Color Grading Basics: Understanding LIFT, GAMMA, & GAIN

as some of you may already know i've been experimenting with different editing software and right now i'm on to davinci resolve it's an incredibly powerful software and there is good reason why people are so interested in it right now first of all it's free there is a paid version but the free version is pretty darn fully functioned i've been using the free version for the last probably month and a half now all of my videos have been done in it and i haven't run into any roadblocks and the other main reason is because of the amazing color grading tools that come with this software but if you're coming from final cut pro or premiere pro and you go to color grade in davinci resolve there's one big question that i know you're gonna ask what the heck are lift gamma and gain so in today's video we're going to take a look at what lift gamma and gain are and why you might want to use them hopefully this should be quick and easy but we'll see let's hop in okay so let's say that this is the first time you've opened up davinci resolve and you're looking at the color grading tab and you see you've got your clips here you've got your nodes which we're not going to get into today and then down on the bottom left here you've got your color wheels we've got lift gamma and gain and you're like i don't know what lift gamma and gain are now if we click on this third dot here you're going to see shadow mid tone and highlight which might seem more familiar to you but we should probably know what all these things are so that we can use them now the easiest way that i've found to explain lift gamma and gain is to give a quick explanation of curves so we've got left to right we got 0 to 100 let's call it that and then bottom to top we've got 0 to 100 as well 0 being full black 100 being full white now the horizontal axis is our input so what that means is whatever's in the picture at zero percent if i move this it's going to affect those things on the vertical axis that's the output so that's what i'm changing it to so if i wanted to take anything that was fully black on my screen and i wanted to change it i can move this point so i'm going to take my zero percent and i'm going to push it up and you'll see that that fully black part that was on the left hand side of the screen is now changing to a gray i'm making it brighter because i'm moving it up and i can move it all the way up until we've got full white which is a full line straight across the top and the same thing can be done with the white point so if i take my white point i push it down the white is going to become gray and eventually it will become black but you notice it doesn't just affect the right hand side it actually affects the whole line right so not only did 100 pure white move down but also this point that would have been let's say at 25 is now closer to 10 and you can also make points in the middle and drag them wherever you want so right now i'm not affecting the full white point and i'm not affecting the full black point i'm just affecting everything around this point in the middle and i'm making a curve hence curves and once again you can see that this is fully reflected in our waveform over here if we look at a full picture like this the waveform looks a lot different it doesn't have that straight line because it's not a simple gray scale there's lots of bright parts and dark parts and so then we're looking at that complicated image over here but you'll notice that right up here this is actually our windows and they're fairly blown out but they're not all the way up at the top so what i can do is grab my white point and i can drag it over until they're fully white and it also brought up everything on the way okay so hopefully some of that made sense curves are hard to explain but now we're gonna take a look at our grayscale and we're going to affect the lift gamma and gain and it's going to show us what it's doing in the waveform because we understand the curves we can look at this and see what would be happening in the curves when we adjust lift gamma and gain so if i increase lift watch what happens [Music] looks pretty familiar right so lift is moving the black point up i can achieve the exact same thing by moving this black point up on my curves exactly the same thing okay let's try gain we're going to move gain up okay so it's moving our white point over it's making our bright parts brighter if we move it down it's making our bright points darker so the gain is adjusting the white point so i could adjust the exact same thing this would be moving the gain up [Music] this would be moving the gain down and again it's important to note that it's adjusting the entire line now if we did gamma let's adjust that upwards [Music] see it's making an arc so it's pushing the middle section up with a slight emphasis on the lower side all right and then if i move my gamma down [Music] the arc goes the other way again we're not adjusting the black or the white point that's still pure black this is still pure white it's just making the arch in the middle you can do the same thing by making a point on your curves and adjusting it like so there we go or we could turn the gamma up so if you've got curves you can do what lift gamma and gain do an offset is literally just going to move everything up or down and this is easier