Basic Creative Look Development in DaVinci Resolve Pt. 1

look development is one of my favorite aspects of the color grading process but as I've talked about before look development and color grading are ultimately separate disciplines that require separate tools so I really try to emphasize the need to study look development as its own discipline and to focus on the tools that are optimal for look development as opposed to Simply repurposing our color grading tools however we've all been in the position of needing a good look quickly right within resolve and that's what I want to focus on in this series is the best practices and the things that we can do right within resolve to build basic looks when we don't have time to go out and Source a high quality third-party look or to build our own using dedicated skills that we've built up in other systems and other software what can we do right within resolve to build basic and effective looks when we're in a hurry and we need to do so quickly and today we're going to focus on the core essential the bare minimum thing we always want to start with when we're doing doing any kind of look development and that's to build an overall creative contrast curve so that's what we're going to focus on today before we dive in if you are new to the channel welcome we love color grading here on this channel it's all that we talk about we're in the color page in resolve in all the content that we explore here on the channel we do two new videos a week and then we do a live session at the end of every week where we do a q a and we discuss everything that we've been covering in the channel That week in depth and you have the opportunity to come in with your questions or your suggestions for uh discussion and we can really go deeper into those subjects than we're able to go in these pre-recorded videos so if you're into that kind of content make sure you subscribe make sure you turn on your notifications stay in the loop on all the cool stuff that we're doing here on the Channel all right let's dive in and talk about basic look development here inside of resolve so just as a quick refresher what exactly do I mean when I say a look when I say look what I mean is what I'm going to call a macro level creative transform that means a creative transform that hits all of our images in the same same way a creative transform that does not change so because we want to do a macro level creative transform in a look today we are going to be working not here at the clip level of our node graph where we adjust individual shots we're going to be working at the Timeline level where we can adjust all of the shots in our timeline at once basically whatever we do here is going to hit all of our shots in the same way and it's going to hit all of our shots after whatever color grading is done prior to that okay so that's kind of the area we're going to be focusing on and today I want to focus on as I said the core essential element of any successful look and that's going to be your creative contrast curve so here's how we're going to do that we're going to use our custom curves and we're going to impose an important constraint because again this curve has to work not just for this shot or that shot or this shot has to work for all the shots as a result one of the constraints we want to impose is to Anchor middle gray that's simply going to mean that a well-exposed shot that goes into the look is going to stay a well-exposed shot when it comes out the other end of the look here's how we can go about that I'm going to turn my gallery on and here in my toolbox I've got a power grade that I've saved called DaVinci wide gamut gray and when I drop this onto a node you can see that this is really just a preset within my exposure chart dctl this is a free download that I'm going to leave a link to in the description for this video and all I've done is set my total steps to 1 and my tone curve to DaVinci intermediate that's the color space that I'm working in by the way I've already set up my color management here today if you're not familiar with color management or you need a refresher on that lots of really good content here on the channel where you can read up on color management or watch up on color management to say it more accurately but we're going to rely on that Foundation today that's the one thing that I've already done prior to starting recording this video here today all right so because I am working in DaVinci wide gamut intermediate as my timeline or my working color space I've selected tone curve of DaVinci intermediate and what this is giving me is a patch of middle gray within that working space and if I create a new serial node by hitting option s and I tap on this gray patch you'll see that I'm going to get this single Anchor Point that aligns right with this tooth that I'm seeing in my histogram of my curves once I've done that I can go over to node number one here and wipe it out I no longer need it I just want to have that single Anchor Point before I begin drawing my creative contrast curve and what that's going to do is ensure that I don't move my exposure up or down as I'm shaping my creative contrast so with that in place I'm simply going to start to create a shoulder and a toe I'm going to start with the toe here on the bottom and just add a little bit of preferential contrast but I'm also going to lift the very bottom Black Point and just sort of shape that bottom end and something that is important to remember when you're doing look Dev look Dev is not about any one shot look Dev is about all the shots so you really want to be bouncing around and auditioning your adjustments and essentially looking for a sort of best fit as you're building your overall look like so so I feel like that's a decent starting point for my uh bottom end of my contrast curve and now I'm going to go up to the top and just create a little bit of a shoulder and I'm also going to drop my Peak white Point as well how am I deciding what to do how do I know what's right or wrong here well it's experience but more than anything it's just my aesthetic preference so as long as you've got a good Anchor Point there's not anything that is explicitly wrong to do here in your custom curves you just want to shape something that is gentle and that serves all of your shots well helps you get all of your shots closer to your intent and your client's intent for the material that you're grading okay so I could continue to finesse this and this timeline that