Creating a Commercial Look with Color Finale 2 Pro

In this lesson we take a flat S-Log3 shot, do a basic Rec 709 conversion, and build a clean commercial look using Color Finale 2 Pro. This is an actual lesson from my color grading masterclass, which fully covers Color Finale 2 Pro alongside Final Cut's built-in tools, so if you're a CF2P user, consider this a free taste.

Step 1: Convert with the ACES color transform

There are a couple of ways to convert. If your log profile is available in the ACES color transform option, use that: input space S-Log3, output space Rec 709 100 nits. If your profile isn't in there, use the LUT browser instead and apply your S-Log3 to Rec 709 LUT as an input LUT.

The nice thing with ACES: there's no input LUT, so you don't need to add your exposure adjustment before one. The shot was a little overexposed, so pull exposure down. I did it on the offset wheel in the layers panel so we can do clean before-and-afters, and renamed the layer "exposure."

Step 2: Contrast with false color on

Important: when using the ACES transform, bring up false color before adding contrast. The luma waveform can tell you you're fine when you're actually crushing blacks or blowing highlights and erasing detail.

Because we need big pushes, use the primary color wheels, not the log wheels (log wheels make small, compartmentalized pushes per range; primaries affect the shot gradually). Lower the shadows until false color shows purple, dial back. Raise the gain until you see red, dial back. Toggle false color off, set your midtones where the skin looks good, and add saturation.

Step 3: Balance using skin

Commercial grades live or die on accurate skin and no gross color cast; the viewer should feel like they could be there using the product. No white or gray reference in this shot, so we balance off skin. Pull up the vectorscope, use isolate ellipse, and crop into her skin (he has a sunburn, we'll deal with him later). Her skin isn't sitting on the skin tone line, so go back to that offset wheel and swing the hue slider away from red/magenta until it lands on the line. Aim for skin sitting about 10 to 40% out along the skin tone line. The shot goes from cool to properly warm, and the vectorscope confirms the balance. Rename the layer "exposure and balance," since that's what it became.

Step 4: An S-curve for pop

Still too faded, so pull up a luma curve. With ACES, small pushes to curves make big changes, so easy does it: pump contrast into the very darkest parts at the bottom of the curve, then lift the midtones and slightly the highlights, creating an S-curve. The sky runs a little hot, but a white sky has no detail worth saving anyway; skin brightness matters more. Where you DO want protection, add a log wheel and lower just the highlights exposure slider: compartmentalized, so your midtones stay untouched. Same trick if the blacks crush a hair. Rename it "clipping adjustment" and drag it to the end of the stack, since later moves can change your extremes.

Step 5: Color adjustments with Six Vectors

Sony cameras push too much saturation into greens for my taste. In the green vector: desaturate a touch, warm them slightly, or go the other way, swing the hue toward teal and desaturate for a muted hipster look (which I ended up preferring for this shot; take it or leave it). In the blue vector, nudge blue toward cyan on the vectorscope so the palette feels more uniform, and desaturate slightly.

The red in the frame is way oversaturated. Rule of thumb: if you drew imaginary lines between the vectorscope quadrant targets, your color shouldn't touch that line. Rather than the red vector (which would drag their skin with it), use the HSL curves, Hue vs Sat: select just that red, narrow the selection, and lower saturation a little (too much and it breaks).

Step 6: Saturation cleanup

In Sat vs Luma, pull saturation out of the darkest parts so your blacks read true black; check highlights the same way. Then Sat vs Sat: decrease the most saturated areas (right side of the curve) and slightly boost the least saturated, with a gentle falloff. Oddly, CF2P's Sat vs Sat makes a subtler adjustment than Final Cut's version of the same curve. Rename: "saturation correction."

Step 7: Fix the sunburn

Time to make my boy look a little better. Add an offset wheel layer, group it (so you can stack more layers on the same mask later), and add an HSL mask. Use the mask input display to check your selection of the red areas, add blur to the mask (it WILL show if you don't), then push the log wheel away from red. Before and after: no more sunburn.

Step 8: The vignette pump

Last move: guide the viewer's eyes to the subjects. Luma curve, grouped, with an ellipse mask over them, feathered around 80 to 90%. CF2P's tracker follows them noticeably better than Final Cut's built-in tracking, by the way. Right-click and invert parent mask so the layer affects everything OUTSIDE the ellipse, then pull the lower midtones down; it reads like they were lit on set. Then Option-drag to duplicate the layer, un-invert the copy, and give the inside a slight midtone push and shadow drop for extra pump. If it's too strong, select the layer and dial back the mix slider. Rename the pair "vignette pump."

The full workflow, recapped

ACES transform, exposure and balance, contrast and saturation with false color as your guardrail, an S-curve for pop, clipping protection at the end of the stack, green and blue vector tweaks, saturation cleanup in the HSL curves, a masked skin fix, and a tracked vignette pump. That's a commercial-grade look from a log clip, start to finish.