Color Correction for Complete Beginners (DaVinci Resolve 17 Tutorial)

welcome to our davinci resolve color correction tutorial for complete beginners so i'm a little bit above beginner i've been using davinci resolve for a little while now and i remember the first time i opened up the color tab and was like whoa what is all this stuff i have no idea what any of these words mean i don't know what these dials do i'm just gonna break something so after a little bit of investigation a lot of kind of just playing around figuring out how stuff works i wanted to share all that with you so that when you go to the color tab in davinci resolve you have some idea what everything does and you can make some adjustments to the coloring of your video so they look great and are good to share with the rest of the world so let's get started let's open up davinci resolve if you haven't downloaded davinci resolve yet i'll put a link down below in the description okay so now let's create a new project color tutorial okay so to add videos to your project you can anywhere that says media pool basically so here the edit tab or on the media tab right here so i have a folder with a handful of things that we'll be able to go and change the coloring of so we have these clips here let's drag them down to the media pool if your project and your videos have different frame rates this screen is going to pop up asking you if you want to take the frame rate of your videos which i do want to do okay so we have these videos now and then if we go to the edit tab we can now go and add all these videos to the timeline so we want to just add them like so now these are all on our timeline and then we can go over to the color tab and it's going to get a little overwhelming from here so the thing is with this is there's a lot of different configurations and different charts and dials and whatever it is so my goal is to give you a little bit idea what you're looking at here so that you can go in and make some adjustments and have stuff looking great one other thing we may want to see are the different clips that we have available so there those are and then nodes are really complicated that i'm not going to get into too much but a lot of times you can think about doing all this in steps you want to say hey i want to correct this in step one maybe i want to correct the white balance then i want to add this to the color correction it's the same way that the fusion tab works if you saw my video on creating an animated subscribe button it works the same within the color piece as well so that's where you have all these this is just i have one node and i'm going to put all the information in that right now as far as the color correction and then each one of the clips essentially has this same piece here and so what we're going to take a look at now so there's all these different charts so you have the curves right here you have and then anything you can just kind of drop down and see like what other different options there are i don't even go through all the different options are right now there's the color warper where you can slightly tweak specific colors that are on the image right now that we're seeing or on this video clip you have different scopes so this is a parade scope so zero is essentially the black so really really dark almost black split up between red green and blue and so all black is essentially zero and white is essentially all the way up at the top you don't want all of these colors to be smooshed at one end meaning that it's underexposed if it's at the bottom or if it's all the way at the top meaning the the video is overexposed and then also you want these to be somewhat parallel if they're kind of twisted a little bit it means that potentially the white balance of your videos are off to look at this another way so we have the waveform which is essentially the same thing just in black and white and so you can see this image right here there's not a lot of color and most of the entire image so this is essentially showing you the brightness from you know left to right so it doesn't tell you where it is vertically but say all the way along the left hand side right now there's only colors essentially that are really dark so if you go over here you're gonna see really really dark so that would make sense wouldn't it and then in the middle you see there's me so there's my skin tone my glasses there's some shadows there's gray there's a lighter gray than the background and there's the table below and so that's why it looks much more spread out as far as the lighting in the middle and then again on the right hand side you have the gray wall and you have the table another thing to take a look at is called the vectorscope so this is really interesting of where most of the colors lie and this line right here is the skin tone line so it doesn't matter your race or ethnicity basically the skin tones all fall within this line and so the thing is if you see stuff that's lit up that's maybe way off to this side or off to this side it generally means the coloring of your videos off so that the skin tones are not going to look natural you want to basically check to see if there are people in the videos that you know there is color along essentially this line and so you can see with any of these things there's different settings and so i have it set so you can skin tone indicator so you can turn that on or off you can show 2x zoom so if i don't do the zoom all the colors are squished kind of around here also anything that's white or black or any gray in between that's neutral not one tone or another is going to show up right in the middle of this bullseye so if you have a lot of things of those colors there should be kind of a circle right in the middle so again if that is off someplace it means the white balance of your video or something is wrong with the