out of the screen. The easiest way to create the look is to use a qualifier to select the skin tones. Then once we have a good color mask, we'll invert it and push some teal into the shot with the color wheels. Then just use the luma versat curve to clean up the shadows. And that's it. A big budget look in really just two steps. Step five, attention to skin tones. Now you might be thinking we just covered teal and orange to make the skin tones pop but we need to take them further in a way that's common in feature films. Our main focus is our talent. So to make them pop more, we'll use either a qualifier or a mask to isolate the skin tones and bring up the mid tones. We can even play with the contrast a bit too. You'll see how faces gain a three dimensional quality and become the focus of our image. It's little tweaks like these that really makes your films stand out. Step six, color density. If you really want to match the color of film, pay attention to how dense certain colors look. This is because the chemistry of photochemical film creates different results than the color science of digital video. Notice how certain reds and skin tones look more rich and dense. For us, to match the density of colors in film, we turn to the luma versus hue curves. By isolating the red range with two points and then a middle point, we can drag it down to match the color density in the skin tones. You can also play around and do the same thing with other colors like green and blue to match the same deepness and richness of film. Step seven, halation. If you look at film, especially old films, you'll notice a reddish or orange glow near the contrasting boundaries of overexposed areas. This phenomenon is called halation and it's a consequence of how light bounces between the layers that makes up film. Let's see how to simulate this on an image where the effect can be seen more clearly. First, we need to isolate the highlights either with a luma cure or qualifier or an extract effect. Then we need to tint and brighten the highlights, add a gaussian blur effect, and change the composite mode to screen. We can change the intensity effect by adjusting the opacity until we get the right look. Notice how the halation shows up at the boundaries of all these points of light and even in some reflections. I'll quickly apply the halation effect to our three original shots and now let's see the before and after with all seven steps applied at the same time. Makes a big budget difference. By following these steps in your own films, you'll be making more cinematic looking video. Now I mentioned at the beginning a shortcut to applying the cinema look to your video. My own obsession has led to the cine look LUT that I've been making iterations on for years. The LUT is encoded into cinema grade so it's not available on the market as a LUT. But for the same price as a LUT, you're able to get point and click grading for your editing software as a plugin. This makes getting the cinema look super fast and easy. Here are some examples of cine look being applied with cinema grade to get all the characteristics and subtle nuances of film. Cine look is only available for a limited time and on a limited basis. In order to get it, after your purchase of cinema grade, send us an email to support at cinemagrade.com with subject line cine look bonus and we'll update your license to unlock cine look. Start utilizing these techniques to get the cinema look and check out cinema grade for an even easier way to an expensive cinema look. I'll include a link for cinema grade in the description below and for more videos like this, click the subscribe button and then the bell to be notified of our next one. I'll see you in the next video. Let's make cinema quality video.