Color grade flat footage to look more vibrant

In this video, you're going to learn how to use Rushes built in color tools to take a flat looking image like this one with the color smoke bomb and make it pop and more vibrant.

So let's go ahead and just pause this video here, and let's click on the Color tab over on the right.

And here you'll see a bunch of presets.

If you click on the presets, you can see how it affects the image, and you can see it doesn't really help us bring out the color, it just applies a specific look.

So this is why I recommend not using a preset, but instead using the Edit tab to have more control over the image.

So let's scrub to the part here where you can see her face and the smoke.

That looks good right here.

And let's start by brightening the image.

Let's just move the exposure slider to the right slightly, we don't wanna do it too much, 'cause then it will be way overexposed.

But just a slight amount, like so.

And then we can add some contrast by moving the slider to the right.

And the highlights, we can bring out a little bit more of the brighter parts of the image to make it pop.

And then for the shadows, we can move the slider to the left to make the shadows more dark to create more contrast.

And this is the before and the after.

You can already see a lot more contrast and it's starting to pop.

Now let's add more vibrance into the color itself.

What this slider will do is as we move it to the right, it adds in more saturation to the least saturated areas of the image.

So this is why you can add a lot of vibrance and it doesn't affect the image as much as saturation.

So we'll increase it to about here, we don't want it to be too much, 'cause then it will start to get distorted.

So around 50 is good.

And then for saturation, this will add in far more color and saturation to all areas of the image, even the parts that are already saturated.

Which is why when you increase it it looks far more drastic than vibrance.

So it really depends on the look that you're going for.

I'm just gonna add in a slight amount of saturation to around 113, that looks good to me.

So now we can see the before and the after, it's looking a lot more vibrant.

Under Advanced, you can also add in a little bit of sharpening, just to make the image pop slightly.

You don't wanna do too much, but just a slight amount to give it a little bit more of a pop.

Another thing you can do is play around with the temperature.

So right now, it looks a little bit too blue for me, and I definitely don't wanna move it to the left to make it more blue for the temperature control.

But if you move it over to the right, you can see it makes it more warm so it looks more like a golden hour, which is very popular look right now.

But you don't want it to be too much.

So I'm just gonna have a slight warmer look here and I think that looks good at 40.

Then for tint, you can, of course, move it to the left to make it more green, but in that case, it just doesn't make sense for this image.

But I can add a slight pink tint to it, so that way, it looks more like a cotton candy sky, which I think looks great for this image.

So let's go ahead a play it back to see the final result.

This is the before and this is the after.

So just with these tools you're able to take a flat looking video and make it pop and feel more vibrant just by using these basic sliders inside of Rush.