hey guys how’s it going welcome to another tutorial and this one’s gonna be all about color grading I get a ton of comments and questions saying that they like the color grades that I do asking how I do color grades and I’ve been trying to figure out how can I show more of that how can I give you guys more cuz at least for me I love seeing other people’s workflow what do they do what plugins do they use how do they manipulate things I really like seeing what other people do so then I can take some of those things into my own workflow and learn from them and I put a lot of work into color grading I don’t leave a single clip untouched every single clip has some sort of color grade to it I always color grade and the reason for that is that it’s a free easy way to make your footage look way better it just takes time and practice but it’s a free way of making your footage just look so much better so why wouldn’t you tap into that and just take your footage to the next level that being said it is also super hard it takes a ton of practice and just training of the eye in order to get really cool color grades but the only way to get better at is to just practice and just start doing it it is 100 percent doable don’t get discouraged and don’t get scared there’s a lot of things going on but it’s actually fairly simple once you get used to it so here’s how you can get a really cinematic color grade straight and premiere and a lot of these same principles apply to all the other editing programs but I’m just gonna show you guys how to do it in Premiere now my first step is to always start with a lot technically you should be color correcting and color balancing all your Clips first and then adding a LUT or color grade to it but I find that this just saves a lot of time especially for YouTube I just don’t have time to be going back and forth color correcting and grading and then correcting again so I recommend finding a let that you like and then using that as kind of your foundation right away and then just get into it it saves so much time using a lot instead of starting from scratch or doing the exact same things over and over again just use a lot and you have a great foundation to start from not to mention it can be really hard to actually make a cool and there’s all sorts of Luntz out there some of them are super good and some of them aren’t so good but I like seeing what other people’s let’s do it’s a good learning process so sometimes.
I’ll just get other people’s let’s and test them out to see what kind of stuff they’re doing to their footage so we’re gonna go into the creative tab and then I’m gonna choose a lot and I’m gonna be using the cinema love from my cine let’s pack these are the lots that I’m using exclusively for all of my videos so if you’re interested in them or you don’t have any lets you can check them out down below best 20 bucks you’ve ever spent I’m just kidding no pressure there’s tons of good Luntz out there but these are the ones that I’m gonna be using for this example now right off the bat this looks terrible it’s way too strong and that’s done on purpose so you can dial it down and tweak it to your liking in this case I’m gonna choose around 47% and this is the biggest key to making a really cinematic color grade is to keep things subtle never go too far with the color grade it should never be distracting the audience should never realize that this is color graded really heavy it should look natural but still cinematic at the same time especially skin tones you need to be really careful and treat them in a very subtle way skin tones are really tricky if they’re not spot-on our eyes can immediately see that next we start the tweaking process and this is where all the fun happens first off the temperature is a little bit off I think it’s a little bit too blue so we’re gonna bring it up a little bit to around 18 or 19 I also prefer a little bit more green in my image I don’t know why I just hate magenta for some reason so I’m gonna bring it down to around minus 6 then let’s play around with the contrast a little bit and this is where you can really experiment and see what works for your image for example here I don’t really like how bright the sky is it was a much more moody feel when we were filming so I’m gonna bring down the highlights around minus 55 is good and this is just affecting the brighter portions of the image for the most part then we’re gonna go up on the shadows a little bit this is kind of the darker areas of the image just to get some of that detail out we’re gonna bring it up to around 20 and then to get a little bit more contrast we’re gonna bring up the whites which is just the very brightest portion of your image basically just the sky here we’re gonna bring it up to 10 and keeping in line with being subtle I feel like this is just a little bit too saturated so we’re gonna bring it in just a little bit to around 95 then we’re gonna go into the three way color correctors and this is where I like to get a little bit more creative with the contrast and the colors basically just adding to the color grade or tweaking it a little bit and for the most part I like what’s going on I’m just gonna drop the shadows a little bit to get a little bit more of that moody look and then we’re gonna raise the mid-tone so we’re not losing detail there and then one thing I think we’re missing here is a little bit of color contrast the sky was this nice orange so we’re gonna add a little bit of orange to the highlights so we can get some color contrast going on in this image between the blue and the sky being a little bit more Orange so take the highlights wheel and drag it towards the orange area be really subtle about this but you can really see how it makes the sky pop now in contrast to the rest of the image now that looks really cool already but again it’s the subtle little things and for me the skin tones could be a little bit better in this image I feel like they’re a little bit too dark a little bit green and maybe a little bit too saturated but I don’t want to affect the whole image I just want to be touching up the skin tones so we can go into the HSL secondary and here we can choose just the color of the skin tones we can use this eyedropper to actually select only a part of the image and here we’re going by color so we’re gonna choose the color of the skin tones and you can check this little box here to see what’s being selected and if it didn’t work out properly you can adjust the hue saturation and also the luminance of your selection to really refine it then I like to denoise that selection around 15 works well here and also blur it a little bit so it just blends in better I’m gonna choose around 5 here this is really important so it’s not super obvious that you’re just changing the colors and the skin tones if you have no blur or no denoising you can get some really funny looking stuff and it just looks really weird alright so first off we’re gonna get rid of some of this green in the skin tones we’re gonna go into the three way color corrector and we’re gonna move the mid-tones to the opposite direction of green to get rid of that green which is the magenta area now remember stay subtle don’t go too far with it otherwise you’re going to end up with magenta skin tones we’re gonna bring up the exposure a little bit just to brighten up the skintone so they pop a little bit more so you can just bring up the shadows the mid-tones and highlights and just play around to see what works best for you then we’re gonna sharpen a little bit just to make that face really pop around 20 is good here and then we’re gonna desaturate take it down to around 80 an oversaturated face can be really distracting and now I don’t really know exactly how these colors are gonna turn out in YouTube but this is a great way to tweak exactly what you need more specifically especially with skin tones all right we’re all done so here’s the before and here’s the after so you can see there’s definitely a big change but it’s a really subtle look it’s not over-the-top it’s nice and subtle nice and cinematic and that is the biggest key with getting a really cinematic look do not go over the top with it alright I hope you guys enjoyed seeing a little bit of my workflow and how I would do things and if you like this kind of video make sure to comment down below and I’m gonna try to think of different ways that I can bring more color grading onto the channel because I feel like it’s a really important thing that we can all do it’s super accessible and completely free unless you need some sort of plugins but everybody can be doing this alright that’s it for this tutorial I hope you guys enjoyed it hit that like button subscribe the channel I love having guys here alright see ya you
