Davinci Resolve 16 Color Grading For Beginners

[Music] what's going on my name is Jay and today I'm gonna walk you through some color grading Basics in DaVinci Resolve 16 let's take a look last week a couple weeks ago I don't remember I put out a video about how the word cinematic is really really overused but there's also some ways that you can make your footage at least look a little bit more like your favorite movie your favorite film and my very first tip was to color correcting color grade your footage because that really is super super important if you want high quality video it's gonna make a world of difference it's really it's just gonna step up your game why wouldn't you want to do that in one of the things that I absolutely love about DaVinci Resolve is it makes the whole color grading and color correcting workflow really intuitive really easy so today we're actually gonna walk through that entire workflow in the color page in DaVinci Resolve but first I gotta clarify a couple things first you've probably noticed that I've used the terms color correcting and color grading in this video so far and that's because they are two separate things a lot of people use them interchangeably but they're very very different color correcting is all about making your footage look like it would if you were looking at it with your naked eye so you're making sure that your blacks are black your whites are white your Gray's are gray and all the colors are correct color grading on the other hand is where we get creative this is where we actually get the look that we want for our videos and people do that in different ways some people use Lots some people do it manually there's just don't date there is no right or wrong way but there is kind of an order of operations to things starting with color correcting so we're gonna jump into DaVinci Resolve and take a look at how to do that right now nope also before I forget stick around to the end of this video because I'm gonna show you a super super cool way to do a really quick color grade that will take almost no time at all alright let's jump into da Vinci all right we're in the color page in DaVinci Resolve I've got a few Clips already lined up and ready to go these are actually some Blackmagic RAW files that I found on the internet they were free to download practice color grading if you are interested in getting your hands on these I'll leave a link in the description let's take a quick tour of the color page so we know what we're working with we've got our gallery over here which if we ever grabbed any stills from our playback monitor we can go ahead and save them there next to that we've got our Luntz or look-up tables these are all of our well basically Instagram filters for our video if you want to really dumb down description of them and you can see I've got a ton of them a lot of them I added but there were quite a few that actually came with DaVinci Resolve next to that we've got our media pool where we can see all of the clips that are in our project and then if I click this timeline button we can see a bird's-eye view of our entire timeline let's go ahead and turn that off because I never ever use that and then if we need more space for our playback monitor for our nodes I can actually turn all of that off and then all I'll have up here is playback monitor and notes moving all the way over to the right I can click this to toggle my clips on and off I can click this to toggle my nodes on and off I can open my effects menu here and if I want a close-up look at all of my footage I can go ahead and click lightbox and then there you go you've got all of the grabs from your footage let's go ahead and turn that off below all of that we've got our playback monitor which is where we're going to see the results of all of our hard work and our nodes which is where we're gonna put all of our Corrections and if you're coming over from Premiere Pro nodes are basically like adjustment layers but with a much more intuitive workflow it's kind of like in my fusion tutorial that I did last week it's basically a pipeline you can see the order in which you've done things really really easily below that we've got our clips which we can like I said toggle on and off if we want but I usually like keeping them on so it can switch between them quickly and then below our clips we've got a lot of cool tools we've got our Camera Raw menu where you can play around with the settings for all of your raw footage we've got the color match menu where you can choose whatever color card you're using if you're using one and go ahead and do your color matching that way we've got our wheels which also includes primaries bars and we've got primaries wheels and log wheels and then we've got our RGB mixer and our motion effects we're not going to be touching motion effects or RGB mixer in this we're actually pretty much only gonna be dealing with the color wheels next to that we've got a whole bunch of tools like curves and qualifiers windows you can do motion tracking blur and sharpening you can change your key output of any one of your nodes it's just a whole bunch of stuff over here and then to the right of all that are our scopes and the only ones we really need to pay attention to for this video our parade our waveform and our vector scope and then if you want to do a little bit more advanced color grading and you need to keyframe some correctors you can do that by clicking on keyframes and here's all of your keyframes we're not gonna be doing that today though we're just gonna be messing around with the Scopes alright so like I said you want to do your color correcting before you do your color grading and there's an order of operations that I like to use that kind of keeps things nice and easy nice and straightforward I'm gonna show you how to do that right now the first thing that we're gonna do is adjust our luminance you can see that this video clip is very flat it is raw footage like I said so it's very flat no contrast very little saturation and we need to do a lot of work with this the first thing that we're gonna do since we are only touching luminance is we're gonna come over to our waveform