DaVinci Resolve 15 - The Art of Color Grading

hi my name is Daria and I'm a colorist compositor and a DaVinci Resolve master trainer today I'll be taking you through the workflows and operations of the color page in DaVinci Resolve now at first glance the color page might look quite busy but it's much easier to approach when you think of it as a collection of panels each with its own dedicated function so let's take a look at this layout in the top left corner we have the gallery this is where you're going to be storing all of your stills stills are high-quality grabs a frame from any one of your clips but they're also capable of containing all of the grading data from those clips so they're gonna be quite important for sharing grades and also for copying across your timeline in the top center you have the viewer this represents the location of your playhead at any time and it also gives you the final look of any clip so this is essentially what's going to be rendered out in the deliver page the viewer has a lot of usability we will be referring to the controls in the bottom left hand corner so the with these you can activate the on-screen controls and they will usually also automatically light up depending on which panel you have active in the top right corner you have the node editor so this is arguably the strong the bit in the page where you have the most control you're able to break up your workflow into separate little nodes each with its own dedicated approach to the RGB signal underneath the viewer you have two different representations of the timeline you have the thumbnails timeline in which you can see a grab of all of your clips and it's completely independent of the duration of these clips so this is just to give you a visual overview of what everything looks like underneath that you have the timeline ruler which is more representative of the timeline that you have on the Edit Page so here you can check out the durations of the clips in relation to each other also see things like transitions you can see multiple video tracks if you're performing visual effects compositing that's going to be quite vital so you'll refer to that when you need to at the bottom of the page you have a collection of pallets so these are divided into three columns you've got the left pallets the central pallets and then on the right hand side you've got your key frames and your scopes which you'll be referring to quite a lot there's also a lot of other functionality in the page that's not immediately visible so for example it's at the top you've got the interface toolbar and here you have buttons with which you can either reveal or hide panels based on what it is that you're trying to do so if for example I wanted to start applying nuts or lookup tables to my media to you know remap it to a certain color standard I would open them up at the top here then refer to the media pull if I need to and go back to the gallery if I had to another reason to take advantage of these buttons is that the way that the interface behaves is dynamically which means that whatever space you afford any of the panels they will take advantage of it so sometimes I really want to see my viewer more prominently than it is right now usually the first thing I'll do is collapse my timeline ruler at the top and as you just saw the viewer popped up dynamically so that's really great and I can keep going with this I can also collapse my Clips timeline and either collapse the gallery or even just grab the edge and extend it so there is a certain level of customization on this page I'll bring my clips back so I can keep working on them something else that a lot of the panels have are options menus so these are represented by this button or the three dots and when you select these these usually give you access to additional controls or tools that are embedded in all of these panels so you can see the viewers got one and the node editor etc something else that some of the panels have is pop down menus that give you access to additional modes of any given pallet so that's quite interesting because that means that we have the curves pallet but inside of that we actually have five additional eight CEL curves so I can access these by using the drop down menu here or what I prefer to do is actually use the pallet controls at the very top so these are represented these dots and as long as you know where something is located you can jump to it pretty quickly you can also find it on the color wheels so this is usually how I switch between my primaries wheels my bars and my log controls finally you've also got the contextual menu this pops up anytime you right-click within the color page but what's unique about it is that it's never the same in two locations so it is unique to whatever element you're clicking on whether it's a clip or whether it's a pallet so it will never give you controls that you can't actively take advantage of alright so let's start looking at our media and performing some grading first thing I'd like to do is address some of our primary grading tools so primary grading is any grading you perform that affects the entire frame of the image this can be done at the earliest stages of grading so whether you're doing color correction or you're doing normalization and balancing so with all of those it implies that you are collab calibrating the entire frame but this is also done at the latter stages of the process when you're creating looks and you're performing creative grading so that's also primary and we perform all of these changes usually using the color wheels or the curves palettes those are main approaches so we'll use both today and they will oftentimes achieve similar things just with in different ways I'm going to make sure my first clip on the timeline is selected so that I can see it in the viewer and I'm going to make sure that looping is enabled underneath my viewer so that when I play it back I just keep watching it on loop I'm going to press spacebar and something that is probably very evident about this clip right away is that it's really flat so there's no in it and the tonal range is just not very dynamics or not seeing much contrast I don't have a very clear idea of what the black point and the white point are so our job right now with normalization is to try to extend that luminance range so that we can get a greater breadth of shadows and highlights to do that I am going to need to refer to my scopes so like I said earlier they're hiding in the same panel as my keyframes I'm going to zoom in here and click on the scopes button next to it now by default you're gonna see the parades which are absolutely fantastic for balancing because you can see the relationship between the red green and blue channels but in this case if we're just adjusting luminance then I would prefer to use the drop-down menu to open up the waveform and by default it's overlaying the red green and blue channels which is also useful useful for balancing because you can then see where they line up and where something might be too high or too low but if I want to just see the luminance I can access the settings of my waveform scopes and I get this little pop-up interface I think it's quite handy because it allows you to switch from RGB to Y RGB at the top so now we've got just a luminance waveform but then we've also got additional controls at the bottom you've got brightness controls on the trace inside the graph so I can click and drag the scroller and this can be extremely useful because sometimes the elements that you need to see might be quite faint on the trace they might be very small or they might just be specular points so highlights in the image and by brightening it up you make them pop a little bit more to get rid of this settings window all I have to do is just click outside of it and it pops back into the pallet and now I can start making adjustments to my clip like I said the first adjustments will be made using the color wheels palette so let's check it out let's identify what everything is doing over here as you can see we've got four wheels we've got the lift gamma and gain which are responsible for the shadows mid-tones and highlights respectively and then on the far right we've got the offset wheel which is just a combination of all three so it will perform a uniform change to the entire image on the wheels themselves you're able to change the colors of the image so I'm just gonna go grab the pointer in the middle of the offset wheel and just drag it towards one of the colors just to test it out and you can see the entire image just went magenta we can travel around so you could see I'm increasing saturation the further I push it if I want to reset the color wheel I will double click inside of it and the pointer will just pop down to the center now another way to control these tonal ranges is to go after the master wheels underneath the color wheels so these are the dark horizontal sliders and they are also responsible for all of these respective tonal ranges but this time only affecting the luminance of the image so on the left hand side for example I have the master wheel for lift which means that I can either make my shadows darker or I can make those shadows shadows lighter so faster grab it right now and drag it to the left you can see it's darkening and it is impacting the rest of the image as well so it's not a very strict tonal range it does spill off and affect the mid-tones a fair amount and even the highlights a little bit and that just makes for a very organic application of the luminance change if I want to reset the master wheels and the color wheels together I can use the bigger reset button next to the tonal range name and then there is also a universal reset button in the top right corner of the color wheels palettes so you're going to see these and if you have the other palettes if you ever want to make a more blanket reset so how will I make this adjustment based on the Scopes information that I have you can probably tell that the trace is quite crunched up it's quite compressed in the bottom half of the Scopes graph that I have and that's usually indicate of a very flat image so not much variety also because it's in the lower half it tells me that it's a dark image so what I'm going to do is try to spread that out a bit and also to raise the brightness I will begin with the lift and the shadows and they're already in a fairly good place but I tend to bring them down a bit lower so I try to pop it down between the Black Point and the first horizontal line above it remember the idea here is not to set up nice contrast it's not to make a look it's just to normalize this trace so that later on when we do start applying creative looks we have access you know to the full range of that RGB signal so we're just cleaning this up right now I definitely don't want to go anywhere near the zero point which is our black point because as soon as the trace starts touching that line it's gonna start clipping our data and we will essentially be looking at a pool of black in the image and that's just no good for later stages so I am going to very gently drag that master wheel to the left and that's just about where I would drop it off it's a very small adjustment I can then do the same thing for the opposite end for the gain I can click it and this time I'm not dragging left because I'm gonna be darkening it I'm dragging to the right to spread it out and normally if I am just setting up a tonal range and just normalizing I would drag it all the way to just under the second horizontal line because that way it brightens up the image but without bringing it anywhere near you know over exposing it but something that matters a lot when you're collaborating is context so you also have to keep an eye on the image and ask yourself do I have enough relevant information to perform this adjustment so if I had something like a clapper board visible in the shot to where somebody was holding up a white piece of paper then I could say objectively yes you know I've got my light source is hitting the white piece of paper ii dragged the top of that trace to that horizontal line but in our case we have some b-roll from a documentary they were not using color checkers so I kind of have to guess as to what is pure white in this image and there's not a clear reference however I do see something that can be used as a reference for luminance and that is this person's hand that you can just see through these wooden poles in the image right so knowing what I know about calibrating skin tones I know that with a fair skin tone in direct sunlight I can probably aim between 50 to 75 percent of the height of the Scopes so in this case what's happening is I'm actually really over exposing the image based on this trace which is that hand that