(relaxing music) - What's going on, guys. This is Qazi. Welcome back to another epic video. And today I want to talk about something that really got
me started color grading, and that was how to
create color separation. When we think about
Transformers, Fight Club, and all these epic movies
that look beautiful, the thing that really stand out is that there is tons and tons
of color separation. And it's sitting right on
that cusp before it breaks. So how do you do that effectively? How do you do it in a way where you're working on these gigs, where there's limited time and you have to create
that impeccable look? You're going to be learning
that in this video. These are the same techniques that I pretty much use
to build my look DNA when I'm working on
commercials and music videos. So get super excited about that. Ever wonder how to turn
your SDR grade to HDR? In addition to that, this free webinar includes proper workflow to using Hollywood's most
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and let's roll the intro. (upbeat music) I'm really excited to be
sharing these techniques because you have not
seen them in this order. So get super excited. This footage is from Panasonic GH5s. So all the people out
there that are always like you're working with REDs and Alexas, can you work with something
that's more consumer friendly? This is what we got here, okay? So the way I'm going to
create the separation is going to be built
on four separate nodes, but then I'm going to
create two more nodes. And in this example, we're going to be using
the color space transform to just convert the footage to Rec 709. So I'm going to hit P
for Panasonic V gamut and already the colors are coming in and then I'm going to hit
Panasonic V log and boom. All of a sudden you're
probably like, dude, what do you have to do? You should just print
it, we're good to go. All right, but as always
this is just the beginning. So I'm going to leave that there. I'm gonna come in here and the contrast is really pushed, right? Like it's a bit much, so I'm
going to go for a cool like, film look with lifted shadows. So let's just raise it up like to something around here. And then let's bring the highlights down. So like I want a really gentle roll offs. Something like that. And then do we want to
do anything with it? So like we can obviously kind
of bring that down, you know, just to kind of create this kind of look. Already, it looks so much more film-like compared to what we had before. And then let's just take the highlights and see if we want to do anything there. So maybe just a little bit, not too much. But like this to me is
just looking so much better than this jarring image that
we get from our Panasonic. Even in the highlights,
like look at that, right? Over here, over there,
it's looking way softer and something that you might even get from say Alexa or RED when
you apply the Rec 709, which is not going to
be this pushed, okay? So I'm going to leave it
somewhere around here for now and now let's start with our steps. So the first one is going
to be temp and tint. So that's our first step. I'm going to spell it
correctly right here. So let's go in there. And basically the objective is simple. Look at your vector scope. We want to add more colors then like this one quadrant that we're living in, which is like warm tones right here, and then pure blacks. So we want to separate,
create some separation. Especially in this area right here. Now I purposely didn't pick a shot that's lit with multiple
different color, temperature, lights and stuff like that because that's not as difficult as like, something like that, which
is just shot in nature. How can we create color separation here? So what I would do is I will
start with my color temp, and start turning it around
and see what's happening. And you can even see
it in the vector scope, how we're creating the separation. Now, if you were going for
a really nice monotone look, you can even do something like that. And then just if I do before and after. It's so beautiful you can print it. Like it looks so natural, looks gorgeous. You can just print it, it's great. But here we're talking
about color separation, so in that case I'm
going to keep twisting it until I create the most
amount of separation between my cool tones and warm tones without losing my warm tones too much. So even something like that is a fine line between how many blues we are getting in
here and then the warm tones are still there for me to pick
at and then go off of that. So as of now, this is pretty nice. So see before, barely any blue. Now we get to see a lot of blue. We see some purple-ish
action going on behind her. And then we see our warm tones here too. They're not as nice as this,
but we'll get there, okay? So the whole idea is to
create color separation. Now, what I want to do
is let's take our tint and move it around and see
what's happening with our tint. So look at in the vector scope, how if I do before and after on this node. Like before we were
living in this quadrant and now we're opening up our image and we're actually going in the complementary color scheme, right? So that's the whole idea, right? So I'm going to keep it
