Is color grading difficult ?

Is color grading difficult ?

This shot has a major problem if you look into the sky you see all of this banding now this shot is from an adventure film that I just finished and I posted a few days ago all around my trip to death valley and in this project, I had a lot of really complicated color grades because out in death valley you have this stark contrast between super bright highlights and super dark shadows and so when you start pushing

Your colors around and doing a color grade parts of the image will break apart now this shot was filmed on the DJI Mavic 3 and I don't have the cine version so I'm not using apple prores and you're limited even with a 10-bit camera you can still push the image too far and you'll have issues like this where the sky has this crazy banding in it so in this video I'm going to teach you how to fix a problem like this in your color grades and if you're new here

This channel my name is Kevin Dovey and on this channel, I'm going to teach you how to make better videos one of my passions is making adventure films like this so make sure you hit that subscribe button and turn on those bell notifications so you don't miss any of these videos now let's take a look at this shot so I have the sequence here where we're traveling across the desert and we get to the trona pinnacles and the trona pinnacles is this really

Interesting place in California and I wanted to have this super strong contrast to show the shadows and the highlights when we were in this space and you'll see at this moment where the problem is happening I have an adjustment layer and on this adjustment layer I have a custom lut that is my Mavic 3 conversion now this takes my footage from log to a standard look it's still not perfect because with every shot you do have to do modifications

When you're converting it from log to a color grade and also in this adjustment layer I added some saturation with this plug-in now the reason I'm using an adjustment layer is that I'm trying to affect all of these clips that I used for this part of the sequence they're all shot in log and they're all shot from the Mavic 3 at around the same time frame so I'm using an adjustment layer with the base conversion and some saturation that's just going to affect

For all the clips now from here each shot I have to go in and color grade independently so on this specific shot I added a color curve and I added a pretty strong s-curve now an s-curve will make the highlights brighter and the shadows darker and a lot of times if you just want that cinematic look adding an s-curve makes a huge difference so when I added that s-curve it started causing issues in the highlights and that's where I have all this banding so we need

To fix this banding and what we're going to do is mask off this section and add a blur now one thing I want to mention is that using this method only works on areas of your footage where it's not the focus because we are going to be blurring part of your image this is going to help when you have things like banding in the sky or tons of noise in your shadows areas that are not the main focus of the video if you have a crazy issue like banding or noise

Or color blocking happening on your subject well this isn't going to help you fix it but this will help in a lot of situations where there is an issue in the sky and it's just completely distracting for the viewer who's watching the video so I'm going to use what's called a mask so we're going to add this to a different timeline just so we could see this by itself and I want to duplicate this shot and add it on top and the reason is we are going to

Use a mask and only affect a certain part of the image so in the final cut, I have all of these different mask options, and depending on which color grading program you're working in you'll just have to find where the mask option is so this is where you can select part of the image and the rest of the shot is not affected so an easy way to do this is turn off the shot that's underneath and let's just adjust the shot that's on top so I'm going to draw a mask around the

Problem area by just using these control points and I want to just select this one area now what I'm going to do is feather it because I don't want the edges to be super harsh we want to blend this into the rest of the footage now I'm going to zoom in so we can see the issue that's happening up here in the sky close and you can see that we have all this banding going on so I'm going to pull up an effect I'm going to use a gaussian blur and I'm going to add

To this shot now as you can see when I added that gaussian blur it completely removed all the banding so I'm going to take off this blur until I start seeing those bands and then I'm going to bring the blur back up until they're completely gone I only want this effect to be as strong as it has to be I don't want it to completely blur the image because effectively what we're doing is we're creating a little bit of blur in this

Problem section and it makes things like noise or banding go away so you don't see it however if you put this on too strong it'll just look like you blurred the image so let's zoom back out to 25 percent let's turn on this bottom shot and let's play this back and we can play this back and it looks like there's still a little bit of a banding issue so I'm going to turn up the gaussian blur just a little bit more and now some of these edges do

Look a little blurred around the clouds so I'm going to readjust my mask I'm going to go back in here grab the mask and just readjust this so that I don't see those clouds blurred because when you have a shot where everything's super clear but then you have this weird blurring happening on edges around the problem area it'll be noticeable when you're doing a cleanup like this you want to make it hidden so people don't notice that you've fixed that part of

The image and so once we've cleaned up all these control points we can readjust the gaussian blur if we need to and now we have a shot where we fix the banding in the sky now if you want to learn my complete 

By Anil Rana