What’s going on guys, it’s Qazi. Welcome to another Grading Your Footage video! 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.

        In this shot, I am seeing this post-apocalyptic time and these two dudes are on another planet. By color palettes, I am going to take Interstellar and Book of Eli to create this look.

        Let’s go ahead and just analyze our shot.

This was shot on the DJI X5S in 4K DNG RAW. Now if you see, the highlights are just done. So we are going to fix our camera RAW settings.

So what am I trying to create? We’ve got dark sands, high skies, we’ve got so much room to work with. We are going to take this to something surreal.

        Okay, let’s get into our node tree.

My goal with this node tree was to make a very streamlined and easy node tree that can be copy and pasted among many clips to allow you to grade projects quicker.

        Alright, the first thing under our exposure node is going to be adjusting the pivot.

As the pivot number goes closer to 0, it gets brighter. If I bring it closer to 1, it gets darker.

We are going to add some contrast and change the pivot to about 7.

        Next I am going into my balance node and I want to make it a proper white balance. Starting with my gain, I am going to bring it down towards the blue/cyan space. Then I am going to bring my gamma towards orange, then bring my lift down to around the same place as our gain.

        Now that it is balanced, I am going under my desaturation node and I am going to pull back on my color boost. To find it, it is under the second tab.

        Now I am going to go into my sky node and under my highlight wheel, under log wheels, I am going to add orange into the highlights. Then I am going to bring my highlight slider to about -8 or so. Then we can go play around in our high range to open it up a bit more.

        Then I am going to go into our look node and use our primaries wheels. I am going to go into the gamma wheel and bring it down towards the blue/cyan color space.

        Now I want to move into my talent node. I am going to create a very subtle window, just around my talent.

Then I want to go into my curves and bring up the bottom portion to kind of lift up my talent.

Now I want to blend it in by adding softness to the window.

Now the only problem is that it is taking out some of the juice in my sky. So in order to counteract that, we need to qualify the sky. So pull it back until it grabs just the talent.

        Now, in our vignette node, we are going to pull down on our shadows to create that drama we need in our image.

Now you can do more to the sky node if you want, but I will leave that completely up to you.

        Alright, we are done! Let’s go ahead and look at this in fullscreen!

I hope you all had a blast! Let me know what you think and wait for the next episode to come out!

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