Color Grading BASICS In DaVinci Resolve 17

hey what's going on everybody welcome back to the edit place and today we're talking about color grading for dummies not that i think if you're watching this you're a dummy it's just that this is going to be a super simplified way to learn how to color correct and color grade some of your footage to kind of help jump start if you're just starting to dive into it this video is if you're just getting started or just kind of want to refresher on the basics and kind of go through what i would consider the basic three steps to color grading anything so it could be this a short film a youtube video something for your business or whatever it is no matter what piece of software you're using most of these um ideas and concepts are going to be the same but of course if you want to follow along directly we will be working in davinci resolve i am of course using davinci resolve studio which is the paid version however you should be able to do pretty much everything that you see in this video on the free version and yeah let's dive right into it so i mentioned this before but what i would consider to be the three main pillars of getting to a successful color graded video is you have color correct color grade and shot match now a lot of people do all three of these steps a little differently sometimes in different orders so i'm going to tell you kind of the general way to do it and then of course you can break the rules bend the rules as you see fit into your own workflow so the footage that we're going to be using today is pretty simple we're going to be using two shots from an upcoming video on my main channel go check that out in the description if you want where we compare the latest samsung galaxy earbuds uh earbuds pro excuse me to the apple airpods pro and then we're also going to be using this portrait shot from a shoe i did last year of course if you're in the edit page like me let's open up the color page so before we start manipulating any of the footage the first thing i'm going to do is bring up my scopes now i see them down here you may as well you also can right click on the image viewer and at the very bottom you'll see you'll see sean connery you'll see show scopes and if it comes up and it looks pretty intimidating that's okay these are a bunch of different scopes that you don't really need to worry about for the sake of just getting started um up here in the top right you can actually change the views to have a six up or so excuse me nine up four up two up or even one if you're going to learn and focus on one in my opinion the rgb parade is a great one to kind of get started with although histograms are also equally important really either one of those is going to both allow you to see what is clipping what is overexposed as well as uh how your color balance is doing now again we could do an entire video on scopes themselves but essentially they are a kind of visual data representation of what the image is now one of the main reasons that you'll hear about people shooting in raw or log is because it gives you this very flat look it's not very contrasty and you can see in the scopes that everything is pretty much hovering in the lower mid tones since this is just a tad underexposed now we'll go over this more in depth in a second but you can see here that if i simply brighten up my highlights and bring down my shadows add in some saturation now you have what is an image that would probably come out of your phone or just regular dslr camera right off the bat as if you weren't shooting in log now if you're the type person that wants to end up here why would you shoot log anyway and just create more work for yourself the simple answer is when your image comes pre-stretched essentially all the way into post you have less room to work with whereas if i reset this go back to the raw look now i can push and pull all the colors and brightness and contrast any which way i please so that way you can style it different ways it can be really bright could be really dark it could be moody it could be realistic and vibrant it basically just gives you all those options so now that we have our scopes up now it's time to do step one which is to color correct and so color correction is basically just creating a really good base layer for yourself whereas color grading is the fun part that you kind of get to decide the style and look of your video so what i'm gonna do here is up in davinci resolve you have your first node now if you're used to editing in final cut premier or many other editors they edit in layers nodes are very similar to that just it's basically a different visual representation so i'm going to hit alt s to add a new one you also can right click on each one and add serial node we'll make another video that goes over all the differences between the other ones now everyone's clips are gonna be different so i can't tell you add three layers or add four it's gonna be different for everybody depending on the clip and depending on the scene and a whole bunch of factors first here is click on this secondary node and then i'm actually going to open up my luts panel now what we're going to do first off here is not what you hear people do with let's all time these are not stylized filters that comes in the color grading section if you want to use them what we're going to use right now is something called a utility lut or conversion lot so most cameras have conversion luts where they take an image like this which again is in log and it converts it to what's called a rec 709 image now it's easier to show you than to explain what that actually means and since i shot this on my blackmagic pocket 6k i'm going to go to blackmagic design these are all included in davinci resolve however if you don't see your camera manufacturer maybe you shoot sony or canon go to their websites and odds are you're going to find the conversion lots available they should be for free and easy to download and since we're using the newer gen 5 color science i'm going to select this one here and you can kind of see a preview but be mindful that sometimes when you're just scrubbing over the luts they're not going to look accurate so you definitely want to right click on it hit apply lut to current node and now we can see on this node it has a little light icon added and we can see our image has been stretched a little bit right it's more contrasty if i were to turn off this node you can see