Hey this is Denver Riddle with
Color Grading Central and this is a 20 minute crash
course on color grading in DaVinci Resolve 15 you'll learn how to use it you'll learn the tools and together we'll create
this really amazing look that you can download as a LUT
or look up table so you can easily create this
same look on your own footage. Also, I want to let you know
about a free live training event
I'll be doing... I'll be sharing with you my top
color grading secrets you can ask me questions it's free to attend Details are below this video
in the description. Alright, let's do this thing! DaVinci Resolve is divided
into 6 pages following a left to right
workflow where we import footage
in the Media Page, assemble our edit in
the Edit page, work on VFX or graphics
in the Fusion page, do our color grading
in the Color page, design and mix our audio
in the Fairlight page and finally export our project
from the Deliver page. It's just that simple. The Media page is where
we can preview clips by double clicking
on them and import them
into the project by dragging them
into the Media Pool. I'm just going to import
a few pre trimmed clips and once they are in
the media pool we'll go to the Edit page and create a new timeline
by going to File, then New Timeline. we'll give it a name and then click create. This will create a new timeline and we'll drag those clips
into the timeline. Now we can make any editorial
changes if we like, Resolve is an editing program
after all... and once our edit is
looking the way we like it, we are now ready for
our color grading. Now because our primary focus
is going to be on color grading, we'll just briefly touch
on the Fusion page so you can at least know
that it is there. In the Fusion page we have
the nodes section with an input and an output. The input is for our original
image coming in and the output is for
our image going out. In between is where we can
do vfx and compositing. So let's say for instance we
want to add a blur effect over our talents face, we'll go to the effect library, choose Blur effect and this will be added
to the node tree. We'll then go to the inspector
and increase the blur value, but you'll see however this
affects the entire image so we'll need to add a mask. Going back to the
effects library, I'll choose mask and ellipse. A node representing the mask
is added to the node tree as a property of the
blur effect and we can position and
resize the mask on the viewer or use the options in
the inspector tab. We can also use a merge node
to merge multiple effect over the same image too and this will allow us
to do tracking, 3d compositing,
all kinds of stuff; now for most people
they won't need to use
the Fusion page but it is here for vfx artists
and finishers. Alright let's go ahead and
delete this blur effect and let's jump to
the Color Page. At the top we have the viewer, the nodal tree, where we keep track
of our corrections, In the middle section we have
all the clips in the project represented as thumbnails. And the bottom section is
where we have our color tools. Now before we jump in
and start grading this thing, let's discuss basic terminology
for how we define color. The three basic terms that
we use to define color are Hue Saturation and Luma Hue is the name we call colors. Saturation is the intensity
or vividness of a hue. And Luma is the brightness
or shade of hue. It's also important to know
how to read the video scopes, which can be super beneficial. We'll bring up the scopes
by right clicking on the viewer and selecting show scopes. The two scopes I always use are the Waveform in color
overlay mode and the Vectorscope with
the flesh line turn on. The waveform let's us correct
for exposure and with the color overlay
mode turn on, unchecking the Y, it allows us to correct for
white balance issues when the color channels
line up evenly. If I overlay an image
on top of the waveform, you can see that the trace...
the stuff you see here... actually corresponds with
the image of the guy walking when I play this back. The Vectorscope, corresponds
directly with the color wheel, and I've overlaid it here
for convenience. It shows what colors are
in the image as well as their saturation. The further the trace extends
from the center of the scope, the more saturated or vivid
the colors are. Here's a simple but powerful
workflow for color correction We first correct the exposure
or brightness of the image, second the white balance or
color temperature if there are any issues and lastly the saturation by
either increasing or reducing it This will make more sense as
we actually do it! I'll choose this clip as
our Hero Shot. Let's first make a correction
to the exposure of this image using the primary color wheels. The horizontal wheels
adjust the exposure and the pucks in the middle
of the color wheels adjust the color. The lift mostly adjusts
for the shadows or darkest parts of the image. The gain for the highlights
or brightest parts of the image. And the gamma for the midtones
or everything else in between. This fourth wheel is the
offset control, which adjusts the entire image and there are some instances
where you use it. Now looking this is really flat, this is very common to see when you capture in a Log
or flat profile. So how we'll correct this shot is we'll adjust the shadows
first with the lift control while watching the waveform. We want to bring the trace
and the shadows down until the darkest parts of
the image sit right above zero. Then we'll bring up the highlights so the brightest parts
of the trace sits right about here
near the top. Then I'll bring the
midtones down by pulling down
on the gamma slider. This gives us good contrast
and exposure. Next we'll fix the
color temperature, since our image seems to be
a little too warm or reddish. We can clearly see the red trace dominating the middle
and top of our Waveform. Our goal is to neutralize
or white balance the whites so the way to do that is to first find something in
the image that is white. In this case we can use
the gal's white shirt and it's corresponding trace
in the waveform. Our goal is to get the color
channels to align evenly and when they do the trace