we're seeing so and you can even see it in the the viewer as well so if you look at the full screen of the image right now and the thumb is quite hot so I'm going to grab the gain master wheel and pull it back and drop it off at around 75% of the height and now it looks much more natural and I've kept the colors and the luminance safe you'll also have noticed that the bottom of the trace is pulled up while when I rejected the gain so that's completely natural this happens grading is very much a reiterative process it means that you often have to go back to the tools that you used previously and make further adjustments because the tools offset each other a little bit and that's fine so I can go back to the lift and just drop it down a little bit more and then maybe the last thing I want to do with this image because it is particularly dark is just brighten up the gamma range which is essentially the mid-tones right now most of the trace is falling beneath the 50% line so I'm gonna try to get it a bit closer to the 50 dotted line I'll click the gamma master wheel pull it to the right and you can see I'm brightening up the entire image alright so I'm pretty happy with this adjustment the next thing I'd like to address is the lack of saturation so it almost looks monochromatic right now to do that I will continue using the color wheels palette but this time I'm going to look at the very bottom of it at this bar called the adjustment controls so here you can make some standard adjustments to your image things like contrast saturation and hue rotation and you've also got a second page of adjustment controls which we'll be looking at later but it gives you temperature and tint adjustments which are really nice really quick ways of balancing your image so in this case I'll go back to page one to make changes by the way to any of these values you can either click and drag with your mouse so you can notice that when I hover over either the name of the adjustment or the numerical field next to it you've got these double arrows pointing in either direction which encourages you to drag so I can click on the contrast for example drag left to decrease drag right to increase to reset any of the values all you have to do is double click the field name so to reset the contrast I'm just going to double click when it jumps back to zero or it's a 1 in this case I'd like to increase the saturation and the way I'm going to do it is by clicking on the numerical field and just entering the value if I know what it is using my number pad press Enter and let's just popped up the saturation a bit I know that for something in a logjam at 75 percent is pretty decent but if I do want to saturate it further I'll probably have a dedicated saturation node for it all right so image has been shifted something that the saturation has revealed in this particular image is that it does have a really strong color cast that wasn't immediately obvious to me before so it's almost got like a reddish or pinkish tinge to it so let's address that next I am going to continue using the color wheels while the palette at least but I might not want to use the wheels themselves for this right so I find that the wheels are quite fun to work with when I'm applying a creative look to the image because it almost feels like playing around with paint you're pushing colors in one direction your dragging them away and another but when it comes to exact calibration they're a little bit trickier to work with so what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch from the primary's wheels to the primary's bars all right so these are also known as printer lights and they affect the image in exactly the same way as the wheels in fact if you look down here at the numbers under the master wheels you can see that the values that we had established on the color in the primaries wheels section of the pallet have stayed in place so this is just an alternative way of adjusting the colors but much more exact if if I want to make a change I could just grab any one of these bars and drag upwards or downwards to adjust the strength of the value want to press command Z to undo that I also like to use the scroll wheel on the mouse when I'm making adjustments with these because I find that the changes happen in much smaller increments which means it can be very very precise you can go down and you know zero point one or pointing this and where we could use the parades for this and we will later on but I want to show you a different technique which is really simple and really helpful and that's using an overlay inside the viewer itself so I'm going to right click to bring up the contextual menu and I have this option to show the picker RGB value what that means is that when I select this everywhere that I move my mouse in the viewer I will get a readout of the pixel directly underneath it and if I had reliable white and black references I could hover over them and identify if I had a color dominance and any of them like I said previously I don't have that in this image however when we refer to context we have a rhinoceros and I have every reason to believe that his skin tone would be grayscale I don't really think there would be a really strong lean towards any one color but when I hover over him with my mouse I find that there's a variation of about 15 to 20 points on the red channel that are higher than on the green and the blue so that implies to me that we definitely have too much red and based on these numbers I'm also seeing that they're in the higher range of the trace so if this was closer to you know 10 20 50 that would imply more of a shadow area so then I would go for a lower range in the primary's bars but in this case I think going after gain would make the most sense some just going after the brighter areas of the image I think the shadows shadows actually look pretty neutral from where I'm sitting so I'm just going to hover my mouse over the red bar on the gain and very gently just scroll my mouse wheel Oh actually it's doing it in reverse because I mean I'm on a Mac so I'm scrolling upwards and you can see that red tint is starting to disappear a little bit before I go too far I can go back with my mouse and I'll see that the numbers are getting much closer so now it's a variation of maybe less than 10 so I might even take it up just one more scroll just a little more flick and come back and I'm perfectly happy with this now it's just a couple of points and it'll probably be it will vary a little bit as I move around so I'm pretty happy with that I will want to compare this to my original image before I move on I think that's a really good way to ground yourself in reality because sometimes when you disable the grade and you look at the original image you realize how far you've strayed so to do this I can either click on the number of the node that I'm working on so that'll be number one and that bypasses it temporarily and I can see that's the original image and yeah definitely we've brightened it up we could see much nicer colors now and there is no color dominance something else I might prefer to do is just to use a shortcut so that would be command D on a mac or control-d on a PC and I would just have my fingers over command D pretty much all day long bypassing as I'm grading Oh Oh scrolled up too far so I'm going to shift a hit shift decide to pop back in cool so now that the image has been cleaned up it's been normalized and balanced we're ready to start applying creative looks to it knowing that we have full access to the entire RGB range so it's full extension and what I'd like to do is to create a new note for that it's but it's an adequate organizational step of course so you've got one node for balancing one node for color grading but it's actually more important than that breaking up the workflow into two steps means that I'm now taking advantage of this extended signal if I was to start applying a creative look on the same node that I balanced on it wouldn't really make sense because I would actually be grading that version of the trace the compressed one so I want to move past that I want to open up a fresh node and now work on this version of the trace to create a new node I am going to right click on node number one and in the contextual menu select add node and add serial and this will just add a standard corrector node connected to the one that you already have and allow you to apply more grading notice that the new node that I've created is pretty blank so there's nothing visible on it whereas on the left hand side on node number one I can see a little symbol so this is one way that we know that a nodes already been used for grading another way is when you hover over it you will also see a list pop-up telling you which tools specifically you've used this is super helpful because it allows you to keep track of what you used which nobody used for what and make sure you're not duplicating your processes something else that you can do for organizational reasons is to start labeling your nodes so I'm very very big on housekeeping I organize everything I make folders and bins and I label absolutely everything so I'm going to right click on node number one I'm going to select node label from the contextual menu and I'm going to enter balance because that's what I was doing on that first node and now the clean signal is being sent out to node number two and I'm going to change that to look that's where I'll be creating my creative look cool so for that what I think would be nice to do is just to push a certain color dominance into it like I said earlier for that the color wheels are absolutely fantastic they're really intuitive if you were using a panel which I'll be getting out in a second you can use the boss just rotate them and get a feel for what works well with that image of course you'll also talk to the director about the context of the scene what mood they're going for or is it there's a certain location have a certain color code but in this case I'm just gonna switch from the bars back to the wheels and a really easy way to establish dominance as you saw at the very beginning was using the offset wheel and you just push it in one direction and you've got a color however I prefer to use the gamma wheel for this because it will create a similar result just without affecting the white point and the black point of the image and those two are quite nice to keep neutral because then it keeps an element of realism to the scene even with a strong color cast so I'm going to drag this pointer in the gamma towards a cyan look just a greeny blue and I can be pretty aggressive with it because I'm just setting it up but because of how large the gamma tonal ranges it will inevitably impact the shadows and the highlights so what I also like to do is then go to either the lift or the gamma or the sorry the gain wheel and counteract the grade that I just introduced so I'm essentially sort of neutralizing one area of the tonal range and that again grounds it in makes it look a little bit more accessible right now it looks too much like a flat filter I think so I'll grab the points are on the left wheel drag it towards red and that's kind of made the shadows a lot more neutral right and it might look like this whole shot has now become like balanced again but let's press command-d and take ourselves back to reality and see what this used to look like so I'm gonna press command D and you can see that we have actually added a cyan cast to it I kept the shadows nice and realistic something else that I might want to do at this stage is to start working with the luminance because even though we've rescued our trace we haven't really made it look very dynamic or very interesting so I am going to go down here into my adjustment controls click and drag the contrast and increase it until I'm happy with it so I really like what it's doing to the detail on the Rhino it's making that skin pop and those his eyes his wrinkles but I think what's also happening is that certain parts of the image are becoming a little overexposed so sometimes you get that so you're happy with the contrast but not with how dark or light the overall images and for that you can use the pivot so you can find that next to the contrast and you can think of it as the contrast balance so it will kind of sway dominance to either you know the brighter or the darker areas while still maintaining the same level of contrast so if I'm happy with you know the wrinkles as they are I'm just gonna grab the pivot and try to remove some of that like overly exposed areas alright so now I think the rhino skin looks much much nicer than I did before it maybe lower the contrast just to bring back some of the shadows that I have down here something else I might want to do is take advantage of