Cheat Code for Setting up Color Management in Resolve

today I've got a brand new resource to share with you that's going to help you quickly and correctly set up your color management for every project that you tackle and that's going to allow you to grade with more confidence knowing that you've got all of your details all of your drop downs all of your menuing everything that you need set up exactly right in your color management so that you can get the strongest possible color grade we call this the color management cheat sheet and I'm going to walk you through each of the steps in this cheat sheet here in this video so let's dive in and we're going to start by going into resolve and mirroring the list of items that we see described here in the color management cheat sheet so I'm going to go into resolve and I'm going to go into my project settings and go to my color management and we're going to set our color science to DaVinci y RGB color managed next I'm going to turn my automatic color management off and I'm going to turn my color processing mode to custom now what we're going to do here is we're going to go through all of the pieces that won't change per project these are the pieces that are going to be constant in all projects and then we're going to look at the one setting that we do need to alter based on the particular project that we are grading so timeline color space DaVinci wide gamut intermediate that's always going to be what we use timeline working luminance is going to be custom 10 000. why because I don't want to limit the dynamic range of my image when I'm grading it I only want to limit the dynamic range of my image when I have to which is when it's on its way out the door to my display up until that point I want access to all of the scene linear image that was captured in camera alright next output color space I'm going to set this to rec 709 gamma 2 4 because that is the standard that my reference monitor is calibrated to If you happen to be grading on your laptop screen or on your computer monitor or something like that you might want to choose Rec 709 gamma 2 2 instead but for me I'm going to say Rec 709 gamma 2 4. input DRT I'm going to set to none for the same reason that I set my timeline working luminance to 10 000. my premise there is don't do anything don't tone map don't compress don't change anything about the dynamic range of my image in between camera and working space we're going to save all of that for the journey in between working space and display space all right now I'm going to set my output DRT to luminance mapping that just happens to be my preference you should feel free to experiment with these bottom four those are going to get you the best results simple I would generally discourage but you're certainly free to try that as well let's go with luminance mapping for now and the last thing that I need to do is change my input color space and I've saved this for last because this is the only thing of any of the settings that we've just gone through that actually needs to change and is going to vary depending on the project that you are grading all these other things these are going to be the same in every single project that you tackle so for this one the input color space this is going to depend on the color space of the material in my timeline and in the case of this timeline I have five shots that were shot in area log C3 and then I've got four other shots that are in some different formats so what I'm going to do as a result is I'm going to select Airy log C3 because that's the color space that the majority of my images are in so just because we're selecting one one space here doesn't mean all of our images need to be in that space but we do want to select the space that describes the majority of the images so that we don't have to go in and tag Clips individually any more than is necessary so with that in place we've now got all of our project settings established and once I hit save we're going to see the image that I'm currently on normalize and we're going to get a healthy level of contrast and saturation so shots one through five we're good to go we're ready to start grading right let's talk about shots six through nine here so shot six is an example of one where I need to change the color space depending on the camera that it was shot on which was not an area Alexa this was shot on a Sony camera in the s-log 3s gamut 3 cine color space so I'm going to right click on the thumbnail for this clip go to input color space and instead of project arielog C3 I'm going to scroll down and find S gamut 3 cine s-log 3 like so and in this case that actually made a pretty minor difference but of course we want to get those details correct because we never know what difference they will make and we want to be in the strongest possible position at the outside of our color grade so that's all I'm going to do there shot number seven here's one that is in Airy log C4 so I'm going to go to my input color space and when we flip this we're going to see a bigger difference I'm going to select Airy log C4 there we go now we've dealt with that single clip that is in a different color space than the majority of our images and now I want to go back to our cheat sheet and kind of get caught up on what we've covered so far so we've covered all this we've covered working with multiple cameras and sources and what we now want to talk about is working with unknown cameras and sources this is honestly the biggest challenge in color Management in my opinion when we are not sure what the color space of our camera is because we really need to get that right we need that information if we want to color manage effectively so what do we do if we just don't know and we can't find out we try to ask our production counterparts or our client and they can't tell us and we're just left with whatever we can figure out here with the footage inside of resolve well we've prepared this flowchart for you that will kind of walk you through or a decision tree maybe better describes it that's going to walk you through some possibilities and we're actually going to go through the branches of this tree right now so we're going to start with is the image in some kind of log color space and let's look at this shot number eight here for our first example the image is not in some kind of log color space in this case is it it's not low saturation it's not low contrast if anything my problem is the opposite I got too much color I've got too much contrast right so let's go back to our decision tree and we're going to say no it's not well things are pretty simple basically what we're going to do is flip between these five options and find the best fit it's not the most scientific but it's the best we can do because what we're essentially concluding is well it's not in a log space so it's probably in some kind of display space and the most common display space is the ones that are going to work in almost all cases are