coloring and you're going to see that a second with some of the things that i tried to purposely mess up in some of the clips that we're going to look at here so that's some of the basics on what you can see so the there's the histogram so you can see again this is essentially a horizontal this is basically showing that most of the colors are at the lower end this is being completely dark and this is completely bright the parade i like so you can see from left to right of this particular image how the the colors are spread out so you can see the red green and blue across you know this image so the things along the side here so there's a couple of different ways that you can look at this you have shadow midtone highlights and offset and then if you look at there's another dial that says lift gamma and gain and also has offset this is where you're going to be making most of your adjustments and you can do some stuff for example in this middle section here and then you basically see the results right here and then also what you see in the actual video up above so the things that i would normally change are on this section right here the lift gamma and gain to get stuff to the right starting point and i'll basically show you why in a second i also like looking and making adjustments on the curves right here and i'll show you that in a second and so the first thing i want to show you is the offset and so if you see these this chart right here so what you see is most of the colors of this is pro everything is fairly dark and so everything is kind of squished down towards the bottom the other thing the blues might be a little bit lower than the reds but it's nothing really dramatic and the thing is so if i want to make everything brighter or everything darker this dial right here below offset i can essentially if i were to increase this you're going to see everything move insusting upwards or downwards like so so it's essentially going to move you know just like that and then the other thing is within this dial if i move stuff it's going to slightly tweak stuff so if i want it to be you know more to the red you can see the red go up and the blue essentially go down or if i said hey the blue looks a little bit darker or so i want to essentially add some to the blue and you can see if i if i pull the little dot towards the blue the blue is now higher than the reds if i want to just reset this entire thing i can just hit essentially the the refresh or the i don't know start over reset i couldn't think of the word reset for some reason so that's basically to move the whole thing up or down to make it lighter or darker and then these are essentially the darks like anything that's very very dark or in the shade essentially this is essentially any colors kind of in the middle and then gain is all of the things that are the brightest and so we can do here is figure out okay the the dark part of this doesn't necessarily need to get darker or lighter in this in this example the mid tones and the the brighter colors maybe could be lifted up a little bit so one of the things that's different with these three wheels compared to the other ones i showed you is these move everything kind of gradually and in sync together it kind of pulls all the other stuff up so watch if i increase the gain watch how the charts all kind of get stretched upwards so obviously when you can see the red getting all the way to the top it probably means that hey the colors are not going to look right if you're if you're not if you're pushing stuff beyond the limits here so maybe if i do something like with the gain so the brights got a little bit brighter and then if i go to the gamma which is kind of the mid-tones and then pull that up a little bit as well and then maybe i can just make the the darks like just a touch darker and the thing is if you want to see the before or after i don't think i need this dropper tool i can turn that off i can then i can zoom if i'm using just the track on my mouse and then if i hit this i can turn off what i did and then turn it back on so here's what it looked like before here's what it looks like after and then some of the other things i want to show you these were ones one this is where i changed the white balance a lot and so if we look at the middle of the clip like this so for example you can see right now this is my monitor right here you can see it in the video and so along the left hand side look at how much higher the blue is so this color the white balance in this is way off and so i think you know i had it set at 4000 kelvin and this light is i think 5 000 something so what i want to do here is essentially if we go for example to the vector scope you're going to see all the colors way down here as opposed to you know there's not much above and there's as far as skin tone and there's also not a lot in the center and so if i were to look at the take the offset wheel right here and then kind of just move stuff in the upper left hand direction a little bit you can see that it starts to get a little bit warmer and probably a little bit more natural tones obviously if you record something that's just completely off depending on your camera it's going to be hard to essentially get all of that information back and tweak it how you want but you can see here you know how blue this looks and then how how much of a change it looks with just changing the offset which basically moved all of the colors to a warmer to be to look a bit more warm and then again i could go back to some of the other things like the parades and then again maybe i want to make everything just a little bit brighter bring up the mid-tones a little bit and so again if we kind of see where it was to where it is now something like that and then let's see what other ones so for this one i essentially turned up the iso a bunch so the video was overexposed and so