this tool I have called the mid-tone detail this is found on the second page of the color adjustment controls and it's labeled as MD and what MD does is it increases contrast in areas of the M that have a high amount of detail so it's really great for bringing up patterns or bringing up in this case the wrinkles on the Rhino without necessarily increasing like the overall contrast of the image I am going to use the scroll wheel on my mouse to zoom in on the viewer so I can see his skin texture a bit better and I'm also going to middle click my mouse button to drag across the viewer well I'm going to go back here into the adjustment controls click on MD and drag it upwards and you can see what that's doing to the skin is just really popping it out making it even more dynamic I'm pretty happy with that so I'm gonna press shift-z to pop out of the viewer and it's a pretty strong look I know but you know this is this was my intention so I'll stick my it's cool I think yep I'm pretty happy with this let's move on to the next clip on the timeline and try to do something similar but this time using a completely different palette so this will be our curves let's move on to this next clip too and once again I'll play it through it's really important to review the media before you start grading it because I've used this word before context sometimes things move into the shot that you don't see on the first frame and you might spend you know half an hour or even hours working on something and then play it back when you're done and realize oh my gosh you know two people just walked into the scene that I thought was just you know a landscape shot so in this case it seems to be pretty uniform it is a really dark image and it's really quite compressed on the Scopes so I'm gonna try once again to expand that tonal range this time using the curves let's take a look at the curves interface you have the primary curve control on the graph over here and it correlates exactly to the Scopes crap to the Scopes graph that you have on the right hand side so the very bottom of the curve represents the black point the top represents the white point and when you make adjustments to those you will then be extending or compressing your trace so for example if I wanted to increase my trace right now I could grab the white point and when I pull it to the left and pushing it upwards I want to drag it downwards I'm compressing it downwards same thing for the black point you can also add additional points to the curves by clicking on it so I can decide to lift the gamma range and that would be the central point and as you can see it's kind of expanding our trace and I can add additional points depending on what I'm trying to achieve I can also right-click on any of my points to delete them and finally I can use the universal reset arrow in the top right corner to just go back to the default position of the curves notice on the right hand side you have some individual curve controls for the red green and blue values which is fantastic I can click on any one of these and start adjusting just the red channel for example by dragging it upwards I'm increasing that value by dragging it downwards I am adding the opposite color so the opposite of red is cyan you can memorize these color pairs red cyan green magenta blue and yellow but if you can't remember them you can always just refer to the color wheels which just represents those relationships very clearly so there it is red and sign on the opposite side of it and color grading is performed in much the same way you introduce colors that you want to see or remove them if you don't and so is balancing so you just push back and what you don't need to see I'm going to reconnect all three of my channels and I'll use this first node for normalization and balancing I'll grab the black point and drag it downwards until the trace again falls somewhere between the black point and the first horizontal line from the bottom and then I'll also drag the white point a fair amount to the left so I feel like there's a lot of room to raise this image it's really dark and unlike the previous one I think I have a fairly reliable point I have this window that's open in the background and I have no reason to believe that it's going to have a cast on it but I'm gonna try to make it as bright as I can without over exposing it so I'm gonna drag it to about the first or sorry rather the second horizontal line from the top so it falls about yay high and I can still see a little bit of detail through the window which is quite important I think if I try to be a bit more aggressive with this and keep pushing it forward I'm gonna lose some of that detail and eventually I'm gonna start over exposing it and that's not what you want to do so I'm gonna drag it back down and I'll press command-d to compare that to the original so you can see that's got a really nice extension a bit more to work with also just like with the previous image I'm gonna raise the gamma range a little bit just to bring that trace a bit higher I'm not going to go for the mid-range necessarily because I know that this is an interior shot I don't believe there was any lighting in that room aside from what was coming in through the window so I can naturally anticipate for it to be naturally dark anyway I'm gonna click on the center of my curve and just drag it up just a little bit to reveal some more details on the face and those scales but then drop it off when I'm finished just about there now to balance the image this time I'm going to use the parades before I switch my scopes to the parades take a look at this trace and maybe try to memorize its pattern a little bit right we've got this area on the left-hand side which is representing the bright window and then the rest of it is kind of more or less flat in the bottom half when I click on the parade mode of the Scopes what you're actually seeing is the same exact trace just tripled and it's representing the luminance where the the presence of luminance in all three channels red green and blue if this image was black and white then these parades would be exactly equal to each other and if I had reliable white and black references then those areas of the traces would also line up perfectly because in something that's pure white the RGB values should be identical the same thing for black if there is naturally colorful objects in the scene so in this case for example I have this red arrow in the middle of the scales so I would anticipate that in that part of the trace the red would would be a bit more dominant and that's perfectly fine but I feel like I am seeing some unnatural dominance one that I cannot justify by red objects so if you look at the very top of the red Channel trace it is visibly higher than the green and the blue so I'm gonna need to address that using my curves and you can also see that the mid-tones there's like almost like a hump on the lower mid-tones that's higher than the green and blue as well so for this I'm going to isolate my red Channel and I'm just gonna go for the midpoint and hope that the gamma is enough to pull down the top half of this trace as well so click the point that we've already created and I'm not even looking at the viewer by the way I'm just looking at at the parades as I do this and you know what I'm pretty happy with this I've got a pretty good line up between the red and the green but now I've also revealed that the blue channel is substantially lower so I can also address that I'm going to isolate the blue channel on the curves click the pointer and then drag it upwards to try to get the height closer to where the green and the red are so it's very gentle adjustment but it's getting us there if i press command-d right now you can see that we've wiped out that red tint that we had and also the image has been substantially brightened up so yeah that would be a pleasure to work with once we create another node and we start applying a creative look once again I'm going to label this as my balance by the way we've been performing both normalization which is when you work on the tonal range and balancing which is when you work on the colors in one node but very often colorists break this up into two steps and that's perfectly fine that allows you to expand the luminance of the image as much as you need to and then use a completely separate node to then work on the colors on a much broader range of the image so that sometimes just makes it more comfortable and you might consider doing it that way in our case I'm going for the contrast next so I'm going to right click on the balance and add a new serial node which will go right after it and I will only use this for contrast this time so I'm just interested in kind of popping out the details and yeah making the shadows a bit more dramatic I'll right-click and select the contrast and type in contrast and since we're using the curves for everything on this clip we will continue to use them for the contrast I'm going to bind my RGB channels so that I'm now impacting the entire luminance range of the image and to adjust the tonal range or to create contrast I'm going to need to deepen the shadows while brightening up the highlights or the upper mid tones because that's essentially what defines contrast right I can do this using the black point and the white point but the more conventional approach when you're color grading is to add two points to the curve itself and drag them in opposite directions and this tends to produce an S shape so that's why it's called an S curve when you're applying contrast using these tools I'm just going to grab the bottom one here make sure that it's not too dark but it's just affecting just the parameter of those scales just a little bit and I'm also going to drag the white point up but remember still keeping an eye on the trace because I was really particular about not over exposing that window I still want to keep it like in a reasonable range but just a little bit and if I feel like I still want to add more contrast to bring up the details on the scales but I'm starting to see a bit of crushing on the edges let go some other information again I'm gonna switch to the adjustment controls on the color wheels and just push up my mid-tone detail just a little bit there we go and I'll press command D and you can see the full image even though the colors have remained unchanged we now have a much more dynamic looking image now if I wanted to start color grading the image still using the curves I might not want to do it on the same node first of all we've already used our curves palettes so there's already points in its and if I start playing around with that I'm kind of working on the previous version of the trace that we had and on top of that I don't really want to interfere with the contrast that I've created I'm really happy with it so I'm going to create a dedicated look node and now the question is where do I want to place it on this pipeline I'm going to discuss the importance of node structure and pipelines later on but in this case I'm motivated to put the look before my contrast because I find that I'm always happy to see like what it does to the shadows at the very end whereas if I put it if I put the contrast in too early then it tends to be a little bit more destructive to the final look so I might end up kind of creating flat pools of luminance in certain parts of the image so to add a node before one that I have selected I will go into my contextual menu and this time I'm going to select add serial before so it's the same corrector node but it will appear before it even though it will be numbered sequentially and what I'm gonna call this node will be a cross process which is a very specific type of look it refers to a type of film development method and it produces a very retro type of look because it forces you to bring in opposing colors into opposite tonal ranges of the image so I could show you what this looks like it's really interesting the only thing you really have to do is isolate one of your color channels on the curves and again either create an s-curve or reverse s so with the red Channel I could for example increase cyan in the shadows and then push read into the highlights and you see it's got immediately got a very distinct look if you are trying to use this in creative projects you might want to be really subtle with it because I think it does pack a punch even when you're using it very minutely but of course if you it looks so much more dramatic for demonstration purposes if you push them in very far areas so I'm gonna switch to the blue channel and I'll do a reverse s-curve for this so I want to push blew into my shadows push yellow into the highlights and the upper mid tones and then counteract some of that if I feel that the shadows