somewhere around here. And now if we'll look at it, I mean just look at the tones now, right? Warm tones, blues, right? The separation in the water so much more. Before like it was just like one big tint. So this is where I'm going
to leave my temp and tint. It's did its job. It's pretty good. Let's leave it there. This one is going to be called log. And now I'm going to
go under my log tools, and I'm just going to take my high range and I'm going to crank
it back a little bit. Maybe somewhere around here. And now all I want to
do is maximize on my... My focus right now is in the highlights. So I'm going to add a little bit more red and just look what's happening. I'm going to add a bit more
warmth by subtracting blue, and now I'm just going
to add more magenta. Something like that. Now I'm going to take my
red and crank it more. I'm going to take my
blue and crank it more. And like that's just you know, finding that fine line
and keep righting it until it doesn't look fake,
everything blends in well. So if I do before and after now. Look at the amount of difference we've made and how natural that is. And look at what's happening on the vector scope once again. Where our colors were to what we're doing. So like if I take these two and turn them on and off, look at that. We were only living here then. Now we just have so much more separation. Here we thought we had already made so much a change in the temp and tint, but at this now, okay? Now I'm going to go under my mid-tone and see what kind of room I
have to play with in there. So here is where I start
creating a lot of separation. So just look at this,
what I'm doing right now. So obviously I don't
want to make it too fake. So I want to find a happy medium. So even something like
that is pretty good. Now I'm going to go under... Like, where do we want to go? We want to keep... We want to keep it looking realistic. And I want to make sure that we don't have weird colors introduced in this area. So you have to be careful about that. And now let's see. So this kind of looks nice, right? If I do before and after, just look at the color
separation that we created. And once again, just look at it. Like the complimentary
colors that we're adding into our image, just using our log wheels. Now I'm going to go under
my shadows in my log wheels and see what we can do there. So now my focus is on the water. I want to separate that, right? But I don't want it to
just look fake, like teal. But I do want to separate it. So I'm going to do... Like I'm really focusing
right here right now, right? It kind of looks like an old
school postcard right now. The colors that we got
going on, it looks so nice. And then I'm going to take... I'm going to keep finessing it, right? So like I'm going to take
some of that teal out. I really want to give some
personality to this water. I want to dial back on my
teal that I added here. So something like that. And if I do before and after now, I mean, guys, come on. So look at the separation
that we're making. Just here, just here. Again, this is shot on Panasonic GH5S. Look at the water, like all these tones. Just look at the tones
that we got going on. So if I just take these two
and turn them on and off. Where we were to where we are now, just by using our log wheels, okay? It's clean. We're not pulling keys. It's not going to break
if we go to our next shot. It's a very, very clean operation. That's why I'm a huge fan of really maximizing your primaries because you end up with the
most even, clean results. I'm going to go in here and
I'm going to call it, HSL. Here what we're going to do is we're going to go under our curves, okay? And we're going to go in here and what do we want to do here right now? What I want to do is I want to go under my hue versus luminance. I want to bring this down. And once I bring this down, I'll be able to punch
in more color in there and have an illusion of like a way more saturated sunset, if you will. So, one trick that I use is like, you can see it in here, the representation to what's happening with your colors, okay? So this is where all my teal
tones are right in the image. And then this is where all of my reds are. Right now, I'm focusing on this area and it's hue versus luminance. Meaning if I take it up,
I brighten the image. If I bring it down, I
you know, make it darker. So I'm not going to do too much since we do know that this is shot on Panasonic GH5S, so we don't
have too much room to play with. So I'm going to park it
somewhere around here and you see like where it tapers off. That's what I'm looking for. And I'm going to click right here. And then I'm just going
to double click right here to go back to basically zero or one which is no change. So now what we ended up doing is like we're only affecting this area right here. And again, I don't want to do it too much. I just want to do it this much. And just once again, look
at the effect it's having. So if you look at the saturation right here on vector scope, no difference. But if you look at the image, just by bringing the intensity down it just gives us the illusion
that there is more there, which AKA creates more
