A Pro Colorist insight. How to Grade in Resolve - What is my thought Process?

so i was chatting recently with a friend of mine james matthews who runs a very successful youtube channel and he recently shot a film using the brand new sony fx6 and the images coming out of it look fantastic the film's called sky on fire i'll put a link to his channel in my description but uh basically got me thinking about an episode that i've been wanting to make for a while which is basically how i approach a grade and what's going on in my head and i'm basically talking you through the entire grading process so james very kindly lent me some footage from that film and i'm going to show you exactly what i did so this is the finished grade that you're looking at i've rearranged my windows a little bit to just make it a little bit easier so i've taken the gallery off i've taken clips off there's only one clip here that we're working on i've just cleaned it up so this view can be as big as possible and you can see my note tree as clearly as possible as well so just talking through the node tree very quickly we've got a couple of primaries here which i'm going to do for you i'm going to reset all this and start from scratch so we've got a couple of primaries here and up here we've got a bit of stuff doing exposure to certain regions in here we've got a colour warper being used here a little bit of isolation work using curves here and a bit of work on the face and finally we've got a glow on the end so let's go ahead and reset all this if i go to here to color reset i can delete all the grades and all the nodes but i'm going to keep my node structure and just delete all the grades all the power windows everything that's in there is now completely reset and the only other thing i need to do is set the color management back as well so you can see how i did that so i'm going to set that back to regular color management so we're now looking at the log file this is the actual camera file straight out of the sony fx6 so before we start playing around with the nodes i want to get this into a decent color space so originally i would use a color space transform node and i showed you that on my a7s 3 episodes so if you want to see how i did it using color space transform have a look at that but now we're on resolve 17 i work in a slightly different way with my color management so let's change to a resolve color managed environment and by default it comes up with the rec709 which is what we want to work in so let's just have a quick look what's going on here if i lift up the gain here keep an eye on the waveform and i'm going to push that up and you see that our highlights blow out quite easily there and the same with the blacks if i just bring these down the shadows get crushed without very little pushing so what i want to do is change the environment i'm working in to be da vinci wide gamut so let's just reset that and i'll show you what happens so if i click in here and davinci wide gamut is for sdr and hdr so even though we're working in sdr this works really well so watch what happens if i do the same thing now if i bring up the gain you see that my highlights just roll off at the top now they don't get blown out and the same with the blacks you just get a really nice roll off obviously you can push it to extreme and you will start crushing it but it's just a much more controlled way of working so i'm just going to reset that and before i do anything before i start grading now that i can see the image a little bit better because we're in a colour managed environment the first thing i need to do is have a look at the actual shot itself so at the minute we're on the last frame so this is a seven second shot and i'm just going to quickly play it through just to check that the camera doesn't move too drastically so when i'm creating windows and things like that i need to know what's happening to the shot so we've got two push-ins here remember this is camera rushes so i presume james would have just taken one of these in the final edit and okay and then he turns his head at the end right so at least i know what's going on with the shot always have a look at the shop first okay so my first node here is uh basically i'll work with offset first just get the uh get the overall image in a good place so it's not in a bad place at all actually at the minute but i'm just gonna play around with this dial here and just get it in a good place now i've got a panel in front of me so this is the dial i would move that was using the software but i'm actually going to do this using the panel just because i'm used to working like that and i'm doing a combination here of looking at the scopes to check that i don't push things too hard and obviously looking at the image to see what's visually pleasing for me so i reckon somewhere around there now let's work on lift gamma and gain so again i'm going to use the panel but the dials i'm working with are these three here so i'm just lifting up again first let's go a little bit let's just drop our lift and bring the camera up slightly okay somewhere around there i'm just going to add a bit of contrast now as well so i'm going to go to my contrast tool which is here and let's just lift that up a little bit somewhere around there okay so i'm not going to move on to the second node and in here i'm going to look at temperature and saturation so let's just have a look so put a bit of saturation in first so that's my saturation tool which is down here i just don't know i don't like to get too much to start with i can always pull it back and then uh let's just check our color temperature it looks pretty good actually and i'm also mindful that i'm setting my basic primaries at this