were too strong cool and yeah I'm pretty happy with that so I can look at my full image so it's command F on your keyboard by the way if you want to expand that to your full monitor and you can still use the same shortcuts for bypassing your note so I can press command D and I can just bypass the look you know and I can assess you know do you know compared to the original data you know do I like this look and I think yeah this kind of works is cool I can also use another shortcut which is shift D and that will bypass the entire node pipeline which includes that balancing that we did and the contrast and the look and that just brings us back to the original media that we were working on so sometimes that's also helpful for review purposes I'm then gonna press command F to exit full screen mode and keep working on this so we've created a couple of looks now let's save these just so we can keep track of them and also so we can reuse them at a later time if we need to I'm going to save this first one by right clicking in the viewer and I'm going to select grab still at the very top right as soon as I did that the still has appeared in my gallery so it's got a thumbnail that represents the exact frame that I was on when I grabbed it underneath that the conventional naming method is that the first number represents the video track that the clip is on the second number represents the order of the clip in the Edit and then the third one is the version of the still that you've grabbed so in this case we're on video track one this is the second clip on the timeline as we saw and this is the first time that I'm grabbed is still from it so that means that you can then you know start designing new looks and start grabbing new stills and they will be named accordingly one two two one two three you can also double click just underneath those numbers to enter a custom name which I think makes a lot of sense because not only can you be more descriptive but you can also remind yourself of what the purpose of the still is not all of them are for retaining your looks right some of them will be there for matching and grading purposes which is what we'll look at later on but I'm gonna give it a name I created a very distinct cross process look so that's how I'm gonna save it and I'm also going to navigate back to the first clip that I have with the right now and do the same thing I'm going to right click grab still that one's called 1 1 1 of course and if the if yeah double-clicking underneath those numbers doesn't work for you you can always just right-click on the still itself and change the label and that will give give you the same controls and this time we went for like a blue look on this image so that's what I'm gonna call it and you know what since we're here in the gallery and I am very particular about housekeeping as I've said we're also going to organize these stills so right now they're just sort of floating you know out there in the gallery I would rather create a dedicated album that we can just file them away into to access our list of albums I'm going to click on the side bar icon in the top left corner of the gallery and by default these are the albums you're going to see stills one is where everything ends up power grade one which is essentially an album that shares your grades with other projects on your workstation which is really cool and then timelines which gives you access to all the timelines that you have in any given project that you're working on so in this case I'm going to right click in that sidebar add a new stills album and I can just double click to name it something else this will be where I keep all of my looks so that's what I'll call it then I can go back to stills 1 which is where these ended up and I'm going to just press shift to select both of these and then drag and drop them into that looks album all right cool the next thing I'd like to start taking a look at is matching clips to each other so this is another very vital process in color grading in primary grading just now we've been working on these clips individually making sure that you know they're normalized that the colors are all accurate and balanced but equally important is matching clips to each other so referring to other media on the same timeline and asking yourself does it all flow the idea of course is that you want everything in your project to look like it was happening in real time so if the colors start shifting a little bit then it's gonna be obvious that this was shot over the course of a day or several days in this case for example we have these three clips captured for a documentary on aviation and I'm going to disable looping in my viewer and then just press play to watch all three of them backwards so notice how none of them really match right the first one starts off it's quite warm and quite dark compared to the one that follows it which is really bright and pretty neutral as well followed by another one that's way too dark and a bit colder so they're all in completely opposite directions and this happens a lot with documentary recording so usually the DPS don't have as much control of the environment they can't really set up the light sources as often if they're shooting outdoors oftentimes they're jumping from you know indoor recording to outdoor wedding videographers experience this a lot so it's important to be able to match everything make sure it flows well I think this central clip is a really good neutral clip so I'll use this as my basis and for the first set of exercises I'm going to use the auto match tool on the color page so I'm going to select the clip that I want to change and I'm going to right click the clip that I want to match it to and that will be clip number five and I will from the contextual menu select shot match to this clip and did you see that so it's a pretty strong change in color once again I can press command-d it see that's the original and that's how much the colors have shifted if you look at any shared elements that they have in terms of like content so they're both on the tarmac these are both planes they've got fuselages you can see that both of those elements match up so much more closely now it's just great I can also do the same thing with the next clip so once again select the clip that you want to impact but then right-click the clip that you want to borrow the grade from this is a shot match to this clip and once again another successful adjustment it's brightened up the image and we no longer have as much of a cold cast so now I can switch between these and I can also play through and now is b-roll it just feels much more natural it flows through all right however this has been particularly successful because of the many shared elements that these clips have and you know essentially the reliable white points of black points that they have oftentimes when you're working with media you're not gonna have these types of reliable points which makes it more difficult to use auto matching which is sort of a mechanical process so it's super important to also be able to match things manually using the Scopes the grading tools and our eyes so we're gonna do this or these two clips on the timeline so these are also from a documentary and I could see captured at different times of the day the first clip is very cold the next clip is a bit more neutral much warmer as well so it doesn't really matter which one I match to which it kind of depends on when where my final grade is going in this case I want to match clip number eight to this one to the one directly after it first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to grab a still of clip number nine as a reference so if I grab it right now it's going to end up in my looks album and I don't want that so I'll click on stills one and then I'm going to right-click on the viewer and go and select grab still again and this time I'm going to double click and type in the word reference and that way you know if I'm starting to clear out my gallery at a later stage I'm not gonna be paranoid about you know am i deleting an important grade that I created earlier that I need to hang on to no it's just a reference I can get rid of it cool I can now go back to clip number eight and if I was to double click that reference still right now it will appear in the viewer side by side so it's actually being wiped right now and then a couple of things have changed in the viewer itself so in the top left corner I can see that image wipe has been activated this is also where you will be deactivating it as well so if I just click the icon it goes away on top of that you have full control over the wipe line in the center so if you find that there's something you need to see that you can't you can always just reveal it that way make room for yourself and then finally you also have access to different white nodes so depending on the content of your video you might find that a vertical wipe is preferable to a horizontal because it might reveal you know certain shared elements and that's perfectly fine I'm gonna go back to a horizontal one and what I also really like about the behavior of the wipe tool is that the Scopes also get wiped so I can actually see a live readout of how the channels are different from each other and that's going to be that's gonna make it so easy for me to match them to one another because matching unlike balancing is not about getting all three parades to look the same in greyscale areas it's actually about getting the relationship between the channels to be the same so if on one image the red channel is far more dominant than the blue then if I'm performing matching I have to kind of replicate that mismatch between the channel the parades so in this case if I was to zoom in right now you can see there's a few different cut-offs the red for example is a little bit too low along the pipeline you can see that the parade on the left-hand side is just all dipped a little bit and then even more so on the blue you can see there's a really big spike at the top here so that means that the image in the mid-tones and the upper mid-tones is has got a lot more blue in it and when I look back at the image that makes perfect sense right this is a much much cooler image than the one on the right so for this I am going to use the curves I'm going to select this first node and I'm just going to preemptively label it so I know what it's doing I'm going to right click node label and call it match and then without even going after the luminance curve I'm just going to directly activate R and I'm going to click on the white point of that curve and drag it upwards and you can see if i zoom into the parades right now that I'm just very gently raising that left parade to match the height of the one on the right and it's a very small adjustment I don't have to be too extreme then I can do the same exact thing for the blue channel so click on the B to isolate the blue and I'm just gonna lower that white point until the height matches notice how I'm not looking at the viewer right now it really doesn't matter if I'm relying on the Scopes then if I do everything right then the viewer should just catch up and show the right thing when I'm done what else if I'm looking at the shadows which I also have to match I'll zoom out and take a look at what's happening so yes definitely looking a lot better so that dry grass is starting to match up when I see those dips in the traces those are the darkest parts of the image and on the left-hand side that will refer to the man's hair and to the wrinkles in his clothes and also the dog's face on the right hand side that will most likely refer to the horse's mane so I think that it's reasonable to get those elements to match in terms of contrast in terms of and I can see that the blue I think is substantially higher than it needs to be so I'll also go for the blue black point and drag that down just a little bit it's a very small adjustment and then drag the blue back up again so we iterate it if I have to and then finally it feels like there is just a little bit of like a green dominance in the image so I'm also going to isolate the green Channel and drag that down ever so slightly to counteract that and there we go I think safe to say that's a pretty good starting point considering room we spent about a minute on it I can increase my white mode so that it fills up pretty much the entire viewer and also press command W to switch between them like that and I can also actually lower that green just a touch I can also just deactivate my white mode and use the up and down arrow keys on my keyboard to jump between the clips on the timeline as well so these are now matched up the great thing about matching your media is that when you then start to perform creative grading you can copy those