Welcome back, guys. Let's take a look at how to create this sharp, creamy, commercial look. The look basically is made up of really rich, dense colors and a nice softness in the blacks, as well as this really nice sharpness. And I'm going to show you how to achieve all of this. These are some techniques that you can use together to create this look, but also that you can take with you when you're creating other looks. This is just one way to approach this look. There are many other ways that you could create it. So let's go ahead and jump right in. So this is the clip that we're going to be using. First up, let's go over project settings. I am working in a resolve color managed workflow. If you want to set that up, go ahead and set your color science to DaVinci Yog color managed uncheck color management. Set your color processing mode to HDR DaVinci wide gamut intermediate and your output color space to whatever is appropriate for your setup. I'm on a Mac, so I'm using Rec 709 a. All right, let's build our node tree. First up, let's put a noise reduction node. We might not add noise reduction in this tutorial, but I just want to place it here to let you know a good placement for your noise reduction node. After that, we're going to build a node for our blacks. After that, we'll put a node for our primaries. Let's add another node and this will be our power windows, actually, let's add another node and let's bring these two together into a compound node. After that, let's add a node for our look. And we'll do the same thing. We'll create compound node. This is just to keep things a little bit more organized. After that, let's add another node for our lut. And then let's add another node and we'll rename this one glow. We'll add another node. We'll call this one lift and then one more node and we'll call it sharpen. And then the last thing is we're going to add a matte node. Right click on the blacks node, go to add matte, and then choose the name of your clip. And then we'll just put this up here on the top left. We're going to be using this matte node for different things. And you're going to learn some cool ways to use this matte node for the glow effect and for sharpening. We're going to leave the sharpening at the very end. And with this sharpening technique, you no longer have to worry about that blotchy sharpness that you get with the DaVinci resolve blur panel, I'm going to show you how to create a really beautiful, natural looking sharpening effect. Alright, so let's get started. Let's go over here to our black snow that we're going to go over to our mid tone detail in the primaries. We're going to take it down all the way. As you're building your look, you can decrease this a little bit if you like, if you feel that the effect is too strong. Basically, what this effect is doing is going to soften everything in the black. It's going to sort of remove the detail from them and create a nice smooth blend into the lower midtones and the midtones. And that's going to help to build that soft, glowy effect. After that, we're going to go to our primaries and let's go ahead and balance this shot. I'm going to go over to my HDR panels, going to use the skin tones as a guide for letting me know where my exposure is. I can see that my skin tones are around 45 ire and I'm going to bump them up to around 55, 60 ire. So I'm going to add one stop of exposure. It'll be 0.6 and that's good there. Now I'm going to come over here and cool down my image all the way. And then I'm going to grab my tint slider and just balance that until the skin tones look good and until there's good color separation. And here's a little trick for when you're doing white balance, you might be having a little bit of trouble seeing the color separation, seeing if the shot is balanced or not. And the trick is to boost up your saturation. You can remove the saturation after you've done the white balance. This is just so that you can really see the colors and it'll help your eye to better gauge color separation and any color deviations. So I'm going to go back to my tint node and marking this right here. I think this looks actually pretty balanced, my skin tones. If we look over at the vectorscope, we can see that little indicator dancing around and it's pretty much on the skin tone indicator line, maybe a little bit to the left, which means we'll add a little bit of magenta just to bring it back. Then our guy over here is a little too red. So I'll bring it back towards green a little bit and that's good there. I'll turn off the saturation and that's because we're going to add saturation in our look node. Let's go over to our power windows. So in our power windows compound node, I'll rename this subject and then let's create a power window and feather out all the way. That's good there. And then we'll track it. I like to have 3d rotate and zoom turned off. If you've ever tried tracking a power window and the power window sort of goes crazy and stretches all over the place, you can uncheck these three settings and you should find that that helps that issue. So I'll hit track and this subject node, I just like to boost up the shadows a bit to about 0.3. And then in this node here I want to affect everything else that's in the shot. And we can do that by grabbing this alpha output and bringing it over to this node and then going over to the key panel and inverting that selection. Quicker way to do this is to hit option o and that'll create an outside node. I'm going to actually come back to my subject node and then I'm going to open up my power window just a little bit in this node here. What I'm going to do is bring down the light just a little bit. We're going to turn off my highlight. Once we have built our look a little bit more, we'll come back in here and make some more adjustments. Now let's build our look. And the first thing we're going to do to do that is add our Lut. I'm going to add my k 83 d 55 Lut. You don't need this lut for this look. You have a Kodak 23 83 Lut built right into Davinci resolve. And this is how you would set that up. Let's pretend I deleted this node. So after the look compound node, you would add two nodes, come over here to your effects panel, grab a color space transform, bring it in, set your correct color space and