5 EASY Techniques for Better Color Grading

[Music] what's going on guys this is qazi welcome back to another epic video and today we're going to be looking at five simple tricks to grade better ultimately as a colorist your job is to make pretty images so that's an oversimplification right but in this video i'm gonna break it down and show you step by step what it takes to make pretty images and guys get super pumped because i just dropped a brand new webinar where i'm gonna be sharing my secrets to developing an hdr ready workflow so link is down below this training is absolutely free and it will not be available on my youtube so check it out before it's too late ever wonder how to turn your sdr grade to hdr in addition to that this free webinar includes proper workflow to using hollywood's most used film print emulation custom techniques to stress testing your luts future proof luts for hdr and asus workflow learn to balance your footage in seconds with printer lights secrets to building an hdr ready note 3 prepping dolby vision trim for netflix pro tip when saving a power grade i will end the session with an extended q a these questions came from you guys click the link in the description to sign up for this free training it's been a while since i did a talent spotting so today i want to give a shout out to cameron marygold this guy is putting out straight up fire all day every day a must follow account on instagram go show him some love and guys on that note if you're enjoying the content smash that like button it will mean the world to me if you subscribe to my channel follow me on instagram if you want to see behind the scenes and other cool stuff let's roll the intro let's get this show on the road so the first thing that i'm going to do is i'm going to lay out my entire note free without labeling it because i don't want to ruin the surprise and then we're going to label each node as we move along so let's go ahead and do that okay so this is going to be our notary structure let's start with the first node which is going to be cst short for color space transform we know that this is shot on red so i'm going to go ahead and do a proper conversion from log to rec709 now that's something that you will need to know either discuss it with your producer or director of photography and find out which camera they're using which profile they're using stuff like that now so i know exactly what they used i'm going to go select that log 3 g10 red white gamut and all of a sudden look at the scopes perfect conversion from lock direct 709 now if you want to learn a more advanced way to set up your color space transform check out my free training link is down below so that is our first step so we've already accomplished that as a colorist your job is to make images look pretty now let's deep dive and analyze what we got going on okay so i see this light hitting the wall and the window right here which creates a motivation meaning we can create a vignette and then everything outside of it we can pull down quite a bit because there's a motivation right the light is coming through here so if this area is really dark it will feel natural so that's one thing that we can do another thing we need to do is we need to bring out our dude so we need to focus on that so another thing that i want to do is i want to create a really hot sunny day okay so i'm going to keep all those things in mind and now let's go ahead and go attack it so let's move on to our next node this one is going to be our primaries and what i want to do here is i want to give my image just a little bit more pop i'm going to start with raising my gamma a little bit bringing my gain down keep it somewhere around here so if i do before and after i lifted my shot up a little bit and now i'm going to go under my contrast slider and i'm going to start cranking it i'm not doing too much okay i don't want to i don't want to push it too much so i'm going to leave it somewhere around here so it's uh it lifted our image it's giving us a little bit of pop i kind of like that okay so i'm going to leave it there still tons of room to work with and now i want to go under my color temperature and start adding that warmth that i was talking about so i want to go too far obviously and then push it back so park it somewhere around here and we can even see in our vector scope to like how much warmth we're adding but this is looking like borderline we're just adding a tint to our entire image and that's where getting granular comes into place so now what i want to do is i want to go into my gamma and i want to pull some of that yellow out so if i do before and after we can see in our highlights that we still have a lot of warmth look at that yellow we and you can even see it right here in the scopes so we still have a dominant warmth in our highlights but now we balanced our image very nicely by pulling a lot of that out uh from our mid-tones okay so it feels and looks way more believable now what i want to do at this point is do i want to mess with my primaries anymore i feel like as of now my primaries are looking pretty good so i'm going to leave them as is now let's get into our log wheels that's what we're going to be doing here log and the idea is that i want to make him look perfect and stylized using my log wheels but nothing else all right so i'm going to start off by actually i'm going to do two things so first of all i'm going to go under my high range i'm going to pull it back a little bit to around 520ish and i'm just going to take my highlights and right now my focus is right here i want to pull it up a little bit not too much i want to pull it and put it somewhere around here so like look at that it just adds a really nice natural pop into my image let's see if we can do a little bit more i'll just keep it down here i don't want to push it any more than that and it's adding a really nice pop in all of these areas it looks really good all right so i'm gonna keep it right there now i'm gonna work on our dude so i'm gonna take my mid-tone and i'm just gonna make sure that his skin looks perfect okay so i'm working on that i'm gonna add a little bit more red in the mid tones now i'm gonna go