grades across across clips and they will continue to look consistent alright and that's really the most important reason for matching if you had a certain look that you had designed and you then copied it across to a whole bunch of media that wasn't matched their differences would just be further accentuated they definitely would not you know continue to look the same with the same great applied so let's test this out I'm going to create a new serial node this time I'm going to use a shortcut so I'm going to press alt s and I'm going to right click select node label call this contrast also and for that I am just gonna use the color wheels adjustment controls so that would be increasing the contrast and then also use the pivot to maybe brighten up the overall image all right so it's a pretty yeah it's pretty nice look come on D to show it before the contrast and then shift D to look at it before the grade and the contrast I can now just use standard copy and paste shortcuts to copy that contrast onto clip number nine so I can press command C command V however you also have access to these types of controls in the Edit menu on the interface so edit and then you have copy and paste as well so I can click on clip number nine and just for the sake of consistency I'm going to create a new note even though I haven't applied a grade to node number one so that will be all test to create a new serial and alt sorry command V to paste it and that's our contrast and now when I click back and forth their relationship has been maintained because of that match node so that's why it so that's really important it's really fun to work with alright so now that we've looked at the grading tools and we've looked at a few different techniques I'd like to come back and talk a little bit more about organization and this time I want to talk about applying flags to clips to identify certain features that you want to keep track of so flags work fantastically with this filter option at the top of the color page called clips well it's located in the clips button and when you click on the drop-down arrow next to it you reveal all the different filter options that you have access to and these are pretty straightforward I really like this one called graded clips so if I was to select that right now I can review what I've graded but then I can also look at the inverse of that ungraded clips which then reminds you of oh by the way you may have accidentally you know skip these when you were grading and that will you know be important to check out before you render out your video so that's one thing but I'm also really I'm prone to using this with flags because if I'm working with a lot of media I might start to identify certain needs that certain clips have that I would rather approach like in one fell swoop you know as a batch as opposed to jumping up and down the timeline trying to find certain clips so I'll give you a few examples I would like to continue working on Clips two and three today to perform some secondary braiding so I'm going to mark them with a yellow flag I can right-click on any one of these and select Flags and yellow and it just brings it up in the top left corner another way to apply Flags is to use the shortcut G however the color of the flag that appears will reflect the color that the flags are set to on your edit page so if you want to change that behavior just change it over here but another thing I could do if I've already applied a flag and I want to change the color is just a double click it and that will bring up its own little Flags interface here I can change the color to yellow and I can even add a note a note which is super useful so in this case I know that I want what I want to do in this clip is to change that water blue and I'll click done and notice that a black dot has appeared in the center of the flag and that's an indication that there is some sort of note associated with it so that's pretty good I would like to also apply a couple more flags so Clips seven and ten I'm going to be using later on for demonstrating open effects so I'm going to press seven I'm going to hold command and press clip ten as well so you can apply Flags to multiple Clips as well it's not just one by one I'm going to right click select Flags and this time I do want a blue flag and now it's appeared on both of those clips cool so yeah let's start looking at some secondary grading I'm going to filter my timeline based on these flags so I'll go over here flagged Clips select yellow and immediately all other Clips have disappeared just those two yellow ones have come back I'm also going to filter it by blue flags so that's just going to append those two as well based on the order of the clips on the timeline of course something that I use this for a lot is when I'm working on projects that have green-screen materials so like a music video because I don't want to be jumping up and down and doing chroma key work like that I'd rather just put green flags on all the green-screen clips and then just filter it and then for the rest of the afternoon I'm focused on compositing and nothing else so that's quite handy with these clips out what I'd like to do with the first one is continue refining this the face of this scale so I like the look that I've created I like the level of contrast that I have but I feel it's just not punchy enough it's still a little bit flat it's a little bit boring so what I'm going to do is use a window to select that the face of that scale and just pop it out a bit more so by the way I've used that term secondary grading I haven't really described what it does secondary grading as opposed to primary which affects the entire frame of the image impacts only a portion of the image and this is done primarily by two means you can either perform a key so in this case we're using the qualifier on the color page of the Vinci resolve to impact a specific color or a specific luminance range and and the second way that you perform secondary grading is white by using masks so this will be vector shaped sorry vector shapes or even custom shapes that you create in the pen or in this case what's it called a custom curve tool yeah and you can then track to the footage or even keyframe animate and rotoscope so we'll be looking at both of these in a second for this one I am going to first create a brand new mode when it comes to secondary color grading you usually want to apply these after the normalization and the balance but perhaps before you start applying creative grades and harsh contrast so what I'm going to do is just move these two aside a little bit select my balance and add a new serial node there we go and I'm going to change the label call this scales so that's what I'm in packing and I'm going to for the first time launch the window palette in the central palettes and it's a pretty easy window to navigate all along the center here you have a series of window presets so these are mostly looks standard shapes like squares and circles but you've also got customization options and then at the top you also have a line of additional presets preset buttons so in case you wanted to use two circles then you would activate the one that comes already in the palette and then create a second one at the top on the right hand side you have all of the controls that you're going to need to position and scale up the window but you will also have on-screen controls which are about to see in a second so I am going to click on that circle window and bring it up in the viewer so now I can pick it up and reposition it I can drag the corners I think these types of transform controls are pretty intuitive to use and on viewers something else I might want to do is collapse my Clips timeline so that I can see this much better and I can also scroll out of the viewer a little bit so I can see beyond the boundaries and adjust that circle a little finer finally because these scales are not you know directly to camera so they're not perfectly round they're an angle I might want to transform this circle into a Bezier shape and what that's going to do is just break up the constrain of the circle and allow allow me to navigate the points individually so I'm going to convert to Bezier and I can now pick these up one by one and reposition them to the edges I can also drag the handles on the Bezier points to refine the severity of the angle of that selection so I can make sure that it follows the curve of that tilted circle all right and if I want to see a preview of what that selection looked like looks like in the viewer I can click on the highlight tool in the top left corner so this is pretty close to that white mode clip button that we had and we now have a representation of our selection against a gray background so that gives us a pretty good overview of what we've just done I could see that the edge on this is pretty harsh so I'll probably want to go here into my softness controls in the window palette and just drag that value upwards a little bit to make it just a little gentler usually if you are selecting something that's organic like people's faces you're following something around then you can be quite aggressive with the softness so you want to just blend it in quite evenly into the shot but with something as geometric as this you can keep it pretty minor and then disable the highlight mode when you're done with your selection and refining it so what do I want to actually do with these scales so far we haven't really done anything secondary great secondary tools like the window and the qualifier don't actually make any changes to your image at all for that you have to go back to your standard color grading tools and perform changes so I'm going to go to the color wheels back to the master curves and I'll drag the gamma to the right to brighten up those guys that looks really nice they're just popping out like that I'm also going to increase the contrast and a pivot even more and once again just return to that mid-tone detail because I've got so much fine information here and I just want to pop that out cool I'm gonna press command-d and that's pretty big change and you know if this was the focus of the shot if I really wanted the audience to pay attention to what they were looking at you know this would be such you know a great way to direct the eye since I'm here I may as well apply another form of window secondary grading this time I'm going to add a vignette which is classically like a shadow that falls on the lens from the matte box of the camera but now with digital grading it's used for aesthetic purposes and as a sort of frame to the image by darkening the edges so that makes sense to add at the very end of the workflow because you definitely don't want any of your color grading effecting the vignette so I'm going to press alt s to create a new one so when it starts running out of room in the node editor it's gonna start placing it on a second line and there's a few ways you can work around that you can for example collapse a panel that you're not using and give the node editor more room something else you could do is also just rescale the size of those thumbnails and just zoom out a bit and they're more likely to end up on one line so I'll select that last one and that will be my vignette cool and I'll return to my window palette once again I'm going to activate the circle and you know what this time I'm also going to name it because I didn't name the previous ones so all you have to do is just double click the empty space next to the circle window icon and that brings up a field so I can type in vignette which is its purpose and now I'm just going to drag the edges extend them to the viewer and I can also drag the red points around the circle which controls the softness so just make sure that the edge is not hard Shh now if I was to go into the color wheels and start darkening the the edges the way I want to something really strange is gonna start happening right the inside of the image is actually getting darker which is the opposite of what I want so I'm gonna reset the gamma wheel and I'm going to click on the highlight mode in the viewer to see what's actually happening right so it's important to remember that all of the windows are additive by default whenever you make a selection you're actually targeting whatever's on the inside of the window if you want to change that behavior you can do so by using a couple of icons here next to the window name so you've got the invert and mask controls and you can use them in combination with other windows so you can actually start to intersect selections or subtract selections from others which is quite handy in this case all I want to do is invert the selection so that would be the option on the left and you can see now that's inverted it and I'm not focusing