What’s going on guys, it’s Qazi. Welcome to another great series! Today we are going to be grading your footage! The point of this series is I want to give you permission to push your images. If you aren’t a professional colorist, you won’t know how far your image can be pushed.

        Here is the image we will be working with

When I see this, my initial thought is a cold winter day in Chicago. That’s the kind of look I am going to go for. This is shot very well. Nice exposure and perfect white balance so there won’t need to be much done.

        Let’s create our node tree.

        Starting with our exposure node, I am going to go pretty heavy on my contrast. Then I am going to bring my gain down quite a bit to let the image breathe and then bring my gamma up.

        Next I want to go ahead and raise my saturation.

        Next thing I want to do is go into our look node and right click on the layer mixer and select composite mode -> soft light.

Staying in our look node, the first thing I am going to do is dial back on the contrast. Then I am going to take my saturation all the way down to 0.

        Next I am going to go into his skin and pick his skin. I am going to use my qualifier to get his skin.

Then I am going to take my offset and gamma towards red to put the correct skin tone into his skin. Then because qualifying the skin like that dirties up the skin, we are going to dial back our midtone detail to soften the skin.

Finally I am going to go into my RGB curves and lift it up just a hair.

        Now moving back into our look node, I am going to split the difference. We obviously don’t want it fully black and white. The way I am going to do that is to go into my key, and bring it back.

        Moving into our look adjustment node, we are going to pop him out using our curves. I am going to click on my editable splines and pull up on the highlight knuckle. Then I want to do the opposite at the bottom.

        Moving into our vignette, we are going to take the output of our skin node and bring it to the input of the vignette node.

Then we need to invert it.

Here what I want to do is go to the RGB curves and click the red channel and pull it down from the top. Make sure editable splines are turned off.

What’s cool is how it is affecting his eyes too. Now I don’t love how much teal is in the highlights so we will go under our LOG wheels and bring our highlights wheel up towards red.

        Moving into my global adjustment I want to bring my blacks down. I am going to go into my LOG wheels and pull down the shadows. Now I want to only focus on his shirt so I will need to use my low range to pinpoint it.

        Next we are going to go into our sharpening node and add our .47 sharpening.

        To finish, we are going to add our grain.

        One last thing, if you find that the building in the back is distracting you can take your key output down to 0.5 and blend it a bit better.

        There we go! We are done with our look. Let’s check it out in full screen.

        I hope you all enjoyed this tutorial! I hope you learned a bunch of new tips and tricks! Be on the lookout for the next one!

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