under my shadows and i'm gonna add a little bit more blue and then just a little bit of magenta i'm looking at his hair right now and then pull that back to just like really give it a nice film look and i'm just gonna add a bit more blue and i'm gonna add a bit more magenta and if i do before and after i mean look at that so it creates a really nice look but it looks even better when i pull back so like look at that and even like the color separation that it created between teal and this like just look at that like look how everything pops and that's all we had to do in our log wheels so i mean how much of a look we created in these two notes just look at it big difference okay so one more thing that we can do in our log wheels is that if we want to add a bit more warmth in our highlights we can do that right so i can just subtract a little bit of a a little bit of blue add more red and then you know obviously control that red i don't want to overdo anything and now if i pull back and we look at it so now what we have to do is pull this down a little bit so it's not blowing out i'm just looking at my colors right here okay so look at that i'm gonna pull back on the red a little bit and keep adding more yellow so like warmth that way and that right there looks really nice so look at that like we had a pretty warm image before but working with our log wheels we were able to control the colors so much and were able to pull out so much more personality out of our image all right and now we're going to move on to our hsl curves and here we want to do a few things so i'm gonna go under hue versus hue and i'm just gonna take my cyan and i'm gonna pull it down cool it off a little bit and i'm gonna take my green and i'm gonna cool it off a little bit not too much i do want it to stay even so we're not making that big of a difference if i go here and do before and after but we're taking some of the warmth out okay and just leaving it at that so that looks totally fine now one more thing that i want to do here is i want to get pretty close to his face hover over and see where my skin is sitting so you can see it right there this is the skin indicator and if i hover over here my skin is sitting a little bit on the yellow side so i want to click right here select his skin and then start moving it towards magenta okay and now if i pull back and we look at it even on the vector scope we were able to pull his skin back toward a natural skin tone color and that looks way way better okay and another thing that i'm gonna do is i'm gonna go under my sat versus sat and i'm gonna take the most saturated areas in the image and i'm gonna pull them down a little bit okay just something like that it gives it a really nice film look okay it just takes the sting out of all the areas that are overly saturated and it just blends everything way better so that's what i'm going to do here and at this point we are ready to start shaping light okay so first thing that i'm going to do is like i mentioned to you guys this is our motivation this light right here so this is what i want to do i want to click right here and create a light shaft okay like this and i want to invert it and now i'm going to go under my primaries i'm going to take my gamma and i'm just going to pull it down okay and i'm gonna keep it somewhere around here and now let's go under our softness and i'm gonna start adding some softness and i'm gonna leave it somewhere around here and if i do before and after just look at the difference and if i get rid of our overlay like look at the difference that we made and it's all believable because once again there is motivation the slide that's coming through so we can easily sell it all right now we can move the frame and see if it needs to be tracked but honestly in a movement like that it doesn't need to be tracked because we added enough feathering where everything is going to be fine so i'm going to leave it as is we should be totally fine now the next one so let's call this vignette because that's a global vignette and then let's call this hero and that hero so then it doesn't matter it could be a car it could be a golf club it could be a person it's basically our main subject in the frame so here it's our dude so i'm gonna punch in and i'm gonna create a custom shape i'm a big fan of custom shapes because they're organic and they blend in very nicely okay so i'm gonna keep it something like this i'm going to go under my curves i'm going to go under my custom curves turn on editable splines just click on this guy right here and then raise it up i'm going to raise it up the something like this i really want him to stand out okay so we're gonna go somewhere around here and all we need to do now is add a little bit of feathering not too much just a little bit and he blends in and at that point what i need to do is i need to track it so i'm going to go in here i'm going to do track forward and now i'm going to go back and i'm going to track backwards okay and if we come back to this point and we look at our tracking it's slashing on everything is totally fine and even if i get rid of this and play it back you see that nothing weird is happening it's latching on okay and it's making a massive difference before and after and we're not done yet another thing that i want to do here is i want to go under my blur radius and i want to add a little bit of sharpening so you know subtracting blur is adding sharpening so now if i go pretty close to him and do before and after like look at before right pretty soft and then after like how big of a difference we're making like our eye goes straight to him now okay so we're still not done yet we're going to do a few more things so here i'm going to call it hi all right so now i just want to bring down some of these highlights like right here is just kind of distracting and then over here i want to take some of the edge off so we can really focus on our little buddy right there so i'm gonna click on this guy right here and go ahead draw a shape like this and i'm gonna go under my primaries take my gain and bring it down so something like that now let's go back into our softness and soften it out where it just blends in