Hi, I'm Ed Wu of WuHawk Productions.
In today's tutorial, I'll be going into the primary room of Apple's Color to correct
some footage that was improperly white balanced.
Let's check it out.
So here we are in Apple's Color and I have two clips here on the timeline, one of which
is shot improperly, color balanced.
It is more blue and then the other one is warmer and underexposed and we're going to
correct these to make them look properly white balanced.
So our first clip, if we look at our histogram, which is always the first thing I look at,
you can see the slight incline in the shadows over here, which means that our blues, which
on this histogram, it is split into three sections.
The left is stands for red, the middle stands for green and the right stands for blue, RGB.
So as we can see, we have an incline going towards the blue, which is why our footage
is primarily blue or toned.
And we can see our mid tones are kind of doing the same thing, but our highlights are very
warm up here.
So we're going to fix that.
So the first thing that we're going to do is we are going to come to our color wheels
up here.
I primarily like to use the color wheels over the curves down here, but that's really personal
preference.
So we're going to adjust the shadows first, where it's zero I or E right here, a little
above, this is where our shadows are.
So we're going to adjust that because the bottom right of the color wheel is representative
of blue and aqua color, we're going to go opposite away from that.
We're going to go towards these ambers and these oranges.
So we are going to go up towards the orange.
And right now I'm hitting option.
And what this allows me to do is I can move this cursor freely rather than if I let go
of option, if I let go right now, I am moving the mouse a lot, but it's not really moving
too much.
So this is more for finessing, doing some finesse work.
So I'm going to watch the histogram over here, and I'm going to try and level them out so
that they're evenly across.
And we move down, we adjust.
If we watch, if I move down towards the green, we can see this green is going up.
The image is definitely greener and we are taking down the amount of red in the image.
So we are going to push that back up and we're pretty close and yeah, right about there.
That looks pretty properly white balance.
This is pretty evenly dispersed across.
So after we adjust the shadows, we're going to adjust the highlights.
This image is naturally more amber toned in the image.
So we're going to push this down and that looks like it's pretty well white balanced.
And lastly, we're going to go to the mid tones.
The mid tones, we're going to adjust towards warmth.
And the way that we adjust these mid tones is if we look down here at the vector scope,
this line right here, right here, this is representative of skin tone.
This is where we want our skin tones to be.
So we're going to really look at the character's face here and really finesse on where that
is going to be.
So we're going to get a right on that line and that looks pretty good.
Our image is looking pretty good right now, but obviously our contrast is very minimal
right now.
We can see we're not stretching out to 100, we're not stretching down to zero.
So right now, we are going to crush our blacks.
What that means is we're going to come over here to the right side, master lift, master
gain and master gamma.
We're going to push this master lift down and get that close to zero.
You can see that already makes the image look a lot better.
We have a lot more contrast, the shadows are pulled down so they look actually dark and
they actually look black.
I'm going to push that up a little bit.
And now after that, we go to the master gain and on the master gain, we're going to stretch
this out here so that we're not peeking above 100, but we're getting close to 100.
So we're going to push that up here, I'm scrolling on the mouse, it's the easiest way
to do this.
We're going to scroll up and we can see that we are starting to blow out our footage on
his hand right here because he's getting close to the light that's over here.
So we're going to come back down and make sure that we're not peeking there.
All right, that looks about good.
And now we're going to adjust the mid-tones, the gamma.
Again, this is adjusting primarily for the skin tone.
So if we look at a skin tone, it's looking a little bright overall, so we're going to
bring that down and we're going to bring that gamma down.
And as you can see, if I adjust one thing, everything else is adjusted.
So the shadows are pushed down even more because I pushed that in that gamma and the highlights
have now gone down because I pushed down that gamma.
So we have to readjust those other settings after we adjust the gamma.
So we're going to push back the gain up and that stretches out our footage a little better.
And I'm going to bring back the shadows up a tiny bit just because the violin right here
is a little dark for my taste.
So we're going to bring that up a little bit.
And it looks like our footage is now leaning a little towards the warm side of the shadow.
So I'm going to bring this back down in the color wheel.
And this is looking a little better now.
Bring down the highlights.
And now I'm just finessing all of the settings with my eye basically.