point i'm not doing any advanced looks at this point i want to keep the image as clean as possible to work with and i'm just going to switch this node on and off so what i tend to do is just press command and d and you can just temporarily take the node on and off to just check that you go in the right way and let me just do that with the offset as well and what we can do is check both of them by highlighting them both okay so that's a good start there so what i want to do now is analyze the image a little bit further so what's going on here we've got some sky here so we can play with that a little bit and bring that out get it a bit more textured we're a little bit dark over here so i might bring that out as well a couple of other things are just jumping out of me so this map this sort of luminous green on the map is annoying me a little bit so we're going to deal with that in the next few nodes okay so let's move on to our next node so we've got this one labeled sky and what i'm gonna do here is have a look at this sky here and just give it a bit more texture and i think the best way of doing that would be to use the hdr tools but first thing i'm going to do is just isolate it so i'm going to use a power window and i'm going to come down here and i'm going to draw a power window now to do that i need to just zoom out of this image slightly so i'm just using my middle mouse and just coming out slightly and i'm just going to draw around here so i'm just drawing quite carefully around the edge of the sky here and we already know that we've got to track this so let's just check that we can get a track before we start doing any detailed work so i'm going to hit the tracker track in reverse because i've seen at the end of the shot okay that's great so this shot is actually quite unstable so i'm probably going to put a stabilizer on this at the end so let's go back to the end of our frame and obviously with any power window i always add some softness so just a little bit on here and let's go to our hdr tools to adjust this so we've got our shadow light and highlights by default i'm just going to switch up to the next range i've already done a whole episode on hdr tools so if you're not following quite what i'm doing here have a look at that episode i'll put a link above so you can watch that easily so what i'm going to do is adjust light level first i'm just going to my exposure and i'm going to bring that down and already you can see the detail coming back in those clouds let's push it a little bit further let's see how far we can actually push it so we're getting this nice detail coming in here let's just boost our highlights a little bit and don't forget that we can play around with the zones as well if we need to so we can go in here and adjust the zones but we've got plenty of scope in there and i think we've even got a bit of specular highlight in there so let me just see yeah there's plenty in there so let's have a look at that i'm just going to adjust the exposure in there there you can see what's going on now let's bring that light down again a little bit more so i'm going to deselect these two and i switch this node on and off and that is looking much better let's just see what a bit of saturation does actually in here okay now it's looking a bit that's looking a bit false i'm going to reset the saturation by double clicking it that's great i'm happy with that for now okay so let's move on to our next node and this is labeled green and what i'm doing here is just i just want to make these trees here a little bit more warm a little bit more earthly if you like and i think the nicest tool for that would probably be taking advantage of the new color warper and i have done an episode on the color warper as well so i'll put a link to that in the description and i'll put a card above so all i need to do on the color wallpaper is choose how many zones i want so i'm going to go for eight in here and i've got them linked so it's eight in hue eight in saturation and i'm going to work in hsl and i understand that hsp is the is the default setting for a reason but i still prefer to work in hsl it just works better for me and so i'm going to go up to the trees here i'm going to sample a green area and i'm just going to push it slightly warmer so i'm pushing towards the reds and maybe give it a little bit more saturation no actually that's it looks a bit false if i put too much saturation so i'm just literally pushing it towards warmer areas let's just take another bit and just check i've got it all and again switch the node on and off it's a really subtle thing in fact what i'll do is i'll put the screen size back to full screen for you and that is what's been effected so all this here is being affected okay it's actually picking up a little bit in the water here as well but i don't know that i mind that i could just put power window on that if it really bothers me it's maybe a little bit too saturated i'm just going to go back and let's just do it manually in here just pull back that saturation a bit and on and off again and that's better so this is really starting to take shape now this is looking really good and i'm down to the last few sort of details really so let's get on to a next node and this is labeled map and what i noticed straight away with this map is it's the green here is very bright sort of luminous green and i think it's slightly distracting i want to be looking at him really you want to be you want to be focusing more on him and maybe the landscape and that green is just popping out a little bit too much for me so i'm going to reduce that using a curve so let's go into the curve tools and i'm going to go straight for hue versus saturation which is already in