Can you adjust contrast without seeing the image? DaVinci Resolve

now in order to explain how this Advanced method works I'm going to be adding contrast to the image without even being able to see the image so that it can fit the image and here we have the Scopes covering the image and I cannot see the image now let's reset hi I'm Alex Jordan from long color grading and filmsimplified.com and today we're going to be discussing adding contrast in a very unique and precise way now let's take a look at this problem so let's take a look at this image here now this image was shot in log but the scene itself has a lot of contrast so you have a lot of bright areas here and some dark areas here and the problem is that most beginner will simply come to the contrast controller increase contrast and now you'll run into a weird issue due to the high dynamic range of the scene you're forced to make a tough choice so when I increase contrast notice that the sky looks natural but I lost all information in the dark areas and if I use the pivot controller to make the dark areas look more natural I lost most of the information and highlights this is where you can use a combination of Curves and scopes to solve this issue just a reminder we're currently running our Black Friday deal for this year it includes all of our resolve courses of course lifetime access to all of the courses and lifetime updates it also includes the full practice footage Library title pack the Lut pack and it comes with the 30 days money back guarantee you can check the link in the description I'll start by opening scope so I'll click here and now here I have the RGB parade Scopes now in order to explain how this Advanced method works I'm going to be adding contrast to the image without even being able to see the image so I'll start by detaching Scopes and here we have four Scopes I click here to make them one and I'll make sure that the Scopes cover the image let's change the aspect ratio of the scope so I'll simply go to ratio and make sure it's 16 by 9 so that it can fit the image and here we have the Scopes covering the image and I cannot see the image now let's reset and start adding contrast to the image actually I don't want to even be able to see this preview here so I'll make it really small and move it to the side now in order to be able to add the correct amount of contrast to the image without even being able to see it which will teach us a lot about how Scopes work and about how curves work but before we start there are a couple of Concepts that we need to understand first in curves I'll make sure that this button is clicked here so I only have the Y curve activated so I'm only controlling luminance notice how the RG and B curves are disabled and if you don't know a lot about Scopes just a refresher this here represents the image so these are the highlights or the bright areas of the image and these are the Shadows or the dark areas of the image however this section here of the scope represents the entire possible dynamic range so this line at the top represents the brightest parts that are possible in the image however currently the brightest Parts on the image are not at this line so we're losing some dynamic range which is not a bad thing this is an artistic choice however today we're talking about color correction adding contrast so we're going to be treating the highlights as if they must be at the top of the possible dynamic range and this line at the bottom represents absolute black and again the darkest Parts in our image are not exactly at the absolute black point of the possible dynamic range that we have again please note that this is not a must we're discussing color correction here and of course in curves this is the point that represents uh the brightest Parts this is the point that controls the darkest parts and the line in the middle controls the rest of the image now note that I'm working with 8-bit footage so this is the worst case scenario however this will teach us something very important about Scopes notice that if I increase the brightest part of the image and I reduce the lowest part and I overdo it for example so let's do this and increase this here now notice these horizontal lines that appear in the image this is caused by the bit depth of your footage not to say that if you're using like 10 or 12 bits they these lines will not appear but they tend to appear more with lower bit depth footage now these lines are not good so what we're trying to do here is to not to make the distance between these lines uh very high so it's not an absolute disaster if these lines appear but we're trying always to keep them slightly closer to each other notice that once I control the Middle Point the lines appear more so the distance between the lines are is higher and now if I just move them to the right at least the lines at the bottom here they became much closer so just keep that in mind for now so we have these lines and we're always trying to keep these lines as close to each other as possible the next thing that we need to discuss is this so again I'll increase uh highlight reduce Shadows increase highlights more so for let's bring this here now I'll add a new point so I have this point and this point here and I'll add a point in the middle and then I'll add another point and notice something very important this point that I just added is close to this point and this point there's a side effect for that notice that every time I increase the brightness and the new point in the middle I get this Clump area basically this is a concentration of brightness values where lower brightness values are trying in the image something that should be darker in the image is just trying to increase its brightness above something that should be brighter now to make this simple just know that these lines are something that we try to avoid so notice if I bring this down we have another concentration line here in the middle and if I bring it up keep your eye in this area well I just bring this up and notice how we have a horizontal line appearing again this is something that we want to avoid let's reset and finally let's increase this more and maybe do this more and notice something very important here when we added these two points is that we started to get areas in the middle that are empty so if I increase these two points more now these are empty areas again we're trying to avoid creating these empty Parts in the middle so what are we trying to do here we're trying to fill the entire possible dynamic range Within dynamic range of the image in other words you're trying to get the image representation to fill the entire dynamic range however the way this