Build Your Resolve Toolkit for Perfect Contrast

in this video we're moving on to the next step of building out your toolkit that consistent sequence of nodes with consistent operators within that allows you to consistently achieve your best results when you're color grading and this step could almost be thought of as a sort of extension or a part two of our first step when we talked about exposure because today we are talking about contrast and contrast and exposure are highly interactive highly interrelated they play off of one another to a large extent however I think it's helpful to your process to think of these as individual steps and to evaluate the best tool for each of these individual steps on an individual basis so today we're going to focus on the contrast side of that coin so let's dive in here to resolve and talk about contrast so what do I have right now I've got my overall color management set up I've got a bit of a look in place here at my timeline level that is coming from my Voyager Essentials pack and right now here in my clip level node graph I just have one node this is my exposure node that I built in part one of our series and I'm going to turn my gain to the right on this node to expose the image up because that's the tool that I chose in part one of the series when we talked about linear gain linear gain is what I've chosen let me also turn this look back on here at the Timeline level and I'm just opening up this image you can see I'm almost opening it up a full stop not quite because my gain is almost at a two now what I want to do is move forward and build a new node this is going to be my ratio node I call this ratio because I'm referring to contrast ratio and that name itself helps me keep my contrast manipulations anchored in the idea of the photographic so thinking not just about twisting knobs and making the image look a certain way but really trying to Anchor what I'm doing and think about how I'm altering or collaborating with the photographed image to produce the ideal expression of it so I'm thinking in some cases about the ratio between the key side of my subject's face and the fill side of my subject's face or the ratio between the brightest pixels in my image and the darkest pixels in my image really thinking about that relationship and thinking about how I'm photographically manipulating it and what I want to talk about now is several candidate functions or candidate operators that we could evaluate as our go-to as our stock for what we do when we arrive at our ratio node inside of our template node graph the first one I want to talk about is the simplest one that I can think of and that's simply to use are lift and gain so let's go in here and I'm going to drop my left to the left stretch my gain to the right and you can see I am increasing my contrast when I do so getting a little bit more pop out of the image in the process right let's go ahead and grab a still of this and what I want to do now is an experiment that we'll be doing throughout this series I'm going to bypass all my color management I'm going to turn my look off I'm going to go back over here to the clip level of the node graph and go to my grayscale ramp and I just want to see what I'm doing in the context of a grayscale ramp so you can see that when I move my lift I am either dropping or raising my deepest Shadows or my shadows in general and when I move my gain I am dropping or raising my highlights okay that's all I'm doing and as you can see this is a pure linear operator and it's entirely possible to hard clip pixels through the top and the Bottom now this is often exactly what you want when you're color grading especially if you're in a color managed pipeline which has lots of lots of curve to it and if you're working under a look like I encourage you to do that's typically going to have some curve to it as well often what you want at this stage in your grade is to hit the image with some hard linear contrast so lift and gain may be the simplest option but it is not a bad option at all and it's one that I would seriously consider when building out your toolkit and deciding on what tool to use for your contrast adjustment let's talk about another candidate another option that we can think about for manipulating our contrast I'm going to reset my ratio node here and I'm going to try out my contrast pivot let's look at the waveform before we even look at the image let's just look at the waveform and see what we're getting here so you can see a similar thing is happening happening I'm getting darker in the bottom deepening the shadows and I'm stretching out my highlights but this has an S curve Behavior to it so I'm not hard clipping but rather I'm compressing as I reach the bottom or the upper end of my images dynamic range okay that's another option that we can think about is contrast pivot instead of lift and Gain another thing that I like about contrast pivot is that I can explicitly elect a pivot point a mid-gray point to Anchor around so for example here inside of DaVinci wide gamut intermediate if I wanted to Anchor around the middle gray of this system I could punch in a 0.336 into my Pivot now if you don't know that value off the top of your head you can consult my mid-grade cheat sheet that's a free download that I will leave in the description for today's video a link to it that is and you can download that and keep it handy if you want to have it so you don't have to remember numbers like 0.336 off the top of your head but in this case you can see I'm now anchoring around the mid grade of my system and I'm in essence getting what you can think of as neutral contrast that's an upgrade that's something that you can't get with lift and gain with lift and gain if you want to preserve your mid gray or keep particular pixels in the image from being pushed up or down you just have to visually evaluate that and hope that you are