will turn white indicating that we've
achieved white balance. A quick and easy way to do this is with the white balance
eyedropper found under the lift wheel. Keep an eye over on the trace
as I click on the white shirt. And voila! The trace for the highlights
is NOW white, indicating we have achieved
white balance. And just in case you're not
happy with the result or if you think the whites
look too sterile or clinical, we can manually adjust this using the temperature
and tint sliders found under the number
“two”. Lastly let's boost the color
a little bit by increasing the saturation. Here's what the clip looks like
before and after the correction. Doesn't that look awesome! If it does go ahead and give
this video a like! Alright! Now that our
hero shot is color corrected, let's move one. On the next shot we'll
repeat the procedure, going for a nice balance of
exposure with the lift, gamma and gain controls. The color temperature in this
shot looks off too, so we'll use again the
white balance eyedropper, this time,
using the white wall. Lastly we'll add
some saturation too. Moving to the next shot we wanna match it to the first
shot for obvious reasons, for obvious reasons, since this is just a tighter
version of the hero shot. To give us a good starting point let's copy the correction
from the first clip to this one. To do that we'll go
to the first clip, open up the gallery, right click on the viewer and select grab still. What this does is it adds
a still to the gallery saving our correction
so we can use it later on. Now coming back to this clip we'll right click on the still
in the gallery and select apply grade. And bada bing, bada bang! That's gives us a good
starting point but you'll see that we do
have some matching issues. To help us with matching
this shots let me just share with you my
preferred method for doing this. We'll turn on the Split
screen view and change the dropdown
to Selected Clips. If we now command, or control
click if you are on windows, on shot 1, we can see the images
side by side. We can also see them side
by side in the waveform scope which makes matching a breeze. To match the traces better
we'll bring shadows, midtones and highlights up
with the offset control. Then to improve the color match
we'll drag the tint to the left, and the temperature to
the right to warm it up. That's a nice looking match! In the interest of time
I've already gone ahead and performed color correction
to this remaining clips. But in this next shot You'll see that the bricks in
this building in the background are looking too yellow when I think they should be
more reddish or orange in color. To fix this we'll create
a new node, and we'll use one of
my favorite tools to do quick secondary fixes and that's with the
HueVSHue Curve, where we'll place two points
on the color spectrum to isolate the yellows, then add a center point and drag up a little bit o lean those yellow Hues
more towards red. Now, if I disable and
enable this node, you'll notice that this
correction also affects the yellow painted lines
on the asfalt. We don't want that. So a cool ninja trick
I wana show you is we can further qualify
or isolate our correction with a power window. Going to the windows panel, we'll turn on a Curve Window and draw a mask shape
around the building. Then we'll add some softening
or feathering to the edges so the window isn't so apparent. And Voila!! Our correction now only
affects the building. But you'll see that when
we play the clip back the camera moves making our
power window move out of place So we want to address that. Going to the tracker panel we can easily and effortlessly
track the shape by clicking on the
track forward button. Isn't that awesome!!! This is one of the things
that I absolutely love about DaVinci Resolve. Now we've completed
our basic color correction for all 5 shots. But, let's say that for
whatever reason, our client decides
that they don't like the girl's red sneakers
in our first shot. Instead they want them
to be say purple in color. Well the cool thing is
we can fix it post with the HSL Qualifier Tool. To do that we need to
add a new node and then going to
the qualifier panel and with the eyedropper tool we'll drag through
the red sneakers to isolate them. To see what we've selected we'll turn on the
highlight feature, the magic wand you see here. To refine our key we'll
change the width and center of our hue selection and pull the saturation low
to the right. We'll further clean up the key
with the matte finesse tools. Ok now let's turn
the highlight feature off and drag the Hue control
to the right until the sneakers turn
a purple color. Haha, yes! Isn't that so cool! Now keep in mind this
isn't the only shot where we see
the red sneakers so we'll wanna copy
this correction to the other shot
of her dancing. But before we do that, let me show you something
really cool if we right click on the node
we have an option to choose Save as
Shared Node. You'll see it now gets
labeled as Shared Node 1. Now when I go to copy this
correction to any other clip and say I now want to change the
color of the sneakers to say green... I can right click on this node, turn off the Lock Node option. Make the change... and because it's a shared node it's automatically updated
on the other shots that have the same shared node. Pretty cool, right?!! Ok, now to the really fun part, and that's creating an
awesome look for these clips. I'm gonna show you a quick way to apply the same look
on top of all of these clips and this we'll save you
a ton of time and ensure that you have
a consistent look across the board. You're welcome! Okay to do that we'll select
all the clips in the timeline using the shift key to
select a row then right click and
choose the option Add into new group. We'll give it a name we'll call this
Orange/Teal Look since that's the look we are
going for... Then click OK. Then we'll change this dropdown from clip to group post clip. What this simply means is that
when we want to make a change it's applied to all the clips
in the group. Alright, now let's
create the look. The Orange/Teal Look is a