color separation, right? And another thing that I want to do is we can go in here under hue
versus saturation, right? And we can just crank this up
and see what it does, right? Like not too much. We don't want to make it look fake, but even if we do something like that. Once again, we're going
to do the same thing. So we're going to click right here, double tap on saturation
to go back to zero. We're going to do the same thing here. Double tap to go back to zero. And you know, we can
easily move this around and see what it's really doing. So if I park it somewhere around here, now look at the difference
that we're making here. Okay, can we do the same thing here? Of course we can. So we can take this and we can crank it and see where it doesn't look
fake and it all blends in. And if I just do this and even if I'm pretty loose with it and I don't really cut anything out, although we can because practically there's no other colors in here. So it doesn't even matter. But even if I do something like that, but usually if I don't
need to mess with it and have a really broad curve, I would rather do that because it'll always give you the cleanest results. So if we look at our image now, just look at the separation
we're creating, okay. And then the last step is going to be Resolve's brand new color warper. And all I want to do here is I can already see the color separation in this spider web, if you will. So I'm going to click right here and I'm going to start swinging my hue to see what it's really doing. And you know, I like it
a little bit around here. It is a bit more believable. And then let's add a bit more saturation. Let's go too far and then pull it back. So if I do before and after. If we like what it's doing, we can leave it there. And obviously it is affecting quite a bit, like look at how much more
separation it's creating. And once again, we can
see what's happening and then just dial it back
right before it cracks. And I can keep it somewhere around here. Now we can do the same
thing in here, right? So I can click right there and
start messing with the hues on what's happening with
my warmth, right there. Take my saturation and really crank it and then just keep playing
with it until I feel like, okay, this looks really, really good. And if I look at this, to be honest, it's looking way better. Now, this thing that you see right here, that's happening to the
image, like this, right there, has nothing to do with
the changes we're making. This is just a Resolve 17 glitch. With the feature updates,
you won't see that. But this right here is just
a Resolve 17 glitch, okay. I've tried it with a bunch
of different techniques and it just keeps doing that. So all I can tell you is if you use this technique
properly with the color warper, you will create more separation. But obviously with what
it's doing to our image, I'm not going to be using it here. And it's not because of the tool, it's just a Resolve bug. Simple as that. So I'm going to leave that off, but this is what we ended up with. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take all of my nodes, turn them off, and start from what we had and what we created. So first step drop the CSD and did a proper Rec 709 conversion, and then opened up my
image using custom curves. And that really helped soften everything. And then the first step
to the color separation was temp and tint. Just look at the vector scope, the changes that we're making. And then log was a major player. Log did quite a bit. But honestly each step did
because when we use this, we were like, oh my God,
this is a huge step. What else can we do? And then this, we were like, oh my God, there's nothing more that we can do. And then finally we had HSL that really created even more separation and we can see it on the vector scope. And now if somebody's
looking at this going, okay, this is way too saturated. I wouldn't leave my image like that. That's totally up to you. That's totally fine. You can bring that down, you know if you want to, but the purpose of this
tutorial was to show you how much color separation we can create with something that looks like this. Where it just feels like
there's nothing there. And then look at what we ended up with. And then if there's one
last thing that I would do because if I punch in right here, there's barely any information left here. So in that case, you can just take your
low soft and just crank it until you start seeing some information. So even something like this. If I pull out and if
I do before and after, it's making a pretty big difference. So this is where I'm going to leave it. Let's check out the final
look in full screen. (relaxing music) Hopefully this gives you a
clear and concise game plan when it comes to creating
color separation without using qualifiers and tons of
windows and things like that, which is just impractical,
especially in the real world. So guys, if you're enjoying the content, you know what to do. Smash that like button, subscribe to my channel
for more awesomeness. Do not forget to watch the free training. It literally will just take
you to the next, next level. Link is down below. I will see you guys in the next video. (upbeat music)
