Build Your Resolve Toolkit for Proper Exposure

a couple of years ago I learned an expression that I absolutely love you don't rise to the level of your goals you fall to the level of your systems I've found application for this expression in all kinds of areas of my life but no area more so than with color grading because the reality is when we're color grading the circumstances are almost never going to be ideal there's going to be problems with the footage it's going to be difficult to understand what the client wants there's not going to be enough time and in those situations what's going to Define your success is the quality of your systems the quality of your process or the quality of your toolkit that's what we're going to be focusing on in this series is building out an optimized idealized toolkit for yourself that you can return to regardless of the circumstances that you happen to be working under for a particular project and be confident and know that you are going to get the best and most efficient results that you can so we're going to start today with the granddaddy the most important tool that we are going to put in the that toolkit exposure and we're going to look at several different candidates for different tools that we might use to make this adjustment to suit this need within our toolkit and determine what is actually the best one for our needs when we are color grading so let's take a look here inside of resolve and talk about our options for working exposure so I'm going to reset my nodes here and first candidate that we're going to look at for exposure is going to be our offset now if you are working in a color managed environment like I am today I've already set up my color management I've already got a look in place I'm working in a log working space which happens to be DaVinci intermediate that's always my working space here on the channel when I'm in a color managed environment like that when I'm working in a log space like DaVinci intermediate spinning my offset to the left or the right is going to give me an exposure s adjustment and it's right down here in the primaries it's a very very simple clean operator so there's a lot going for offset and you could choose that as your go-to operator for exposure and and that would make perfect sense that would be a good place to start but I want to show you a few more candidates that we can look at for getting potentially even better exposure adjustments because this is an adjustment you are going to make on virtually every single shot in every single project that you tackle so if you can make a two percent five percent ten percent gain in the quality of the results that you get or in the speed at which you get those results that's going to have a dramatic impact on your color grades that's the kite the type of incremental Improvement that we're really looking to see when we talk about optimizing our toolkit all right so we've got offset that's number one let's look at a second option here and let's first notice if I really start to stretch this image out if I really open it up quite a bit you can see how when I'm working my offset it starts to feel a little bit non-exposure like the floor starts to come up a little bit it starts to feel a little bit thin in the shadows and maybe not quite like a pure photometric exposure adjustment like the type that I would get by opening or shutting the lens of my camera okay now a good option a good alternative here to our offset I'm just going to label this offset would be in a second uh panel down here in the lower left I'm going to go to my HDR zones palette and I'm going to look at the global wheel here okay now I have my control surface here so I can work my exposure here on the control surface but you could also just work this exposure slider down below and you can see that in this case my Shadows are holding a little bit better when I make that same level of adjustment let's actually grab some Stills and line these out okay so I've got this I'm going to grab a still I'm going to turn that off and I'm going to wipe to my Global exposure adjustment and we can see that even at the same really really pushed Exposure My Shadows are holding better with the HDR zones exposure with this Global exposure than they were with our offset another nice thing I can actually think and express myself in terms of stops here when I see this number 2.6 down here in the HDR zones palette that means 2.6 photometric stops that can be useful to to me to get my bearings in terms of how much adjustment I'm making in my color grade it can be really useful to my client if I can express to them hey we're opening things up a third of a stop or shutting them down a half a stop it gives us a common language that's going to be familiar with our filmmaking and production counterparts so in many ways the global exposure knob here in the HDR zones palette is an upgrade but I want to go one further here and show you an alternative to the global exposure wheel for this I'm going to create yet another node let's grab a still of this first and we're just going to start labeling our Gallery Stills here so we've got our offset we've got our HDR and I'm going to disable this and we're now going to do a new node and we're now going to go back over to our primaries and all we're going to do is right click and go to gamma and select linear now I want to emphasize here as with everything else that I'm showing you here in this video you need to have your color management properly set up if you don't none of what I'm showing you is going to hold and it's really not going to work so if you're having trouble with any of the stuff that I'm demoing and with getting the same kind of results on your side make sure that you've got your color management set up I have lots of great content here on the channel that walks you through how to set up the color management that I'm using here in this video Okay so we've got our linear gain set up now and spoiler alert linear gain is actually going to do the same thing as the HDR zones palette all I'm going to do is turn my game to the right and let's just get kind of a side by side here and I'm just going to keep spinning this wheel until I have risen to the level of what I see on the left hand side of the frame so somewhere is around there okay we're actually going to go even a little bit further and I can zoom in so that we're really seeing the difference there so that's starting to feel pretty darn close right that's starting to get really really close because the HDR Global exposure knob and what I'm doing right here with my linear gain are actually identical operations they are doing the exact same thing so why am i showing you two knobs that do the exact same thing well here is my logic here and here's why another spoiler alert of these three my go-to is actually this linear gain operator it's because if I do my linear gain I never have to leave my primaries I can stay uh where I'm comfortable here on my control surface I can stay in one palette I never have to tap over to the HDR zones palette now we've talked about the HDR zones palette in other videos I encourage you to check that video out or those videos out if you are curious about the HDR zones palette however I'll give you the short version uh here today I don't use the HDR zones palette a ton in my color grading practice so if I can avoid having to add another palette into my toolkit just for the sake of getting one knob to me that's a win to me the time I'm saved in tapping over the HDR zones palette just to get to that Global knob and then to get back over to the primaries to make my other adjustments that's a tangible increase in efficiency so it's better for me to just simply set up my template node graph where I've got an exposure knob that is set to linear gain and I can simply work my gain knowing that it operates in that fashion and the other thing I'll point out here is you can see I have my gain set to a 5.92 but we can also think about this gain operator in terms of photometric stops so if I were to reset this if I want to get an extra stop of light here all I'm going to do is multiply this by 2 to the power of 1. that's going to be two for any of us who are a little rusty on your map I know I was before I started having to learn math for all of my color science Adventures that I've been going on in the last decade or so you can also think about going two stops up that's going to be 2 to the power of two or four right so if I want to go two stops up that's going to be a 4. like so and the same thing works for pulling exposure if I want to pull one stop I'm going to divide by 2 to the power of 1 meaning 0.5 if I want to pull two stops I'm going to divide by 2 to the power of 2 which is 4 so I'm going to get a 0.25 okay so we can still with a little bit of math and a little bit of practice think about things and express things in terms of stops of exposure even when we're doing our linear gain here in the primaries tab but this is really just the beginning of our construction of our toolkit and I wanted to walk you through what I think are the three most viable candidates for making a true efficient photometric exposure adjustment in our images and look at the pros and cons of each offset has been with us for the longest if we go back to the discipline that preceded color grading of color timing they were operating with offset in log the HDR zones palette in many ways can perform better especially with bigger moves of exposure but in order to take advantage of that Global exposure knob you need to incorporate a new tab a new palette into your toolkit finally linear gain which we arrived at here at the end allows us to get what we can get in the HDR zones palette but without needing to incorporate that palette at all if your practice is like mine and doesn't necessarily need that HDR zones palette for anything else that you might be doing so hope that's a helpful introduction to you to the most important tool that we're going to build into our toolkit really excited to continue this series with you guys and go forward and start adding into this toolkit and doing the same type of exercise that we did today evaluating candidates for the needs of the next tool that we are adding in and over time building out our idealized toolkit for color grading here inside of resolve

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 8,354

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Id: BrsyIBw974c

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2023