How to get vibrant colors in your video

It Is Not The Saturation

To start off, no, you cannot just crank up the saturation in your video. You'll get really ugly colors and your skin will either be to red, or too orange and everything will just look fake. Getting the perfect vibrant color for your video where it doesn't feel like it's cheaply tinted is like balancing a stack of rocks. Every small little change will tip it over the edge and ruin everything. The corollary is that if you ever see a super desaturated video / black and white coloring, that's just laziness and incompetence in the name of creativity and artist choice. Yup, I am guilty of this all the time.

 
 

You Need A Fast Computer

First thing you have to realize for vibrant color corrections is that each raw footage is different. It depends on a whole host of things like:

  • Colors in the environment
  • Lighting conditions
  • Color temperature of lights
  • Camera brand
  • Camera settings
  • White balance

These things vary for each shoot, which means that it's almost impossible to find a once size fits all color grade to get obtain the vibrant color that you envision. Because of all these variations, in order to test what works and what doesn't work for a particular footage, it takes a lot of trial and error of stacking layers upon layers of color correction.

The key is that you need to have immediate feedback how your tweak in color correction affects the footage in realtime playback. In the beginning, for every 100 little tweaks that you try, maybe only 1 of them work. However, most online tutorials are never going to teach you the 99 times that it doesn't work. But in my option, knowing which of the 99 cases that doesn't work is more valuable than knowing exactly which effect works for a particular footage because it allows you to better adapt to new situations.

In order to have immediate playback on your footage (especially if you have a 12-bit 4K footage), it is important to get a really fast computer with a really fast graphics card. I recommend a top of the line gaming card like the 2080TI (as of January 2020). And also geek out and get liquid cooling for it too. And yes, it's going to break your bank, but think of it as an investment in your education and write it off as a tuition that is well worth it.

 
 

Camera and Light Settings

The most important settings to get right for the most vibrant colors is the white balance and setting the picture mode to a flat / log profile. Unless you are shooting raw video, you cannot get back the right white balance during post editing. When the wrong white balance settings are used, the general way to make the video look better is to desaturate, which is going in the opposite direction of vibrancy.

Before you start the shoot, always check the white balance. This also brings up an additional issue, which is to never to mix color temperatures when you are going for the vibrant look. In general, cool white colors are more accurate than warm white colors especially if they are high CRI (Color Rendering Index) lights.

Flat / log profiles are always recommended for any video that needs color correction.

 

Davinci Resolve Vibrancy Color Correction

For the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 4K - Blackmagic RAW (BRAW) 12:1 Compression Videos.

Here is my general work flow for getting the most vibrancy for all of my videos.

  1. Increase saturation and color boost to the maximum to check where all the colors are. Adjust the color temperature and tint balance such that the white blob on vector scope has its center of mass directly in the center. Once this is set, re-adjust the saturation and the color boost to about 1.50.
  2. Adjust the exposure and gamma such that the center of the histograms for RBG colors is at around 40%-60% depending on how bright the scene is.
  3. Increase saturation for only places that matters. This includes reds, blues, teals and mid tones Only. Increase yellow and green only when there is grass and trees (or in other special cases). Never increase orange saturation as that will affect skin tones. Adjusting the saturation in the highlights and the shadows is not recommended as they will only serve to increase noise levels.
  4. Adjust hues to make the grass greener or to make blues look purple or teal. Hues on the oranges can make skin tones look better.
  5. For luminance, generally lighter oranges makes the skin look better and darker reds make the reds pop out less while still maintainining vibrancy.
  6. To make additional video effects, change the tint of the mid-tones or shadows in the color wheels. Do not do this before adjusting the saturation levels in steps 1-5.
  7. Once you have the colors, its time to adjust the contrast. I generally use a contrast pop and set it at around 60-70% opacity for increased detail.
  8. As a final step, because you have all the color information all set, you can apply various LUTs at 25%-50% opacity to get an additional mojo to the video.
 

Examples

For example videos, check out anything in the gallery -->

Kai Zhou