Did you know you can make a video look much better with simple editing techniques?
There are many aspects that contribute a lot to the aesthetics of a video, and there are very specific ways to improve the look of your videos during the editing phase, no matter what Video Editing Software you use, and you can do that without worrying about pre-production (the recording phase).
Even though it’s important to know about camera angles, lighting and scene composition, the post-production (when you edit the video) is a process that allows you to greatly upgrade the looks of your video, and that’s what we’ll cover in this post.
With a handful of tools that most video editing software programs have, you can make your audience notice your video much more to directly improve the way people see your videos.
Let’s see how to make videos look better with editing techniques.
Technique 1: Edit the Brightness
The first method to make a video look better is to adjust its brightness with a Video Editing Software. Every video has 3 main light tones that compose its brightness: highlights, midtones and shadows.
Usually there are many details “hidden” in a video that can pop up if you edit the highlights and shadows correctly. For example, if you recorded a person with the sky as the background and the sky appears too clear in the final footage, you can correct that by highlights of the video. Likewise, if you recorded a video in which some parts were very dark, if you increase the value of the shadows you will get images with more details.
However, you need to be careful because very high shadow tones can result in images with noise glitch, which are small colored dots that decrease the quality of the image making it look like footage shot in the 1960s or something like that. So, do some tests with the brightness tones (highlights, midtones and shadows), until you find the best result possible.
You can look for the waveform monitor in your video editing software, which is a type of chart used to display the overall brightness of a video. You need to check on the waveform monitor if there’s a lot of information at the top or bottom of the chart (too many peaks in the chart) and also if there’s a part with very intense white tones at the bottom top of the waveform chart. Both of those cases means that video details are being lost in the chart areas, which can be corrected by adjusting the highlights and shadows of the video.
Technique 2: Edit the Contrast
The second method to make a video look better is to adjust its contrast. The waveform monitor can also help with that: the greater the distance between the top and bottom of the waveform monitor, the greater the contrast of your video, and also the bigger the difference between light and dark tones in your video.
To enhance your video using contrast adjustment, you can:
• Increase the contrast and also add an intense color scheme to your video with a color grading tool. Try to reach a color scheme close to suspense movies, that usually attracts a lot of attention from the audience.
• Greatly decrease the contrast of your video, which will give it a smooth and calm vibe, like movies with drama or romance movies. It all depends on what you want to communicate with your audience.
Technique 3: Edit the Saturation
The third method to make a video look better is to adjust its saturation. Higher saturation levels makes a video look more vivid, with intense colors. Lower saturation levels makes a video look less intense, as it was winter. The more you reduce the saturation of a video, the closer the image is to black & white.
You can adjust the saturation of your video with any Video Editing Software. Within your video editing software, look for the Vectorscope tool, which is a chart shaped as a circle that shows the saturation levels of your video. You can adjust the saturation of your video without exceeding the limit of each of the colors that appear in the Vectorscope. Videos with high saturation levels portray happiness and fun. Videos with low saturation levels portray darker emotions or look retro.
Technique 4: Edit the Hue Curves
The fourth method to make a video look better is to adjust its Hue Saturation Curves if your Video Editing Software has this feature. “Hue” means color or shade, so this tool is used to adjust the saturation of a specific color. The Hue Saturation Curves allow you to manipulate specific colors in your video. You can change the color of an object to a different color and also change the saturation levels of specific colors.
For example, you can make the blue tones of a video more greenish, or make the yellow tones more clear or less clear, or change the color of one single object of your video, and so on. This is useful for when the colors of a video aren’t balanced, you can make it look much more uniform and get incredible results.
Technique 5: Edit the White Balance
The fourth method to make a video look better is to adjust its White Balance, a feature that defines whether the video will be more yellowish or more bluish. This attribute balances the color temperature of your video. If you want a video to seem “colder” as if it was shot in winter or a rainy day, you can set its White Balance to lower levels, which will intensify the blue tones of the video.
On the other hand, if you want your video to look “warmer”, as if it was shot during summer days or at the beach, you can increase its White Balance, which will intensify the yellow tones of the video.
Just remember that the White Balance influences a lot in this type of footage: the color of skin of people in the video (if any), the color of the sky in the video (if included) and the color of vegetation in the video (if any). You can find the Color Dropper Tool of your Video Editing Software to select a specific color in a scene of your video to set up the White Balance accordingly.
Conclusion
Great! Now you know 5 methods to greatly increase the looks of any video and make it look beautiful. You also know the best ways of editing the video brightness, of editing the video contrast, of editing the video saturation, of editing the video Hue Curves and of editing the video White Balance. So don’t hesitate to put what you’ve learned into practice!
You can also share your thoughts in the comments below!