on the edges of the screen I can disable my highlight mode and do the same thing with the gamma again the reason I'm using gamma is because I don't want to darken the white point and the black point because that would be far more evident especially in somewhere like the window but if I go for the gamma ranges it's going to target the walls first and that always tends to look a bit more realistic also while I'm working on this I can go back to the softness controls in the window palettes make sure that the edges are not super obvious and another tip is that if you go back to the clips timeline keep an eye on the thumbnail a good rule of thumb is that if you can start to see the vignettes in the thumbnail that's usually an indication that the vignette might be a little too harsh and it's gonna be really obvious on a bigger screen so I think mine is starting to look very obvious so I'm just gonna drag that back a little bit all right so it's almost at the point where you think it's not even there anymore but again press command-d to compare it to what it was before before the vignette and you can see that there is this little just meant all right so I'm pretty happy with that just before I move on I'm gonna save this window as a preset I use vignettes quite a lot so what I'm going to do is just go back here to the window palette click on my options menu and at the top I have save as new preset so I'll select that it prompts me to give it a name and I think that's an obvious one yet click OK and now next time I'm on a clip and I activate a circle window when I click on the options menu I will see this preset at the top of the list so I can just click on that and it will automatically rescale it resize it to the viewer but it will not make any changes to the color wheels so that's still entirely in your control it's just about reshaping and resizing that window position so it's pretty handy also if you're working on a documentary and you've got a lot of interviews for example and maybe the way that the people were framed and positioned were more or less the same from one interview to the next you can just make something that looks specific like the interview vignettes you know and save that as a preset window and keep reusing that all right let's take a look at the second form of secondary grading on the color page which is using the qualifier so you'll find the qualifier right next to the window palette and right now it's just giving us a broad selection of all the ranges once we start indicating what we want to keep then those ranges will contract to those selections so let's do that I am going to click and drag across the image and I just realized I'm doing this on the balance node I'm glad I made this mistake because I can explain why that was a bad idea so right now I'm completely extracting all of the data from the balance node I'm going to press command Z to reset my qualifier notice and I'm going to make a dedicated note it'll be a much better idea so that's option s and I will also label it I know that the task that we were given that we wrote down on our flag was to turn this water blue so I'm going to enable looping in the viewer and I'm going to play back this clip and I think changing the water to blue will be relatively easy because this water is almost the color of green screen you know so it should be relatively straightforward to key out but we do have to be really careful with all of these elements that appear in the second half of the shot so you've got this really vibrant yellow airplane you've got these flamingos in the background so I'm going to keep them in mind make sure we're not being destructive I am going to make sure I'm on this part of the viewer when I'm making my selection because a big part of keying is making sure that the extraction is clean around the edges and I will not be able to tell how clean that is on the first frame of the clip so it's not as useful to me I'll drag it to the end right over here and I could just click to define a range in the qualifier but by clicking and dragging I'm actually recording like a multitude of ranges so if you look down at the qualifier palette you can see that the little ranges are just kind of expanding the more I drag cool so now that I've made my selection the ranges are defined I need to see what that looks like in the highlight mode you can already see the result of the selection by the way in the notes and note editor but of course I would like a much clearer representation of this so I'll enable highlight mode I can also collapse my eclipses timeline so I can see this even bigger that's great so it's not a bad first selection but I do need to clean this up I could see but I'm losing here one thing I can do is just grab the edges of that huge selection and white in it and you can see that it starts to grab a wider range of colors so I think the airplane reflection was not being grabbed very well I'm going to be quite careful with this because I don't want to grab you know a really strong key at the expense of like some of the other elements in the shot but so far that looks alright I think maybe there's nothing else that jumps out at me maybe also grab things of a lower saturation all right I'm pretty happy with that once I'm done refining the ranges over here the hue saturation and luminance which is where the name of the qualifier gets its name I'm going to switch to a matte representation of this selection so this is the black and white highlight and this gives me a much clearer representation so I'm no longer looking at you know these green and gray colors and if I still had any noise left over this would stand out in a really big way I think I have a little bit over here but to clean this up I'm now going to go to the right side of the qualifier pallet which is the matte finesse so this is almost like stage 2 over finding your key whereas on the left-hand side you were refining it based on the image content and the RGB data on the right-hand side you're refining it based on the actual mat right the black-and-white image itself so I am going to click on the D noise field and drag it and I can see that a lot of the dots have just disappeared cool and then clean black and clean white or almost like contrast adjustments they will just increase white in areas where it's not as strong as in others and that got rid of the rest of the noise that I had over here so I'm really happy really small adjustments as well I might want to blur this just a touch just to make sure that I'm not seeing any like pixelation around the edges of my selection and I mentioned earlier that grading is a really iterative process same thing with key selection you can always go back to this tool and refine your selection once you start performing the actual grade so sometimes it's not always clear how the key tools or sorry the grading tools will interact with the selection I'm going to hide my highlight mode and apply a grade to this so I'm going to decide which tool I want to use I could use the color wheels if I wanted to I could for example use the hue rotation in the adjustments so it's not a bad option something that I think might work well as well is the blue Channel so I could grab the black point of that blue channel and just raise it up up up and that will change the color pretty uniformly which I'm very happy with and then I can go back to the color wheels and maybe use he rotation to change like the warmth of that blue so I can make it a bit more cyan I'm gonna also change the brightness of the water using the gamma wheels all right now I've performed changes to the water it but I might also want to continue working on the elements outside of that water so in this case I also like to grade the airplane I could you know make a new cereal note I can make another selection and I could invert it because I've already showed you that inverting is possible with one does and it is also possible the qualifier you have an icon over here but generally the rule with node based rating and compositing is that you never have to do anything twice so if I've already performed this key I should be able to just reuse this key data and we use it at inverted after-the-fact so that's what I'm going to do I'm going to right click and what I could do is add a new serial node and just connect the key between the two but there's actually a single node that will perform both actions in one go so I'm going to click on add outside node and we're suddenly seeing this structure for the first time the RGB pipeline that we've seen before is still running through all the nodes and reaching the output which is what we're seeing in the viewer but now there's this new mini pipeline running between the he outputs of the blue water into the key input of node number three which I'm also going to label outside and by default when you have this kind of connection it will automatically invert the key that you had I could disable this behavior and I can reimburse earth at I can keep you know working on the water if I wanted to but in this case I do actually want to work on the plane so maybe what I want to do is fix how vibrant it is like it almost looks artificial against this blue water which I toned down a bit so what I'm going to do is maybe go back to my curves connect all of my channels and I'm just gonna lower both the white and the black point almost like to to darken it a little bit and I'm I'm bringing back a little bit more detail in the shadows of the airplane so it's not as overexposed anymore so if I press command D you can see it's brought back a lot of information maybe another thing I could do is just drag the offset towards yellow so that it's also still quite quite vibrant alright maybe it raised the gamma cool one thing that I'm not crazy about is that I think that there is a pretty solid outline around the airplane in the image and like I said you can continue to work on your qualifier tool and the map finesse after the fact so I can now go back to blue water and select my qualifier pallet and then use the in-and-out ratio to either expand or contract that mat that I have so I'm going to click in that ratio and pretty much clean up that outline by dragging it to the left if I drag it to the right then I'm gonna end up expanding it and you can see there's like a red tinge around it now because it's being affected by the hue rotation so I'm gonna reset and drag it inwards alright and that's pretty good cool something that's also a bit of an issue when I disabled this note and bring it back in is what's happening to the flamingos in the background so they're obviously being graded as well and that makes sense right because when we were making the selection of the water we were just focusing on the blue of the water so when we inverted that selection and started working on it in the outside node anything that we you know integrates that we apply are also going to apply to the birds so that's the next thing I'd like to do is to draw a window around that airplane to isolate that extraction to just that area and that's what makes secondary grading so versatile is that you can combine so many different tools and combining the qualifier with the windows is just one of the most one of the best ways to refine your grade so I'm going to create a custom curve around that window I'm going to activate that icon down here double click to call it airplane and to start drawing a custom curve I just have to click and then click when I just click I create linear points but when I click and I drag I create a Bezier curve so that allows me to create fewer points because that means that I can just make circular selections around something this is particularly helpful with organic selections like when you're trying to rotoscoped people and then to turn this into an actual shape I have to click on the first point that I made last and that closes the loop of the path and it generates a shape crate and that it's also given me some on-screen controls so you can see that I've now got this rotation arrow that I can take advantage of but then I've also got the transform controls of the window palette itself cool alright so that feels like it's almost done except for us to play this through of course this is a moving shot so we'll also need to track the motion of the airplane I am going to navigate to the next pallet next to the window the tracker palette and I'm just going to create generate a very basic track since we're at the end of the clip we will need to track in the left direction so I'm going to click on analyze or track reverse the playhead will just dance across once the airplane starts leaving the shot the tracker will stop before him because obviously there's no more RGB data for it to follow so I'm gonna need to complete the rest of this manually this is also fairly