I'm looking at my color calibrated monitor and kind of adjusting to what I think will
look properly white balanced.
And this is looking pretty good.
I'm pretty satisfied with this.
So now we're going to look at the actual footage here and see what it looks like when we move
it.
So we definitely always have to do this because we're never, we have to look at what's at
the beginning of the clip and then what's at the end of the clip because this isn't
still photography.
This is moving pictures.
They're always changing.
So we have to make sure that if some sort of light turns on or something later, look,
if I like this hand right here, it's getting closer to that light, which means that is
going to be different from if I corrected this original footage when there's nothing
close to that light.
So we have to compensate for that.
So we're going to go to that part and we can see his hand is a little overexposed.
So we're going to bring down this master gain a tiny bit and we just fixed it.
All right.
So now that we've properly white balanced this first clip, I'm going to go to the second
one and walk through this clip as well.
This clip is underexposed.
I'm looking at it on the histogram.
I'm looking at the preview monitor.
I'm looking at my vector scope and I can see that it's leaning towards the warm tone of
sides things, and again, the contrast is not stretched out.
So let's start again with the color wheels.
I'm going to start with the highlights this time because I can clearly see that there's
a shift towards the red.
So I'm going to push that away from the reds here and I'm going to press option again
and level that out.
And that looks about even.
So we're looking at this histogram here and that looks pretty even across.
Now I'm going to adjust the shadows.
So I always go highlights, shadows, mid tones, or shadow highlights, mid tones.
Mid tones are usually the last one that I do.
So I'm going to adjust this down and add a little more blue in it.
And then our mid tones, we can kind of see in the middle here that they're a little leaning
towards the red as well.
So we're going to push that down.
And that's looking a lot better in our image.
But now because I adjust that mid tones, our highlights are changed a little bit.
So we're going to adjust that now.
We're going to add a little more warmth back in there.
And that's looking pretty good.
We're going to adjust the highlights a little, or the shadows, I'm sorry, shadows a little
bit.
And that's looking pretty good.
Now we have to adjust the contrast.
So I can see by the histogram that the highlights are way farther down than they should be.
They're down at IRE 80.
So I'm going to start with the master gain.
Typically we would start with the master lift and crush the blacks, but since I can see
that this master gain is really far low, I'm going to increase the master gain first.
So I'm going to stretch that up here.
And I'm bringing it to 100.
And there we go.
See our image is a lot brighter now.
The snow is closer to what snow is typically going to look like, closer to white.
And then I'm going to bring down the master lift to compensate off of that and crush the
blacks a little bit.
So now we see in his hair, in his jacket, those black areas are getting darker.
I'm going to bring that up a tiny bit so that we're not going all the way past zero.
So now because we pushed down the blacks again, our gain and our brights are brought down
as well.
So we're going to adjust that and push that back up.
And now we're going to adjust the gamma.
We can see in his face that it's kind of dark and in her face, she's kind of dark as well.
So we're going to adjust the gamma here.
We're going to push this up.
And then we're going to find a kind of a middle space of where we think our skin tone is going
to be.
And that looks about right for a sunny day.
And now we have to re-tweak the lift and the gain.
So we're always readjusting after we adjust another setting.
So we're going to push down this lift and get some nice contrast in there.
Push the gamma back up a tiny bit.
And this is pretty good.
I think I like the way that this image is looking.
You can tweak with your saturation in here and your highlight saturation, shadow saturation
as well, but typically I do those in the secondaries.
And if you have multiple clips that were shot all underexposed on the same day because you
didn't change your settings, you can save this gray that you just did, this primary.
By going over here, I have a bunch of primaries set already, but you can hit save and this
appears and I'm trying to find it right there.
So now you can see the visual clip, the image as you see right here that it's corresponding
to this image here.
So if we wanted to load that onto another clip, we just find it on the timeline and
then we hit load.
And so that is an easy way to correct a bunch of footage, a bunch of clips that you had
already previously underexposed or had the same setting.
So that would be the way that you save and load presets.
And that is my tutorial for the primary in-room of Apple Color.
Head over to my website to check out some of my work and some of my other tutorials at
www.WooHawkProductions.com.
And I hope you enjoyed this and I'm Ed Woo for WooHawk Productions and thank you for
watching.
