From the course: After Effects Guru: Color Grading Footage

Creating a film look - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Guru: Color Grading Footage

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Creating a film look

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- A popular category of image gradient adjustments are often referred to as a film look. Let me show you how some of the techniques you've already learned can be repurposed to create this new overall enhancement. Now, I've got two very different shots but I'm going to use techniques and you'll see that it works in a very, almost universal way. Let's start with the film look. There's many ways to do this but I'll show you the technique. My preference is to add a new adjustment layer. Then, we'll take advantage of the lumetri color effect or you can use the apply LUT, it's ultimately up to you. What you're going to want to do is apply a LUT, but instead of an input LUT, we're going to use a creative LUT, and I'll choose browse. Now, navigate to the folder here and you'll see under cinematic, I've given you a few of my favorite lookup tables. Here we have some different transition types including cinematic one and two. If I click apply, you see that LUT is applied for cinematic. There's cinematic one and for good measure, let's take a look at two. You can decide which one you like and I think I actually prefer one a little bit. And then using the controls here, adjust the intensity of that LUT. Now, once that LUT is applied, it might affect the color balance in other aspects and you can decide if you want to adjust that or sort of leave it as is. In this case, I feel pretty good about the overall balance here. I'm just going to bring up the white point and pull down the highlights a little bit. Now, we're going to add another effect here but this one needs to be blended. So, let's just rename this one, grade, and then add another adjustment layer. Layer new, adjustment layer, and this one we'll rename, glow. Now, we'll apply a blur. There's many different blurs so you can use the one that you like. I'ma take one that's a little slower called camera lens blur. And with this, we'll increase the amount of the blur with the blur radius. Be sure to check the box for repeat edge pixel. Additionally, you can use the threshold and gain option here if you want to bloom the brighter areas and just lower the threshold until they start to bloom. And you see we got this great blooming highlights. Now, we'll change the mode and use it in something like soft light or perhaps add, and you see that it just takes it and mixes it in. Screen. Now as you do this, it might be a little strong so you can adjust that and blend it in. My preference though is generally the soft light mode which does a nice job of getting the highlights in and giving it that little lift. Once you've done this, it may darken the image, so feel free visit the lumetri color effect and you can dial this in until it feels like the right overall exposure and the right balance of color and even sharpness. Now, I like where that's going and we'll just apply the vignette effect. Give this a little bit of darkening at the edges and we've got a nice film look now. If we'll look at the original and the new one, it's taken on a nice contrast ratio, has a good vignette, and the bloom just makes it look a little bit less perfect, which is working well. Now, here's what's quite cool. You can just select those two layers and choose edit copy, switch to another piece of footage in your project, target it, and just say, edit paste. And you can see those, and there is the grade in the glow. Now, I'm going to switch the stacking order and it's pretty simple. Now, we have that effect re-used. And so, by copying and pasting, it's quite simple with adjustment layers to re-use them. And as you get to another piece of footage, you can go ahead and tweak this if needed. Maybe the effect just needs to be slightly exposed better, so I'll lift the exposure slightly. And just tweak the color balance with temperature. There we go. Balance that out a little bit. And that feels about right for this image. And you see, that without a lot of work you can dial in the look that you're going for.

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