Colour Grading Practice

-Colour Grading Before/After-

In this video I am showing my gained knowledge of colour grading throughout the last week or so. I want to apply these grades into our final production as I think it will make it not only look more appealing, but also more professional. To grade, I used Adobe Premiere Pro - due to the fact that it has a built in lumetri colour panel where you can adjust hue, saturation, highlights, shadows, primers and add LUTS or mess around with lighting effects like lens flares. At the bottom of this post is a timelapse of me and one of my group members Jordan practicing and experimenting in the program. 

-Changing Fire Intensity-

The first bit of grading that I did to our existing footage was to alter the scene where Jordan is lipsyncing behind the fire. I decided I wanted to make it a bit darker and to focus on accentuating the flames which were close to the camera lens. I took two approaches to this, the first ending in a result that looked a lot more green than I would have liked. The second added more of a red tinge to the frame, which I thought was more appropriate. The screenshot above shows my changes to the brightness, which I reduced and the contrast, highlights, shadows, whites and blacks. The finished product made the fire more yellow and the subject, Jordan, darker and also the background more green - so that it contrasted the flames more as they are the point of interest here. 

The next clip I edited was of Jordan's solo. What I did here was reduced the brightness and then alter the other settings in order to make the clip look less washed out - this part of the music video is supposed to be somewhat depressing so it was inappropriate to have high key lighting. 

-Alterations Using Colour Wheels-

This clip is one of our favourites in our music video as we used a red smoke grenade to act as a moving background for the lip-syncing. However, as we filmed at dusk, the lighting was not great and the smoke grenade didn't have the intensity that I would have wished for. However, using colour wheels, I was able to shroud the subject in shadow and accentuate just how red the smoke was. The way I did this was first by focusing on the subject, changing the brightness, contrast, hue (e.t.c) so that the black of his jumped was very dark and his facial features were shadowed. I then opened up the colour wheels and attempted to alter all three, finding that this changed the colour of the clip, which was not what I wanted. So I experimented some more and found that I could make the smoke more red by making the mid-tones more red. This was what I did and the result was just as I had imagined.