What’s going on everyone! Welcome back to yet another epic tutorial. Today we are taking a clip from Sony A7R, that is shot incorrectly (bad white balance), and it is highly compressed, so the odds are against us. Now let’s get into it.

        First things first, usually you see me jump into my offset and correct my white balance, but that’s not what’s happening here because our vectorscope and parade show we are balanced at the bottom.

But our highlights are completely off. So we have to take all the blue out of our image, get our skin tones back, then get the colors where they belong, and then get our image to pop.

        Starting off, I am not going to use my offset but instead use my gain to start correcting it.

You can see we did a ton with that correction.

        Now the next thing is to raise up our gain. Then I want to drop the gamma a bit to make her skin pop and bring some color back in her skin.

Now at this point you have to improvise a bit. What do you want in your image? How do you want it to feel? If you want it to feel cooler, you’ll have to go in and add some more blue back in.

Now look at how good her skin looks. Look at the snow in the back. Now we are getting somewhere.

        Now adding a second node, our third step is to pull out all the embedded blue in the image. The cleanest way to do it is by using the hue vs saturation. Now there are a couple ways to do it. You can either manually add your points into the curves, or you can hover on the screen and click and it will put the points in there for you. Then, you want to drop the saturation.

Just like that we really cleaned up the image and added more color contrast, without breaking the image. We are taking out all that color cast baked into our rec.709 negative.

        Now I am going to create a third node to work on the highly saturated areas. So the cleanest way to do this is to go under saturation vs saturation, and grab it from the top part and bring it down.

Now why did I take out this much saturation, because the concept is simple. We don’t have a lot of color in our image. So when I pull saturation out of the image and leave the reds where they are, one it makes it look clean like film, but two, the red still pops because there isn’t much saturation in the image.

        Now I would park it here but there are a few more things you can do, if you want. You could go back to the first node and raise the gain even more.

Now yes it’s sort of pushed, but I like what it does to my image. What you don’t want to do is do too much, and have it become a stylized look. Right now we are just correcting our image.

        Now finally what we can do is go to our first node and add a serial node before it, drop on grain, and then because we have a lot of artifacting, I want to use heavy grain to cover it up.

        Look at what we just did. Like how crazy these changes are, without breaking our image. Plus all of these changes are easily applicable to an entire scene where everything was shot with an incorrect white balance. Now let’s check out this huge change in full screen.

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