we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna click the adjustments for the waveform we're gonna change the waveform from RGB to Y so that way we're not seeing any of the colors we're only seeing our luminance next thing we're gonna do is come up to our nodes and we want to label our nodes so we know what we're doing so let's go ahead and right-click on that I hit node label and hit luminance and what we're gonna do is we're gonna come down to our color wheels you can also do this in curves but I like doing it in color wheels and if we look at our color wheels you can see there's a couple things going on first let's talk about lift gamma and gain lift basically refers to your shadows gammas your mid-tones gain are your highlights and then offset kind of creates an overall adjustment across your lift gamma and gain now you'll also see that we've got our color adjustments where we can change the color of our shadows our mid-tones and our highlights or put an overall cast over our image and I'm gonna just for an example show you because I want to show you that the farther you push these outs the more saturated your image is going to be with that color so if we take a look at offset we kind of just go ahead and drag that towards red and we're just gonna push it out and you can see the farther I push it out the more saturated that red gets and then if you go too far and you just need to reset and start over go ahead and double click and that'll reset everything below your color adjustments you have your master wheels and these all deal with the luminance of your lift your gamma and your game below that you'll see the values of your luminance your Reds your greens your blues and all of that stuff and then below that you'll see things like contrast pivot saturation hue luminance mix and then if you click on the number 2 you've got some more tools like temperature tent mid-tone details color boost shadows that kind of stuff so like I said the first thing that we're gonna do is adjust the luminance of this image and if I come over to my scopes you can see that it's a very bright image we actually have our whites or clipping a little bit and our blacks are way way up there so we need to change that a little bit what we're gonna do is we're gonna come over to our master wheels we're gonna do the gain first we're gonna go ahead and drag that down and you can either click and drag which is what I'm gonna do or if you want some more detailed movements you can just hover your mouse over the wheel and you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse to go up and down and since I know this is a very bright video clip and I know that we actually have some things that are pure white what I want to do is I want to make sure that my bright spots are just below that 10:23 line and then we're gonna adjust our shadows which I want to keep above the zero I'm probably gonna drag it down to where they are just touching that line above the zero so let's come over here to lift we'll go ahead and drag that down and that looks good right about there and now if you actually look at the scope you can see that I actually dragged my highlights down a little bit when I dragged my shadows down so I want to come back to the gain and I'm gonna readjust that just a little bit and now luminance is looking pretty good so we'll go ahead and we'll hit alt s and add a new serial node and this one we're gonna label saturation we're actually gonna want to go ahead and go to our vector scope and the cool thing about the vector scope not only can you measure your skin tones by making sure that they're along this line but you can also measure your saturation and I kind of want to keep like a little bit of a barrier like imagine that there's a fence where all of these boxes are and it's just going around and when I push my colors out when I add saturation I don't want those colors to go outside of that fence now I'm gonna come over here below my wheels and I'm going to hit saturation and there's two things you can do you can either click over the number and you can drag it left or right or you can just click on the number and you can type in a value and since this is log footage I typically find that doing 75 is pretty good now you can see we've got a nice bit of saturation here but if we look at our scope we can see that we've got some red that is really sticking out there where you are gonna fix that little bit later for now saturation is done so we're gonna go ahead and hit alt s again to add another node let's go ahead and right click hit node label and this is gonna be color balance and this is where we actually balance our colors this is where we make sure our whites are white and our blacks are black and in order to do that we want to do a couple things first we want to change from our vector scope to our parade because our parade is going to show us the balance that we have between the reds the greens and the blues the next thing I want to do is come to the color menu and I want to right click and want to hit show picker RGB value because now when I scroll over when I run my mouse over the image I can actually see the RGB values of whatever I put my mouse on all right now what we're gonna do is we're gonna mess with the whites and the blacks we're gonna see if everything's balanced and if I come over here to the snow we can see see red 246 green 243 and blue 242 that actually looks pretty good so we're gonna leave our snow alone for now and now what we want to do is come over let's find something that is dark we're gonna come down here and we have 16 15 and 11 that's pretty good let's come over here to another dark spot 40 30 420 Blue is a little bit low I feel like I can drag yeah I can drag the Blues up a little bit so what I want to do is come over to the primary's bars and I'm going to adjust the blue by putting my mouse over the blue and the lifts and I'm gonna use my middle scroll wheel just to inch that up a little bit to come over here and recheck that 38 36 30 that looks pretty good it's within a couple of points and now we've got a nice color balanced image all right the next thing that I want to do is I'm gonna hit alt s and add a new node and we're gonna