What’s going on everyone. Welcome back to another tutorial. In this video we are going to be creating The Runner look on a difficult shot. This has variable lighting, meaning he starts in the shadows, then hits the sun, then hits shadows again. I know this will be helpful for you all, so let’s get started!

        Let’s analyze our shot. We are starting in the shadows, then there is a lens flare. That flare drops out, then our guy hits the shadows again. So we are going to pick our hero frame.

This time I am going to build my node tree as I go because it’ll make more sense. Starting with our second node, we are going to dial in our exposure. We are going to start by dialing in our contrast. Then I am going to pull down on the gain and lift, but bring the gamma up to brighten the midtones.

Now we are going to add a balance node. I am going to start by pumping in some saturation. Then I am going to use temp and tint to add that balance.

Now our next two nodes are going to be a layer mixer and this is where we are going to really dial in our look. In the bottom layer node I am going to select color -> preset -> red.

Now you may be wondering why I have a balance node before all of this, and that’s so I can have a clean key. You want to have as much color separation as possible when you qualify.

Now see what it selects.

Because this is a layer mixer, the changes I do to the top won't affect the red I qualified.

        Now we are going into our look node to inject the colors we wanted. Now in my lift, I am going to raise it up, then I am going to drop just the Y channel down. Then I am going to do something similar in the gain, I am going to drop all channels, then bring back up just the Y channel.

Now what I am going to do is start doing the stylized look. I am going to take my lift and gamma towards blue/cyan. It may not look great at first, but just wait. Now to counter the changes to the highlights, we are going to add warmth in our gain.

Now I am going to create another layer mixer to focus on the shoes. I am going to go into my qualifier and do just my shoes.

Now you can see that it’s also selecting some of his skin, so we are going to select a gradient window and invert it.

I am going to inject some contrast and pivot to add some color. Then I am going into my offset and pump in more red.

Now I am going to create a skin node to qualify his skin. I am also going to denoise the qualifier to about 10.1.

It’s okay that it is selecting some of the background. That will be a welcome change. I am going to use my hue vs hue to pull out the red and make it more orange.

Then I am going under my hue vs saturation and I am going to bring the red channel down.

Then I am going into my gamma and I am going to pull in some more yellow.

Now I am going to create another node and call it midtone detail. I am going to use my luminance qualifier and I am only going to grab the top of the image.

Then I want to subtract my midtone detail to add the cinematic bloom to the highlights.

Now I am going to create another node called glow and add the glow effect. I am going to change the composite mode to softlight, and I will control it with the shine threshold and spread.

I am going to create a global adjustment node. I am going to use printer lights to get my desired look. I am going to start off by pulling my blue down, then pull down my red. I will also pull my green down just a tiny bit.

I want to use my LOG wheels to inject some warmth into the highlights.

Now we have to work with different lighting conditions, which requires using keyframes. We first want to create a node after my global adjustment called dynamic keyframes. We then want to switch our keyframe from all, to color.

A pro-tip about keyframes is to use the least amount of keyframes. To do that, we need to find anchors. When do things change? Here are my keyframes

I want to make some changes. I want to add some more teal in my shadows using my lift wheel, then I want to bring down the skin a bit in my hue vs saturation.

Now I am going to add a dynamic keyframe at the start.

Now I am going to pull up on my lift, and then adjust the color wheel so there’s not a ton of blue in the shadows.

Then I am going into my log wheels and I’m going to pull down on the shadows. Then I can adjust my low range and control it so that it affects just the bottom.

Now I am going to add another dynamic keyframe.

Here I am going to lift up the contrast by bringing up my lift. Then again I am going to bring my reds down under hue vs saturation.

Now on the last frame we want to add one more dynamic keyframe and raise it up a bit.

Then again I am going to use my log wheels to bring it down, just slightly.

        Now I want to go ahead and add some noise reduction.

        Then I am going under my grain node, and using 35mm 400T as our base, we will make adjustments.

        There we go! We are done. Let’s look at this in full screen.

        I hope you guys had a blast and learned a ton! Just remember that when you work on commercials, you need to really work on them and they can get complicated. But if you stay organized, you’ll be fine.

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