shown with an actual picture so watching the wave form it literally just shifts the entire picture up or down now how does that compare to what we're used to which is shadows mid-tones and highlights so we're going to go over to our shadows mid-tones and highlights here and we're going to watch that waveform again i'm going to increase my shadows okay so we can see that it made a bend but it's not affecting the entire line it's only affecting the lower parts so our whites and our brighter parts here our highlights are still fully intact but what i've done is i've brought up only the dark parts to compare that to our lift if i bring up the lift it brings up everything and leaves the white point so we're pivoting on the white point to bring up the black points now our mid tones it makes a bump in the middle but again it's it's like it's anchored right here and right here right so we're not actually affecting the entire line and then our highlights same deal as with the shadows it's like there's a pivot point somewhere near the middle here that's making this kind of curve but we're not touching the bottom half of the line at all now what can this do why would you want to use one over the other generally the what i've found so far is that lift gamma and gain are great for making your broad strokes adjustments let's say i just got this picture in and i want to make some tweaks to start with the first thing that i would say is that if i wanted the whole thing to be brighter let's say we didn't like the fact that it was like kind of dark and moody here i wanted it to be a little bit more bright again on the right hand side you can see here that the waveform is not anywhere near close to clipping and yet we're definitely bright in those windows so i can bring my gain up and that's going to bring my white parts up again this would be the same as if i grabbed this and brought the whole line closer to being more vertical i'm going to bring that gain up and now our picture is a lot more bright so we can see before and after and then maybe i wanted to bring up the exposure in her skin tones i can have my gamma and i can move that up a little bit now it's starting to look a little bit more washed out i don't necessarily like this picture but those are the kind of broad strokes that i can do now if we take that and we copy it and apply it to our grayscale so now you can see that i've made a bit of an arch and i've moved our white point over to the left so you could do the same thing by using the curves now what if we were to try and do that same thing using shadows mid-tones and highlights so we're gonna flip over into what they call our log wheels and i'm going to start to try and push my highlights up the bright parts the windows actually do get brighter the skin tone is not touched so i'm not making things brighter altogether so in this case i probably want to also move my mid-tones up to make the skin a little bit brighter but you can see that it's starting to make some kind of weird things happen in the colors and there's like some banding and stuff going on and so now we've got kind of this strange look in the skin and so if we were to take that and copy it and apply it to our grayscale you can see what it's done here it looks like i've pushed my white tones over to the left but that line isn't going straight from that point down to black and then we've got this little hump in the mid-tones and it doesn't really look good because our line is getting broken up into too many little pieces if we want it to look better we need to be more delicate with the line and that's what lift gamma and gain are great for so one more time let's use our lift gamma and gain i'm going to use my gain to push this up i'm actually going to push my gamma down a little bit and then we get a little bit more of a contrasty kind of curve last time i pushed it up but i didn't really like that so we've got before and after so basically i added some contrast in there and then if we copy that over to our grayscale you can see what i'm doing my white point moved over to the left and then we've got a slight curve in the line and that is our our gamma there hopefully that made some sense i know it can be a difficult thing to grasp on to believe me it's even harder to try to explain but i think that having the grayscale representation on the waveform makes it a little bit easier to comprehend if you do have any questions or you need me to clarify something hit me up down in the comments and on your way down there make sure to hit that like and subscribe button and hit the bell notification so you don't miss out on future reviews and tutorials thank you so much for watching and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Dunna Did It

Views: 64,696

Keywords: color grading basics, color grading basics davinci resolve, color grading basics davinci resolve 16, color grading basics for beginners, color grading final cut pro x, color grading in premiere pro cc, davinci resolve 16 color grading, davinci resolve color grading, color correction, davinci resolve 16, fcpx, film look, lift gamma gain, lift gamma gain explained, lift gamma gain offset explained, lift gamma gain vs shadow mid highlight, premiere pro, tutorial, video editing

Id: Gz_QzBdHDYc

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/spinfire]

These YouTube thumbnails are out of control.