Davinci Resolve: Create Better Contrast, Part 1

nearly everything we do in color grading can be thought of as a form of contrast manipulation to better understand this let's check our definition of the word contrast we most often use this term to refer to altering the distance between the darkest and the brightest portions of our image but a better more inclusive definition would be altering the distance between any two unique components of our image now we know that we can target these components based on their tonal value such as shadows and highlights but they can also be targeted based on their color or their spatial value for example saturating only our reds and in doing so creating greater contrast with the other colors in our image or darkening the edges of our frame and thereby creating greater contrast between the edges and the center so if we think of the entirety of the grading process as a series of these various types of contrast manipulations it's easy to understand that we should be paying close attention to the form they take and their ultimate effect on our image in short we need to create better contrast in this series i'm going to walk you through three key types of contrast manipulation and the tools davinci resolve has to offer for each now one of the best things about resolve is that it offers multiple methods for accomplishing nearly any task but until we understand the way these tools differ and the way they overlap we're leaving money on the table in terms of creating the ideal contrast for our images so let's dive into the first and maybe most important form of contrast manipulation tonal adjustment so let's take a look at some different ways we can think about and approach tonal contrast here in resolve now before i dive in i should mention that i'm working in a log space with a downstream transform happening here at my timeline level and that's going to have a huge impact on the behavior of all the tools that we're going to be looking at today now i know you guys have been asking about a full tutorial on color management and aces and we're going to do one soon but in the meanwhile just know that for these concepts to work and to get the best out of your grades in general you should be working in some sort of log space with a downstream transform to your display space so with that said let's dive right in and start by talking about the simplest possible operation we can perform to affect the tonality of our image and that's our offset wheel so to get a better understanding of the way this tool works i'm going to temporarily turn my image into a linear grayscale ramp and i'm going to go to the timeline section of my node graph and turn off this output transform we were just looking at so that we can look at our image in terms of its journey from pure black up to pure white and let's create a new serial node and just look at the behavior of the offset wheel as i go up or down so everything is moving in a single piece right no piece is moving faster than another and no piece is being left behind and because of this offset technically isn't a contrast adjustment because we're not moving any two points closer together or further apart we're simply moving the entire image upward or downward and this also means that offset is an analog for a concept that we're all too quick to overlook in color grading and that's exposure so let's get a look at how this works practically i'm going to reset these nodes here i'm going to turn my output transform back on and i want to have a look at shot number two here and see what we can do using our offset wheel so hopefully we can all agree on what we need to do with this image to get it into a more balanced state we might verbalize it in different ways we might say oh the highlights are too hot or we might say we need to lower the contrast or we might say the exposure simply needs to come down and that's the concept that i want to tackle my initial adjustments using so let's go to our offset wheel and i'm just going to pull it to the left here until i feel like i've got a more healthy kind of middle exposure somewhere like this let's go full screen and go off and then on and look at where we've landed so just by making this ultra simple single adjustment i've gotten my image a good portion of the way toward where it needs to go in order to be balanced so this is a great example of using offset as the foundational aspect of your approach to tackling tonal contrast it's always where you want to begin when you're evaluating an image is hey where's the exposure right now is it perfect right out of the box or do i need to adjust it up or down a little bit or in this case quite a bit to get it where it needs to be in terms of that ideal foundation this is going to make it much easier to make subsequent assessments and adjustments to the tonal contrast of your image now let's go to shot number three where we're going to see something slightly different if i evaluate this image as it's come in i actually really like where the exposure is and i don't think it needs to move at all however my highlights do feel a little bit hot i feel like i do have a little too much contrast specifically on the high end the shadows feel great lots of texture lots of detail there but the highlights are a little spicy so this is a situation in which i would break out my gain wheel here and once again to understand the behavior of the gain wheel i'm going to turn this image into a linear ramp turn off my output transform and let's look at how this wheel behaves so you can see when i move to the left i am decreasing the distance between the brightest and the darkest portion of my image without actually affecting this darkest point down here i'm only moving that white point and same thing if i go to the right i am increasing that distance between pure black and my brightest point here so gain is a contrast adjustment which affects only the very top of the image and pivots around the very bottom of the image now let's work with this tool in a practical context i'm going to turn my output transform back on and let's grab this gain wheel and just lower things down a touch we're not going to need much let's go full screen and turn this off and then on so i've made a good contrast adjustment here that's brought in some of those peak highlights without really affecting the rest of the image and now let's go to shot number four where we're going to explore a related but different issue in this case the contrast of the image feels a little bit heavy in the bottom i feel like the highlights are right where they belong but i want to open up the bottom of things just a little bit and to do that i'm going to use my lift once again let's get a feel for what lift does to an image before we use it practically anybody want to take a guess at what we're going to see when i turn this wheel to the left or right here on the waveform that's right we're going to see things either go up or down on the bottom lift is the exact opposite of gain where with gain we are moving the top and pivoting around zero with lift we are moving the bottom and pivoting around