Colour Grading

This time, my task is using Premier Pro to colour grade one of my video clips of my projects to make it become different from the original. We have not finished our final video clip for digital story project so I decided to use some of footages that we have done for that project. I have not tried to colour grade video clips with professional editing software before. I only use applications on my mobile to do it because those apps are very simple and do not require technical skills.

I have chosen 5 different clips to edit and below are my final results:

Unedited

This one I used three-way colour corrector to create the painting effect. To do this, I kept the grey, white and black levels at low numbers, as well as increasing the input black and output white levels. I also changed the brightness a little bit and increase the contrast because the original seems too bright.

With the influence from Instagram, I tried to make my clip have the same effect with this app so I decided to change all of shadows, midtones and highlights by using colour wheels. The final result seems really cool and natural because I also fixed the tonal range definition

Unedited

With this clip, I wanted to add more colours to my interviewee and surrounding stuffs so I simply changed the saturation of the clip. With the rise of shadow and midtone, I believe it brings more vitality to viewers.

I thought the surrounding stuffs were messy so I changed it into black and white to make them some how seem invisible. However, it made the yoga teacher look boring and lack of energy.

Unedited

Suddenly, I was interested in making the viewers feel cold when they see the light instead of feeling warm. Therefore, I adjusted shadows, midtones and highlights wheels to produce this green light.

I preferred making the colour inside the candle holder stand out so I applied leave colour effect. I used the pen to choose specific colour I wanted to leave and adjusted both tolerance and edge softness to get this final effect. However, the colour might change when I played the whole video clip because it also depended on the moving of the light.

Unedited

Once again, I chose to make this one have colourful comic and painting effects. Before changing clip’s saturation, I also adjusted brightness and contrast.

In the original, the houses on another side did not appear clearly and it had too much light. Thus, I decided to change the saturation to reduce the brightness and make houses sharpen.

Unedited

I did not like the background behind my character so I tried to adjust the master wheel of shadows into more blue. Then, I continued changing shadows in terms of hue angle, magnitude, gain and angle as well as increasing the master and highlight in saturation. I was quite happy with the result because it not only added in more colours but also drew viewer attention to the character in stead of focusing on the busy background.

Without colours, what my character will look like? To know the answer, I tried to use the leave colour effect to make everything become grey except the grass. Besides, I adjusted brightness and contrast because it was little bit dark behind. The result made me surprised and I did not like it. Although it emphasised my character but she seemed to not belong to the clip. It also did not reflect the powerful energy and joy that yoga could bring to people.

Overall, this is one of exercises that I enjoy a lot. I can do magic things with my final products although it is quite hard to achieve and require a lot of time. It also helps me realise the important of colours in making film because they could create different moods and change feeling of audiences.