straightforward to do I mean it just took us about two seconds to perform the front end of it that's already finished I'm going to use these keyframe navigation controls in the tracker graph to jump to the last point that it was able to analyze and I'm then going to switch from clip mode which applies changes to the window on a clip long basis to frame mode which allows me to essentially perform key framing and when I'm in frame mode I can also jump to the very beginning of this clip or actually you know what I'm just gonna pick up the playhead and drag it across until the plane leaves the shot like there so it's not really the very beginning and I can Center click my mouse so I can drag to the top of the viewer pickup the window and then just drag it off like that and because we're not performing manual key framing the data between the preceding keyframe and the current one is just gonna be generated for us based on the amount of movements the windows performed and the amount of time that occurs between the two of these so I'm gonna drag these and make sure that we're not leaving out the window and that's great and then finally there was also keyframe at the very start so I'm gonna just jump to that with my navigator and drag the window off for that as well so that's great and now if I was to check out the Matt data the airplane is on its own if I was to deselect that outside node you will see that it reveals the birds again cool so I'm going to turn off highlight and return to my clips timeline alright so I've been talking a lot about the node editor I've been talking about the integrity of the RGB signal and also pointing at the notes but I haven't expressly talked about this workflow so what I'd like to do is construct a few very basic grades ready to show you the principles of how the RGB signal is treated on this pipeline so the first thing I'd like to do is just talk about the node anatomy first of all you have a single starting node with every clip that you select it's completely ungraded and it's stranded on this single pipeline that runs from the RGB source on the left hand side this represents your source media essentially this is what the RGB values are when it enters if you're working with raw media this will be the stage at which it is the bayard so the bearing happens before that and again you're now working with RGB pixels at this stage it enters the RGB input of the corrector node and here you can start to perform any sorts of changes that you'd like whether they're color based whether they're effects based using the open effects palette and these changes will impact the waveform of the image and then that version of the waveform exits and it travels through all the other nodes which also transform it in some way until it reaches the final output node and this is is what you see in the viewer and is also what will end up on the deliver page what will be rendered out underneath the RGB inputs and outputs are the keys which I mentioned earlier so these do not can carry any RGB data these purely work on the basis of a black and white guide layer that will notify the RGB pixels where they should be visible and where invisible so white in this case is full opacity black is full transparency and then grayscale also qualifies as semi-transparency you saw earlier that we can share key data and that we can send them out same thing for the RGB you can actually send out a signal to multiple nodes at once like I said you don't need to do anything twice in a node based structure if you don't want to or if you don't have to so with certain node structures we have layer mixers we have parallel mixers there are types of notes that are capable of taking multiple inputs so then you can send a normalized version of the image and you can blend it with something that was maybe graded with a look or you can oftentimes blend things that have secondary grading on them but there is a dedicated video for that so check it out in this case we're just gonna be looking at this linear pipeline and the first demonstration I want to show you it might seem really obvious but it's kind of important to check it out just to verify that you've understood the nature of the signal treatment so the first thing I'm going to do to this image is turn it black and white the very simplest way I can do this is by going to the bottom of the color wheels and just setting my saturation to zero because of course when there's no color saturation the image turns grayscale but I think we can do something a little bit more interesting I'm going to command Z to undo that and I'm actually going to use a different palette for this right next to the color wheels we have this palette called the RGB mixer and what this usually does is it allows you to change the balance of the primary colors in the RGB signal at the very bottom of this palette you have a monochrome option which will turn your image black-and-white and then you can continue to adjust the individual channel outputs to control their strength in the black and white image which i think is really interesting gives you a lot of control creatively so in his case because we started off with an image that was very kind of beige a very muted in tones he's kind of like blending into it too much and what I can do is increase the read output to make him stand out just a little bit against that wall he is wearing a blue shirt I believe so using the blue output could either brighten or darken his shirt but of course that's affecting his skin because that's affecting the amount of yellow information which is the opposite of the blue channel so these are pretty fun to play with especially when you're working on videos with like organic elements like trees and skies because obviously the green and blue will impact those quite a lot all right so I've made this black and white note I am going to label it accordingly and then I'm going to create a new node that's then working with this black and white version of the signal so alt s and I'm going to label this one sepia and you might be familiar with the term sepia refers to like a reddish brownish tint it's usually associated with old photography since we've got a black and white image it's perfect for this because all I have to do is just grab the offset color wheel and push it towards like an orange --red range and that's it so that makes perfect sense right in terms of what's happening on the signal turning the image black and white and then adding a single color to make a monochromatic effect however what will happen if I was to switch the order of these two notes all right think about what's gonna happen to the signal and what we're gonna see visually in the viewer all right so perform that change right now one way to switch nodes around is just by extracting one of them so I will press the e shortcut for extract and that popped out the sepia I can now move my black and white node across pick up the sepia node and then when the pipeline lights up like this it means that I'm ready to drop it off and reconnected and when I reconnect it hopefully that result was predictable to you the image turned black and white because that's the very last thing to impact the signal before it reached the output of this pipeline but something else that should be noted is that the sepia node still has a function so it hasn't it's not completely useless just because it's being overwritten by the black and white remember we increased the amount of orange and red in the image at this stage which means that it is now impacting the way that the RGB mixer is revealing this information if I was to go back here and disable my sepia note with command D that actually impacts the image as well so everything matters in this case I'm going to reset my pipeline and show you another example so I'm going to right click and in the contextual menu just in the general area of the node editor I'm going to set reset all grades and nodes that's great and this time I want to talk about destructive workflows so it's something that's very easy to fall into and I want to show you a few ways that you can avoid them for this example I'm going to first go into my color wheels and what I'd like to do is just grab the master wheel of the lift and absolutely crush those shadows so dragging it to the left far far darker than anything you would ever do in a grade but I'm doing this to demonstrate something so you can see that the shadows are completely gone down here and the Scopes they're all crushed under that black point line all the detail in his shirt is gone so I'll remind you command D that this is what it looked like a second ago and I'm going to label it accordingly lift is what I uh what I adjusted I'm going to make a new serial node option S and I'll be honest with you I am using a shortcut for labeling at this point but it's a little it's a shortcut that I had to make myself I'm going to show it off because this is a new feature with the latest release but here in DaVinci Resolve you have your keyboard customization options and what I did was I just did a search for the label in all commands and here revealed that on the color page inside of notes I have the label select the note command and what I like to set it to is the tab key so it's a very prominent key on your keyboard it's next to the letter Q I use it all the time when I'm jumping between windows and it's not really assigned to anything on the software by default so that's that's my little spiel that's the Daria shortcut so I am going to press tab and I'm gonna try to restore these shadows this time using the curves but do you think that can be done so image is completely crushed and let me try this I'm going to open up the curves palette I'm going to click on the center of the curve and I'm gonna try to drag this upwards so try to restore this data and this feels like a very strong no way like this feels like permanently damaged video in fact I'm clearly making it worse some increase in contrast I'm over exposing the areas that we can see and that data at the bottom of the Scopes seems to be permanently stuck there so to a much lesser degree this is something that a lot of colourists find themselves doing adjusting their shadows or their contrast too early on in the process not to you know this degree but look how much smaller to be and then trying to bring some of it back at a later stage and finding that the adjustment is just too aggressive you know they're starting to see noise and pixelation and banding it's not great so the good news is that technically it's not a destructive workflow until you start using the tools incorrectly so when I reset this I can still restore the data it's a digital signal so nothing is actually getting lost or destroyed the only thing is that I was targeting the wrong range when you grab the middle of the curves you're actually adjusting the gamma of the of the image and we know that we made the adjustment in the snowed using the lift master wheel so the lift is the black point on the curve I'm gonna go back to this curves node pick up that black point and knowing that it used to be negative 25 I just have to raise it by a factor of about 1/4 and I shouldn't Theory be able to bring back all of this information and keep grading the way I started out so yes workflow is not destructive but if you're not careful it can very quickly become that way I am going to reset this once again so right click reset all grades and notes and then I'm going to show you a final example and this will probably be the most subtle of the three but it kind of follows the natural progression of what I've been demonstrating so far so we'll combine kind of both techniques I will start off just by creating a bit of a contrast to this image so something quite gentle so I'm gonna make sure his face is not overexposed but it's just popping out a bit more all right and then I'm going to press alt s to make an e note and this is where I'm going to apply a look so I'll call this the blue look and I'm gonna make it super simple I'm gonna grab the gamma color wheel push it towards blue about this much and the next question I want to ask is again will it make much of a difference if I drag the positions of these two nodes around let me perform that switch so previously I used extract or the shortcut eat but another way I can do this is just by selecting and well clicking the node holding the command key on my keyboard and then just dragging it across to a different node and that will switch their positions so you can see the blue blue look appears first now followed by contrast and did you see the switch in the viewer right that was a pretty big change so I'm going to command Z to undo that to show you what it looked like previously and then command o command shift Z yes to go forward again so there is a