one so lift is a way of targeting the bottom of the image and if we reset these notes turn our output transform back on and then turn our lift to the right i'm going to be able to open things up and see a bit more into my deepest shadows in this image however i've now walked into a scenario that is going to be more common than one in which a single wheel is going to do everything that you need it to i like what i've done in terms of opening up those shadows but as a byproduct of this adjustment i've kind of thinned out the image a little bit it feels a little bit thinner and less dense than it did a moment ago so i'm going to need to compensate for that a bit by going to my gain wheel and dropping it down like so and if we go full screen and look at the net of this i'm now closer to where i want to be in terms of softening out that contrast although i actually want to go even further with dropping this gain down like so so i now feel like i'm getting what i wanted out of the shadows without thinning things out or compromising in other areas of the image now for me this is a scenario once i'm having to adjust more than one of these wheels here where i would consider instead of targeting things with lift and gain using my contrast knob and let's once again look at a ramp and explore why i might want to do that so i'm going to turn this image into a ramp disable my output transform and let's take a look at the way the contrast knob is affecting this signal it is doing exactly what i just described in that we are affecting the lift and the gain simultaneously in our image and what's even cooler is i can affect how much i'm affecting the bottom versus the top by adjusting my pivot over here to the right so if i go over to the right or over to the left i'm going to be affecting more of the shadows or more of the highlights depending on where i move this slider and this can be a really great intuitive way of adding or removing contrast from the image when you're not so sure that it only needs to come from the lift or only needs to come from the gain and you simply know you need more or less overall contrast and let's see how this works practically i'm going to delete these notes turn my output transform back on and i'm simply going to say hey i want to pull some contrast out of this image so i'm going to do that like so and then adjust my pivot until i feel like i'm pulling the right amount of contrast out of the right tonal regions of the image so if i go off and then on here i have a similar result to what i had a moment ago with my lift and gain but i'm able to get it by just making a generalized contrast adjustment and then sweetening that so that it's borrowing from the appropriate portions of my tonal range and now there's one more concept that i want to explore with my contrast pivot here on shot number five so here is a shot where i know i simply want to add some contrast in again i'm not so convicted that it has to be only left or it has to be only gain i feel like it's going to be some combination of the two and how much of each i'm not quite sure i really just want to visually assess that as i'm making that adjustment so i'm going to add contrast using the slider here and then i'm just going to simply try to sweeten it using my pivot knob over here until i'm getting the desired result maybe back off that contrast a little bit and i think that's a really healthy adjustment and adding some nice snap to this image now in scenarios like this where you are actively adding contrast into the image there's another little hack that we can employ that is going to make sure that we preserve as much detail in our image as possible so let's once again do our ramp trick turn off our output transform and let's look at the way that contrast being added in a positive direction affects this waveform so you can see i'm simultaneously dropping my lift and stretching my gain effectively when i add contrast and you can also see that as would happen with those tools i've got some portions of my tonal region that are now spilling through the floor and out the top of the image now if i want to avoid that there's a trick that we can use that i'm going to show you now i'm going to go to my project settings under my file menu and i'm going to go to my general options here and i'm going to turn on my use s curve for contrast checkbox here now i want you to pay attention to what happens to my signal here when i hit save i've turned that linear clipping contrast that we were just looking at into a rolling s-curve form of contrast so that i'm perceptually getting about the same level of contrast but i'm not clipping out shadow or highlight detail because there's now what's called a knee and a shoulder built into my contrast curve so that's a great setting to leave on whenever you are adding positive contrast in using your contrast knob it's a great insurance policy to take out that ensures that as you add contrast and snap you're not clipping out anything that you don't need to from your image so that's a great overview of to me the fundamental tools that i use to manipulate tonal contrast inside resolve there are definitely others that we haven't covered today we could look at our log wheels over here we could look at our custom curves or for those of us who've already upgraded to resolve 17 we could explore the brand new hdr zones palette over here however i can tell you that as a working colorist 95 of the tonal contrast adjustments that i make when i'm grading come from either lift gain offset or contrast and pivot and the rest of those tools are really for outlier situations where you need to control a narrow tunnel region or remedy a very specific problem but you can go a long way using these tools and what's more you're better off focusing on a smaller set of tools and really mastering them and getting a clear understanding of how they behave under the hood so i hope this gives you guys a simple and practical foundation for thinking about tonal contrast inside resolve and creating better contrast in your grades okay so we've now got a much better grasp of the tools available within resolve for manipulating tonal contrast with all these different options available it's tempting to use a bit of each thinking that we're adding flavor to our dish when most of the time we're just muddying up the flavor that's already there but if we can instead think of each of these tools as serving the same basic function we can be more judicious in selecting the ones that best fit our needs and achieve our desired result more precisely and more quickly so i'm going to challenge you guys in your next grades to pick out just one or two of the tools we discussed today and use them on every single shot exclusively it's gonna feel strange at first but stick with it and let me know how it goes we'll see you back here for part two of this series where we're gonna dive into creating color contrast

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 10,056

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Id: dWAaO1cpOh4

Length: 14min 18sec (858 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021