One Secret How to NOT Break Your Image
Here’s why your color grades need fewer adjustments.
Hey everyone!
I bet you’ve been there. You made one tiny adjustment using your curves (any curve for that matter) and suddenly your image falls apart, even though you only made a very targeted adjustment.
Curves are a powerful tool for colour grading, but you know what they say:
“With great power comes great responsibility”
– They
So let’s have a look at what this secret actually is, what the pro’s know you (probably) don’t and how you can implement it into your work in under two minutes so your images won’t break so easily!
Let’s say you want to make one specific part of your image a bit brighter. The obvious choice might be using the curves as they allow for very targeted adjustments.
So, you use the colour picker to sample the area and then boost the curve up in that specific area.
Your resulting curve looks a bit like this (exaggerated illustration):
In isolation, it might seem to work on your clip but let’s have a look at what’s actually going on.
Here is a simple gradient from black to white:
And this is the same gradient with the curves adjustment applied:
As you can see, this is absolutely unnatural. Light doesn’t behave like this. You need to keep in mind that your curves adjustment affects all the parts in your image that have the luminance value you targeted.
Adding insult to injury, different colours have different inherent levels of luminance as well. So you might not even know what you’re targeting.
Here is a simple colour gradient:
Here is the same gradient with the curves adjustment applied:
As you can see, you might be targeting colours you don’t even want to target.
What went wrong?
You wanted to boost the brightness of a very specific thing in your scene. Since it has a specific brightness, you used the curves to do so.
I can understand that reasoning, but as demonstrated, targeting adjustment based on luminance is a slippery slope.
Speaking of slope… To actually pull this off, your curve had some steep slopes, which is a mistake many beginners make.
What to do instead:
If you want to make a specific object in your scene a bit brighter, try using a gradient or shape mask.
Choose a large feather and try to shape the light in a natural way. Also, sometimes it’s beneficial to do the opposite–maybe just darken everything else a little bit to make room for what you want your viewers to focus on.
What the Pro’s do differently:
knowing which tool to use for which job and which side effects it might have
avoid hyper-targeted adjustments as much as possible. (Often they aren’t even necessary)
Mind the Slope: The steeper the slope of any curve, the more drastic is the change → the steeper the slope, the more likely it might break your footage
As few points as possible but as many as necessary
Better grades in two minutes:
The next time you’re using curves, take two minutes to reduce the amount of control points on your curve whilst keeping the same result.
This is a powerful skill to master curves.
See you next week!
Eric
