Original subtitles

Let's dive into some of the specific tools that we use to adjust

the kind of major parts of thinking about exposure, saturation, color casts.

Contrast.

And after that, we're going to get a little bit more detailed.

So most of the adjustments for our image as a whole are going to happen here

right in the primaries palette or in the curves palette.

I think it's pretty safe to say that about 90% of what

you need to do to an image you can do just in these two palettes.

If you need to make an image brighter or darker, the primary color,

we'll give you a whole bunch of different adjustments from

brightness adjustments down here in these master reels.

I can grab the gain and move that up and down to make the brighter

parts brighter or darker.

I can move the gamma up and down to make the midtown's brighter or darker

and the left up and down to make the darker parts brighter or darker.

I can reset everything by clicking this little reset

all button up here in the upper right and I can move the brightness of the image

as a whole by grabbing the master wheel under the offset right here.

I also have quite a few different controls up here above the wheels as well

as below things like color temperature and tint

contrast adjustments, saturation.

I can even change the hue, which is the actual color of things,

and I can adjust the color casts of each tonal range

by moving these color wheels around the brightest parts

of the image with the gain, the midtown's with the gamma,

the darkest parts, with the lift and the entire image with offset.

You can do so much with just this panel.

You can just about color grade your entire project with only this.

So if you're going to learn one palette, I would recommend the primaries

color wheels. Now, behind the primary color wheels.

If we click on this little bar button right here, we have our primary bars.

These are the exact same adjustments, but with a different interface.

So if I grab this green bar and I push it up, we have a green image.

And actually, if I switch back over to the color wheel,

we'll see that the center of this has been moved right towards green.

So this is just a different way of looking at the same adjustment.

And depending on your preference and how exact you want to be

with each color channel, this can be a really good tool.

I'll find myself doing this

to adjust white balance sometimes if I think something is too cool.

I can just go to the blue bar and kind of bring it down a little bit.

Just rolling with my scroll wheel to make really subtle adjustments.

Behind the primary bars, we have the primary log wheels.

These are very similar to the primary color wheels,

and they target specific tones of the image.

And you have the wheel that changes your color cast and your saturation.

And the master wheel that adjusts your brightness.

The big difference here is that the highlights and the shadows

are kind of limited to a smaller range, which you can actually adjust.

So if I were to go back to my gain and I were to push this towards pink,

I can make basically everything look really pink and do that

and go to my log wheels.

And if I do the same thing and push it really pink,

almost nothing turns pink.

The reason is that nothing is really in the range

of this highlights wheel because this is kind of a darker image

and it has a cutoff point where it only adjusts

things that are brighter than a certain threshold, which is right here.

This upper range, if I were to take this and bring this down,

we can see it's starting to affect the darker parts of the image.

Anything that's over about 25% brightness, it's actually turning pink now.

The same thing happens for the shadows.

If I were to push those really pink, we'll see.

It's adjusting just the darkest parts of the shadows, and I can adjust

that range with this lower range control.

I can push that down just so it's barely touching the very, very darkest parts.

Or I can push it up to where it adjusts nearly everything.

So you can think of it like this your primary color wheels.

These are really big soft adjustments that are stronger in their tonal range.

So gain is stronger for the brightest parts.

Lift is stronger for the darkest parts.

But any time that you move the left or the gain,

it will move everything in the entire image.

It just moves a little bit slower

than the darkest parts for the left or the brightest parts for the gain.

The log wheels actually have that limiter to where it will not affect things

that are outside of its range.

Now, kind of an even more advanced version of the log wheels are the HDR wheels.

HDR wheels are almost the exact same idea, except for you also have a saturation

slider for each tonal range and it's split up into six ranges instead of three.

So you can have specular, which is the really, really bright stuff.

The highlight, which are pretty bright light, which is basically anything over

like half brightness shadows, like anything under half brightness.

Dark is really dark and black is really, really, really dark.

So it's kind of the same idea as the log wheels.

So if I were to take my highlights again like this and I can adjust the range

with this little slider here, and as I bring this down,

I can start to affect the image a little bit more.

You can actually get a really good idea

of each controls range by clicking this little HDR zones button

and it will show you visually on a graph where your little cut off point is.

So I can decide that my highlights

are going to be anything to the right of this zone.

My specular are going to be anything to the right of this zone

and I can tailor that to the tones that are available in my image.

If I want to kind of spread these out so that each of these zones controls

an actual part of my image.

I can even hit this little button to move the zones over here to the right.

And then I have my HDR wheels over here

and now my specular just adjust the very brightest parts of the image.

The highlights are kind of the next zone down

light is the next zone down from that shadows a little darker,

darks a little darker, and blacks the darkest.

So you can see you can get really, really detailed this way.

A very cool tool to use, but it's also really easy to trip yourself up

with because if you're used to how things work with the Gain gamma and left

and you switch over to the HDR palette, it doesn't quite act the same.

We're going to touch more on the HDR wheels in a little bit,

but that's the big idea of the color wheels.

The next major palette we're going to be using is the curves.

The curves are very powerful and you can actually do a lot

of the same adjustments that you'd be able to do in the primary wheels.

In fact, this little dot up here is essentially your gain

and what we're doing is affecting points on this graph.

The bottom axis would be the input image and the y axis would be the output image.

So if I want my blackest blacks to be gray, I can push those up like this,

and anything that's black will be mapped as gray.

So now we have a little bit brighter image.

This is the exact same thing as taking our lift master wheel

and pushing it to the right.

Same thing, Same thing for the gain.

I can take the brightest part of my image right now.

Only the very whitest things look white.

But if I push this to the left, this more and more of

the image will actually be mapped as bright white.

And that means that we get a lighter image.

So if you've never used curves before, it's definitely worth

playing around with this and getting an idea of how it works.

You can actually add

control points to the middle here and you can get really detailed

of how you kind of remap the brightness of all of the tones in the image.

You can right click the points to get rid of them.

And what people will often do with the curves is make what's called an S-curve.

We take a little point at the bottom and bring it this way

and a little point at the top and bring it this way.

So it makes a really subtle s.

What that's really doing is taking the darkest parts

and making them darker

and the brightest parts and making them brighter, which increases our contrast.

So now we have a much more contrasty image which for an underexposed image,

just kind of makes it darker.

So one useful thing is we have the histogram here was just shows you

the amount of pixels that are each brightness

and we can put our darkest part down here

where there's a little bit and our lightest part here.

And when we boost that up

now we're boosting the contrast of just the image without darkening it as much.

So that might be a good way to adjust things.

Right now, by default, we are moving all of the color channels at once,

but if we go over here to edit and uncheck this little chain link,

we can adjust just one channel at a time.

So I'll reset everything and let's say we just want to grab our red channel

and bring the mid tones of our red channel down.

We get more of a cyan looking image.

We can even do that just in the lower parts and add a little control point

to the middle here and then we get just kind of the more cyan type of shadows.

This again, is a really nice way

to get really detailed with how you map your colors.

We can even just affect the luminance without affecting the saturation

and we can put in a bunch of contrast here and we can go really, really crazy

and we get a much different look than we would if we did this

with all the channels linked.

That's before. That's after.

This is just the white channel and this is all the channels linked together.

So you have a lot of control in just the custom curves here.

That's a good overview of the main tools that we're going to be using

to adjust the image as a whole.