How to Color Correct Video Games!

ohaple

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So this tutorial is not about growing your channel like my previous ones were, but it can be useful for video producers.
Here are my previous tutorials on ytt:
How to start out right!
How to get to 100 subs quickly!
How to grow quickly through ad campaigns!
How to get thousands of views as a small channel!
How to make intros easily in iMovie!

As always, here is the video tutorial, feel free to scroll down if text is more your style. The comparison that shows the results is in the last 20 seconds of the video if you just want to see how it turns out before dedicating your time to learn it.

Alright, as promised, the text tutorial. :)
This method (the specific numbers) was designed for use in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, and COD Ghosts. The same techniques can be used for other games or editing software, but the values you need to use may be slightly different. This can even be used to non-gaming content to help make things pop a little. Just be careful, it is easy to overdo it on real life video.

First, make sure you know how to add effects to video in Premiere Pro. Find that effects tab, and it is as easy as drag and drop. Then access the effects controls section to set up individual effect parameters.

  1. Apply a ProcAmp (Processing Amplifier) effect to the game clip that you want to enhance (make sure that you do the same effect to every clip for consistency)
  2. First we go to work on the contrast. Change the value from 100 to 150. This may need tweaked depending on the game you are playing, or if you pre-enhanced it through your capture card settings.
  3. Next we set our brightness to -12 to help take away some of the brightness that the contrast change created.
  4. Now, set your saturation to 180 (from 100) to help saturate all of the colors more. This helps a ton, since COD is known for its greyish greenish brownish haze.
  5. Last, we need to bring some definition back into our dark shadows. Use a Shadow 10 and highlight 50 effect with the shadow set to 10 and the highlight set to 50.
  6. You can check the video at 3:50 t0 see the side by side impact.
  7. PROTIP! Make sure to right click on the two effects after you have done this, and click "Save as preset" Name them something you will remember, that way you can quickly apply them next time straight from the presets effect folder.
  8. A CONSIDERATION! Any time you do color correction, your render time will be increased, just as is it with other transitions and effects. The longer your video is, the more layers it has, the more effects it has, and the higher frame-rate and resolution it is, the longer it will take to render.
    1. For example: A standard 5 minute COD gameplay can be rendered by my computer without commentary or editing in 5-10 minutes. A more complex video using chroma keying and many effects and layers that I did recently took 1.5 hours for only 5 minutes of video.
Hope this tutorial helped! Be sure to post examples below of before-and-afters, or any questions you have about using this technique. It isn't super groundbreaking or complex, but it is something that can just improve the production quality of your videos.
 
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VanCityVideo

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Good post. I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't even bother doing this since they assume the captured video will be good enough. Do you feel this is necessary across most games? Or just COD in particular?
 

ohaple

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Good post. I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't even bother doing this since they assume the captured video will be good enough. Do you feel this is necessary across most games? Or just COD in particular?
Cod is particularly bad, but most "war" games have some of this haze. Games like halo and titanfall require less. Games like cod and fallout require more.
 

WeiseGamer

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Good post, though I personally would not do it. I know a lot of big CoD you tubers do but the game is the game, don't change it lol. Just my opinion :)
 

ohaple

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Good post, though I personally would not do it. I know a lot of big CoD you tubers do but the game is the game, don't change it lol. Just my opinion :)
I see your point. But what you should consider is what is most important: viewer opinion. The goal is always to do color correction so that it isn't super obvious. Try doing some color correction, then bring over a family member and ask which they find more pleasing. If they like the original better, then keep it. Some games (like titanfall or skyrim) are very pretty right out of the box. Other games (like Fallout or COD) have a very drab grey hue to them, and can benefit from some color correction.

One thing I wanted to update to this video. I still use this process on every one of my on-demand videos, but the numbers I used in this example are much more extreme than you will want to use. At the time, I didn't realize that this particular COD map was exceptionally dull. Adjust the numbers all to suit your content. You can fix a lot of stuff in post (even make your vlogs look prettier).
 

Samantha Brown

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Good post. Color correction is in my opinion always to be considered. I don't do gaming vids but I don't see why it shouldn't apply to gaming as well. Just consider that just about every single mainstream product image or video is color corrected. So much so that we expect it. Unprocessed video can easily look grey, fuzzy, bland, boring. We often dont take the time to consider how much colors affect our mood and decisions. Just scroll down some youtube thumbnails and see which one catches your eye and which one doesn't. I'll bet you'll see my point as to why it matters.
 

Consolex

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Thank for the video as it was really useful to me. I have plenty of washed out videos that I should be colour correcting.