really popular look it uses principles of
color contrast to make the skin tones
or our talent stand out from the background. And frankly it just looks
awesome so you're going to love this! In the first node let's dial up
the contrast for our look. To stay organized we'll
right click on the node and choose Node Label. In this case,
I'll just call this Contrast. For this part of the look
we'll use the Custom Curves which allow us to make complex
adjustments to the exposure. Now just a quick crash course
on the way this works... the bottom point adjust
the shadows, the top point adjust
the highlights and we can make as many points
along the curve in between to fine tune the contrast. In this case we don't want
to affect the highlights or the
shadows too much so we'll create contrast
in-between these areas known as the undertones
and midtones. I;ll make a point here in the
midtones and drag up. This improves our exposure but makes the undertones
look a little washed out. So let's add another point here
and drag it down to adjust the density
of the undertones, there that looks nice, now we have much
richer contrast. For color, let's add another
node and name it Teal. Here we'll push teal colors
into the overall image with the offset control. This is where we'll start to
see that color contrast. Next we'll add a parallel node or a color adjustment at
the same stage in the grade and we'll bring out
the skin tones. We'll just label this node
Skin Tones. Now this is where we'll
get them to pop, going to the Hue VS Sat curve and using the eyedropper tool we'll click on the skin tones to auto set the points
on the curve. Then dragging up on
the center point we can make the skin tones pop
without affecting anything else. We'll then just refine the curve o make sure that all the warm
in the skin are saturated evenly. Lastly because we pushed teal into the entire tonal range
with the offset control it's making our shadows
also look teal, so we'll want to clean them up so that we can have
clean shadows. To do that I'm gonna show you
a really awesome trick. We'll add another node... call it Clean Shadows... and go to the Luma VS Sat Curve Now the way this tool works is the shadows are to the left and the highlights are
to the right, and anywhere that we
place points on the curve, we are gonna affect
the saturation for that part of
the tonal range by either pulling up
to increase the saturation or pull down to
decrease it. So this is really cool way for selectively reducing the
saturation in the shadows without affecting
anything else. So we'll place a point here so that nothing above
is affected and then we'll drag
the left point all the way down to reduce the saturation
in the shadows. I'll then just adjust it
a little bit more, and voila our shadows
are nice and clean. If I toggle this node off and on
again a few times you can see the difference
it made in pulling the teal out
of the shadows on the side of this blue car as well as in the the
dark metal on the windows. Okay, so don't forget that
cool trick. As a final touch, I want to apply one of the
free LUTs from Ascend that you can download when you sign up for
the free online workshop. I want to show you how
we can actually preview LUTs in realtime in DaVinci with
the LUT Browser and this totally amazing
that we can do this! We didn't always have
this ability. At the top left of our screen we'll find the
LUT Browser option, let's go ahead click on it and now we have a list
of all our LUTs. Now this is also the same
as if you right click on a node
to view the LUTs but the big difference is that we can a visual preview
of the LUT before we actually apply it and this makes finding the
right LUT for your project so much easier! I'll navigate to the Ascend LUTs and hovering the cursor
over the LUTs thumbnails you'll see a real time preview
of each LUT in the viewer. We'll choose the 3strip LUT
by double clicking on it Yuck!!! That's too strong but that's okay because
we can dial it back to taste by going to the Key panel and pulling back on the
output gain control until we have a result
that we're happy with. Now let's play this
whole thing back... What an amazing look!! Alright to wrap this all up
I'll jump to the Fairlight. Although we've been primarily
focused on the color grading, I think it's worth pointing out
that Fairlight page gives us professional
audio tools that you would normally
only find in highend tv and film production tools So that's really amazing that
we've been given so much. Just let's just explore briefly. Here we have access to
the media pool we have the effects library which will list any VST
audio plugins that you have in your system. the Index section which
displays the Tracklist and markers. We have the timeline
and transport controls. A mixer, meters Metadata section an inspector to see the
characteristics of any audio clip. And pretty much anything
else you'd need to make a really sweet
audio mix. In my particular case I don't have any audio
associated to these clips so we can just jump to
the Deliver page, but I wanted you to see
that this is all in here. Now the Deliver page has
four sections. The Render settings, the viewer, the timeline and the render queue
where we basically press go. For this project we'll output
for uploading to youtube, so we can choose from one of
the convenient presets. We can change the output
resolution to 1080p, specify a location
for exporting, and finally click add to
render queue, then Start Render. It's as easy as that. Now, I know I went
through a lot and I skipped over
a lot of details, but what I wanted to give to
you is the big picture and if you liked this tutorial
and you'll like to see more and download the FREE LUTs
I mentioned hen sign up for my free online
training at the link below at the event I'll share with you
my top color grading secrets you can ask me questions so to reserve your seat
visit the link below and I promise you it will be
well worth your time and you'll get a lot better from
one simple one hour training. So I hope that you enjoyed
this crash course as much as I enjoyed
creating it for you and I look forward to
seing you on the webinar Have a great day!