input gamma settings. In this case here we're going to do rec 709, rec 709 and then for the output color space you're going to set it to rec 709 and Cineon film log. And then we can rename this node CST. And then this will also be lit. And then in the second node you can right click go to Lut, go to film looks. You'll already have this folder in your Davinci resolve version and then go down to rec 709 codec 23 83 D 55. And it's basically giving you the same look. I like Mylut. I think that Mylut reproduces colors a little better. So we're going to use my luck. So I'll delete this, I'll enable this node. And now let's go into our look compound node with resolve 19. I believe Dmitry resolve has updated compound nodes. And now you don't have to hold down command and then double click to enter a node. You can just double click on a compound node and you'll enter it automatically. So let's rename this HSL. And this is basically my secondary node. I just prefer to call it Hsl. So I'll just call it HSL. And then in this node we're going to call it HSV saturation. And then in this node we're going to call it HSL saturation. We're going to leave this for now. Let's go over to our HSv saturation. Right click, go to color space HSv. Right click again. Go to the channels. And let's turn off channel one and channel three. Good. Now we have this node set up. Let's go over to the HSL saturation node. Right click, go to color space HSL. Right click again. And let's turn off channels two and channels three. We're going to be able to add some very beautiful, dense, color rich saturation with this setup. So let's go over to our gamma wheel and let's bump this up to around 0.5. Actually might bump it up a little bit more. Let's say 0.08. Perfect. And then I'm going to come over to the HSL saturation. And then I'm going to come over here to my lift and I'm going to set it to negative 0.01. And what this is going to do is it's going to clean up the neutrals. And what that means is it's going to take all the hues in the shot that are the least saturated and it's going to remove the saturation. Basically, if I turn this on and off, you can see that that sort of takes away some of the saturation that we've added in the HSV node. But that's not a problem because we're going to come back into the gain wheel here inside of the HSV node and bump this up to recover that the difference between adjusting the saturation this way with the gain wheel or the gamma wheel the gain wheel is taking the outer edges of the saturation and pulling them out. And then the gamma wheel is working more in the center of it and pushing things outwards. It also affects the top end, but it first targets the colors that are closer to the center. And a good balance of these two, depending on the look that you're going for, can help to create that really rich saturation effect. This HSl node is where, if you would like to adjust the hues of your shot as a way to build the look, this is where you can do it. I'm not going to do it for this footage. I like the natural colors that are in this shot. We already have a color aesthetic and a contrast curve being applied with our lut here. And so this HSl note would just be if you wanted to fine tune those hues. And since this is a commercial look, if you're doing this for a client, this would be where you would want to target any hues. Let's say the client has a specific brand color that they like to use in their videos. This is where you can bring in that color. Let's say they had a specific blue. You could come in here and target these blues and switch it over to match that color of that brand. So let's go ahead and exit our look node. And now we're going to add some glow. Come over here to effects panel, grab the glow effect and bring it in. And before we continue, let's grab our matte node, let's grab the alpha output and link it to our glow node. And now over here in the glow effect, we have these two boxes here. Alpha masks light sources and alpha limits effect. What alpha masks light sources does is if there's some sort of key going on inside of the glow node. So, for example, if you made a selection using the qualifier, in this case, we're using this matte node, which creates this key here. Everything that is white will be affected. Everything that is black will not be affected. If we turn this off and bring the shine threshold all the way up, this glow effect is shining off of everything. If we turn this on, we can see how the glow disappears from the low end, right? And now it's just really prominent up here in the high end. And that's because with this key here, we're only affecting the highlights. And that's exactly what we want. We only want to add this glow to just the highlights. We also have alpha limits effect, and that's going to further limit where the glow is shining. So we're going to check that. We really only want to limit this glow to the shiny areas in the shot. So the only settings you need to worry about here in the glow node is to bring the shine threshold all the way down. And then I like to turn off the saturation just because I like to have full control of my colors and their own separate nodes. And so I always turn off the saturation here in the, in the glow effect. Now we're going to leave the composite type to add and then with the opacity for now, we're going to set it at. .2 okay. If I enable disable the node, you can see we're still getting a small glow effect. We're still going to affect this look a little bit. So let's leave it here for now and let's go ahead and adjust our look a little bit more. So right now our look is looking not so bad, actually. It's just got a lot of contrast. Right. And we're not clipping. Right. We're not losing any data. Everything is looking healthy. But there are some things that we need to address. Number one is this hot spot over here, which really takes the eye away from our subjects. And number two, the contrast. Right. I want to lift up this image a little bit more, and I want to open it up and help to reveal more details in the shot. So first up, let's take care of this hotspot here. And we're going to do that by going into our power windows. We're going to add a node here, and then we're just going to quickly add a custom power window. Doesn't need to be