Color Grading Basics for Beginners - Davinci Resolve 15 (free!)

hello and welcome to this DaVinci Resolve tutorial on how to grade your color from this very dull kind of look to something a lot more stylish fully white balanced and has a lot attached to it so this is going to be a complete workflow for people who are totally new to DaVinci Resolve and you want to just get something from a bad looking clip to something that looks a lot better I've gone for this very mundane clip because I was in the midst of making a tutorial for my mother-in-law on how to use a camera with basics and I thought why not just throw it together DaVinci Resolve basics tutorial as well to be extra meta so let's go for it I'm using DaVinci Resolve 15 this will probably be the same for 13 and up until they change something drastic DaVinci Resolve is free it's awesome go download it from the Blackmagic Design website and it's really the best thing out there for color grading and it's getting a lot better in terms of the editing workflow as well I currently use it for pretty much everything you can see from the bottom here it does everything from edit to fusion which is like after effects like node graph color grading Fairlight which is a big audio mastering suite and then deliver which is their export or share in Final Cut terms so I'm going to show you just how to bring in a bit of footage color grade it get it white balanced and some of the basics that DaVinci Resolve has to offer so you can see I've shot this I shot this basically explaining how to use a camera to my mother-in-law and I've shot it in a very very yellowy light doesn't look good at all so it's really the perfect candidate to show you how the basics of color work in DaVinci Resolve so the first thing I would do with this clip is to jump over to color when I want to grade it so what you'll see is as you have several Clips so if I put a cut into this one with the b4 blade now have two different clips then in the color you'll see you've got two different clips so that's just an easy way for it to explain all the different cuts in your grade and it's also easy to copy grades across so when you go to each grade they're each a different graph and grading really works around this idea of this frame graph so this graph over here is basically from input to output all the different changes you make and you can add an immeasurable amount of different changes you can add multiple changes onto a single one as well so the first thing I'm going to do is to set up white balance so currently I've got my master frame and I usually leave that one blank with nothing on it it's just how I do it and then the first thing going to do is add a serial node so you can do alt and s s for serial to get a new node or you can right-click and say add node add serial so basically a serial meaning that it's just going in in a linear line through and you can do things in parallel but we're not going to talk about that in this tutorial so the first thing I'm going to do is to isolate an area that I know should be white so this is on a plain white table so what I'm going to do is use this tool the window tool to select only an area that I think should be white so I'm going to and this which we call an isolator this black box to this and then I'm going to resize it down like that so that it just looks like basically the just the white part is selected you'll notice in resolve that you also have the ability to kind of feather these selection boxes we really don't want that so I'm just going to make sure it's really just covering that white part I've got kind of a shadow there but generally speaking if we put somewhere that we think should be white we'll be able to use that in combination with the tools that we've got to get our white balance once we've got the isolator to where we want it then what we can do is click this magic one button here called highlight which basically takes the window that we've put in or the isolator we've put in and only shows us that now what this means is that when we go to our scopes so if you click on this button over here called scopes then you get an idea of well basically the scopes represent only what is highlighted so this small box here not the our G and B red green and blue of the entire image because that's hard to work with we can't really guess as to whether we've got good white balance when there's all kinds of different colors in the scene but if we just select a part that we think should be white then we've got a good RGB so now what we can do is try and balance these out and we do that using this area here so the RGB mixer so one two three fourth button in from the left RGB mixer you've then got red output green output and blue output so what we're trying to do is balance the levels of these three things now it's quite difficult to see so I'm zooming in so I can show you but basically we're adjusting red on the red output Green on the green output and blue on the blue output and trying to basically match them together so the first thing I notice is that the the red is kind of higher up than these two so I'm going to move the blue up a little bit I can move the red down a little bit now obviously moving this down moving the slider down on red reducing the red doesn't mean that this is going to go down it's it's kind of inverse in that in that sense but we basically want to get to a point where we're balancing all three and when you when you move each one you'll notice it affects the other slightly as well so I can see that around here and this will be different for obviously for every every shot but there is roughly the same you can see that my square has gone from a yellow to now a kind of a grey then when I switch off my magic wand I can still see that that's still just the area highlighted I select this square in the window panel and I click on the square to switch it off so now I have a white balanced image and what you can see by bypassing the color grade which you can do with this button up here bypass color grades and fusion effects that's the difference that we've made so far so a nice white balance that balances everything out so that's great and you can name these nodes so click on right-click and go to node label I'm going to call this WB for white balance for some reason DaVinci Resolve very