Color correction exposure & adjustment layers

Hey, welcome to this video, in this one were going to look at colour correction, exposure adjustment layers, just fixing up a video. So there are a billion ways of doing it literally there is, maybe not a billion but there is definitely about 20 different ways to fix up a video in after effects and you might find a tutorial online or somebody else that you know might give you a suggestion and that might work for you perfectly. I'm going to give you this ones called lumetri colour and it’s the one I use and its one a lot of people use and its just really easy especially if you’ve come from any other adobe products its similar to lots of those.

So what we can do is we've got to go find it and its under the effects and presets so you can go to window, go to effects and presets, its toggled in with this libraries one. Now you do a search up the top here and you can type in its lumetri and it should get down to here now I could just quickly add this to my video and you can see over here its applied that effect now that totally works but it would be more common now to put in what’s called an adjustment layer. An adjustment layer is like a place holder it accepts things like these colour adjustments and it just means its on its own layer that you can turn on and off and it means that why its really useful is that at the moment say we colour correct this video and we have another video that we want to interact with this wed have to then apply lumetri to that one as well. So you’d have to put it on all of them where as if you put that on the adjustment layer right at the top it effects everything underneath and that’s really handy because were going to look a little bit like a vignette and say you want to apply the vignette to the whole video and there's lots of different videos, this whole composition there's lots of different videos that are apart of it, its easy just to add it to the adjustment layer which sits over the top and affects it all. If that doesn’t make sense lets just do it aye.

So what were going to do is we’re going to go to layer, new adjustment layer. Nothing really happens see down here, here’s my adjustment layer and what were going to do is instead of dragging it and adding it to this video watch this, lumetri here you go. And to this one. and it’s the same thing, its going to effect everything underneath so if you're looking from the top down like a bird, everything underneath. So we could have hundreds of things underneath here and it would still get the same effects.

So there's lots to go through in here I'm going to give you the basics, now the easiest thing to know about this is you just start at the top and work your way through. The most obvious and big changes are in this first one called basic correction and then you work your way through some of their creative bits and colour wheels if you need to. To be honest I never get out of basic correction, it does everything that I need most of the time and well jump down to vignette in another video. So what you can do to really help out is set the white balance. White balance just means this video here if I scroll through it looks like its got a reasonably confident white anyway but you might be working on different videos.

So what you want to do is grab this little eye dropper tool and set the white, and tell it what you think white is. I know that using my massive human brain, I think that is probably the whitest thing in here and I know that’s white in real life because I've been in that room, that looks like pretty solid white so I'm going to say you are white. What happens is nothing really changed in this one, I'm showing to you so that I guess when you're working on something else, you might see bigger effects. You just need to tell it what is white. That is white, that is white set. You might see some bigger changes.

Next is temperature, temperature just means, at the moment its quite blue because its all under these fake fluorescent bulbs and everything gets a blue tinge plus this is Dublin and Dublin is always cloudy so its never going to be streaming sunlight and things, its lots of artificial stuff even though it’s the day time. So temperature I'm just going to warm it up, yours might be different so just drag it right, left, decide you want to make it cooler or warmer. I'm going to make mine a little warmer to make it feel like it was a sunny warm day in there. Up to you, I've got mine up to about 38, you can see it’s a bit warmer here. Next is tint, not going to have to play around with this, if you're finding it’s a little too red or a little too green, watch this, we can make it green or I can make it pink, it depends on your image, I'm not going to set it. I'm going to set mine back to 0. Mine doesn’t need to go anywhere, alright so I'm going to twirl back up white balance, keep it nice and clean. So where it goes to tone, this is where you start at the top. Just kind of wiggle these things left or right. So you can either twirl them down and drag this slider back and forth which may make more sense to you. What I end up doing is I'm going to set that back to 0. Is I close that up and I use that scrubbing that we used for fonts earlier I'm just going to click hold and drag the number there. You just, this particular image you can follow me but when you're doing your own stuff, it literally, this is when it’s more artistic than it is a science. You want to drag it left or right, are you making it better, are you making it worse. I'm dragging mine down, actually there's not much change in terms of that exposure. Pretty much nothing, now the way to turn it on and off can you see that appears this little effects button so if I click that on off, so that’s what it was that’s what it is now, so its definitely warmer but is it a bit better, its up to you and its what you're trying to look like and what you're trying to do. I'm trying to make this look like a lovely warm environment so toggle this on and off.

Alright, exposure, contrast, left, right. What do I want to do, I probably want to I'm kind of happy with where it is. Maybe I want to pull it down just a little bit because of the stuff in here. So I'm lowering mine down a bit. Highlights, up down, up, down. I'm going to lower mine down a little bit there's some weird stuff coming in through the windows. If I lower it down watch this, you can start to see more stuff out the window. So where should it be once again this is total just artistic eye balling what you think. Have I made it better, have I made it worse. Shadows I'm going to lift mine up a little bit. Whites, just so you know the biggest changes happen at the top here, these smaller ones are just little tiny adjustments. You start exposure, my one was shot okay, it was on a bit of a crappy camera but with a good lens so well, .an average lens if I'm honest. So its captured okay, but then you just go through and decide what works for you, might raise mine up a little bit.

Okay, so the next one is saturation so these ones are all to do with tone they're lights and darks and greys, saturation here is colour so I lighten it up, its going to get crazy fuller colour and I can make it black and white this way. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bump it up a little bit. Not too much. I want to, we've got this really cool orange thing going on in the office and I want to extreme it up and its lifted a lot of these things, they're quite cool, painted lines. Alright, um so now the rest of the options, were not going to go through here, creative is literally that, you're going to go through and there's a lot of dragging of things around, this is more instead of fixing, once you’ve got into creative this is trying to make it look like instagram filters and those sorts of things. So were going to leave those for the moment because this is more of a corrections video. And you can work your way through all of these but to be honest once you get down to here you're getting into some really minuet details which cool be cool and what you want.

But just start a basic correction, move through playing around with the tone, the white balance and yeah and your saturation. Alright so that is how to fix a video. Remember turn it on and off, have I made it better have I made it worse. I've probably made mine a little too saturated but I'm okay with that for the moment. Alright, see you in the next video.