perfect. And then we'll track it. And now with that power window there, we'll go to our HDr wheels. We'll go over to the light wheel and decrease that by minus one. And here it is before and here it is after. Another thing we'll do is to feather out our selections to maybe like point 30. And that's looking much, much better. And so let's tackle this contrast in a very creative way. And I want to show you this technique as a way to show you one way to draw the eye into a subject that you want. And then we'll call this node background. And so in this background node, I'm going to decrease the contrast as a way to lift everything up. Right. We could go into our look node here, maybe add a contrast node and then open up the entire image. And you could do that. I'm going to show you this other technique. But if you don't want to use that technique. You can use this technique. I'll just leave this off for now. I'll go back to my power windows and in my background node, I'm going to decrease the contrast. And I have this reference level down here set to four ire. And that's just giving me a good reference point for a nice black point that's dark but not too dark. And I'm going to decrease the contrast of my background to around that point. Now I'm going to come in here to my subject node, and I'm going to decrease the contrast. But I want to leave the contrast a little bit more pushed. And actually, I'll turn off the power window so we can see. Right, if I move this around a lot, we can see how we're just affecting the contrast in that area. And boom, there you go. The human eye naturally falls on a contrast point. And so because we've hidden slightly bit more contrast here, it's going to help for the eye to land naturally on our subjects here. So now that we've done that, let's go ahead and adjust our glow. I'm going to bump this up a little bit, maybe to around 0.3. I might then just bring this down to around 0.28. And this lift node here, we're going to add to the creaminess, the softness of this look by going over to our curves panel. We're going to come down here to the soft clip, and under low soft, we're going to bump that up all the way. Okay. And that's very simple way to add that hazy look in the shadows. If you wanted to create a version of this that you can customize even more, then you can come up here in your image and set a point for, let's say, the skin tones and also something that's somewhere towards more of the lower end, let's say around here. And then making sure you only have the luma curve selected. Grab this low end here and bring it up, and that'll create a very similar effect. And then if you wanted to adjust the range that you're affecting, you can hold down option. You can grab this anchor and then just slide it down and up until you're only affecting the area that you want. Holding down the option key will lock this anchor onto the curve. Good. One more thing that I want to do before we go over the sharpening effect is I want to recover these highlights. So I want to create a power window. I'll just put them here, this out all the way and we'll track it. I'm going to come in here into my HDR wheels. I want to check which wheel has them. I want to see if I can adjust the specular wheel to affect just those sprite spots. So I'm going to bring down this limiter, and let's get there. Then I'll boost this by around two stops. And that's good there. We can see that now. These lights are up here and they're not clipping. And that's just going to help to add a little bit more shine in our image. We can see that this is affecting our subjects a little bit. So one way to quickly handle that is to come over here to our saturation in the qualifier and just bring this down, say, to one, and then bring up the luminance. So we're only affecting that. Let's add some softness to this. Maybe three. We'll also add some softness here. Nope, maybe not. Just a little bit. And we'll add some denoise. And that's good there. I can see I'm affecting the shirt here. That's fine. I'm not going to worry too much about it just to give those lights a little bit more life. Okay, let's go into this sharpening technique. So first thing, we're gonna grab this matte node again and add a key. The point of this look is to have a very soft look and created that with different elements. And we don't want to affect that, but we want to add back in some of that sharpness that we like in commercial looks. And so one of the ways to do that is to make sure with that, we're only adding sharpness in the highlights, in the areas where there's actual detail that we want to bring out. And by limiting the sharpness to only these areas, we're going to be able to create that effect very beautifully. Let's go over to the blur panel, and in the blur panel, let's go over to the sharpen section. And before we do anything, let's go over here to our level and set it to 50. And then let's set our coring softness to 50 as well. This level control basically acts as limiter. And when it's set to zero, you're basically adding sharpness to the entire shot. And the more you increase it, it starts to ignore areas where there's less contrast, say areas like this, where it's just like solid colors. And as you increase it, it goes and affects only the areas where there's more contrast. And then the core softness basically just blends that selection. And now we're going to go over here to our radius, and you can see that we can really bring this down and it won't affect the image too much. Whereas before, I'm going to turn off this node, when you add sharpness this way, you get that really blotchy, weird digital looking sharpness. If you just add a little bit too much. Right. Even if you go to 0.45, I'll punch in here to our subjects. It gets very blotchy very quickly. But with this effect and with this setup, we can really push it a little bit more. And look at that. The sharpness looks much, much more natural, and we'll just park it somewhere around 0.36. And look at that. It's looking much sharper, and there's no digital artifacts. And there you go. That's one way to approach this look. If you have any questions on this look or on any of the techniques that we went over when creating this look, let me know in the comments. As always, thank you for watching.