I'm working on has a lot more shots than I've even looked at thus far so that's something I would continue to explore and really finesse and by the way a look just because it's something that we do at the beginning and that affects every shot it's not something that we have to do once and then forget about and then we can't change it anymore you can of course as you're going through your grading pass continue to refine your look if you're noticing patterns or Trends or things that aren't yet perfect about your look you can always go back and tweak it but we want to get into a good level starting position for this look and I'd say that for my eye we are starting to get there now with just a sort of moderate level of contrast that's limiting our Black Point limiting our white point and adding a bit stronger contrast sort of in the mid-tone section of our image here and again because we started by anchoring ourselves to DaVinci wide gamut gray we are leaving our exposure as is so here's the honest truth if you're wanting to get into look development or you're wanting to do quick look development right within the color page right within resolve this right here is what you need to focus on your creative contrast curve is going to be the biggest role player really in any look and it's something that you can do a really good job of with the limited tools that we have within resolve so this is where I would focus I would really focus on shaping and nuancing just this creative contrast curve and we're really just going to add one more ingredient to this today as the core Foundation of a successful look that we build right within resolve we've got our creative contrast curve and now we are going to add well we can sometimes sometimes call split toning or we could call color contrast I'm really just going to shape this creative contrast curve by changing the ratio of red green and blue that's hitting our shadows versus our highlights all right this is something that I'm going to add previous to this custom curve so I'm going to hit shift s to prepend a Serial node and we're actually going to do exactly what we just did a moment ago with our gray point I want to Anchor a neutral point for what I'm about to do in the same way that we anchored our mid-grade just a moment ago so I'm going to drop my DaVinci wide gamut gray create a new node eyedropper that section and then wipe out my exposure chart dctl and now I again have an anchor point for Middle gray and what I'm going to do is go to my chain link icon here and ungang everything and I'm just going to look at adding a complementary color scheme into this image this is sometimes called a teal and orange scheme if it's done in a stronger way I don't really think of things as teal and orange or not teal and orange I just tend to think of them as like I said split toning or adding color contrast or color Harmony to the image so for this material it's going to look something like this let's go back to shot number two here and I'm going to start with my blue Channel and I'm going to create another control Point kind of down just below my mid-grade point and just add a little bit of a rainbow and right now I'm not worried about going too far I'm worried about not going far enough so I'm going to go nice and strong with this then I'm going to go to my green Channel and draw a similar sort of second control point and create a little Rainbow there I'm just going to go not up quite as far as I did with the blue and if we pull up our Scopes you can see that I'm starting to kind of stretch the bottom end of the image here on the vector scope toward kind of a cyanish blue all right so that's my scheme in the bottom and then in the highlights I'm going to do a similar thing and the highlights I'm going to Anchor a control point a bit above my mid gray and create a rainbow with my red up top like so red you're going to find is very touchy in this curve it's really easy to go too far with it but again we're not too concerned about that right now because I'm going to show you a technique for taming in whatever we're doing now in just a moment so I've got some red added in and now I'm going to do the same exact thing or a similar thing anyway with my green so that I'm adding effectively kind of some gold or some orange into my highlights and you can play with this relationship of you know how Orange versus how red you're getting by modulating your green upper down accordingly so this is the beginnings of what I'm looking for here this is adding some color Harmony and some color separation and you know just some sort of preferential color palette to this image I also want to start labeling things here so we're going to call this split and we're going to go back over to node number two we're going to call this curve like so and like I said if you start here and then add this one extra ingredient of adding your split toning scheme here Upstream you can create a really really successful really really gentle and dynamic look using just these two ingredients so this is really what I would focus on at the foundational level at the simple I've got 10 minutes to build a look that works type of scale these are the two things that I would focus on overall contrast curve and some kind of color Harmony or split toning scheme if that's what you want for your material you may not even want that in which case you can keep it as simple as having an overall creative contrast curve lots of color grades have been done I've done lots of color grades using nothing but a slight preferential creative contrast curve so this is your foundation and the details that you express here in these two sort of components of your look can have a huge influence on the success of your overall color grade but let's talk just a little bit more about this split toning piece so you can see I've got you know this combination of blue and green pushed into my Shadows a combination of red and green pushed into my highlights and I've got a couple of variables that I can play with from here first of all you can see that because I set these additional anchors kind of above and below middle gray I'm essentially protecting the middle exposed areas of my image and I'm keeping them from getting biased either warm or cool because I've got this sort of cut out where everything is being left neutral which can be a nice detail to add but you could of course get rid of these completely and just control click these control points and have your split tone scheme run right up