What’s going on guys, welcome back to another tutorial. This is a must read for anyone getting into color grading. This is my three-step color grading process. These are the rules and foundations I use for every grade I do.

        Now, let’s go ahead and jump into the grade. The first thing I always do is to set the exposure. Then the second step is balance, with a little bit of a look. Then the third step is pop.

        Starting with our exposure, we are going to start with our contrast and pivot. Because this is 8-bit, we need to be gentle with it. Then I am going to bring my offset up to pop her out, bring my gain down just a tad and then bring my gamma up a bit, then lift down.

Moving to my balance node, I am going to start by cranking my saturation. Then I am going to mess around with my lift, gamma, and gain to balance the image, but also create a small look.

One thing to note, don’t be afraid to play around with the color wheels. They help give an organic look with the dance between moving them all.

Now I am going to pull my life down, then gamma up. Then I am going to pull my gain down just a hair.

        Now we are going to move onto our pop. I am going to start by clicking on my editable splines.

Then I am going to take the top up to give it a really nice pop. Then I am going to take the bottom down a bit. Then if you pull up on the low soft, you can help protect the black points and give a nice film look.

To control this look a bit more, we are going to go into our exposure node and go in our log wheels and take our shadows down and control it with our low range.

        Now going back to the balance node, I am going to use my hue vs saturation to tone down the color in the background.

Now this is our base grade. In three simple steps. Just like I said, this is a great way to start off each project.

        Now we are going to create a really fun look. We are going to add a node after our second node. In that node we are going to start by pulling our lift wheel down, then move the gain wheel the opposite way.

        Then I am going to create a layer node to qualify her skin.

        Then I am going to create a layer node to qualify her skin.

Now if you see in our key, it’s affecting more than just her and that is causing some artifacting. So to control that we are going to create a power window around the girl to restrict the key.

        Now I am going to create another layer mixer to grab just the top highlights to give me the clean white.

Now you can see that after these 3 nodes, we went from a rec.709 type look, to a very stylized look, with perfect skin tones.

        We aren’t done now. After our pop node, I am going to add a node and take our midtone detail down to -50.

Then I am going to create another node and add some glow. I am going to change it to softlight and control the glow.

It is hitting the highlights a bit too much, so I am going to connect the bottom layer mixer node to the glow node and invert it so that it doesn’t affect the mask.

        Now the final touch is grain. Start with 35mm 400T, then crank the grain strength.

        Boom. We just created such an awesome look. Let’s check this out in full screen!

        I hope you guys learned a lot and can take away something from this video. Catch you all on the next tutorial!

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