that stretched it added some saturation and now it's starting to look like a normal uh kind of image so now i'm going to click over to my next node or layer and now we're actually going to start uh raising the exposure a bit because it's still a little bit underexposed i want to correct this image so i'm going to go down to my primaries again shadow midtones and highlights and i'm going to simply raise this up now you don't want to raise it too far you notice that i purposely clipped the highlights is what it's called you can see kind of how one flat line that means you're losing information so i can see up here in the brightest white area it's pure white which it means it's clipped now sometimes you'll find that you just have to clip an image depending on if it's not shot properly for example if you have a shot of someone inside with a window in the background unless it was like professionally lit or a very cloudy day outside usually the sun is going to be brighter than whatever light bulbs are in your house so the window's probably going to be blown out but if you were to properly expose that down then your inside is probably going to look very dark so on some cameras sometimes you have no choice but if the information is there and you can pull it back you want to do that as much as possible to keep it in same thing with my lift or my shadows you can what's called crush the blacks which again if i go all the way down you can see flat lining and then on the image it looks very underexposed so i'm going to bring that back up and then i'm just going to play around with mid tones raise them lower them see how you feel and you could even go in and add a touch of more saturation and it's helpful to uh turn on and off notes to see how your progress is actually going and you can do that by clicking the number on the bottom left of the node or hitting command or control d you also can turn off all of your effects if you want to turn off all the nodes you can use that by this button right here of course that's just going to give me my log look so we can see with the conversion lut and a basic correction how far we've actually come already and that's great so now we have our basic correction here again we haven't graded it yet we've just done a basic correction step two is when you are going to shop match so that's why i have this here now of course this is basically the same setup as the previous shot just with a different product but same time of day same angle same relative lighting now of course if i wasn't explaining how to do it i could do the same thing probably in a minute but that's a waste of time because what we can do is right click on this image and hit grab still and i'm going to select this image go up into my gallery which is where that still was saved and just like how we added a lut i'm going to right click on it and hit apply grade and it's going to apply every step that we did so if i look over i can see that added three nodes and see that added the conversion lut and the same corrections here now this is the best case scenario because literally they are practically the same shots but for example if i go back and let's see add in something else so this shot was from the same again same time of day but it was under a little bit more of a shadowed area and so if i just add this in here and do the same thing right click apply grade we can see that this shot is a lot darker and so for this one i'm going to have to play with the primaries i'm going to have to raise the shadows and raise the highlights and definitely gonna have to bring up the mid-tones a bit and i'm gonna play with the contrast there we go now if i flip back and forth between those clips you can see that they're matching pretty nicely and so that's what shot matching is it's basically going through all your clips and making sure they're relatively the same exposure same white balance so if you have warmer tones like this or cooler tones and that's going to make your grading life way easier because if you just immediately jump into the fun stuff of oh i want to stylize this i want to grade this then what you're going to have find is you're going to take this like cool image cool as in uh like more bluish tint so you have your cool tones and you have like warm tones obviously that's dramatic but if you had a clip where the white balance was really cool and you apply gray you correct it you make it look all good and then you go to the same scene but maybe you shot under a warm light and just apply that it's going to require so much extra work and push and pull to get that whereas if you start from a decent place then you can find your grade to be a lot easier and finally let's jump in to color grading now this is the really fun part and it's the most subjective part so i'm going to create a style here but this is where you can't necessarily follow the exact parameter controls but you can follow just the general concepts so i actually took this clip from another project this is what the log looked like and in the other video this is what i had the final grade look like and you can see all the steps here dramatic difference i really like this look and we may end up creating something similar something a little different but i'm going to delete all those nodes and i'm just going to start adding in some so again i'm going to leave this for noise reduction and first i'm going to do a basic correction so again i'm going to go back to my luts i'm going to apply color science now it's going to give us this very basic grade let me go and do some primaries raise it up since this is more fashion generally like it to be brighter because that's more pleasing on the skin and i'm also going to add in some saturation and there we go that's our color correction now let's get into a grade now again for this video we're going to keep things very simple grades can get more complex you can start picking out skin tones and and selective color and all that we're not going to mess with that too much here and talk about just generic grade stuff we're definitely going to be doing more color grading type stuff so if you're excited for that leave a comment down below saying you want to see that and i'll make sure to kind of put it in the more front of the line but for now let's keep things simple so i'm going to add a new note here and we're just going to use luts for this video rather than creating a look by hand now you can get luts anywhere personally