Speaker 1: Anybody can buy a preset nowadays and just slap it on their footage. Fact. For example, I sell my Cine LUTs 2.0 pack. Anybody can buy my LUTs that I use all the time, put them on their footage, but the question is, can you make your footage look consistent and crispy every single time? Let's take a look at how to do that. First, I'm going to go to my camera app. I'm going to go to my camera app, and I'm going to click on my camera app. I'm going to click on my camera app, and I'm going to click on my camera app. Let's take a look at how to color correct like a pro. I'm going to go through and show you guys some examples of how to color correct footage. Footage shot with this guy, Fujifilm X-T30. Friendly reminder, if you do want to win this one, you have a week to enter. I'll link it down below. But basically, when we're talking about color correcting, we're talking about exposure and contrast and color balance, and that we can then add on our look, our LUT, our preset, or our color grade. So color correcting always comes first, and then you add on the look, your preset, your LUT. And why is color correcting so important? Well, it basically makes or breaks your grade. Like I said, anybody can buy and slap on a preset, but can you actually make it consistently look good, nice and cinematic? Another massive thing is that all the footage in your sequence will actually match, and it won't be one clip looking really blue, and then the next clip looking all orange. You're going to have really consistent colors. Again, just making your video a lot better and look more cinematic. I'm going to warn you guys, this takes a lot of practice, but it is definitely worth it, and it's actually kind of fun once you understand what you're doing. Okay, so this is my workflow, and I'll show you a little bit of a different workflow also, but this is the way that I do things in Premiere. First off, I'm going to add a colorista, and then I'm going to have my Lumetri corrections, and then I'm going to have another colorista. And colorista is just a plugin basically for color correction. It's really handy. It's got some color wheels. You can change the contrast and exposure levels. There's just a lot of control that you have within colorista, and I really like it because you have control over the shadows, the mid-tones, and the highlights separately. And like I said, you can have a different workflow for color correcting your footage, but this is the way that I really like color correcting and then color grading. Also, it's good to know that it makes a massive difference which order you have these plugins. You should always be color correcting first, and then adding your color grade or your look. If you're doing it the reverse order, first adding on your look, and then trying to color correct, you've already manipulated your colors and your image so much that you can't color correct your footage anymore. You need to first color correct, and then add on your LUT. Now we can break down color correcting basically into two different parts, exposure or contrast, and your colors. Exposure has to do with how bright or dark your image is, but also the contrast, how much of a difference is there between the shadows and the highlights and the mid-tones. Now I rarely actually just change the overall exposure. I always like to manipulate the image using the shadows, the mid-tones, and the highlights. And to make color correcting a little bit easier in terms of exposure, we're gonna use the waveform scope. I've talked about this before, but it's basically your image from left to right from zero to 100. Zero being pure black, so anything below zero, there's not gonna be any detail in those shadows. And then 100 being your pure white, anything above that, there's not gonna be any detail in your highlights. Now my first step always in color correcting is taking the shadows and dropping them until something hits that zero mark. As soon as something hits it, that's where I stop. Then we do the same for the highlights. We take that and we bring it up until it hits that 100 mark. Now where this gets difficult is if there's nothing in your image that's supposed to actually be black, or if there's nothing so bright that it should be white. For example, if you don't have something like this black boot, or the sky in the background that's supposed to be pretty much white, where do you put the exposure levels? Do you always go to zero and 100? No. What do we do then? We look to our old friend Ansel Adams. He's basically an OG photographer, and he made this zone system for where exposure value should lie. And this is basically the exact same thing as your waveform from zero to 100. Here we're going from zero to 10, same thing. And we can, for example, look up pale white skin. Matt's kind of pale. And we can see that it's supposed to be around 70 in exposure. So if we take this portrait shot of Matt, there's nothing crazy bright. There's no bright sky. There's no light that's super bright. The brightest thing is actually his skin. So we shouldn't take it to 100. We should take it to about 70, and that's gonna be the proper exposure for his skin. And this is also how we deal with mid-tones. We just wanna make sure that the exposure values are lying in a natural place. And if we want to really zero in on something and see what exposure value it is right now, we can just add a mask around it. For example, his skin tones, we can just make a quick mask. And now in the waveform, we're only seeing the exposure value for his skin tone. So we can see exactly where the exposure is on his skin, and then we can tweak it. Once you're done, you can just delete the mask, and then we have the proper exposure values for the skin tones. And until you know kind of where the exposure should be, I would just look it up. Look at this Ansel Adams zone system and figure out where things should lie in their exposure values. Okay, so that's how we correct our exposure or our contrast. Now let's take a look at colors. When we're color correcting the colors, we want them to be balanced and natural. We don't want, for example, the skin tones to be really warm or really cool or too magenta or too green. We want natural-looking colors, and colors are a lot harder to deal with than contrast, in my opinion. It takes a lot more time to really see colors in their true form. And even if you're experienced, your eyes can really play tricks on you with colors. But to help us be a little bit more scientific, we can again use a scope. This time we're using the vector scope, and this one's basically just a color wheel, and it's showing where on that color wheel your colors are kind of going towards. So you can see whether your colors are a little bit too blue and they're going towards the blue direction, or you can see if they're a little bit too green and going towards the green direction. If it's a balanced image, the colors should gravitate towards the center of the vector scope. If they're not in the