DaVinci Resolve Color Grading Tips That Make Life Easier

so every now and again when I'm just sitting there editing a video I'll randomly think of a tip that I've picked up over the years and be like you know that might be a cool thing to share in a video so that's exactly what we're doing in this one we're going to be talking about a few completely random quick fire tips that I've picked up from various places that apply to The DaVinci Resolve color page and I just want to quickly mention I'm not like a professional colorist by any means these are just things that I've been doing in my own workflow and they've been working pretty well for me and there's no specific reason behind the order of any of these but I just felt like most of them might end up being pretty useful to a bunch of people so here we are so here we are in the result color page the first tip I want to talk about applies to color grading 8-bit footage you might occasionally find yourself in a situation where you want to change the Hue saturation or luminance of a color of something in your frame and you've probably tried doing what the pros do by going to the eyedropper at the bottom bottom and qualifying the color the issue is 8-bit footage doesn't have enough information for you to be able to get a clean color key in most situations so if you want to avoid getting weird artifacts and blocking I recommend using the curves panel instead 8-bit footage can handle color changes made with the curves a lot better for example if I want to change the color of the leaves in this image I'll go to the Hue versus Hue curve and then click the colored dots at the bottom for the yellows and the greens because that's where the color of the leaves is sitting then resolve will automatically place the points to isolate the colors on the curve and then when I drag the two middle points for yellow and green around I can dial in the look I want for my leaves this is what it looks like before the changes I made and this is what it looks like after them in this example the leaves cover a huge part of my image so selecting the color by using the buttons under the curve makes sense because it allows me to make a more General change to a wider range of colors if you happen to be working on something that's smaller in frame or has a very specific color it instead of using the colored dots you can just hover over your preview window and use the eyedropper to select that one specific thing that way resolve is going to select a way smaller color range and you can make sure the changes you're making aren't affecting anything else you don't want to touch you can also use this exact same method for changing not just the Hue but saturation and the luminance of stuff in your footage as well a lot of people might try to tell you that 8-bit footage is completely unusable but they're very wrong you can still definitely do a lot with it especially if you know how to approach it sure you might not get the exact same result you would with 10 or 12 or 16-bit footage and using qualifiers but if you adjust your expectations you can pretty much still get most of the way there the next tip I want to talk about is how I personally handle fixing white balance issues when I'm color correcting footage a lot of people instinctively go for the temperature and Tin sliders and while you can probably get a good looking result with them a lot of the time sometimes if you're working with more challenging footage it can be pretty annoying you might be able to get a white balance that looks good overall but maybe your subject's skin tone or the color of something else in your frame doesn't look the way that you wanted it to that's why I prefer using the offset wheel in combination with the vectorscope if you can't see the vector scope you can go to the squiggly lines at the bottom right and enable your Scopes then select Vector scope from the drop down menu now if you look at it you'll see all of these white Speckles they represent the color in your image whatever is closer to the center of the circle is going towards Pure White and the further it goes towards the edges the more color saturation it's going to have when you know this white balancing becomes a lot easier because all you have to do is move all of the colors in a way where they're going to be more evenly distributed relative to the center of the vector scope you do this by grabbing the point in the middle of your offset wheel and dragging it in the opposite direction of where the majority of your colors are currently sitting then you just keep an eye on how your image changes and dial in good looking white balance and at the end you can use the temp and Tin sliders to adjust that last little bit if you need to some people might disagree with me but I personally think that this is the easiest and most intuitive way to color correct your footage you don't have to take my word for it maybe just give it a shot and see how it works for you also here's a bonus tip to add onto this one if you want to be able to see what's on your vector scope a little bit better you can hold down alt and when you hover over it with the mouse you can use the scroll wheel to zoom in or out this should make it a little easier to see what you're doing if you decide to follow my tip about using the offset wheel not really sure what most of you will think about this one but it's actually something that I use way more often than I expected to when I learned it the next tip is a little bit oddly specific but it's something that I couldn't figure out for the longest time and I feel like other people might have to deal with this as well sometimes if you stabilize a clip in the edit page then go to color grade that same clip if you reset any of the color grading nodes it's also going to reset your stabilization if you check in the stabilization panel in the edit tab it says that everything should be fine but it's actually not until you reapply it I have no idea why this happens but the fix is pretty simple you just go to the keyframes section in your color Tab and using the drop down menu you change it from all to color now your color grade shouldn't mess with stabilized clips and you don't have to wonder why that one bit of footage is shaky again when you're sure you fixed it before color grading next up I want to talk about how you can get rid of unwanted Color cast in your darkest and brightest parts of your image sometimes if you're working on a stylized grade having a bit of color to your shadows or highlights is fine but if you're working on something that needs to look very clean this might help to do this you want to go into your color curves Tab and then go to the Luma versus saturation this panel essentially allows you to control the saturation of parts of your image based on how dark or how bright they are now by clicking the two dots at the bottom you can isolate your darkest and brightest parts of your image then you pull down each of the ends and that should take out any unwanted Color cast you might need to move the points that Define where this effect actually starts on the curve because in some cases it might affect other areas that you still want to have a little bit of a color to them this is a trick that I use pretty often and depending on what your footage looks like it can really have a big impact on it for the better next up is one for those of you who like using Luts whether you're using creative Luts or conversion ones sometimes it can get pretty annoying to have to look for the exact one that you need from the Lut Library that's why you can just find it once and click the Little Star at the top of the preview to favorite it then when you right click on a node you can find that lot you always use in the favorites menu for example I've got two Phantom Lots set up exactly like that because I use them as conversion Luts basically all the time this next tip is kind of like the previous one except instead of saving a single lot as a favorite it's doing it with an entire great if you often film videos in the same location with the same lighting setup you can save yourself a ton of time by just turning the color grade you usually use for that scenario into a preset that you can use for every project after you've dialed in the color grade the way you like it on a clip right click on the preview window and click on grab still that basically takes your entire color grade with all of the nodes and settings in it and converts it into a preset then if you take that still from the gallery and drag it into your power grades it now becomes available in every other resolve project now the next time when you make a video you just drag that still from the power grades onto the preview window for the new clip and it's going to apply it exactly as it was before if you need to make any changes they're definitely not going to take you as long as color grading from scratch this is basically what I do for most of my YouTube videos Okay so this entire video was a little bit more chaotic than I would have wanted it to be but as long as at least one of you found any of this information useful I think that's completely fine I just couldn't figure out a better way to share all of these tips so I kind of just decided to get it over with because if I hadn't it would probably annoy me a lot anytime when I thought about one of these tips in the future as always thank you so much for watching this video Until the End it really does mean a lot to me consider sticking around by subscribing and I'll see you in the next one foreign

Channel: George Kamenov

Views: 12,607

Keywords: davinci resolve, davinci resolve tutorial, Resolve color grading tips, better color grading, color grading youtube videos, filmmaking, resolve workflow for youtube, color grading 8 bit footage, film color grading, how to color grade, how to color correct, davinci resolve 18, cinematic footage, cinematic color grading, cinematic video, george kamenov tutorial

Id: XG8kngZnKVg

Length: 8min 30sec (510 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 02 2023