Davinci Resolve: Create Better Contrast, Part 2

as we discussed in part one of this series most of what we do in color grading boils down to some kind of contrast manipulation and remember while we most often think of contrast as manipulating the distance between different tonal regions of our image such as our shadows and our highlights we can also create contrast by targeting and manipulating color or spatial values and with this broader definition in mind it's easy to recognize that contrast manipulation is at the heart of our work as colorists and it plays a huge role in the final image to put it plainly we should all be looking to create better contrast and now that we've looked at tonal adjustments in part one we're ready to explore the concepts and tools that we can use to create color contrast inside davinci resolve so let's explore some ideas and tools for controlling color contrast and just to define our terms where tonal contrast which we discussed in part one is defined as the distance that we create between the different tonal regions of our image such as our shadows and our highlights color contrast is about the distance that we're creating between the various hues in our image and this is a concept that is a lot easier to show than to talk about so let's get right into it and just like we did with tonal contrast we're going to start with the simplest possible and move out to the slightly more complicated tools that we can break out to manipulate our color contrast so we're going to begin by talking about color temperature which is very similar to offset which we discussed in our tonal contrast video it's similar in the sense that it is a uniform adjustment that moves the entire image without actually stretching or separating any components in the image but it is still capable of creating perceptual color contrast just like offset can do on the tonal side so i'm going to grab my temp slider here and by the way i'm in resolve 17 and i'm in a properly set up color managed project which means that this temperature slider is now color space aware now if you're still in resolve 16 this slider is not color space aware and so it is not going to have the proper behavior so i want you to pay attention to what happens when i start to move my temperature slider to the left take a look at my vector scope as well as at my image and you're going to notice that as my signal approaches sort of evenly straddling or bisecting my center bullseye line here my perception of the colorfulness of this image is going to increase so if i park it somewhere around here and i look at before and after i feel perceptually that i have a greater spread of colors there's kind of a sweet spot or a slot that i felt this slider drop into as i was moving to the left i've kind of maxed out my color contrast just with my temperature slider here even though i haven't actually moved any of my hues further away from or closer toward one another perceptually i have created more color contrast and the opposite is true as well if i turn this slider to the right and go further into this warm quadrant here i'm going to start to lose color contrast because now everything is up in this upper left-hand quadrant everything is kind of being shoved into one corner of my color wheel and there's nothing wrong with either of these two extremes or with anything in the middle it's simply an axis that we should be mindful of and be controlling in a manner that's consistent with our goals so again if i wanted to max out my color contrast and get the absolute most that i could out of the image i would go somewhere like this or i could go anywhere in between it simply depends on my creative goals there's no single answer that's right or better than any other it's simply something that we should be aware of and articulating per our creative vision for the project so that's the first piece is our temperature shift it's a single axis uniform shift but it's a very powerful way of creating or reducing color contrast and now let's go on to shot number two and talk about some ways that we can actually reduce our color contrast if we want to this is a shot where before i even begin to make any adjustment if i visually look at the frame or look at the vector scope the distance between my hues at the far end of my signal is pretty dramatic i've got a pretty massive spread of colors that span this cool to warm axis here and i would actually like to tame that in i think i could do with a little bit less color contrast in this frame so we're going to break into our curves for this job and i want to find my hue versus set and if i zoom in on my subject here what i'm really feeling is that this hue that i see on the fill side of her face as well as in various accents here in the background i feel like i could desaturate it and still have an image with plenty of color contrast so i'm going to eyedropper and drag around this region here and i'm going to take the control point that i'm given and i'm going to drop it down and i'm actually going to look at my control points and i'm going to open up this leftmost because as i look at my overlaid histogram here it seems that there's a large spike in saturation which i know is going to correspond to the largest saturations in this kind of cool quadrant here so i want to make sure that those are getting swept up in this operation so i'm going to move this control point over the left a little bit and i'm going to play around with where i parked this control point and let's have a look at what something like that looks like before and after and if i zoom out we can look at the effect on the entire frame i still have plenty of color contrast in this frame i still have a signal that's very healthily straddling my upper left warm