center, let's tweak them. How do we do this? Again, we're gonna take a look at the shadows, the mid-tones, and the highlights. Now usually I start with the highlights because I find that this fixes a lot of the color balance issues right away. So let's take a look at the highlights, the brightest parts of our image. Do they look too blue? Do they look too magenta or green? What's going on with the colors in the highlights? For example, here we can see that they're a little bit too magenta, and we can also see it in the vector scope that it's pushing towards the magenta area. So to fix this, we're just gonna take the highlights towards the opposite direction of magenta, which is green. Again, if you wanna be more specific, you can just do a mask around the highlights, and we can really see where are those colors going towards, especially if it's, for example, the sky. It should be pretty balanced, white right in the middle. It shouldn't be going in any direction. So you can really quickly see what direction you should be taking those highlights. And then we just do the same for the mid-tones and the shadows, paying special attention to the mid-tones because that's where the skin tones lie. You really want your skin tones to look natural, and that's probably the most important thing about color balancing or color correcting your footage. Just like with waveforms, we can use a quick mask to see the exact specific color of a certain area. Now this is where it gets a little bit tricky. I said that the color should be around the center, but a specific color, for example, skin tones here, shouldn't be in the center. They should be going towards the orange section of the vectorscope. Not towards yellow or magenta, but somewhere in the orange section. That's where they're gonna look natural. So overall, the colors should lie around the center of the vectorscope, but specific colors will go in the direction of that color. For example, a pink sign will not be in the center of the circle, and that is okay. The center of the circle is like a neutral gray, no color. So if your skin tones are looking too blue, take that mid-tone wheel and drag it towards the opposite direction, which is orange. Now that we've fixed the skin tones, the whole image looks a little bit too warm, and since the skin tones are good, we're just gonna add a little bit of blue to the shadows to cancel out some of that warmth. And this is what color correction is all about. With colors and with exposure also, you're gonna tweak one thing, and you're gonna have to change another setting because they all kind of affect each other a little bit. In this case, we changed the skin tones a little bit, and that affected the shadows in the whole image, so we need to correct for that in the shadows area. Also, adding a whole bunch of saturation can really help you see what's going on with the colors. So just add a bunch of saturation, check out the colors, fix it a little bit more, and then take off that saturation. Once the colors are balanced, we just need to take a look at saturation, and in that vectorscope, the further away the points are from the middle, the more saturated your image will be. The closer they are to the middle, the less saturated your image will be. And saturation is a little bit hard. There's no exact standard for how much saturation there should be, but I just basically kind of eyeball it, but don't go overboard with saturation. Once you add too much, it really just kills that cinematic look completely. More importantly, you wanna make sure that each of your clips has the same amount of saturation, so each clip, the colors should be going out from the middle of the vectorscope about the same amount. Once the color correcting is done, we go into the Lumetri, we add in our preset or LUT. In this case, I'm gonna use the Cinema LUT, which is part of my Cine LUTs 2.0 pack. Bring it way down, as usual, with LUTs, and then that last colorista is just tweaking the look a little bit. If I want the shadows to be a little bit more blue, or if I want ray shadows or dropped highlights, this is where you tweak that part. You do not do this part in the color correcting. The color correcting should make your image look natural, and then later on, you change the look, so on that last colorista is where I would really dial in the look. Whether I want it to be low contrast, high contrast, saturated or not saturated, really teal and orange or not so much, this is where you would manipulate the final look of your footage. Color correction is to make your footage look right, and then color grading is making that final look. Okay, let's just do one example, all in Lumetri. If you don't have colorista, which a lot of people don't have, you can do all of this in Lumetri, but you don't have quite as much control over it. So again, we start with the exposure. We're gonna take the blacks, we're gonna drag them down until we hit that zero level, and then we're gonna do the same with the highlights until they hit the 100 level. Then we can tweak the midtones, and that looks about right for exposure. Let's take a look at the colors. In this case, we're just gonna use the tint slider and the temperature slider, so if your footage looks a little bit too magenta, we're just gonna drag it towards green, and if it looks too blue, then we're gonna drag it a little bit more towards the warm direction. Remember, when you're trying to cancel out colors, you wanna add in the opposite of the color that you have in your image. Then we add the cinema LUT, and then we tweak the look to get it just right in the creative section using the color wheels and whatever other tools you want. The reason why I don't do everything in Lumetri is I want those color wheels before I add in the LUT, not just after. I want them before to color correct and then after to change the look. Plus, with Colorista, you have a lot of fine-tuning abilities using the HSL section, so yeah, I think it's a worthwhile investment to buy Colorista. I've been using it a ton ever since I started filmmaking. But everyone has their own workflow, so you just need to figure out what works best for you. Maybe you color correct using curves. I do not suggest this, but some people are really good with curves, and that's their most comfortable way of color correcting and color grading their footage. Whatever works for you, that's the best method. As long as you're color correcting, I don't care how you do it, but color correcting will always make your videos so much better. It'll make your footage look way more cinematic, way more consistent, and just have that nice, consistent crispiness every single time, not just when you add your LUT or your preset and you get lucky and it looks good. And lastly, remember, small tweaks go a long way with color correction. So, yep, that's how I color correct all of my footage. That is my process. I hope you learned something, and I hope you can take something for your own workflow. Okay, I'll see you guys later. Bye.