How to iPhone Footage Color Grading
Yo what's up guys I recently posted a poll in the community and many of you wanted to know how I color grade my iPhone footage and that's what we're going to look at today the footages we will be using was all shot on the iPhone using filmic pro's log v2 picture profile as this gives me more flexibility for color grading in post
Now I will be using final cut pro x as this is my main editing software so first I will quickly show you how I set up my timeline for color grading and then we will move on to the main part which is base correcting and creating the look of your video and if you stick till the end I will show you how you can create your own popular
Orange and teal look there will be a timestamp below if you want to skip or go back to a particular part of the video so these are the three footages we will be grading today so the first step I do in my color grading workflow is set up my workspace for color grading now I have created my workspace already where I have my viewer video scopes inspector timeline
And effects now this is my personal preference but you can, of course, create your own so once you have your color grading workspace set up you can save it or if you made any changes you can update it by selecting window workspace update workspace or save workspace as this method is really useful since I can
Quickly select my caller workspace and get started with color grading so now that I have my workspace set up I will start by base correcting the clip this is where I correct the exposure and color balance of the image to do that I used scopes that are helpful for base correcting the image so the first scope that is great for
Evaluating the exposure in an image is the waveform luma this is my go-to scope for correcting exposure the scope is read from left to right which corresponds with the image the trace information is read from top to down with the highlights at the top and the shadows at the bottom you will also notice the numbers on the left which range from -20 to 120
Ire where 100 is white and zero absolute black it's important to not go beyond that range because going above 100 will blow out your highlights and going below zero will crush your shadows so if you haven't already opened up your color wheels where we will start our base correction with these wheels you can adjust brightness saturation and separately control everything with the
Master wheel with these wheels I can adjust the highlights mid-tones and shadows the highlights affect the brightest part of the image the shadows the darkest part of the image and the mid-tones everything in between I start by correcting the shadows then the highlights and last the mid-tones so I can now bring down these shadows a little bit until it touches the zero and
Mask drag it over and then I'm gonna just create a mask around his face like that make sure to just get the skin and as you can see it's between 50 and 70 ire and that's good and for the last step I will increase the saturation so next we will color correct white balance issues you want to make your whites look white and your blacks look black for this i
Like to use the RGB parade so when an image is balanced the red green and blue traces align with each other in the highlights and shadows if an image is unbalanced the red blue and green channels will appear offset causing a strong color to be dominant so the first thing I do is I try to find out which color dominates the image
And subtract that color now here's a big tip most of the color balance issues can be corrected with the highlights control so the image already looks well balanced but I feel it's a bit too warm when I shot this video it was quite cold outside and cloudy so I'm gonna drag the highlights into the blues making it cooler if you're starting out correcting white balance issues can be challenging so what
You can do is to auto-correct your white balance it does a decent job but in most cases, you will need to make further adjustments you can also use a white balance picker if you have a wide reference in your image to get more accurate results so next, we're going to look at the vectorscope so the vectorscope is like a color wheel and is helpful
For analyzing the color in your image you have your primary and secondary colors shown the center represents white and the more you move away from the center the more saturated the color will get in the image the boxes represent 100 of the color and you want to make sure that you don't go beyond that otherwise the image will look oversaturated and make the subject appear
Unhealthy using the vectorscope is a great way to create continuity in your shot but also great for especially getting nice-looking skin tones the white line serves as a guide for correcting skin tones and most of the ideal skin follow along with that line a great way to adjust your skin tones if they're off is to create a color mask around your subject's skin and additionally use a
Shape mask to really just affect the skin tones and not anything else so the skin tones actually look good on him already but just to demonstrate it I will add a color mask like this and then add a shape mask around his face so that it will only affect that area and then usually if it's too green I can
Take the mid-tones and move it a little bit away from green subtracting it usually with smartphone footage you don't have a lot of color grading options usually you just tweak a little bit to get your desired look if you have a hard time seeing it you can also draw a mask around the subject's skin to see what's going on on the vectorscope now that I base corrected
For the clip I will do the same process for the other clips adjusting each individually again you don't want to add the same base correction to the other clips because not every clip is exposed the same way so for this clip I will again use the waveform luma and I will open up the color wheel and I will start with the shadows dragging it until it touches zero and
The highlights touching hundred I will add contrast to it and this already looks really good color balance in the clip using the RGB parade let's see what happens if I add auto white balance and it makes it super warm and if I choose manual white balance with the picker so as you can see with the picker you get accurate white
Balance if you have any white reference in your clip so this looks really good I'm just going to increase the saturation boom so I now want to check if the skin of my subject is well exposed I'm going to drag a mask onto the clip and draw it around her skin so it's a little bit under the usual value so I'm going to
Luma and I'm going to open up the color wheels and I'm going to drag the shadows until it touches 0 and the highlights until it touches 100 and increases the contrast by lowering the mid-tones like that and I'm gonna open up the RGB parade the white balance on this image looks pretty good so I'm gonna leave it that way so now that we have made our base correction to all of the clips
We can create a look now you could use those clips as a finished product but since I like to take it further I want to give the clips a cinematic look so for the first clip I will be using my creative lut that I have made which will make the image pop more and give it a nice moody look so to do that I will first create an adjustment layer and drag the custom lut
Into that layer now click on the layer and select um my lut which is the cold steel lut I'm gonna open that up and there you have it it's a bit too strong for my taste so I will dial it back down a little bit about 85 and that already looks pretty awesome must be a very cold winter by the way the adjustment layer is free
To download it if you don't have it yet the link will be in the video description below and what an adjustment layer does is that it applies the creative look to all of the clips that are below that adjustment layer if you're interested in the luts I use I have them available for purchase on my store which also helps support this channel if you don't have a creative lot or don't feel like
Spending money doesn't worry I will show you how you easily can create your own orange and teal look so we're gonna do that with our second clip so to do so add a new color wheel to the adjustment layer and push the shadows into the teals and the mid-tones into the oranges again you want to adjust the intensity by dragging back the mixing tool and what I also want to do to make it
Pop more is add contrast by dragging down the mid-tones even more so what I want to do is make her skin tones pop a little bit more so I'm going to add another color wheel and select the color mask and just select her skin that and what I can do is increase the saturation and also push it a little bit into the orange area
Not too much otherwise she will look unhealthy so this already looks good I'm gonna use the vectorscope just to check if her skin tones are on that skin tone line and yes it is everything looks well and here is the difference before after you see how the image pops more and same goes for this shot as you can see there is a difference
Now before exporting the project when working with smartphone footage I like to add a little bit of denoiser and sharpness this overall cleans up the image a little bit so for that I will use another adjustment layer to layer it over all clips so I'm going to drag the noise reduction into that adjustment layer and here I can add the amount
Of noise reduction will keep it low and sharpness low as well and I will export the project that way so hopefully you got a basic understanding of the workflow and the thought process behind color correcting and color grading so that you can make your iPhone footage look the best keep in mind that it takes practice in time you will soon realize that color
Correcting and color grading can be fun so if you have any questions feel free