Color grading pt. 1

 How I color graded my warm tone clips  

To change my clips from low quality and very bland to better quality with a warm, mysterious vibe, I use color grading in adobe premiere. I started off by watching a lot of tutorials from Zac Watson on YouTube. This was a great start, but he was editing videos to have a cooler tone (the opposite of what I wanted to do), so I watched a few more of his videos just to understand how the program worked. I started by color grading the clips that have three-point lighting. I wanted a warm but mysterious tone to engage the viewer in the film. I moved the saturation up from 100 to 120 to make the warmer tone, then I color graded the lighting, changing these settings: 

• - Exposure 0.5 to make the clip a tad bit darker. 

• - Contrast 9.6 to create depth and set the mood by pulling the audience's emotions. 

• - Highlights –37 to soften the bright uneven spots in the clip. 

• - Whites –30.4 to remove the original color cast that was on the original shot from the lights in    the home.  

  I tried to do curves at first, but I found out very quickly that it was hard to understand how to correctly do curves. Every time I would do a curve, the clip would either be a completely different color or would mess up all the settings I had for the lighting, so I ended up not using the curves for this movie's opening.