going to be one of the five that are listed in the document so I'm simply going to flip through these we could say Rec 709 scene okay that looks decent gamma 2 2 maybe that's got a little bit more reasonable level snap to it gamma 2 4 that's pretty similar so far gamma 2 2 is my favorite next we could look at srgb and by the way you may not see a huge difference between these but you it's a good idea to audition all of them srgb is a good candidate as well and we also have Rec 709a as another option let's just scroll down here and take a look at that so I'm going to say Rec 709 gamma 2 2 is the best fit honestly these are all pretty close and they generally are going to be pretty close but you go in you find the one that best works for your image and you say okay that's my Baseline that's the best I'm able to do here and I'm going to plan to grade this image to adjust make any further adjustments I need to to get it level and balanced kind of at the beginning of the grade okay so that would be kind of one branch of our decision tree no we are not in some kind of log color space next let's look at this scenario and say is that we are in some kind of log color space we can do that here with shot number nine so with shot number nine the first thing that I want to do if I can confirm that an image is in some kind of log space which as we see see here we've got low contrast low saturation we're in some kind of log space with this so what I'm going to do here is see if there's metadata in this file that can tell me the color space that I'm working in so I'm going over to my edit page going up to my metadata Tab and I'm going to take this upper right and Corner drop down menu and select all groups and really I'm just going to scroll through now and see if any of these fields contain any information about color space this can pop up in different places but you will often see it appear if we scroll up here in your gamma and color space notes or it could be even further up here in the earlier pieces of metadata so if you can find something here that's great now we actually know what our color space is and let's go back to our decision tree and see what happens if we can't find that if we do obviously we know what to do we set our input to match what we found in the metadata if we can't find anything which is the case here here's what we're going to do we're going to go back over to our timeline I'm going to right click here and I'm going to set my input color space to same as timeline okay so effectively what this means is that I am treating this image like it is in DaVinci wide gamut intermediate which is a big high volume log color space so it's not the craziest choice for a log format and I'm just going to kind of log in my mind okay this shot is almost certainly going to need some love because it is not fully properly color managed but I have got it into a reasonable starting point and because I simply can't find the information that I would ideally have I need to do my best and map things to a level starting position and I'm just going gonna plan to do any additional grading that I need to to get my exposure to get my contrast to get my color balance my saturation all those pieces kind of feeling good once I actually begin working my way through this pass so that's the nuts and bolts of the color management cheat sheet and for the rest of the video today I just want to walk through our things to remember down here so a couple things first set your color management up first make sure that you don't start grading and then go in and do it because when you set your color management that's going to change your grading context right so you want to make sure you do this right at the beginning of your process even though it can be kind of a drag if you've got new images and you're excited to get in there and grade start with that color management it's going to give you a better Foundation next sometimes we'll resolve is going to ignore your project settings and it's actually going to automatically set your input color space for a particular clip or a group of Clips to something other than what you designated in your project settings so that would mean that you go to a clip and you actually see before you even change the input color space that it's not here to start so if you're getting an image that's looking really weird even though you know that you've tagged the right input color space in your project settings go in and make sure that resolve isn't trying to help you out by tagging what it thinks is the input color space even though that's not the input color space that you asked for that's something that can definitely happen and something that can drive you crazy if you don't know where to look to solve the problem okay uh lastly this is another one that used to drive me crazy camera raw formats so that's r3d b-raw area raw any kind of camera raw format it actually doesn't need you to set an input color space at all and it will not let you set an input color space so if I had a piece of r3d media in this timeline an hour to right click on the thumbnail and look for this input color space I wouldn't find it at all and if we don't know why that's happening and we're thinking we need to go in and change or confirm our input color space that also can drive you sort of crazy so just be aware any raw format you can't change its color space in terms of input you don't need to change its color space in terms of input and that's good because you don't even have the option to do it in resolve so if you go looking then you're just going to get frustrated going where in the heck is that input color space option it is disappeared in the case of those clips because it's not necessary so I really really hope that this PDF helps you guys out to just have a handy reference guide for where to flip all these settings it sounds fairly obvious and straightforward when we walk through it here together as a group but when you're getting these things set up at the beginning of a process it's a lot of little details that you want to get right so hopefully this cheat sheet is something that you can keep handy and consult if you're ever not able to remember where a particular setting should be or if you just want to make sure am I getting that right is that what Colin said to do you can flip over easily to the color management cheat sheet and check it out and confirm that you are getting everything set up for the strongest possible grade right from the outset of your process

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 20,035

Keywords: color correction, davinci resolve color grading, davinci resolve tutorial, color grading, how to, video editing, color grading davinci resolve, davinci resolve color grading tutorial, davinci resolve tutorial for beginners 2023, davinci resolve green screen, davinci resolve tutorial for beginners, davinci resolve color management

Id: hgVqUATQSMg

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2023