From the course: Creating a Short Film: 11 Color Grading

Using curves to create a cinematic look - Premiere Pro Tutorial

From the course: Creating a Short Film: 11 Color Grading

Start my 1-month free trial

Using curves to create a cinematic look

- All right, folks. I'm excited about this one. This might be one of the best tutorials in this entire course, certainly one of the most helpful. As I mentioned a little bit earlier on, like one of the things that makes things look cinematic is color contrast. And in this image, there's not too much color contrast. There's just a white background, lots of white pieces and then there's like some red here and red in their skin tones. So there isn't too much color contrast. I mean, it's not completely monochromatic. I mean, there's like reds and warm tones and there's white but we really don't have too much strong contrast. So there's these, you know, orange-y flesh tones but not the opposite of that. And so what we want to do with Curves here is we want to create some of that cinematic contrast. And the way that we do that typically in like film color correction is that we want to warm the highlights which brings out the skin tones and makes them feel more rich and vibrant and then we also want to do the opposite to the shadows. We want to cool the shadows. So I'm going to go ahead and make this medium size again so we can really see what's going on here and I'm going to go into the red color channel, which is where this typically happens here. And what I want to do is I want to boost the reds just a little bit in this case, just a little bit, and then I want to darken or take red out of the shadows. And you can kind of see what's happening here. Actually, let me go ahead and exaggerate this effect a little bit. I'm going to add a little bit more warmth to the highlights and I'm going to take a little bit more red out of the shadows and keep kind of fiddling with this until I have almost an exaggeration of this. But now what I'm going to do is I'm going to reset so you can see the difference. So here's the after and then here is the before. So you can see that when I reset that, it's almost like it reddened the shadows and these other details here in the background. It's almost like it put a red wash over everything. But realistically, it didn't. We just put the red back in the shadow areas and we took red out of the characters' faces. So I'm going to put that back. And by the way, one of the things I typically do, this is like a weird trick, this is not an official thing, I've just noticed this from working, I don't think there's any kind of like science to this, but I typically use the S curve, which you can kind of see in the background here, like the white S curve, I use that as kind of like a basic starting point for my red channel adjustment. So basically, I'm going to take the highlight in the red channel to the point that they were at in the RGB curve. Likewise, I'm going to take out red, kind of like what we did to the shadows in the RGB curve as well. So my red curve kind of mimics the RGB curve and I usually find that that's a pretty good starting point. But I can fiddle with this a little bit more if I want to. And one of the things I did in this project that's a little bit different than what we saw in the last tutorial is that in setting up this one, I used the IPP2 workflow, so then I went back to my Lumetri Color panel and I reduced the vibrance a little bit. So we can take that back up so we can see a little bit more, and I also decreased the saturation a little bit so you can take that back up to 100% so we can see what this would be like at full saturation. And now it seems a little overkill and we have a little bit of like red over here and I'm not sure I'm totally liking that, so I actually might want to take this back down to about 85%. But what a difference, right? It's so cinematic now. We're really telling a story. We're not just recording image. This doesn't look like, you know, somebody's like backyard party or something. Like, this looks like a movie and it's because of this cinematic curve. It's because we added warmth to the highlights and took away red from the shadows. So there's again color contrast. There's separation between these shadows that are now cool and the highlights, which are warm. And that's really what cinematic means. Cinematic means that we're telling a story. And as we pull colors away from the skin tones, the story of this image, this visual even, is that these people are now more important because we've gotten rid of fluff and other colors that were kind of getting in the way. We've isolated them. It's almost like depth of field on a camera but instead of using blur, we're using isolation of skin tones in order to make them pop. Now, we could also go in and maybe like add some more green to the shadows if we wanted to. I don't typically do this but, you know, if we wanted to like leave the highlights or the mid tones where they're at for the green and then maybe just like click here and just boost the greens in the shadows or whatever so we have more of like a Matrix-y sci-fi thing. I don't know. I don't really like very much in this case. I'm going to go ahead and hit command or control Z to undo that. But that is an option. Another thing that I like to do is there's a Red Giant Mojo, which is a really cool color grading effect, and the purpose of Mojo is to do this very thing. I'm just going to go ahead and turn off Curves for a second. But Mojo does this very thing where it warms the highlights and then cools the shadows and so then we can, you know, tweak the tint as far as how much magenta and blue there is. Same thing here too, we can squeeze the skin tones together so we get just those and then also squeeze the shadow areas if we want to. We could take down the strength. We can use one of the presets here if we want to, you know, just have a jumping off point to play with this a little bit. But all of these looks are attempting to do something similar in that that they are warming the highlights and cooling down the shadows 'cause it's such a popular thing to do. And I'm showing you this because there are a lot of different ways to warm the highlights and cool the shadows. Sometimes, as in this case, it's basically just a wash of, you know, bluish green but then we just have a little bit of this skin tone that pops out and is allowed to kind of stick out and so we have so much contrast. Again, I think this is a little bit overdone in this case but all these options are here to play with because this is how you create cinematic color, just this combination here. I'm just going to delete Mojo here. Just this combination of warming the highlights and cooling off the shadows.

Contents