works is that we're not simply trying to fill the dynamic range we're trying to get a nice gradation in the representation of the image on the scope so this seems a bit complicated when I say it but it's actually pretty simple once you see how it works so let's start with this image so I'll start by controlling the top of the curve increasing the brightest point in the image until it almost touches the line and then I'm going to bring the Shadows down great this is where things get interesting now what we're going to be trying to do now is that we have a curve and on the curve we have points so for example there's the Highlight point and the Shadows point we're going to fill the gap between each every two points with a new point exactly in the middle and we're going to control this point in a way that makes the curve uh smooth so let's take a look so here we have this point and this point I'm going to add a point in the middle and now I'm going to try to increase the brightness notice how when I increase the brightness of this point I'm affecting the scope however we're running it to the first problem when I increase the brightness of this point notice that now we're starting to see these horizontal lines and that is not good so I'm going to bring the point down until the scope start to look more natural I'm going to actually increase a bit more yeah I'm going to tolerate this level of of seeing these these lines here let's bring this to the left a bit and now we have this point and this point I'm going to add a point in the middle and again up or down to see how this affects the image so if I bring it up notice how I'm losing information here I'm compressing these parts at the top and I don't want to do that so I'm just going to bring the point down until the gradation looks natural again we have this point in this point I'm going to add the point exactly in the middle bring it up or down and notice that now we're starting to run into the problems again so here we have a lot of the horizontal lines keep your eye here when I increase it we're getting the horizontal lines back and if I bring it down we're starting to get some empty areas so the solution is to maybe bring it to this point and again I'm going to be adding points in between each and every point you know notice this point this point is very interesting keep your eye here while I control this point notice how this point is affecting the compression or the gradation of the sky I think this part here represents the sky and if I bring it up I'm compressing the sky and if I bring it down I can see the horizontal lines in the sky so I'm going to move it to a point where the gradation looks more natural now notice the shape of the curve we just created it looks a bit unnatural janky but the point here is that it fits our image perfectly and we just added contrast to the image the right amount of contrast without even looking at the image just by using Scopes and understanding how they work with with the Y curve actually I'm going to maybe add just this image a bit more so I'm just going to go through the points making sure that the gradation of the image looks natural so yeah maybe this one here this one here notice the sky we just got some of the blue parts of the sky back and this one up or down and great and now let's take a look at the image and notice the contrast we added let's add saturation and the new node increase saturation further and take a look at the image now in order to understand how important and impressive this is let's take a look at this image and repeat this one more time notice that if I add contrast I automatically lose information and highlights or Shadows notice how much compressed this part here so when I added contrast to the car so for example if you add contrast here notice that we lost all information in the sky so I'll add the new version reset bring this here and let's repeat this one more time so I'll bring the highlights up Shadows down and I'll just try to increase the mid tones getting some of the horizontal lines but just try to make sure that the spaces between the horizontal lines are not very far and then I I'm just going to start adding a new point between every two points now notice this Chi here notice that by controlling this point if I bring it up I lose information in the sky I really compress information however if I bring it down I'm retrieving information in the sky and this is the one thing that the regular contrast adjustment or the color wheels adjustment cannot do because they have usually contrast controls two factors so there's the contrast and the pivot so it cannot have a curve that adds contrast but protects a certain part of the image like the sky however and also that's true for color wheels so there's highlights mid tones and shadows and you're controlling three points and you cannot add a new point in the middle that protects a certain part however using this method this point represents highlights shadows mid-tones and on top of that we managed to add this point in the middle that retrieved some of the information highlights in order to make it more natural and this is something that is extremely unique to Curves so I'll add a new point between these two curves up or down yeah so maybe just increase the bit between these two points notice this okay when I increase this point notice that I got this horizontal line here and we said that that's something that we don't want so I'll just increase it until the gradation look more natural natural look to the sky this point and this point and notice the interesting shape of the curve now I'll remove Scopes and crease saturation and take a look at the image I'll just go back to the version before this one this is the original image that we just added contrast to however in this new version let's add another node and just increase saturation even a bit more note that we achieved what seemed to be impossible so we have the right amount of contrast in these areas here while preserving information in the sky that is thanks to this weird shape of the the Y curve so this part of the curve lifted information on this part here of the image and this part of the curve protected the sky again let's add a new version reset and just try to recreate this look using contrast and you always find yourself struggling between preserving information and highlights or Shadows however using this method notice how more natural the image looks so so regular contrast and using curves contrast curves filmsimplified.com

Channel: Learn Color Grading

Views: 11,163

Keywords: davinci resolve, color grading

Id: _9mYsO9Cpqs

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 25 2022