Color 3 - The Breakdowns: What Recurs Across Fifteen Favourite Shots, Two Travel Videos and a Fall-Colours Edit, Plus the Special Cases - Flat Footage, FPV, Snow, Night and Real Estate

1 Contrast first - the slider, then 'use the bottom of the curves to bring those blacks down just a little bit closer to zero' ('I just prefer to use the curves rather than the sliders'); lately curves instead of the slider entirely, whites up and shadows down with the waveform open. 2 Split - Window > Gradient (flat horizon) or points along a hilly one, Shift+H, soften ('I forgot to feather the mask... so I'm going to go back'), track forward/back; Ctrl+C/V and invert for the pair, or the Ground Sky / Sky Ground / Basic Masks presets; in the newer videos a Qualifier selects the sky and an outside node ('something I've been doing recently') inverts it. 3 Cast - dropper on fog, cloud or sky that 'should technically be white', sometimes rejected ('makes it really really blue... looks a lot worse'), then tint and temperature nudges. 4 LUT on its own node at reduced Key Output Gain. 5 Local - Alt/Option+C for a circle-mask node: shrink, feather, brighten the castle; inverted as a vignette ('adds a lot of depth and contrast and really draws our eyes in'); tracked like any mask. 6 Finish - Gallery > Flying Filmmaker Grades > Temporal Noise Reduction appended, then Blur panel radius pulled to ~0.45-0.48 to bring detail back. He revisits: 'you'll go on keep color grading then you come back to a shot and it's like oh I messed something up.'

Warm Cinematic (Flying Filmmaker pack) at 0.25-0.6 on at least five of the fifteen; rejected on one - 'for this shot it just doesn't work very well.' A Lutify.me free Rec.709 LUT (name unrecoverable) at 0.2-0.5. M31 (Color Grading Central) at 0.5 on the Texas sunrise, 0.2 on a ground node, near-full on the viaduct, as low as 0.099 in Germany. Resolve's Kodak-style Film Look pulled back with the Contrast slider. Germany adds Parker Walbeck Rec.709 ('a paid LUT it costs like maybe 10 or 12 bucks... nice muted cinematic colors') and X-Grain (~$15 bundled); Slovenia runs Parker Walbeck at 16-30 % on most shots and regrets it - 'it took a little bit too much life out of the greens. Probably if I had to go back I wouldn't use that. Or turn it down.' Blue Sea (~30 % or lower), Blue Sea Panama City on night footage, Cold Fog on fall footage. Stacked LUTs, keyed to exclude a hue (no yellow), masked to the ground only; leftovers at 10 % doing nothing. The rule: apply at 1.0, judge, dial down; on snow, skip or near-zero because LUTs push colour into pure whites.

'The Mavic Air 2 has kind of a greenish tint... the Air 2S on the other hand especially in D-Log has kind of a magenta cast which I prefer because that gives more of a nice warm golden hourish look' - Air 2 gets tint toward magenta; Air 2S trees 'kind of look pink when they actually weren't' - Color Warper or HSL on the real-estate footage. Mini 5 Pro shadows run warm/magenta - Lift toward cool blue-green, Gain warmer. DJI greens lean yellow - hue vs hue toward true green. Pink roads - Qualifier on the road, post-filter up, desaturate; a tracked mask when the key spills. His own bias: slightly magenta highlights over green ones; skies that a LUT turns 'too teal instead of blue' come back on hue vs saturation or the Color Warper's middle point.

A tracked oval on an island church raises its whites and contrast; a gradient darkens bright foreground water; a circle mask brightens the castle 'it's okay if a little bit spills onto the background'; mountains get a tracked oval so they stand off the sky; the pack's vignette combined with an inverted gradient so it darkens only the sky. Backlit or blown backgrounds: a luma-only Qualifier ('luminance slider down here at the bottom'), Clean Black / Clean White, Denoise, Blur, Highlight Soft, then Curves to pull the background down 'enough that it's not way brighter than the castle'; when he keys the wrong half, the Key panel's invert box fixes it without redoing the key; a luma-plus-saturation key excludes the sky and a saturated hill to work only the clouds. Qualifier and mask together isolate doors and windows on one building face; the Germany castle gets a qualifier on 'all the highlight areas' so nothing outshines it. He skips a key when the payoff isn't there - a canopy against sky on a real-estate job.