really mild switch between the two and to answer why this is happening why there's such a big impact even though we made such small adjustments again it all comes down to the trace and what it looked like at the point in which it was being creatively graded so right now with the blue look in front it's actually impacting the version of the trace in which there is no contrast right because we're adding this last I may as well turn the snowed off bypass it to see the original parade and that's what the blue look is being applied to so we've dragged the gamma which I know is the central part of the image so in this case it's actually impacting a great deal of it after which we are applying a contrast and pushing the two further apart with that blue look baked in however if I was to switch these two around so I'm holding the command key and dragging them apart the shadows look a little bit more neutral and the reason why that is happening is because now the blue look is being applied to this version of the trace where the the tops and the bottoms of the luminance signal have been pushed further apart and because the blue look is targeting the gamma range it's impacting a smaller portion of the image while keeping the shadows and the highlights a bit more neutral right they're a bit more separated from that blue look so I'm not trying to imply that one way is correct and one ways wrong not at all what I'm saying is that it's really up to you how you want the grade to look and you have to keep in mind that where the node is placed has a pretty substantial impact on the final look of the image so if you see it behaving in a certain way try to move some nodes around and see what happens all right now that we've taken a look at those I am going to go back to my timeline and we're just gonna look at a few more options that we have on the color page so click on to this final clip it's already balanced it's even got a look on it so it's it's got its own little cross process there as you can see that's the original and what I'm going to do is apply an effect on to it from our open effects palette I'm going to activate it at the top here and that will bring up the controls by default you're going to see the library of open effects and these are broken up in a multitude of categories which you can scroll through you can also double click the category names to collapse them if you know that there's certain ones that you just are not going to be referring to as often and there's also a search option at the very top which allows you to just well that's the whole top of it is blurry huh yeah allows you to filter what you're seeing so for the first demonstration I would like to apply an effect called the tilt shift blur type in the word tilt and that it appears over here now I can just pick up the effect and drag it directly onto the pipeline and that will turn it into a node but what you could also do is generate a node first and then apply the open effect to that and the advantage of doing it that way is that you can still use secondary selection methods that way in this case I'm happy to leave this the way it is as soon as you apply an effect to your pipeline the open effects palette will expand to show the settings as well so you now have these two tabs library and settings I can collapse my search field at the top and can I I guess there it is this so here I've got the controls for the tilt shift blur and I can also already see the result of this effect in the viewer if I was to press shift F I will end up expanding my viewer in a way that retains the open effects palette which is really useful because it means that I can see everything at maximum capacity but then I also have all of these settings that I can keep working on and some of you might recognize the tilt shift effect it's meant to mimic using a lens that achieves an artificial depth of field with a sensor that's tilted towards the lens it's one of those effects here we're doing we're achieving this artificially if I was to disable this at the top here you can see that the top and the bottom of the image are being D focused a blurred I can also activate the matte representation of this blur by clicking a depth map preview and that would just show me a black and white image and using this I can line up where I want the horizon of the of this focus to be so right now it's actually falling pretty well on those rhinos in the background and it's covering some of the man but he's being defocused at the bottom on the top and I think that's making it look less realistic because with true shallow depth-of-field you can never really achieve that on that plane so I'm just going to activate that preview and maybe expand or sorry relocate the focus sweep a little bit closer to him it's just a little bit lower and also expand the InFocus range so I'll just cover a wider range I can now deactivate that and also impact the amount of blur that I'm seeing in the near blur range in the far so don't want to be too intense but just enough to draw the eye there we go and once again shift f-22 get out of this and I'm all done resolve effects can also be combined with secondary tools like I just said so I'm gonna go back to this shot that I had of this gentleman and here we're going to obscure his face and protect protect his identity it's a little late at this point in the day but you know there are best I'm also going to reset the node pipeline so I'm going to right-click and reset all grades and nodes or actually wait a second I want to hang on to that contrast so I'll just delete the blue look and hang on to this I'm going to press alt s or option S Mac keyboard and I'll call this face blur and what I'm gonna go for is a mosaic blur which is kind of like an old-school way of obscuring things and we're gonna see some pixelation on a certain part of the image if I was to just drag and drop this the way it is can't really work with this image anymore so I'm going to disable this and I'm going to use a window to identify what it is that I actually want to apply the mosaic to so I'll open up the window palette at the bottom I will activate my circular window and remind myself what I'm using it for again so that'll be face blur we position it over his face excellent there we go and then I can bring back the mosaic blur but the pixels are a little bit too large so I'm gonna have to increase the pixels frequency so that they become a little bit smaller and I can also further refine my window I can maybe blur out the edges a bit and make it larger however if I was to play this back I can see that he's he's moving his head around a little bit and I don't want to risk losing in so once again I'll switch to the tracker palette and then I'll press track forward and that will follow him along as he talks I had excellent alright let's go back to our full timeline before we applied the filter so I'm going to collapse my open effects palette and over here in the clip so I'm going to select all clips from the top cool I'm also going to open my gallery up again and remember we made that looks album a while ago we've still got our blue look and our cross process from earlier and I'm going to try to apply one of those grades onto one of the clips in the timeline so let me go for clip number four I think that's a pretty good candidate right because it's a pretty neutral clip we've already matched it to the other neutral media that we had on clip number five there's a couple of very quick ways to apply grades from an existing still or from even a clip on the timeline you can either right click and choose apply grade so you can do that on either a still or a clip or you can actually use the middle mouse on your button and just click that over the thumbnail and it will apply it to the media that you have underneath that you have selected on the timeline alright so I've just done that and what's bizarre is that it looks absolutely I shall I went for the cross process there is yep so it looks absolutely nothing like the cross process that we had this feels very strongly overexposed really bright the shadows are severely blue whereas here everything is a little bit more muted so why did this happen well there's a reason for it when you simply apply a grade or you use your middle mouse to overwrite it this way you're actually copying the entire pipeline across and overriding anything that was there before remember with Clips four and six we had actually performed matching on them to clip number five and that match note is now gone so I'm going to press command Z to undo and bring back that match note so if a press command D you can see it comes back I'm also going to label it so I know it's there and instead of just overriding the grade what I can do is right click and I can display the node graph and that allows me to actually see the individual nodes that make up that entire node pipeline in a separate node editor and then I can just drag and drop them across onto this pipeline which i think is great so I can pick it up drag it and this is a much more subtle application and it's no longer applying the balance that we had on clip number two which is very distinct to that clip it's now using the match that we performed that was specific to this media so it allows us to break up the workflow a little bit if you want to export a grade that you've created either you know to share with someone else or to save for your own use later on it's very easy to do from inside the gallery I can right click on that thumbnail I'm just going to disable this behavior right now it's got live preview on so I'm just going to turn that off there again right-click select export and I'm just going to send this to my desktop to a folder call it Rhino grade and select Oh got a name select export' and I'm gonna go find that file now just to demonstrate what it looks like when it's been exported out so I'm gonna go back into my desktop there it is my Rhino grade double click to launch it and notice how it actually exports out as two separate files a DP X and a dr X so these represent the two elements that make up a still the DP X is that high quality still frame of the image that's been grabbed you can use it for viewing you can use it for comparing and matching the dr x contains all of the made of data that contains the entire grade pipeline so you need both to be able to import a still into DaVinci Resolve however you can use DP X on its own purely for visual references so I'm going to now do the reverse of that I'm going to import a grade that I had made earlier so I will right click inside the gallery and in the contextual menu select import there we go on the desktop I have my airplane grade and when I expand that I also have these two files but DRX isn't even given to me as an option so in some systems you might not even see this DRX at all but it will piggyback onto the DPX file when you import it so the grading data will come across I'm going to select that click import and there it is we've got the still thumbnail but I'm now going to select an image so I think clip number six number four yeah yeah go for clip six and I will right-click and I will apply the grade and this came with its own normalization stage you can see that it's broken up it's got a node that's combining two halves of a grade and then contrast them in yet at the end so with shift D I can bypass the entire look and you can see that the sky has been modified using the qualifier and stuff like that so pretty nice construction so I'd like to thank you very much for watching this overview of the cover page in DaVinci Resolve if you have any further questions or if you would like some tech support I highly recommend that you visit the black magic forum it's a pretty active forum and you can get advice directly from the people who make the software and also from professional colorists who use it on a day to day basis so you can get some pretty solid advice also to see a list of training partners to check out our certified books and find the additional videos in this series check out the DaVinci Resolve training page on the websites thank you very much

Channel: Blackmagic Design

Views: 951,444

Keywords:

Id: jo0YcNRlrNA

Length: 116min 31sec (6991 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 12 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/teak421_837Studios]

Thanks for posting... Good stuff.

[u/Adderbox76]

Great video. One of the nice surprises in moving to Resolve was finding out how much I actually really love colour correcting/colour grading. It was an aspect of the process that I hadn't really put much thought into because the tools I had been using previously were pretty basic at best. But with Resolve it's literally my favourite part of the whole process.

I could quite happily spend my entire day doing just that.