like that and now go ahead and let's track it so i'm gonna track back perfect track and now i'm gonna track forward perfect we are good with this so that really takes the emphasis off of the window and puts it right on our dude another one i'm gonna create another custom shape just like this and i'm gonna go something like this there and boom done and that's going to be our second shape once again i'm going to feather it out a little bit so it blends in and let's go ahead and track it again go back to this and now let's track it back once again perfect tracking latches on everything is great and we're done with the shapes so now if i get rid of the overlay and show you guys how big of a difference it's making how it makes it even and then the focus goes to our dude like we're not even paying attention to what's happening here okay so that does quite a bit um last one is if i move do two seconds and go here and you look at the door that's again it's it's not necessary but i wanna take care of it because this door is just kind of distracting like to how yellow it is just because we were creating uh such um warm look that it affected the door a little bit so one way to attack it is just go under luminance versus saturation click right here bring it down and now what i want to do is just kind of blend it in so it's not too crazy so even like something like that this is before and after and then again obviously you want to feather it out just a little bit not too crazy and then track it back and let's extend this and then let's track it forward so that's done and it is once again super clean and if i do before and after it takes care of that and uh that pretty much does it for this look one more thing that we can do is create a global adjustment and this is where we just make like last second changes so what i like to do here is i can go under my set versus set bring this down so we can create some sort of like a clean look park it somewhere around here but now i feel like there's just not enough saturation on my dude so what i want to do is i want to go under hero okay and i want to just go under curves and so i want to go on my hero node and i want to click right here and then expand it i want to grab a little bit of his face you know and i want to grab a little bit of a shirt and i want to pull those areas out to like put even more focus on him so i'm going to keep going until it starts to look kind of unnatural and then i'm going to come back so this to me so far is looking pretty good realistic and guys i mean this for me does it one more time we can get close and just make sure that the skin tones are perfect and we can see it it's like dead smack in the center so our skin tones are looking really really good now some of you might be watching this thinking like you know you can't spend that much time per frame and i can tell you right now it depends on the project that you're working on if you're working on a commercial if you're working on a movie with big budget where you have time you will be expected to do these things and this is me explaining it to you so it's taking so much time but if i was just like breezing through it if i'm just blasting through my grades i'm doing it i'm not taking the time to explain it to somebody what i'm doing i'm just working on those issues to make sure that i end up with a pretty image so let's kill everything so we started with our cst and then and then used our primaries to create a really nice warm look and then logged it quite a bit to accentuate that warmth in our image by creating a lot of style and then hsl curves to just cool off the walls a little bit and then swing the hue on his skin to like really get it where it's supposed to be it was a bit more yellow created a vignette to shape light and then pulled out our dude by a lot and then control the highlights a little bit right there took some of the dinge out of the door right there and then finally just brought the saturation down overall i can even go back there now and see if i want to bring a little bit of back so even something like that looks cool let me see do i want to bring it back even more just a little bit so even something like that right like it does really i want to i want to bring some of that back to be honest so we'll hold it somewhere around here and it looks pretty freaking good so guys this is our final look and if we compare it to our rec 709 like rec 709 looked really cool when we created it right like i mean when we just dropped the cst we were like we're pretty much done and then you look at this thing that we sculpted that's what color grading is all about you have to start thinking like this the reason why i take my time building these looks for you is for you to understand the concept that these are the thoughts that are going through a pro colorist mind and once you start thinking like that you will be just coming up with cool looks and you'll be creating all sorts of cool stuff without even thinking about it let's check out the final look in full screen i'mma be where i'ma be i like me for me i am who i wanna be so as i said in the beginning of the video that on a high level our job is to make pretty images but hopefully this video was able to give you an insight to what it actually means to get there from a to z and before we end go check out the link to the free training where you will learn how to develop an hdr ready workflow link is down below and guys if you're enjoying the content smash that like button subscribe to my channel for more awesomeness and i will see you guys in the next video

Channel: Waqas Qazi

Views: 52,697

Keywords: davinci resolve, davinci, davinci resolve studio, davinci tutorial, davinci resolve free, resolve color grading, color grading davinci resolve, colorist, color grading, color correction, davinci resolve tutorial, blackmagic design, davinci resolve color grading, davinci resolve effects, theqazman, davinci resolve 17, resolve 17, davinci resolve 17 tutorial, davinci 17, davinci resolve 16, davinci resolve 16 tutorial, waqas qazi, davinci resolve 16 color grading, film look

Id: Nq3xdPedwvg

Length: 21min 12sec (1272 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021