What’s going on guys! Welcome to another awesome tutorial. We are going to be creating a pretty crazy look with a shot that is completely far off from where we want to be, and try to get it in the ballpark. So come along on this adventure!

        As always, we are going to start by analyzing the image. I want to drop in the color palette look so that we can analyze what is happening through the color palette.

We have our neutral blacks, but not our neutral whites. They are creating a very nice darker brown look in the lower mids. However, the land and grass is probably natural and not done with hue vs hue. In our scopes, we can see that most of it is sitting in the mids, just touching the top. We can also see there is more green and red than blue in the image.

        Now our frame is very different. Ours was not shot in the same season or place, making it hard for us to bring it into the ballpark. My point is to show you what can really be done through color grading.

        Now let's get into our color grade. First, we are going to set up our node tree.

Now going into our first node, we are going to start by bringing up our contrast to roughly around 1.5(ish). Then, we are going to pull our gain down to bring back the detail in the sky. We are going to crank our gamma to bring up the mids, but bring down the lift so that we can match the contrast in our reference.

        For now we are going to skip our saturation and go to our balance. In our gain we are going to add red and subtract blue, and bring our gain down. Then we are going to take our gamma and pull it towards our yellow/green.

        Now moving on, I do need to use a disclaimer ** If you are working on a project, keying out things on tons of shots can be time consuming and is not recommended. Now, I need to select the yellow. I am going to do that by selecting color -> presets -> yellow.

Now it did a great job picking up the yellow.

All I am going to do is move my hue up until the yellow grass starts looking like the grass in our image. I will also be taking out saturation to match.

        Moving onto our next node I am going to go back into color presets and select green.

Our goal is to grab everything the yellow didn’t pick up on. Now that’s selected I am going to do the same technique by moving the hue dial up and bringing saturation down.

        Moving into my node 8, what I want to do is grab the road. I am going to qualify our road and work on perfecting our qualification.

I am also going to create a power window to select only the road.

The power window will not need to be tracked, but we will want to keyframe it a bit. Select frame at the top right, instead of clip and just bring it up a bit.

Now that we have that done, let’s get started on our road. This road is our gamma, so we are going to bring our gamma towards green to subtract the magenta in the road.

Now I need to lift it up, so I am going to go into my curves and lift it up, about 40% of the way up from the bottom.

        Now what I want to do is control my sky. I am going to use my luminance under my qualifier to select the highlights.

I want to pull some of the magenta out. To do that I am going to go under my gain to pull out some of that color. Staying in our gain wheel, we want to bring it down towards the green/cyan color space. Then bring up our gamma towards the orange/red color space. Finally, bring down the highlights just a tiny bit.

I am noticing a bit too much magenta in the sky, so I am going to go under my hue vs saturation to pull down on the magenta and red.

        Now I want to go into my look adjustment node and create a gradient layer.

Now I am going to go into my curves and turn on editable splines and raise up the highlights knuckle.

        Now I am going to go under my vignette node and make a circular window, just for this specific section.

Now I am going to add some contrast, to about 1.314, as well as bringing down the overall saturation just a tiny bit. Then I am going into my gamma and moving it towards the yellow color space. Next, I will bring down my lift just a tiny bit.

Then I am going to go into my hue vs saturation and pull down on the color.

Then I am going into our hue vs hue to try and flip the colors.

Finally I am going to track the power window to the footage.

        Now, our bottom parallel node is going to come in handy. I am going to go under hue vs hue and I want to start off shifting the cyan and blue up.

Then I want to go into hue vs saturation to bring down the saturation.

This is the subtlety that we need when creating a grade. It may not be super obvious, but the little things add up when creating a look.

        I am going to skip my global adjustment node and move into my sharpening and grain nodes and drop in my general grain and sharpening specs.

        Then I want to go into my noise reduction node and add that NR sauce.

        As we can see, our grass and land is just not matching. How can we affect it without affecting everything? I am going to show you something cool. First, I need to create a key mixer.

Then, I am going to take the alpha outputs of the yellow and green qualified nodes, to the alpha inputs on the key mixer. From there, I am going to take the alpha output on the key mixer, and match it to the alpha input on my look adjustment node.

What this does, is it allows me to be able to control both nodes, in just one node. Meaning I can dial in the grass without having to do corrections in multiple nodes. Now I am going to take my offset to put everything into the reference’s world.

Now it is making one side not look great, so I am going to go under my key output and drop it to 0.500 to blend it in a bit more.

        Just like that, we are done! Let’s check out the final look in full screen.

        I hope you had a blast creating this look with me! It is one of those looks that you have to do when you have time, but don’t be afraid to tackle it on a short project!

MORE LIKE THIS