and let's just sample a bit of that green so it's roughly around there and what i usually do is expand these out from whatever it chooses itself and let's just start bringing down the saturation keeping an eye on that map and i want a little bit of green in there but i just don't want it as bright as it was so somewhere around there let's just command d again and that subtle move is a big improvement for me i love it when a little thing makes a big difference so just to be safe i'm going to put a power window around that so let's go and draw a shape around it that way we know that we're not desaturating any of the other greens in the shot and let's do a track on that obviously okay nice clean track again i always put a little bit of softness on it even if it doesn't need it just to be safe and more force of habit i think and uh that's done so let's switch that on and off looking good okay let's move on to the next node so this technique i've used before on my a7 s3 video but it's going to work really well on this shot so let's just go through the shot and when we get to the end as he turns around you see that his face is quite sunburned so it looks quite red and it's got quite a sort of hard line on it so what i want to do is reduce that if i can so what we're going to do is take a qualifier first so i'm going to go to here and we're going to qualify using hsl and just grab his skin tone there let's put our highlight on so we can see what we've actually qualified and we're going to play around with these now to try and get as best as we can on his face so first thing i'm going to do is bring the width of this down i tend to start at the hue and i tend to push and push and push until it breaks and then come back in so that's gone too far when i'm adjust the center point back over and that's really clean there let's see if we can tighten the width up a little bit so the tighter we can get that the better we're gonna be let's have a look at our saturation so if we go saturation low there you go that gets it right in now i'm not worried about all this stuff because i can mask that out really easily let's bring our high okay so that's again it's broken there so we're keying on to his face now so let's bring that back again and let's have a look at what's happening with the luminance okay so just try the limits high around about there and i'm just going to check our center point again is good okay so something around there is about as good as i'm going to get it i think for now so i'm going to try a little bit of de-noise and i'm also going to clean up blacks and clean up whites i don't push these too far if possible and a little bit blur on there and let me just double check that we've got the best we can and it's even better there just tweak that center point again just check and that is fine for what we need to do so i'm going to take the highlight off and i'm just going to draw a shape around him actually let's see how much of the body's actually included we might just get away with that to be honest i think i can just put a loose shape around that so let's just go here i know let's do it properly so i'm just going to isolate his head let's track it backwards okay and then we need to go back to our end position so i can see his head turned around as usual bit of softness on the window okay so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to go to my open effects i'm going to add a color compressor now i've got this set to my favorites at the minute so usually you'd see it like this but if you just press the little star at the side you can add it to your favorites box and then i'm going to choose in here a color compressor so i'm going to drag and drop that on now because we've done a qualification on his face the color compressor is only going to affect that region and we also put the window on it to make sure that it didn't pick up the few little bits and the outside that the highlight picked up now to get this his red face here to match the his natural skin tone i'm going to take this tool here the little um the little color picker and i'm just going to sample maybe that area of his back there and that's giving us a new target color and what we're going to do is compress hue saturation and luminance i don't tend to touch luminance it starts to look a little bit weird but let's just bring hue down and you should see let me zoom in for you so you can see this better if i now go extremely that you see that we're just adjusting the color of his face so i'm going to bring the hue down a little bit somewhere around there i'm going to globally blend this back in a minute so i don't mind going a bit too far and then i'm going to compress the saturation as well and then always just put a little bit of blend back in just to keep it looking natural so if i now switch that on and off with command d that's before and after so again it's one of those little tiny differences that make a big difference to me so let's put that back to best fit i could have done that with shift z and let's just play that through just check it's not picking up anything else there we go so that is good so what i'm going to do now is i'm just going to press shift d to actually bypass all the grades we've done so far so that was us in color manage so this is bringing the resolve color management into rec709 color space using davinci wide gamut and it's recognized that this clip is set to sony s log 3 cine gamma so i'm going to show you that if i bring the clips back if i right hand click on this clip you can check using the input color space and if i come down here you'll see that it's set to sony gamut 3 cine slog3 which is correct let's take the clips back off again just to give you a bit more space