to Middle Gray from the bottom and then start diverging from middle gray as you're climbing above it almost immediately so that's an option that's totally available to you I just like to kind of lock those things off and have a bit of a neutral section to my split toning scheme and the other thing that I'll emphasize is once you've got a sort of General Baseline for where things are at you're going to find pretty quickly that even if you pop out your custom curves and get a bit of a bigger view as a result these control points get pretty fussy to really really Nuance so what I'll often do when I'm really getting into that stage with just wanting to get things kind of overall dialed in is I'm going to stop adjusting these control points and go over to my sliders over here so let's say that I just want to do a little bit less of that warm push in the high end I'm just going to bring back my red and my green a little bit like so and so now I'm getting a little bit less of that warm push than I was getting before another option if you like everything that you're seeing and it all feels good and you just want to scale back the entire scheme a little bit would be to go over to your key output gain here and set that key output gain to say a 0.5 and now we're only going to get 50 of that scheme and remember with look development really the name of the game is we want to move everything closer to where it needs to go maybe we move everything way closer maybe we only move things a little bit closer but the trick is that we want to make sure nothing is getting further away so if this split toning scheme we're working for 10 shots but then by the time we get into this material it really isn't holding up anymore and it doesn't feel right that would be an indicator to me that I need to scale back on that scheme because it's not enough that it makes a bunch of shots look good it has to make all of the shots look good or something needs to change within the look that's a difference in mentality that when you need to adopt when we're doing look Dev versus when we are color grading individual shots so like I said if you can just nail these two ingredients and practice getting good at dialing these in in a hurry and getting them working for the material that you are grading this is a great foundation for a look this is really the beginning of look development and you can do it right within the resolve color Page look development is a huge subject and it goes far beyond this and it goes pretty quickly into skills and tools that are separate and distinct from things that we tend to do in resolve in the color page as colorous but this Foundation right here can really set you on a path to success when you do need to build your own looks if you don't want to build your own looks if you don't have time if you want a more advanced or a more sophisticated look then you can pull off with the tools that we are going to explore in this series that's really why I made my Voyager Lut pack comes in two forms the essentials is 17 great single Luts that you can drop into your timeline section of your node graph just like we did these components here and you're instantly going to get a really sophisticated really great robust Dynamic look for the material that you're grading and the Voyager pack also comes with a pro version or it comes in a pro version I should say where you have individual components individual modules almost along the lines of what we just did today except they've already been built and they've been built using Color science that's not available to us right within resolve so both of those forms of the Voyager pack are great options if you do want the ability to quickly dial in a look right within resolve without needing to become a color scientist or to build up an entire practice within the look development realm those are great options if you're liking what we're talking about today or if you're interested in this footage and Grading this footage for yourself another thing I want to point out is we are starting the wait list for my colorist career accelerator core course it's coming up super soon we always have a blast in this course it's an opportunity to get Hands-On and in depth and go through a structured curriculum on how to take your career to the next level as a colorist doesn't matter if you're a working colorist today or if you've never color graded a job professionally if you want to accelerate your career if you want to see it move to that next level that is all we are focused on for the four days of that course is taking you from where you're at and building up your professional practice so that you can really have a great run at maxing out your potential as a colorist and we cover not only color grading Technique we cover not only the nuts and bolts of working when they're in resolve we talk about business we talk about negotiation we talk about how to Bill how to estimate how to quote how to invoice all these things that are critical to your success as a professional colorist so if you're interested in that course it's coming up very soon and if you want to stay in the loop on that there is a link in the description for today's video to sign up for the wait list for that course and to stay in the loop as we open up that course invariably sells out it is sold out I think within a day or two every time that we've run it thus far so make sure you sign up if you're interested so you're in the loop and you can jump on it if you decide that it's the right fit for you and as I said if you want to grade this very footage that I'm looking at here today that's part of what we offer in the colorist career accelerator is this practice footage which you can practice on and also use in your reel so that you can start showing people your new skills as a colorist so some really exciting things coming up but regardless of those things if you can take these ideas that we've talked about today put in a little bit of practice with them you can have your color grading practice and your look Dev practice in a place that is going to allow you to quickly build clean and dynamic and effective looks for your color grades even when you don't have all the time in the world and even when you just need to quickly put something together so that you can get started with your grade

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 24,234

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Id: HFES-nHS-js

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 14 2023