Some people have a glow about them. A spark. A sense of Joy that is bubbling right under the surface of their personality. It’s not just joy though, its happiness, laughter, smiling, and love all at once. Nicole and Estevan have that.
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Color grading has always been one of my favorite facets of cinematography. Think about the warm reds and oranges of Mad Max, or the darker hues of The Revenant. The ability of a colorist to alter the mood and feel of a film through hues and saturation is incredibly powerful. I’ve been wanting to make a color grading tutorial for years, but it wasn’t about a year ago that I felt that I had learned enough to even consider doing that. I knew that the time was right when I finished creating my video about my favorite picture profile for the A7Sii.
That does not mean that this tutorial only applies to wedding films shot with the A7Sii or any other camera for that matter. The philosophy, curves, and color wheels, should apply to any video you are color grading, regardless of its content. You will need a copy of Adobe Premiere Pro CC to follow along with this tutorial. Adobe currently offers a free 30 day trial of Creative Cloud with all their apps, including Premiere Pro.
I do have a couple recommendations before you start color grading. First, I would watch my first video about my favorite A7Sii picture profile. Spoiler Alert: my favorite picture profile is PP8, with the CINE4 Gamut and sgamut3.cine color space. By filming footage with that picture profile, it makes it easier to follow along with this tutorial. Second, I would invest in a good color calibration tool like a Spyder 5 Pro. If your monitor isn’t calibrated you will have no way of knowing if your color grade will look good on all screens, or only yours.
If you are interested in learning more about color grading, check out the Tao Colorist Newsletter by Patrick Inhofer. Every week, he covers the latest news, tutorials, and technology in the world of color grading. It is incredibly insightful and a joy to read every Sunday. I am also a huge fan of Denver Riddle’s Color Grading Central. He offers training, LUTs, and plugins for aspiring colorists around the world. Now if he would only make some plugins for Premier Pro. 🙂
I hope this tutorial was helpful for you. I’ll be coming out with another tutorial for color grading with LUTs very soon!
Want to watch more? Check out my reviews of the A7Sii and FS5, as well as a tip for how wedding cinematographers and photographers can get along. If you have any questions or comments about this picture profile or anything else relating to wedding cinematography, please get in touch.
I met my wife at a smoothie and movie party. Of course I didn't know she would be my wife in that moment, but I did feel an immediate connection. It ended up taking a year of friendship and two years of dating before we made our marriage official. I still remember that first moment our eyes met, and our first conversation.
When I hear Gabriel speak about how he first saw Kaydrian, he speaks with the same fondness I do when I speak about how I met my wife. He was sitting in speech class at college (no smoothies or movies in sight), when Kaydrian walked up to present her speech. To hear him describe it, you would think an angel floated in through a window while harps played and a childrens choir sang. It may not have been that dramatic, but it still left an impression on his heart and mind.
Kaydrian's story of how they met takes a less heavenly tone. She talks about public speaking in the same way that vegans talk about burger joints. Her quieter demeanor didn't lend itself well to speeches, and she said she didn't actually notice Gabriel at all while stumbling through her presentation. That evening though, once the speeches were finished and she could relax, she happened to run into him at a bar. From then on they were inseparable, seeing each other every day, and not just in speech class.
Soon after they started dating, a major curveball hit their relationship. Gabriel's company moved to Dallas and wanted him to move too. It was then that he asked Kaydrian to uproot herself, from all her close friends and family and move with him.
She said yes.
This was probably the second moment that Gabriel saw an angel and heard harps playing. It is also the second moment that I saw a similarity between Kaydrian and Gabriel's story and my own. Around the same time Kaydrian was pulling up roots and moving to Dallas for Gabriel, I was doing the same for my soon to be wife, Rachel. I couldn't envision life without her.
When filming weddings, it is so easy to get caught up in the day of the event, but it is important to consider everything leading up to it. The small decisions to come up and speak with someone, that lead to bigger decisions to date them, followed by life-changing decisions to move cities and get married. I'm glad that I get to be a part of one of these moments.
You can also watch Kaydrian and Gabriel's wedding highlight film below:
Shot with the Sony FS100, Canon 7D, and Canon 5DMK2. Edited in Premiere Pro CC. Colored with Magic Bullet Looks.
Interested in having me film your wedding? Get in touch!
Three months ago, I started making wedding cinematography training videos to help others film weddings. It took about a week after uploading my first video for me to discover that there is a massive community of wedding cinematographers out there that want to get better at their craft. As I produce more videos in this series, I find that I am asked even more questions in comments and emails. These messages are added to an ever-increasing list of videos that I will be making in the future.
By far though, the most popular question I have received is, “Which picture profile should I use when shooting with my A7Sii?” This is definitely a complicated question due to the sheer depth of the picture profile menu on the A7Sii and FS5, as well as how many differing opinions there are across the many blogs and forums across the Internet. Your train of thought may have been something like mine: “Do I shoot with the new fancy SLOG3? But doesn’t that cause noise in the shadows? What about SLOG2 instead? Isn’t that going to cause an odd green tint in some images? Maybe one of the Cinegammas then? Aren’t those called Hypergammas in the higher end Sony Cameras? Why is everything so different? Am I crazy? Does this even look better?”
I’m excited to say that today I have an answer for you. After extensive testing, and reading throughout the vast corners of the Internet so you don’t have to, I have found an ideal picture profile. Please keep in mind that while this may be my favorite picture profile, it doesn’t have to be yours. You can have a different opinion from me, and that is alright.
I wanted a picture profile that would suit my needs well. It needed wide dynamic range, a flat image for color grading (but not too flat!), and be versatile for the wide variety of shooting locations I typically go through on a wedding day.
Those needs almost immediately cut SLOG2 and SLOG3, with their minimum ISOs of 1600, and their bright exposure requirements, from my list of options for picture profiles. Incidentally, the 8-bit codec of the A7Sii in SLOG3 can also cause banding in the finer color gradients like blue skies etc. I wanted to avoid this as well.
If you don’t feel like watching me ramble in the above video for 6 minutes about picture profiles, here are the settings for my favorite picture profile:
-Reset PP8 to default.
-Change the Gamut from SLOG3 to CINE4.
That’s it! Congratulations, you’re now shooting in my favorite picture profile! Leave all the other settings as they are. Go try it out and see how you like it. I’ll be making another video soon, showing how I color grade this picture profile.
Special thanks for Marien Breithouwer for originally sharing this picture profile.
Want to watch more? Check out my reviews of the A7Sii and FS5, as well as a tip for how wedding cinematographers and photographers can get along. If you have any questions or comments about this picture profile or anything else relating to wedding cinematography, please get in touch.
I may be a little biased, but I believe a film is the best way to remember a wedding. Jordan and James must be biased too because they agreed with me.
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Remember your first love in high school? I had one of those. And by “had”, I mean that I was the one in love; I don’t believe that the object of my affections actually knew I was in love with her. But thankfully this film isn’t about my high school romance, it’s about Will and Stephanie’s.
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