and shift d puts the grade back on so it's looking really good okay so going on to the next node now this is an exposure one so what i want to do here is i'm just getting rid of the open effects there just so you can see the note 3 clearer i want to just adjust this bit of beach here it goes a little it's sort of lighter here and it's a little bit darker here and here it could kind of work as a vignette but i want to see what it looks like a little bit lighter so i'm just going to zoom out a little bit so i can draw a shape again let's go to my pen tool i'm just going to draw a shape around from here i'm just being quite loose with this i work with lots of shapes so i'm always just sort of controlling light so i make my own light using power windows again tons of softness now when you're doing this sort of effect when you are literally adjusting light you want plenty of softness uh even more than that normally and i'm going to just adjust my offset so go back to where my primaries and let's just lift that up a little bit and that to me is looking better so again this is you know personal taste but if i switch that on and off then i'm preferring that now if i just click here i can actually get rid of that power window as well so we can see it a little bit clearer and that's looking good and the next node is doing a very similar thing but i'm just highlighting this area here so again i'm going to grab a new power window but this might need a different level that's why i've done it on two nodes i could have done these two windows on one single node and used opacity to adjust the intensity but i prefer to just put it on two separate nodes it's easy enough to do so again let's have a look at our offset that's a bit too much oh and it's also not got any softness on it again tons and tons of softness and you might even want to track these but if you've got a lot of softness on often you'll get away with it just check that's looking better i might bring it down just a little bit more so again let's just take the window off and then command d and then let's do a shift d just check the overall image is looking good and it's always wise just to play a little bit of the shot as well so that is there is quite a lot of movement in that so do you know what i'm going to do i am actually going to track those two so i'm going to guess my tracker and just try that it tracks so quick i might as well i'm going to go to this one as well i'm going to do the same i'm going to track it okay yeah that actually had quite a lot of movement in there but again i've got a big softness so it's really going to be unnoticeable and then my final note is just a bit of subtle glow just to give it a little bit of a pop so into my open effects and i've got glow in my favorites i'm just going to drag and drop it on and good thing to do with glow is to change the composite mode and what i always do is blend it back so if we go to let's go to soft light you'll see that obviously darkens the image straight away so you need to go to your threshold up here and bring that back now i put it back to full and then i'm going to use the blend tool here to decide how much i want now that is obviously quite extreme there but watch what happens when i move this blend so this is completely without and this is with so we are slightly changing exposure here as well so once i've added this glow i might just check my exposure and what else i want to do with this is isolate it to just this part of the image so again let's grab a power window and let's just isolate that really loosely around here okay if you want to adjust your shape you can do so i can just bring that down like this actually let's take all that let's keep all that in and if you press shift you can multiple select these so you can move more than one at a time let's add tons of softness and inside i might have to move this whole window over a little bit i don't want the glow to go into the clouds so let's just switch that on and off okay let's get rid of the power window and let's just see that on the move and see if i need to add a track no i don't think i do but i think the glow is still a little bit too strong so i'm going to blend it back even more so i've blended that back it's only at 0.2 so it's really subtle on and off and i now decide if i want to adjust my exposure or not and so if i do want to do that it's easy enough just to add another node or i could go back to the original nodes where i set my exposure but i'm quite happy where it is so that is the first time i've graded sony fx6 footage this was a 4k shot and it graded really easily and nicely it behaved how i wanted it to the davinci resolve color management tools behaved as i wanted them to and i think we've got a really pleasing result there so james must be really pleased with the footage you got out of that camera so i hope you enjoyed that little insight into what goes on in my head and how i approach a grade thank you again to james matthews for the footage it looks great i'm really impressed with what's coming out that fx6 hit the subscription button and the notification bell for me if you haven't already that would be great and i will see you in the next episode you

Channel: Darren Mostyn

Views: 40,943

Keywords: how to grade in resolve, Grading Sony, How to grade SLOG3, resolve 17, davinci resolve, resolve17, killertips, how to use resolve, editing with resolve, learning resolve, tips for resolve, colour grading, color grading, killer tips, DaVinci resolve 17, Sony FX6, FX6, Slog3, James Matthews, how to grade Sony footage, grading in resolve, Grading in davinci resolve, color grading tutorial, Color correction

Id: mXIRlpqkIq0

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2021