not bumping things too much inadvertently so that's a nice upgrade there as is the s-curve if that's what you want out of the image but one more thing before we start to look at this in a uh real world sort of visual context we can also still get that linear form of contrast out of our image by going into our project settings going to our general options and Ticking this use s-curve for contrast option off and now I'm still going to get the same benefits of having a two knob solution and having a pivot knob where I can explicitly set my middle gray but I'm also going to get that hard form of contrast that we're looking at a moment ago so you can actually see if I now turn my color management back on and turn this ramp back off and turn my look back on and just reset my contrast pivot for now and try to kind of match to what we were doing with our lift and gain I could actually get a one to one match to what we were doing with our lift and gain pretty quickly because I'm actually doing the exact same thing in this case I'm just using a different set of knobs for it so that's another candidate that you could consider and it's going to give you similar results when you're in this use use s-curve for contrast turned off mode as you will get with your lift and gain with the main benefit being that you can explicitly set a pivot point if that's what you want to do okay that's another option that you can think about now here's another option that we can think about and this one's kind of confusing because it's also called contrast pivot it's a little odd to have two of two sets of the exact same knobs inside of resolve but that's the situation here we've got a contrast pivot in our primaries by the way let's just go ahead and label our first still we'll call it lift gain I'm going to grab a still of the second one and we could call it uh CP for contrast pivot and what I want to do now is reset this and I'm going to go over to my HDR zones palette and I'm going to take a look at my contrast in my Pivot that I have in here by the way if you're on a control surface once you're in the HDR zones palette the contrast and pivot knobs are now going to drive the HDR zones contrast and pivot now what's going on with this knob well let's to get a sense of that let's pull up a wipe here and just try to match our overall contrast level by adjusting things here in the knob I'm going to go ahead and take another crack at that maybe I need to go a little bit deeper with my Pivot like so and it's never going to get exact because it is a different operator and we're going to talk about exactly how it's different in a moment but probably somewhere around there is a decent start okay now let's assume for a second that I've gotten the contrast pretty close here what do you notice that's different between these two images if you can't tell visually take a look at the vector scope my signal mass is actually smaller in this version isn't it that's because the contrast pivot in the HDR zones palette is actually trying to do something fundamentally different it is trying to preserve saturation as contrast is increased or decreased and if you hadn't noticed before when we did our contrast pivot using our contrast and pivot in the primaries we actually increased the size of our Vector scope didn't we or the size of our signal within the vector scope I should say that's a typical byproduct of operating directly on the RGB of our image is that when we increase contrast we get more saturation and when we reduce contrast we get less saturation generally speaking so one of the differentiators here in the HDR zones palette form of contrast pivot is that it's trying to zero that out as you can see here when I go off and on with this my contrast is increasing but my signal Mass here in my Vector scope is staying the same so this is another option for you and this is something you really want to think about in your color grading practice when I'm turning my lift and my gain to the right or when I'm when I'm turning my contrast to the right for example or I'm decreasing contrast using lift and gain do I like the fact that that's typically accompanied by either an increase or a decrease in saturation many colorists do many colorists are comfortable with and they actually like that behavior or do you feel that that's something you're always having to fight like good example would be if you are using lift and gain now but you find that you often have to go in and turn the saturation knob to the left when you increase contrast or when you decrease contrast that you often have the impulse to go in and turn the saturation knob to the right that could be a really good clue that maybe the ideal stock Baseline contrast operator for you is actually the HDR zones contrast pivot but those are three candidates for you to explore obviously those are three of many candidates that you could think about in terms of how do I manipulate my contrast and my Pivot but for the sake of this series on building out your toolkit I want to focus on the most fundamental the simplest the broadest the most most sound operators because we're always going to have the option of doing more we could go into our custom curves we could go into the individual zones of our HDR zones palette we could go into our log Wheels we could do any number of things to achieve more nuanced uh you know like shot level uh manipulations of the tonality of our image but as a stock as a go-to we want to have a broad and consistent and consistently sound way of introducing or extracting contrast from our image in a sort of global way and through these three candidates that we explore today I think are three really strong candidates for doing exactly that

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 3,430

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Id: -3CyJ9EubF8

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 29 2023