quadrant and my lower right cool quadrant but i have significantly desaturated this cooler color and in doing so reduced or tamed in my color contrast we can see it visually here in the frame and you can also see it here in the scope the max distance between warmest color and coolest color has just gotten smaller when i make this adjustment now let's go into shot number three and we're going to continue to play with our curves and look at some of the other options we have available here let's go to our hue versus hue and what i want to do in this image here is create a bit more separation and create a bit more of a split complementary color scheme using the color of my subject's skin versus the color of her hair so i want to kind of distinguish and separate those two hues a bit more and the way we're going to do that is we're going to target her hair which also happens to be close to the color of this kind of accent on the wall here and i'm going to eye dropper that area on the wall and what we want to do now is use this hue versus hue to rotate the hue of this hue upward toward a more primary red and separate it a bit further from the values that i'm getting more in this kind of yellowy vector here on my scope so i'm going to grab this control point and i'm just going to start to nudge things upward like so until we're hitting more toward this kind of pure red vector like so let's go off and then on now that's fairly subtle but you can definitely see it happening and what i've done is i've created more of a split complementary color scheme more of kind of a fork between my skin tone or the color of the wall versus the color of my subject's hair or the color of the accent on the building here so again off and then on i've just created a bit more color contrast a bit more separation there's actually another adjustment that i want to make here to push this idea a bit further those of you who've been watching the channel for a while know that one of my kind of core aesthetics when i'm grading is borrowed from the language of subtractive color and film prints which says that highly saturated colors really cannot be bright they need to be darker and i want to get that feeling and also create even more color contrast by targeting this same color that we've been working with and dropping its luminance so to do that we're going to go to our hue versus loom drop down here and i'm once again going to eye drop her to select the hue that i want to adjust and i'm going to take the control point that i'm given and i'm going to drag it downward like so i'm going to drop the luminance of that particular hue and if i zoom out here we can see that the net has become pretty dramatic i've rotated and separated things out not only on the basis of hue but they also have a distinction in terms of their luminance the luma of the wall versus the luma of the accent are now further separated and as a bonus i've gotten a bit more of a film print kind of subtractive color aesthetic out of the deal so last thing i want to show you guys before we wrap up for today is a brand new tool again exclusive to resolve 17 and that's the color warper here and the reason i want to show you the color warper is because it corresponds to all of the adjustments that we've just made so we just looked at our hue versus sat and then our hue versus hue and our hue versus loom and what's cool about the color warper is that it actually offers us the ability to kind of tactilely manipulate all of these controls in one interface so let's just go through that real quick here if i wanted to target say my reds and i wanted to desaturate my reds the way that we would do with a hue versus set i can grab my axis for red to cyan and grab that red and pull it inward toward my neutral and you can see on my scope as well as in the image that my reds are losing saturation or let's say that i wanted to rotate the hue of my reds i could grab that same control point and go to the right or to the left again you're seeing that in the image as well as in my vectorscope and finally if i wanted to drop my luma like we just did in our hue versus loom i could take that same control point take my luma slider and drag it downward like so now this is by no means an exhaustive look at the color warper but i wanted to give you guys a bit of an introduction to it because for me it's a great sort of one-stop alternative to the adjustments that prior i would always make using these various curves in this section of the resolve interface now i can make them all here in the color warper by manipulating this same wheel and adjusting the control points within it so i hope this gives you guys some new methods to try out when you're wanting to play with color contrast in your grades if you're like me you might find the topic of color contrast to be a bit daunting at first in fact i think one of the reasons that we so often confine our idea of contrast to tonal adjustments is that with this type of contrast we only have to navigate a single axis the journey from pure black to pure white where with color contrast we're stepping into a three-dimensional space where the possibilities can feel a bit overwhelming but as with learning anything new your best assets are going to be curiosity patience and diligence play around with the tools that we discussed today ask questions down below and pretty soon you're going to find yourself creating a whole new type of contrast in your grades we'll see you back here for part three where we're going to wrap up this series by exploring spatial contrast

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 18,562

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Id: mswRIx-zjMI

Length: 11min 46sec (706 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021