flaky in terms of typing often it'll just lose focus on the UI and so click back and retype it so that's my white balance I'm now going to add another node so remember alt s add serial node and this time I'm going to balance out the areas of light and dark so this time on the vectorscope so remember this button down here I'm going to change from the parade of RGB over to a waveform now I've shot this clip with my Sony a7 three with quite a flat color profile I think it's either s log 2 or 3 and what you can see with that is that we've got a vector scope that sorry a waveform that looks like this now the problem with this is that there's not a lot of highlights and the the darks aren't all the way to the very baseline either so what we're trying to do with this is to even that out or to kind of fill up the full dynamic range of what we can show so I'm going to go to my color wheels section on the left here and I'm looking now at the lift gamma gain and offset so lift being the dark parts gamma being the middle parts and gain being the highlights and offset is kind of like a mix of the whole three so I don't tend to use that that much so these dials at the bottom which go left to right you kind of it's like a wheel that you turn you see as I turn that you can see now that the Scopes are moving and what I want to do is change the lift just move it down a little bit until those dark parts are basically meeting the baseline of what we can render and then likewise with the gain I'm going to pull that all the way up well maybe all the way up I mean obviously use your eye as well look at what's on the screen and and decide for yourself but typically you would crank that all the way up until you've nearly blown out your picture so let's just go with that for the sake of argument do it technically and then we'll worry about how it looks a bit later so I've brought the top of this up nearly to the top of my scope so I've got a bit of headroom nothing is blown out nothing is too bright so there's nothing where you would you know in a camera see zebra lions to show you that it's too bright but basically this is now the full range and then I can think about color grading this image so the next thing I'm going to do is to just label that so I'm going to I just call this contrast and you can see it looses focus all the time it's really bad for that so contrast and it lost focus before I finished typing that time and who'd label contrast there we go and I'm going to alt s for another serial node and you can move it down here for tidiness and this time I'm going to look at something kind of stylized so I'm going to go to my curves window and this time I might reduce a little bit of each end of the picture and I can also click to add another point and I can make it look stylistically how I want so I can play around with that curve and bring some of the highlights down so this obviously this top right is the highlights play around with those flatten them out a little bit so it's just like a curve editor in in something like Photoshop now I'm going to get that to a kind of a flat look again because the last point in this is where I'm going to use a lookup table or a lot which there are quite a lot built into DaVinci Resolve and so this one I'm gonna call lut prep because it's basically my last step before I'm adding a lookup table now a lookup table for those of you don't know basically a lookup table is kind of like a predefined look for an image it's kind of like think of it kind of like an Instagram filter it's kind of applied over the top of the whole thing it's got a bunch of settings baked into it and it will give you a certain stylistic look certain changes to colors and changes to the light and dark of an image so what I'm going to do to get a lot is simply to right click on on my node that I want it on and go to lots and there's one that I quite like there's a lot in here to play with which is really great they're mostly under 3d lots and you can go through all of these and play with them one that I really like is film looks kodak it's the first one in the list of codecs at the bottom of the list so film looks collect rec 709 codec two three eight three d five five very easy to remember but basically that one i like quite a lot and when i apply it it's quite it's quite a stark great it's quite a quite a serious look to the thing so what i'm gonna do is to just change the amount to which that is applied now you can do that using this button here so this is the key and Enki you can basically also define how much output there is of a node so if you go to key with a node selected the key output is basically like the opacity of that note so if I put this at say 0.5 its reducing the effect if I split on 0 there's no effect at all so I might put this say at 0.6 so I have kind of a nice look and just to remind ourselves how far we've come we can click on the bypass and switch it on off so we've gone from a really bad flat color badly lit terrible colors to a nice look with a lookup table and a certain style to it and so if we look how that used to look in bypass it kind of a bit flat and a bit dull I switch on and everything looks great paper looks white colours are great and there we go so other interesting things we could do so I'm just going to label that really quickly as the lot da Vinci you must get better allowing me to type and I'm gonna leave these at the end because they're kind of like the finishing of the image I'm just going to throw in after the contrast I'm going to add another serial node and I'm going to just add really quickly an example of how you can sharpen up an image now sharpening is kind of cool for a few reasons obviously when you normally think of sharpening an image you think of kind of degrading it slightly it's not typically something you would do if you're a pro and you've got things focused you might not want to just add sharpening across-the-board so the beauty of that is that we can use the selection tools in DaVinci Resolve which are called the qualifiers and pick just a certain part of the image now this isn't a great clip to do that with but I am just going to show you how it works so how we do that is that we would say okay well we're going to use a qualifier for this particular node and what this is doing is saying that this node will