i use ludify they come with an amazing pack if you want you can check them out in the link in the description i will say it is an affiliate link so then i do get a little kickback so i appreciate it if you're interested in those but no worries either way luts are everywhere and you'll see they also do come with conversion luts uh for a bunch of different cameras you can see here panasonic red sony all that good stuff but we're now in the color grading and so now we're going to go under both generic log as well as the standard rec 709 so if you're watching this video i have a feeling you're probably going to be in the rec 709 because you're probably not already shooting in a bunch of log but they work very similar but since we've already color corrected and we've gotten out of that log look we're going to use these and this is where you can kind of start just playing around hovering over it will give you different previews for stuff and again you can make very dramatic different looks now i believe for the one you saw earlier uh in case people are curious i used the black panther one and then obviously made a bunch of modifications i guess for this video i'll try to create a different look here all right so let's do something like this this is almost like high key sort of thing um so i'm going to right click apply lut to current node now we can see that it's kind of messed things up a little bit and here's where you can do a couple things jury's out on what is the best per se but you can now either go back to your layer where you made your primary controls and adjust them to fit into this new look however i prefer not to kind of go back and change anything when you add stuff so i want to add a new note on top of that and now we're going to make corrections for our grade so i'm going to go back to my primaries but of course now i'm on a new uh layer and so everything looks kind of like it's back to the base and using my scopes i'm just going to see where my highlights are at those are still pulled but i think it's just the mid tones are really heavy up top this is definitely pretty gritty but i like it definitely could use a bit of color boost bring out the skin yeah that looks kind of nice to me it's funny as i'm making this pretty much near what it was before but that's okay you obviously i have a look that i like the last thing i want to show you this is a little bit more into the intermediate level stuff um is going to be a vignette but it really can help kind of add depth to your overall image not every image needs one and personally while you can scroll through the effects library here and you will find vignette ver ayu there it is can't add a vignette here it's gonna do that you can add softness change that sort of thing i i don't recommend this at all it usually doesn't look very good a way better way to do vignettes is going to be this little guy right here your masks and then i'm going to add a circle and you'll see a pop-up in your image like this now you can move it around by clicking in the center the inner circle is going to be the actual shape which usually i do kind of a long oval and you put it kind of in where your subject is going to be and rotate rotated a bit it's not perfect and then the outer circle with the red dots is going to be how soft that harsh line is so for example if i lower this a bunch just so you can see what the vignette is obviously you can see if i bring it close it's a very harsh line circle and if i bring it all the way out it's very soft and it blends nicely so for vignettes you want it to be very soft now you'll notice that it made her face dark and not the outside edges and that is fixed by simply going down to the same place that you added the layer but all the way to almost right here this little guy is your invert and now you can see that the face is lit up now this is too strong again we made it for demo purposes we can see that our blacks are crushed and so i'm going to reset that and so now that i've reset it it pretty much doesn't look like anything's happening so now i want to go to my curves and i want to turn off the rgb part and i only want to deal with the luminance which is the light value and i just want to grab it in the middle and start to pull down again you can be more dramatic or less dramatic totally up to you again i like kind of gritty stuff and there you have it and as a little cleanup we can see that it's getting a little noisy in the shadows and mid-tones and so if you remember we always reserve the first node for noise reduction so i'm going to go down here to my noise reduction panel and i like to change this to three frames it should default to zero and right here for temporal threshold just wanna move it up usually doesn't need too much if your image isn't bad maybe around five or six but you can play with your own clips and we can see if by turning that on and off there's definitely a nice little bit of cleanup there and so there you guys have it that is how you color correct shot match and color grade in a very basic sense now the nice thing about this basic sense is that this is the basic professional way to do it there are plenty of people who literally just hit like auto correct and then like add a filter or a lut to make it look cooler to me that's not really learning how to color grade that's just applying a lot because people say you should do that and not really understanding how your image is actually uh functioning and being manipulated so this is a good baseline to really dive into some of the deeper topics and secondary corrections and all that stuff that we'll cover in other videos but for now hopefully you got good value out of it if you enjoyed this video give it a like and don't forget to subscribe and yeah thanks so much for watching guys and i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: The Edit Place

Views: 25,607

Keywords: davinci resolve 17, davinci resolve, davinci resolve color grading, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve 17 tutorial, color grading davinci resolve, resolve 17, davinci resolve 16, davinci resolve 16 tutorial, davinci resolve effects, color grading, what is new in resolve 17, resolve color grading, how to use davinci resolve, new in resolve 17, color correction, color grading tutorial, davinci 17, davinci tutorial, davinci resolve studio, davinci resolve free

Id: Ro93Tgy0YAI

Length: 22min 5sec (1325 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021