you can see a bunch of the colors now just like hitting up against the top and so we could do now is if we so you could either there's stuff the darkness so i guess i could bring down some of the dark a little bit so maybe just the entire offset to move everything down slightly something like a little bit for everything and then i obviously want to bring the brightest stuff off of the you know the limit at the top so i could bring it down something like like so and you can see how that compares to some of the earlier clip that we saw and then maybe you want to see hey what happens with some of the the mid tones can i pull that down a little bit so there's two other things that i end up changing sometimes which could be the contrast so if you've ever shot stuff with like a log footage it basically squishes all the stuff together then you have to pull it back apart but if you wanted to add add or increase the the contrast with this i think there may be slightly too much contrast in the original kind of overexposed shot also it's a matter of you know the saturation is another thing you may want to go in to adjust so to see you know started at 50 do i want to go this is all the way exposed if i take it all the way out it goes to black and white and to see kind of where in here if i can get a lit the coloring a little bit better so you can see how how bright everything is and it's just if i it's just there's too much light that i had in here and so i'm not going to be able to recover essentially all of this but you can see hey if you have footage you need to use you know i imagine that if we go back to the original you know you can at least see a little bit of you know here's the side of my face that was just way overexposed and you can see it a little bit better now let's take a look at the deer that were outside so for example here you can see i think it's slightly overexposed you see everything kind of hitting up against the top here and also there's nothing you know this is black this kind of shadow should be black and so there's a lot of space kind of down along here and so what we could start out doing potentially is just move the offset to just go down a little bit to move everything off the top something like that maybe and then also it looks like the white balance is off you see how this is up way higher than the blue and the green so we could do here is if we you know pull this down and to the right a little bit so maybe something like that i think makes it a little bit more even and then what else do we want to do what could are these are the the tails do those look white to you do we want to yeah i think those are probably pretty good the white looks pretty white and then so you can just kind of play around with it a little bit to be like hey do i want to change some of the mid-tones at all so do you like this better or do you like the dark darker mid-tones where you see you know you can see all the the woods behind it getting getting darker as i change you know this style here and then you know the darkest stuff do i want to make that darker or not by changing the the lift i think maybe just a touch darker something like that maybe um and you can see with like what should this be saturated more so that so for example the green is going to pop a little bit more if i increase that because that's one of the louder colors i think in this image so i record a little bit in log so basically as you can see kind of squishes compresses the color so that there's nothing really dark and there's nothing really bright and so essentially what you need to do is then go and add more more contrast and probably it looks like here everything just needs to be brightened a bit as well so if we increase some of the gain we increase some of the mid tones we want to yeah adding just a little bit of saturation you can see that this was really pale before and now you see a little bit of color on that side of my face so we can see here's what the log footage looked like before you know here's essentially what it looks like afterwards i think this is more reliant along the lines of how i would normally record so after kind of seeing this and playing around with a little bit realizing that i can probably make i can probably like the videos a little bit better so i need to turn this up to be brighter or if i'm going in and editing i could essentially you know the dark seem to be fine but if i increase the gain just a little bit and then if i increase the gamma slightly something like that compared to yeah i mean so you can just see more of the color in the wood for example and then it brings up the the gray the fairly dark gray background okay so that's the majority of how i could i would go through and start editing things so these are the main dials that i end up using the other thing so the the contrast for example these curves essentially you can adjust it'll work somewhat similar so the top is going to be white essentially so if you want let me take one that maybe i didn't change yet so if we take this one and so if i want the whites to be brighter i can move the the outside dot that way if i want the whites to be darker i can move it down this way the same thing with the black so the darkest stuff i can make darker or i can make it lighter so i can do maybe yeah the darkest stuff should probably be like that the brightest part of the footage so this i think was another one of the ones that i shot in log if i remember right log two s log two and then the other thing is you can add certain points this so if i want you know the kind of some of the higher mid tones to be slightly brighter something like that and then i want some of the the darker mid-tones is essentially increasing the contrast to be darker you know i can i can basically make this type of of s-curve so if we want to see the before and after here is the fairly flat footage