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For us, Color Grading is one of the most fun processes of video editing. We’re both really big control freaks, and being able to control how a scene or video clip looks and feels is a huge deal to us. So, a few steps we take to have almost complete control of how the final color and feel looks is to, first of all, try our best to white balance right in camera. While there are really great white balancing plugins that come with most video editing software, the best way to get the perfect white balance is to shoot your video already correctly white balanced! Now we are huge Mac fans simply because they are the freaking best, and actually work:) hahaha! However, we’ve heard (and seen) from a few of our freaking amazing PC video editing friends that PC users can also have some pretty cool color grading, and correcting tools too. Since we are Mac users though, we will be showing a few stills from FCP’s color program! Below, we’ve used the cool Mac App “Grab” to just select sections of our desktop to take pictures of. It’s a pretty cool and underrated tool that we believe comes with every Mac!

Now, the easiest way to white balance a shot in post using FCP is to simply use FCP’s 3-way color corrector plugin. You then can select the white eyedropper, and then click on something white in your video footage. You’ll want to do the same with the black eyedropper, only selecting something black in your footage instead! For the most part, the plugin does a pretty good job, but (like we said earlier) we like to just have the white balance correct the first time! The examples we’ve used below are from our recent shoot with Eye Candy Salon.

In the screen grab above, you’ll notice we have a before and after shot! The shot on the left was straight from the camera. Notice how her face is kind of lifeless, and just doesn’t really pop off the screen. One reason for that is the fact that we shoot all of our videos flat in camera so later we can have complete control over the color and look of the shot. You can easily see that our pretty model’s face gets lost in the shot. There are a lot of ways to bring the shot to life, but in the shot above, all we did was tweak the black & white levels a tiny bit using FCP’s Color Program. Isn’t it amazing how tweaking something just a tiny bit can change the look of the clip!

In the screen grab above, you’ll see that we had a little fun with the color options for this oh-so-cool guy! However, when shooting for a salon, we’ve learned the hard way not to tweak colors too much. You’ll notice in the “Fun Color Grade” his hair looks a little golden; and some stylists might get upset that his hair color doesn’t 100% represent the original color (which is understandable.) We say that to encourage you to recognize when you can go crazy color grading and when you should just make the basic corrections.

Above you see Ashley, another great Eye Candy Model. Working with models like Ashley makes for a fun time when you get to color grading. She pretty much had the best looking skin we’ve ever seen in our lives:) So color-wise we could’ve done anything. One thing to consider when color grading is not to just try to do something you think is really cool, but color grade your footage in a way that sets up the emotion you want to get across in your video! We thought Ashley was pretty much the nicest bubbliest girl ever:) So, if we were to do a video that just featured Ashley, and it wasn’t a matter of making stylists mad, we would use our “Fun Color Grade” for her video. It just says fun, bubbly, and carefree.

Now Caitlin was the bomb to work with. Not only was she gorgeous, but she was so good at delivering every look that was needed, without hesitation. She was also really good “fake laugher” [If you've ever shot a video that required laughing you'll appreciate that.] Now, if we were to do a video that featured Caitlin, we’d probably mix up the color a little bit. I think the black and white would be great for her though. It sets up that Abercrombie & Fitch feel (and trust us when we say that Caitlin could pull it off:) Keep in mind that when it comes to black and white color grading…theres way more to it then just black and white…Just saying.

We’ve saved Veronica for last:) You may remember her from one of our twitpics we posted a few days ago. We still don’t beleive that she’s never modeled before, but thats for another time. The Eye Candy Salon stylists wanted to go for a rockstar look on Veronica. She had the rockstar dress, heels and hair:) I think they got it right on! So if we were to put together a video that featured Vernoica, we’d probably color grade like the above “Fun Color Grade.” After watching some of the video footage we captured, Veronica came off to us with that Amy Lee-ish look.

So, clearly, you can see that color grading can make or break a video! Even if you’re just messing around, we encourage you to figure out different looks you can get by experimenting with color. Some of our coolest looks have come from us messing around and doing something we thought would look absolutely ridiculous:)