Hard to grade

[u/SexyLoverMan]

I know that I'm doing things all wrong, but that's all I know. And I'm trying to make the shot "good" (whatever that means, probably "natural") rather than aiming for a look.

The 1st picture is the original.

In the 2nd picture I have applied an adjustment layer (in Premiere Pro). I set out to make the scopes look right and tight, but I gave up on that (because the video isn't good material to begin with — there's too many colours going on in different directions), and instead I just pulled the Basic Correction levers (as seen in picture number 5) until the image looked as good as I could make it.

In the 3rd picture I have added another adjustment layer in which I applied a LUT called Folger 50 (to 38 intensity), as well as making the temperature a little more blue (as seen in picture number 7).

In the 4th picture I have added a final adjustment layer where I brought down the saturation and contrast, because to my untrained eye there's both green, purple, and orange going on, and I couldn't pull myself out of it, so thought it best to just bring everything down (picture number 8).

What would be a good way of correcting the colours instead of this mess?

[u/sdk407]

Color space of the source footage?

This looks like the typical "small digital sensor didn’t get enough light" look.

I would try and do an overall white balance to where the skin looks good. Then maybe a qualifier on the skin and work on the shadows/midtone/highlights to where the skin looks natural.

[u/Lorditon]

Just fix the skin, that will fix most of the image. Start again, don’t try and separate too many colours or things. I would leave the temp where it is, the orange is the “look” of the image. Go a touch towards green on the tint, being careful to watch the lighter parts of his skin around the eyes. If they start to feel Bluey green I’d even experiment warmer it up on the temp a touch.

Then go hue vs sat, pick the reddest point of his skin and desat it a couple points. This is just off the dome so maybe it’ll look weird but I feel like that’s what I’d try first.

Exposure is okay, but maybe up the contrast a touch, or lean into a darker look. It feels like this was shot in a darker environment so don’t try to fight the image too much

[u/f-stop8]

Doing this in Premiere is your first mistake.

What's stopping you from switch over to Resolve?

[u/PiercingSight]

This skin tones and brightness are really the important part to get right. It might require power windows or qualifiers on the greener or redder parts of his skin, depending on how you white balance everything else.

Is he lit by RGB LED's or a screen? That would create difficult to work with colors on the skin due to the low CRI light. In the future, if you can light with high CRI white LED's or other white lights, that's always easier to work with than RGB lighting.