only apply to whatever qualifies to be well in this case sharpened but in other words whatever else you put on here so if I put a sharpening on here if I put a lot on here it will only apply to the areas that I select currently everything is selected so the full range of all colors the full range of saturation and the full range of luminance from dark to light now if I only wanted this to this sharpening so first off I'm going to put on some sharpening so I click on the blur and if you drag blur down you get sharpening so here is some intense sharpening right so drag it down sharpens everything up obviously sharpening everything you can see here we're getting these intense like noise everywhere now if I just have a slight bit of sharpening and again you can bypass everything just to see the difference in the sharpening you can see it's popping up in all of this noise but I'm just going to put on a an over-the-top amount of sharpening so that you can see what's much gonna be happening there now what I'm going to do to qualify that is go back to the eyedropper the qualifier tool and make sure it only applies to the very lightest part so I want to be able to sharpen up these icons so this where it says display and you know one over 125th the UI of the camera and I want to just sharpen those so the qualifier is great because basically it's allowing me to just select certain things now I don't want anything with much saturation so I'm going to reduce the high because I know the UI is only in white and if I click on this magic wand it will show me what I'm highlighting then I can adjust the luminance to only be certain things so you can see here if I drag the high or if I drag the low obviously I want to drag the low because I only want it to apply to that text so basically I'm trying to isolate just the text and you can see that by selecting the highlights I've now got mostly the bits of text got a little bit too far so I'm going to increase the low soft so that's kind of like adding feathering to that selection somewhere like that then you've got a bunch of other things like you've got clean black so you can kind of you know adjust that to kind of clean up the edges around those things and currently we've got a problem with is kind of like a mid-range of stuff obviously the tables super-bright that's going to get sharpened as well not a huge problem in this instance because it's just a table so that's no big deal but something like that will allow me just to select those so I could I could drop that down but some reason it thinks that they are they require some saturation so they must must just be a little bit colorful and then deal I mean we could play with you but I'm really addressing a white part of the image so I'm just gonna ignore that entirely and I'm just gonna sharpen those points so I'm just gonna drop the saturation down slightly increase them high soft I basically want to get rid of this yellow here but it's not happening until right at the very end so we'll just roll with that it's no big deal the other thing that we can do is use an isolator again so if I know that the camera is pretty much always in the middle then I can add this remember everything is going on to this node so I can add this box drag it out so that for the duration of this shot this note is basically in charge of making sure that only these things within this frame with this qualification get sharpened that's pretty much it so you can see there's dots on each of these to tell you that they are in use on this note and there's little icons to show you that they're in use on that note too so I'll switch that off entirely and now what you'll see if you could see this a lot more clearly is that these are sharpened nothing else around here is sharpened and it's literally just sharpening that point so if I crank this forward then the problem with that is that for this shot what I would do if I was shooting if I was editing this properly was I would cut there because then the sharpening is going to be happening right on the middle of this piece of paper because that carries on throughout that shot regardless of of what's in the frame so I've got some sharpening right here but not out around it but anyway so that's basically how you kind of isolate how you color grade how you white balance and how you kind of prepare clips in DaVinci Resolve 15 actually there's one more thing that I wanted to add or a couple more things if you wanted to move this grade from one clip to another you can use the apply grade function so select the one that you need to apply something to right click on the one you want to take it from and go to apply grade and that will just copy it across another thing that's useful to know is that when you're typically working on grades you're working on them per clip now you can obviously copy/paste them across like I just did with apply grade but you can also use this kind of global function called timeline where basically you're applying changes to everything in the timeline now that will apply to everything so be aware that you probably don't want to use that for too much but if there's like a tiny little effect may be something in open effects which is like they're kind of screen space effects that you want to apply to everything maybe you might want to do it there but typically you probably don't want to do that so the other useful thing final useful thing that I wanted to mention is that there is a really useful shortcut called shift and F which will jump you to full screen I should have used this during the tutorial but I'm terrible person that I didn't but this is what I'm now using to show you the before and after shift and F will jump you from that viewer to kind of maximized view within the UI so last two tips were apply grades so select the one you want right click apply grade the ability to switch between clip and timeline and shift an F on the keyboard to jump between normal and full-screen mode just to check how your grade is working out anyway that really is it for now thank you for watching

Channel: Will Goldstone

Views: 57,392

Keywords: davinci resolve, grading, color, colour, grade, LUT, look up table, improve video, better colour, better color

Id: snS0WbzKOcQ

Length: 21min 12sec (1272 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 02 2018