Don't Make These 10 Color Grading Mistakes in Final Cut Pro

I don't want you guys making the mistakes I see a lot of people making with color correction and color grading. So let's dive in and do some learning.

1. Using temperature and tint to color balance

This is something I see creators do a lot, and it's not the right way to go about color correction. Usually shots are unbalanced due to incorrect white balance settings in camera, which causes your entire shot to swing toward an unwanted color.

Picture a gradient that should be pure black and white, but has a blue cast from bad white balance. A temperature and tint adjustment barely touches the shadows. A push on your global hue slider, on the other hand, fully takes out the blue cast and gets the shot to a balanced level. That's the issue with the temp and tint sliders for balancing: your black point stays locked to that incorrect color and never gets corrected with the rest of your footage.

2. Not taking care of skin tones

Skin should generally be a certain brightness, a certain saturation, and a certain color. Not always, because stylized looks can push skin way off, but for a natural clean look, aim for these values:

Brightness: between 30 IRE and 80 IRE, depending on the person's complexion and environment. Saturation: roughly 10 to 40% of the way out along the skin tone line. Color: falling on the line between the yellow and red hues on your vectorscope, aptly named the skin tone line. No matter what race or ethnicity, skin naturally lies on this line.

3. Neglecting your color curves

Curves are one of my favorite tools for color correcting and grading, and in Final Cut Pro the ability to change the hue of each curve makes it so easy to hop in and create looks with specific colors. Same goes for correction: if your shot has a color cast in, say, your midtones, pull up that exact color and drag down to subtract it from the midtones. That balances the shot out. You could use your wheels for this too, but I find the curves fun for some reason.

4. Overexposing and underexposing

More of a beginner mistake, but I see it all the time from non-beginners too. Watch your luma waveform, which measures brightness. Past the 100 IRE line, you're blowing out your highlights and erasing detail in the brightest parts of your shot. Below 0, you're erasing detail in the darkest parts. Staying inside those boundaries is an important rule.

That said, crushing your blacks isn't always bad. It can be a stylistic choice. Blown-out highlights, though, are a surefire way to make footage look amateurish.

5. Overly saturated white and black points

This plays off the previous one. When you push color into your shot while grading, there's a chance you're also pushing color into areas that should be black or white. Say a grade throws too much color cast onto someone's dark hair. It looks amateurish and unnatural.

The fix: hop into your HSL curves, go down to Luma vs Sat (which adjusts color intensity across brightness values), and pull down the left end to desaturate only the darkest parts of your shot. If your grade has clean blacks, clean whites, and accurate skin tones, everything else can work no matter how far you push it. Within reason, of course.

6. Transforming LOG footage the wrong way

I highly recommend NOT converting LOG footage to Rec 709 using the Camera LUT tab in the inspector window. If your shot is over or underexposed, applying the transform there gives you basically no ability to recover that detail.

Instead, use the Custom LUT effect from your effects browser. It lets you make adjustments BEFORE the input LUT, so you can access the wider tonal range and color information in the LOG footage and pull that detail back. This works great for color balancing too.

7. Overcomplicating your grade

This one I'm kind of throwing in to remind myself. Often I'll make lots of secondary corrections, add shape masks to draw attention to specific areas, and use color masks to isolate specific HSL values. It's a thorough way to grade, but it's not always necessary, and it can seriously increase your shot matching time. Know when to put in the work and when not to. With commercials and shorter videos, more work makes sense given the clip count. With films, consider dialing it back because of the huge amount of footage you'll need to grade and match.

8. Ignoring story and mood

Color grading should serve the narrative and mood of the project. If you're making a war film, you wouldn't add bright pastel tints. If you're making an educational video, it probably shouldn't look like Blade Runner 2049. This is part of color theory, which I go over in the FCP Color Grading Masterclass.

9. Avoiding (or misusing) your video scopes

Not a glamorous mistake, but an important one. Scopes are the best way to identify when areas of your shot aren't where they should be. And just as important: learn to use them correctly.

For example, I see people using the RGB Parade and RGB Overlay to add contrast and adjust brightness all the time, when they should be using the luma waveform. Even Tyler Stalman did it in a popular FCP color grading video. No shade to Tyler, I love the guy, but here's why it's incorrect: the luma waveform can show your brightness sitting comfortably between 0 and 100 IRE while the RGB Parade shows a channel spiking past 100. People then drop their exposure to bring it in range when they don't need to. Usually all it takes is a saturation or color adjustment to bring that channel to a normal level, and doing it that way means the brightness of your shot doesn't change. Because it never needed to.

10. Not using the comparison viewer to shot match

Pull it up with Control Command 6, or go to Window, Show in Workspace, Comparison Viewer. It gives you a side by side of either shots on your timeline or shots saved in your frame browser, so you can shot match and create consistent looks way more accurately.

If you learned some things in this video, you'll learn way more in the FCP Color Grading Masterclass. The course goes significantly more in depth and even gives you LOG and Rec 709 clips to practice on while following along with the lessons. Have a great rest of your day.