and then here's but basically how i can make adjustments within the curves here if let's see if there's another one so for example if we take this footage let's i want to show you i like that shot one of the things that we could do is if we go and instead of use these dials i want to show you how the other wheels essentially work so here we have shadow mid-tone and highlights so what happens if i drag the other ones so if i move these at all it essentially moves if you think of like a rubber band like the the far end of it gets pulled on if you're pulling on this and it kind of stretches everything all along so if i pull everything down you can see even from the very top it's pulling down a little bit we can reset that and the same thing if i pull this up you know it's pulling everything all the way it's moving the stuff more way at the top more so than the stuff at the bottom but it's pulling it all a little bit the thing that's going to happen if you go to these other wheels is it's only going to move a certain section and if you move them too far it ends up looking really weird so for example let's increase the shadows and so you can see the scopes changing but thing is if i just crank it as far as it'll go it only you can see it only adjusts stuff in this range and it just basically pushes everything up to you know this point and nothing above it was touched whatsoever and so i can put that back and then the same thing here if i go all the way one way or all the way the other you know it only moves from what is it or like 300 to 550 something like that and the same thing with the highlights so if you want to make big kind of sweeping changes this is going to make your footage look really oh that's kind of creepy this one makes the ground looks like it was snowed on you can see like right here that's interesting um so so these are the ones i think you can make kind of fine tone fine tweaks to so for this i would make kind of fine like very small tweaks to stuff kind of artistic changes of how you want the footage to look where you know i think if you go back to the other wheels the lift gamma and gain so if i were to make changes now so basically there's nothing that's really bright in this so if i or sorry there's nothing that's really that's really dark so i can pull that down and then also the gain you know i can pull up or the thing is what i could do is if i if i hit command z i can just undo both of those one of the things that might change is if i just increase the contrast kind of pulls all of it apart the and so you can see you know maybe that was too much so if i again so here's one but then if i do just a touch more contrast maybe and then i want to maybe pull everything like this is maybe a little overexposed so if i just pull the offset down a little bit you can see how the the grass move so one of the things with this is you're looking at this on one particular monitor and the colors and everything are going to look different on any given monitor so you may want to export a video upload it as unlisted on youtube and then look at it on your phone look at it on your friend's computer things like that just you can see you know hey is this is my monitor giving me exactly what i want stuff to look like or not but you can kind of guide yourself by the the different dials that we have along here one other small piece that i haven't used all that much is this color warper so if we go to maybe this main first image and so if we were to look at maybe my my skin tone seems just like slightly off the line a little bit so what you can do is maybe you just want to adjust these kind of red and oranges colors along here and so you can see you know that's probably these tones more or less so watch if i move watch the vector scope as i pull this around so i can pull this you know way over here that's interesting i don't see any changes oh it's turned off see if you have it turned off you make changes and you're not going to see anything happen because that's not actually being viewed right now okay let's turn this on this will actually show up now all right oops all right so grab this and pull it slightly so you can see how the vector scope changed a little bit by pulling this so so for some reason just the skin tones look a little bit strange like you know i could be like my skin tone is like fairly red to begin with so if it's very red or looks a little yellowish or something like that you know there can be some small tweaks that i could make you can see if i drag it way over here like this probably isn't going to look good but let's check it out so yeah that's probably not what i would want that you can see is kind of i don't know i look kind of green right now but anyways you can see more specific areas of of tweaking to the colors that you could do you know within this color warper so those are the basics of making changes to the colors of your videos using davinci resolve so if you want me to do more videos like this let me know down below in the comment section we can explore the endless opportunity to learn and improve your videos within davinci resolve if you want to see some of the other davinci resolve tutorial videos we did check them out along the side right here hope to see you in another video bye

Channel: TheFigCo

Views: 6,824

Keywords: davinci resolve, davinci resolve 17, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve 2021, davinci resolve for beginners, color correction, color correction tutorial, davinci resolve color correction, davinci resolve color correction tutorial, color correction for beginners, color correction basics, color correction tutorial for beginners, how to color correct davinci resolve, how to color correct, how to color correct your videos, how to use davinci resolve 17

Id: 3SIxbKrZvf0

Length: 24min 15sec (1455 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021