- [Qazi] Hey guys, what's going on? This is Qazi. I'm a colorist and an editor in LA and mostly I work on car commercials, branded content and stuff like that. (upbeat music) There's 10 million ways
to do things as an artist. Whatever you're gonna see
from me is just my approach and that's how I do it and then you guys are more than welcome to add
on in the comments section and just let me know what you think or what you would like to
see next and stuff like that. We'll just take it from there. This series that I'm working on is called Color Grading,
One Shot at a Time. This is not about color matching. We're not gonna get into the nitty gritty of like any and every nuance
that goes into color grading. Here, I'm just gonna pick a random shot and we're gonna make it
as good as it can get. My goal is to give you guys the logic, give you guys the practical sense, give you guys how it actually
works in the real world. I mean, there is 10
million trainings out there where you can go and learn the tools. I'm not gonna focus on that. I wanna focus on, when I'm on a job, how do I tackle something
and how do I go about it. I'm gonna show you the systems and processes that I've created and work with so many A-list brands and like how was I able
to satisfy my clients, yet satisfy myself, like
got away whatever I wanted, besides the money from the job and how does it all play out. So that's what we're gonna do. (relaxing music) So this was shot in Canon
RAW and it's a 12 bit image. It's shot with the C200. I'm just gonna show you how I'm gonna do this particular shot. Then, tomorrow I can show you a different approach to this shot and the day after, a different approach. That way I can show you four, five different ways to do the same shot. And then, you pick and choose
whatever works for you, whatever makes you more
efficient, that's the key. Okay, so let's start with the primaries. So I'm gonna use my gain to bring it up and like let's see
where we wanna leave it. So this is fine, this is fine. So now I'm gonna dial my lift down and look at my black levels,
bring it up a little bit. And now let's just bring down the mids because it's looking a little washed out. So okay, bring it up a little bit more. I brought up my lift, lift the gain. So this is the game that you gotta play. You bring one things down, you
gotta bring something else up and, you know, you just
keep going back and forth, back and forth until it looks good, but I'll just push it to the
max and then bring it back. So I mean, what kinda
look are we going for? Are we going for the moody look? And where we can just like
really crank the highlights and bring down the mid tones
and the shadows or the lift? Or are we going for like
a low contrast look? So I mean, for me, something like that is looking pretty good. We go before and after and this is like giving me that drama
that I was going after and like just really, really push that, exercise that dynamic range
that we get from this camera. That, to me, is a good starting point. This is my primary node, so in this node, I'm gonna do my contrast,
which we just did, and I'm also gonna do my
saturation in this node as well. Okay, so when we crank our saturation, let's just go all the way, don't be shy. Like, let's just crank it all the way. So now I'm seeing my colors, so let's dial back a little bit, let's dial back a little bit. And, you know what, I'm
at 89% saturation, okay. Now here's the thing, so let's
go in here in vectorscope and make this a little bit bigger, so we can see where we are. So I mean, you know, we're well under how far we can actually stretch it, okay. Just start big and then shrink until you get to a point where you go, this is perfect, let's
just leave it there. Okay, so now, do you see all this grain? This grain is not pretty at all, okay. So, you can use Neat
and that can remove it, but that will just slow down
your system like a mother, like it'll slow it down so much. So what I would do, I will
create, I would hit Shift+S, which will give us a node
prior to our primary node and then in that node,
I'll show you a quick tip and this is my secret sauce,
this is a game changer. This is something where you wanna pause, take notes, watch it again, and this is just the dialed in settings. Just do it and it's game over. Most of the time, it's gonna
get you where you need to be and without any latency, without any lag. So what I would do, is I
would just set this to, Temporal NR, to one frame. I'll take this up to around
4.8, five-ish, which is great and then, here, I will take this off and I will take my chroma
to about 6.8, maybe seven. So now, if I turn this on and off, now mind you, I'm zoomed in like 600%, so that's why it's a bit too exaggerated, but just even look at, right here, in my scopes, how much it's taken out and without any degradation, okay. So, if I move back, right here, and now if I show you on and
off, like, the noise is gone. You always wanna start
with the noise reduction and not add noise reduction at the end. And the reason being is that then everything that you do afterwards is gonna be so much cleaner. When you're doing qualifiers, it's always, always, always a great idea to run noise reduction pass first
to get the cleanest key. Okay cool, so this was one node, okay. We've come a long way. Obviously, your shot is never complete until it has a window
or a couple of windows, like, you just have to
window out everything. So in this one, we can
just do a simple one and one thing that you gotta keep in mind, that in Resolve, softness is everything. Like you just gotta soften
the F out of things, like just crank it, crank it
until you crank it no more. So like, here, I would
do something like that. I will reverse it and
then use different wheels and just see what works, but I start with the mid tone, usually. And then, I would go before
and after, before and after. And, you know, this is also helping us with the noise situation on
the left, top left corner. So it's gonna help us
with that a little bit, so then, I mean, just really see. And plus it's bringing back
a little bit more saturation in the highlights, too, which I like. I feel like for today, this
is all I wanted to show you. So that's one way to do it. Most of the work was done in one node, just with our primaries and
then we cranked the saturation. We had some noise issue that we tackled and then, we added a vignette. We can isolate things, I can crank up, I can create a window around
this and saturate my blues. I can create a window around this and cool it off a little bit,
create window around that and bring it down a notch. You know, there's so many
things that I can do, but guys, one thing that
you need to understand is that you can spend
seven hours on one shot, but when you're working on a project, ask your client what are you looking for? What's the objective, what's
the goal, what do you need? I say color grading is
all about troubleshooting. You're looking at a shot as a problem and then, how are you gonna fix it? Anyways, this is my first video, so I wanted to just tell you
a little bit about myself and what to expect. Hopefully, you guys enjoyed it. I'll see you in the next one.
