Change These 2 Settings Before You Start Coloring | DaVinci Resolve

hi I'm Anna Jordan from blonde color grading and film simplified calm and every time I create a new resolved project there are two settings that I change every single time for every project now not to say that anything is wrong with the resolve this is my personal preference but I just wanted to share with you what these settings are and why you might want to consider changing these settings and resolve let's start every time I open a new project and resolve I open the settings select general options and if you scroll down you have these settings here under color the first thing I change is luminance mixture defaults to zero I select that so I activate luminance mixer defaults to zero and I deactivate use its curve for contrast so I'll click here and I hit save and that's all and let's see what do these options do and why do I change them personally I'll revert everything back to its original state so I'll just open the settings here go back to general options and deactivate activate and save and we're back to the original settings and to understand these two settings you have to understand something very important resolve is trying to make your work much easier it's trying to recover the highlights and the exposure of the image automatically for you without you needing to do anything that is not bad that is actually great however you need to be aware of these changes because sometimes you will you'll just change the colors in a certain way and the colors won't behave the same way you expect them to and you'll be a bit frustrated and then you'll discover that this is a feature and resolve that is designed to prevent you from sometimes over exposing the image so let's take a look in this image I'll simply come to the contrast controller and I'll increase contrast now when I increase contrast take a look at the Scopes here and notice the top area in the Scopes and the bottom area so I'll go to contrast increase and note that resolve is automatically recovering the highlights and shadows so what happened here is a lot of pixels are hitting a wall around the highlights and hitting a wall around shadows these areas are holding a lot of pixels now and resolve is trying to prevent these pixels from being overexposed by not crossing this line and when I increase contrast I want the dark areas the black areas in the image to be pure black and I don't want any recovery or something to prevent these pixels from becoming pure black so let's reset open the settings again general options and I will uncheck use s curve for contrast save and now take a look at the behavior of contrast we just preset everything and we're back to the original state of the image and now take a look at the RGB parade I'll increase the contrast and note that resolve is allowing these pixels to actually cross the line into becoming overexposed so our underexposed in this case so again getting the contrast back down increasing the contrast notice that we don't have a lot of pixels here being prevented from crossing the line you know I'm becoming overexposed and personally I think this makes my work much easier because when you add contrast a lot of the times what you're trying to do is to make the dark areas of the image really black and you can recover the highlights manually later it's not hard at all so with the s-curve setting turned off I'll increase contrast and look at her hair now I managed to make it really black and this is a good look however I have some overexposed areas here and overexposed areas can be recovered very easily for example by switching to log wheels and bringing the highlights down and I just recovered the highlights area that's one way so this was the first setting let's take a look at the other setting I usually change to understand the setting I'll simply switch from primaries we used two primaries bars so this is the primaries bars and notice that I have this controller to the bottom here that says luma mix luma mix is another way that resolve is trying to prevent you from over exposing the image or changing the exposure a lot how does it work take a look at the scopes here I'll come to gain and I'll increase the green Channel and notice that when I increased the green channel even though I pushed the green Channel without a meter King V red or the blue channels they were both pushed down and if I bring the green channel down the other channels are being pushed up and the same is true for blue pushing other channels down and up or the red Channel so when you control one of the channels the resolve tries to keep the exposure the same by counteracting your exposure adjustments for this channel by reducing or increasing the other channels and this might be very helpful for a lot of people if you're working on a fast project and all you need to do is to make the image just a bit more green it will work fine because resolve will prevent you from you know going overexposed with your image or maybe underexposed and that is very great and helpful however what I want to do personally is to control the green Channel without affecting the other channels and that is pretty simple what I need to do is to simply bring the luma mix controller all the way down so notice that now when I brought the luma mix controller down to zero now when I control the red Channel notice that I'm only controlling the red Channel without affecting the other channels at all so for example let's reset this and let's say I want to bring the blue channel down in in highlights and bring the blue channel up in shadows you know for this look personally that makes my life easier so note that every time you bring the luma mix control down and then you add a new node so I'll simply go to color nodes and add the serial node and now in the new node luma mixer went back to 100 so I need to bring the luma mixer from 100 to zero for every node and sometimes I might forget to do that so the solution is to come to the settings here general options and select luminance mixer defaults to zero are selected save and now every time I add a new node so I'll simply go to color nodes and add a serial node in the new node the luma mix control is zero by default and you can increase it for every node separately one last note here note that this only works if saturation is exactly at 50 so for example the luma mix now is zero and when I increase the green or reduce the green Channel both channels are not affected at all other channels let's reset and now we'll increase saturation and note that even though luma makes a zero when I change gain now for green resolved went back into affecting the other channels so if you need to increase saturation I would recommend that you increase saturation in one node unless at the new node color another serial node and in this new node I can control the gain of green without affecting the other channels because if saturation is changed in the same node resolve goes back to the behavior of trying to prevent you from over exposing or under exposing the image note that these are not problems this is actually these are actually very good features however you need to be aware of these features there so that when you add contrast and the image still looks a bit washed out so the black pixels aren't exactly black and you keep on pushing the contrast and nothing is happening the image still doesn't look very contrast here at least you know that this is the setting to change where contrast will go back into the behavior of allowing the dark pixels to become pure black so if you like this base visit aside from simplified that combo you can join our free crash course that is designed for the absolute beginner and takes you through every single tab in resolve thank you film simplified dot-com

Channel: Learn Color Grading

Views: 151,215

Keywords: davinci resolve, color grading

Id: 9wz5DpL0OfM

Length: 8min 1sec (481 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 18 2019