OFX Color Space Transform with Input Color Space DCI-P3 (rest default) on the last node of 'almost every shot' in Slovenia - 'adds some extra saturation and pushes the colors into a little bit more cinematic color scheme', gain ~0.6, found while sorting Mac colour management; occasionally stacked twice. OFX Deband after aggressive sky darkening 'even though this was 10-bit footage' - it hides some cloud detail. Curves instead of the Contrast slider: 'way better to use our curves tool because we have way more control'; RGB curves with channel lock off for a heavy per-channel white balance ('probably a little bit overkill'). Post motion blur on shots without ND. The Mini 5 Pro's D-Log M: 'I'm using the one for the Air 3. They're practically the same' with +210 temperature on the same node, and the warning - 'they just throw on a log correction LUT on their log footage and think it's color graded. No it's not. That's just the first step.' The signature fall node: HSL raises saturation and luminance of yellows and reds, darkens and desaturates greens and shifts them blue-green - 'probably the single biggest thing that takes this shot from looking okay to looking great', downloadable as PowerGrade or LUT; applied twice by accident once, fixed at 0.5 opacity. Secondary tools: Color Warper to warm neutral rock or pull teal off church walls; Magic Mask 'didn't do that great of a job'; manual keyframed masks when water fools the tracker; Color Stabilizer before the log node for a shot that darkens over time.

Flat (the viaduct: Normal profile because 'in D-Cinelike I could barely see what I was actually filming', ND not set): waveform 'close to the bottom'; two similar curves nodes - 'if you try to adjust it too much especially in curves all at once it can start to look weird'; M31; TNR at Frames 5, Better, medium radius, threshold 36 luma and chroma ('dramatically reduces the noise'); sharpen 0.45, accept a slightly over-sharp railing. FPV (a student's Avata, D-Cinelike, 8-bit): 'you can't really use masks... the frame is always moving and changing so fast'; quick pass = contrast, saturation, highlights/shadows sliders, his Panama City LUT; advanced = luminance Qualifier with L Soft and Denoise to take the sky, Option+O outside node for the ground, grade each - with banding risk on water. Snow (Air 2S 10-bit D-Log): 'you want the snow to be white, both brightness-wise and color-wise' - white point near the top of the waveform or 'it's going to be gray'; sky split and tracked backward from the reference frame; darken and saturate blues; the dropper warms snow too much, so keep it slightly cool; no-sky shots get whites/blacks, an S-curve and a watch on the brightest patch. Night (D-Log M at max ISO after sunset): no LUT - one curve point up, a second near the bottom back down; TNR 3 frames at 100; Temperature about -600, tint -5 against the pink sunset; Blue Sea Panama City then shadows back up; accept clipped sky.

Grade the first clip early, before the edit is finished, to learn the footage. Several small nodes over one heavy one. Fix the Air 2S pink on foliage (Color Warper or HSL). Compare against DJI's stock Air 2S LUT - the manual grade looks 'real and dynamic.' Sky/ground masks 'really worth it' with dramatic clouds; skipped when the shot is front-lit and balanced, or when the key isn't worth it. Tips: accuracy over stylised LUTs (~40 % if any, from the LUT lesson), maximise contrast and saturation within reason, don't over-invest per shot - 'quantity' and turnaround; the speed hack - grade one shot thoroughly, Grab Still, apply to the rest of the same-day shoot and tweak. A downloadable timeline/PowerGrade of the real-estate grades.

1 Mavic Pro golden grain field - contrast, blacks, Warm Cinematic 0.6, TNR. 2 Air 2 backlit Rhine castle - sky/ground tracked, Lutify 0.3, tracked circle on the castle, TNR + sharpen. 3 Germany hillside - saturation 70-80, sky darkened, Warm Cinematic, cool sky vs warm ground. 4 Air 2 Amish farm - Ground Sky preset, ground curve midpoint up, Warm Cinematic 0.25. 5 Air 2 log, bright sky/dark ground - split, cooled desaturated ground, blue via LGG, later contrast fix. 6 Texas pond sunrise - silhouette, heavy saturation, M31 0.5, manual TNR before the LUT. 7 Air 2 wildebeest at midday - stretch, Kodak film look minus contrast, inverted circle vignette. 8 Air 2S 10-bit D-Log M sunbeams in fog - contrast, warm WB kept, Warm Cinematic, blue in the shadows via HDR wheel. 9 Mavic Pro - curve mask tracked both ways, sky saturation, dropper, HSL blue. 10 Air 2 8-bit fog hyperlapse - contrast, highlights down, warm + magenta. 11 Overcast dramatic clouds - Sky Ground preset, sky darker, Highlights-in-Primaries warm push, M31 0.2. 12 Same place, sunny - curve mask on the mountain, road blued with log wheels, chroma-only NR. 13 Air 2 German old town, backlit - Basic Masks, green cast out, Warm Cinematic over Lutify. 14 Air 2S backlit castle - luma key down, tracked spotlight, Lutify 0.2. 15 Air 2S 10-bit log with a white sky, never graded - gradient, luma+saturation key, Lutify masked to the ground; the Air 2S magenta note.