label this one look and this is where if we want we can go ahead and we can add a more creative look I'm gonna do a really simple one here and I'm gonna do it using the prime Aries wheels let's go ahead and go back to the wheels and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use the mid-tones to create that kind of a cyan cast over everything because well it's winter and I want everything to be colder so I'm gonna go ahead I'm actually gonna drag the Gama towards blue and I can push that out if I want because we can adjust it later now you can see there's a teal cast over the entire image but the blacks and the white still look pretty black and white it did they did get affected a little bit though so we're actually gonna counteract by adding a little bit of orange into the shadows and into the highlights and you'll see that it kind of looks like we're back to having a balanced image but if we actually go and we make sure our that our look node is selected and we hit control D you can see there actually has been a good amount of change done to this image now that is looking a little bit warm for a wintry scene so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come down here and I'm gonna go to temperature and I'm just gonna cool that down a little bit and that looks pretty good once again hit control D to deactivate that node and see where we came from and then if you want to see everything that we've done so far you can go ahead and hit alt D and that will disable all of your nodes so you can see everything that you've done so far alright now it's time to mess with the contrast a little bit let's go ahead and hit alt s to add another node you're gonna right-click node label contrast hit enter let's go back over to our waveform and we're just gonna go back to number one over here below the wheels we're gonna find the contrast we're gonna click and we're gonna drag until it looks how we want it to look and I actually like that a lot and then one thing that a lot of people do just to get a more realistic look and it's something I'm gonna do right now is desaturate the shadows which I'm gonna by hitting alt s to add a new node I'm gonna go ahead and hit node label again I'm gonna call this LVS luma versus saturation hit enter I'm gonna come back down to my curves I'm gonna go to my lumina versus saturation curve and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click all the way on the left of this curve and I'm gonna drag it all the way down and you'll see this got very very D saturated and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click in the middle and I'm gonna drag it up to that center line and then just to make sure that that snow is nice and white let's go ahead and add another marker here towards the right side of the curve and then we can drag the far right down and take some of the saturation out of the snow let's come back over to the contrast I'm gonna go ahead and hit alt s so we add a node between contrast and luma versus saturation now if we go over to mid-tone details what this is gonna do is it's gonna add contrast just to the parts of our footage that have detail let's go ahead and you can see some of the detail and the snow is coming out which is really nice and from there you can do things like add a vignette and all that stuff we're not gonna get into that right now for now this is actually looking really really good I'm impressed now another thing that you can do if we click on this clip with the helicopters which is still log still very desaturate and very flat let's say I wanted to make this clip look like the other clip what I can do is I can go ahead and I can right click on the clip that I already graded and I can hit apply grade and now you can see that the clip is already pretty much done and that I can go ahead and I can maybe add another serial node I can actually go back to my luminance and I can go back to my custom curves and I can drag my highlights down just a little bit so I can get more of that sky in there and drag the shadows down a little bit maybe bump up those mid-tones and that looks pretty good to me and those are the basics of color grading but let's say you don't want to mess with all that let's say you're in a rush and you're trying to just get everything done quickly you want your footage to look decent it doesn't have to look perfect and all that stuff what you can do let's go ahead and click on this third clip of the people getting into this ski lift you can see it's still very flat no contrasts no saturation and all we're gonna do is make sure this first note is selected and we're gonna hit C now you can see that DaVinci Resolve basically decided how this clip should look and from there you can add nodes and you can put your color cast on there if you want go ahead and add some blue to the gamma and go ahead and add some red to the lift some red to the gain maybe mess with that contrast just a little bit more click over to to go ahead and up those mid-tone details a little bit come back to our grade go ahead and drop that temperature down and it's not perfect but it'll do in a pinch now like I said before color correcting color grading is a great way to make your footage look more cinematic if you want to call it that if you would like some other tips on how to do that make sure you watch this video right here and if you enjoyed this video and you want to learn more about video editing camera gear and how to make better videos make sure you subscribe to my channel any of that bell so you don't miss anything thanks for watching thanks for hanging out and I'll see you in the next video go watch it now [Music]

Channel: Jay Lippman

Views: 86,964

Keywords: davinci resolve 16 color grading for beginners, davinci resolve 16 color grading, davinci resolve 16 color grading tutorial, davinci resolve 16 color grading workflow, davinci resolve 16 color page, davinci resolve 16, davinci resolve 16 tutorial, color grading, davinci resolve, davinci resolve color grading, davinci resolve color grading tutorial, resolve color grading, davinci tutorial, video editing

Id: AENIL4N7dDI

Length: 19min 40sec (1180 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 30 2019