DaVinci Resolve Power Windows - The Secret to Crafting Dynamic Scenes

[Music] hey what's up my name is Evan Schneider and welcome back to another video power windows in DaVinci Resolve can be used for a lot of things but the main purpose of using a power window is to make a localized adjustment to a specific area of the image as humans we generally gravitate to looking at things with higher contrast higher saturation or higher brightness and so we can use that to our advantage when we color grade making areas of Interest either brighter more contrasty more saturated and making areas of less interest darker less saturated or less noticeable in the image if you have a photography background you can liken this process to dodging and burning while you're developing the image or actually blocking the light or adding light to draw attention and honestly once you get a feel for how to direct the viewer's attention it kind of feels like a superpower and I think over time it'll become a main part of your workflow so before we get into it I want to mention the the word cinematic and when we talk about something looking cinematic I think what we really mean is that we want it to look intentional and you can feel that in the emotion that it portrays in how it makes you feel how it looks and how it contributes to the overall story so as we're making these adjustments we want to be thinking not only as a colorist but also as a director as a cinematographer and as a viewer of the final project in my general color grading workflow I usually spend about 20 to 30 percent of the time actually crafting the image using power windows and as I'm going through the timeline I'm paying attention to where my own eye is looking when I go to a shot what am I looking at am I looking at the subject or the main purpose of the shot or am I looking at something in the background that is taking my attention away from the main subject of the shot by doing this we are improving the overall quality of the image and we're making the project easier to watch more pleasing to the eye and more engaging for the viewer all right so here in DaVinci Resolve we've got three clips that we're working with today first clip is kind of a medium wide portrait shot the next slip is a very wide mountain landscape shot with a subject walking in the foreground and then finally we have a beautiful food shot that looks like it was shot for chef's table so if you want to work with power windows you're going to click on this palette right here this is the window palette and you're going to see that you have all these different options for the type of window that you want to draw so you have a square window or you have a circle window you also have a polygon window and then you can use the curve tool to actually draw your own window if you want and then finally you have a gradient window where you can actually just adjust the this is kind of the direction and then this is the fall off so I'm going to reset that node over here you see that if we create say a circle window now we have all of these different transform and softness controls for those windows so I prefer directly grabbing the actual controls on the viewer and moving it around but if you want to you can also use these tools to adjust the size aspect pan until rotate and opacity of the tool and then you can also adjust the softness using this down here now right off the bat I want to say that with the window tools the simpler the better but if you are wanting to say affect her face instead of drawing a curve around her face with multiple points I would recommend actually using a circle window and this is because if you ever have to adjust the curve window you're going to be clicking every single point making all these fine adjustments and wasting your time when you probably would have been better off using a circle or a linear window instead so in general just keep it simple with Windows the simpler the better because you're going to save yourself a ton of work in the long run another cool thing you can do is that say you're making a lot of Windows on someone's face you can actually make a power window and then you can actually go to this menu here and save as a new preset and I can just call this face I can go to face and just click that now I have that window and you're good to go there so for this first shot we're going to be working in just basic DaVinci y RGB Rec 709 gamma 2.4 so I'm just going to pull up a preset node tree that I made for working in DaVinci y RGB and so the first note here is just a noise reduction node I like to keep a free node at the beginning for any noise reduction next we're going to do our primary adjustments so this includes things like overall exposure white balance contrast saturation adjustments next we have these three nodes in parallel which are our power window nodes the reason that we want these nodes to be in parallel is because we don't want these adjustments to compete with each other in the image it basically means that it's using this primary node as a source and then applying all three in parallel with each other and then mixing them at the end this basically just ensures that we're going to have a much cleaner grade we're going to have a much cleaner power window adjustment next we have our CST so this would be if we're working with log footage next we have a node for the look if we want to make any stylized adjustments then we have an adjustment node finally a vignette node at the very end where we can make a vignette so right off the bat I'm going to go to my primary node and I'm just going to make some simple adjustments to my offset and I'm just going to bring down the exposure a bit since this is a Rec 709 clip I'm going to bring down my gain and I just want to create a bit more of a pleasing image I feel like it was a little bit bright and then I'm going to adjust my offset let's bring up the vector scope I kind of want there to be a little bit more color contrast in this shot and so I'm going to move my offset down so that we're getting some teal in the shadows and some warm skin and then I'm just going to boost saturation a little bit and make sure the skin tones are lining up and that looks pretty good so our primary adjustment this is before and this is after so we've made it a bit darker and we've increased the color contrast in the shot so now we get to use power windows and overall there's a lot of stuff happening in the background and I really just want the viewer to focus on the face right off the bat a common workflow or style that colorists use is inside outside nodes so our node number one for our power window is going to be an outside node so I'm going to bring down the stuff in the background the outside and then for node number two I'm going to adjust the stuff on the inside so I'll bring up her face increase the Shadows a bit add some fill light and that way we're directing the viewers attention to a brighter portion of the image which is her face and then taking away distracting parts of the image in the background so let's create the first power window I'm going to create a Circle power window I'm just going to make it really big and really soft and we're going to center it kind of over her face and that's pretty good and for this one we're going to click this button which is basically inverting the window so if you click on this button up here the highlight button you can see we're only affecting the areas of the image that are um not grayed out so inside the power window we are not affecting and then outside we are if I click this button again it basically does the opposite so inside the power window is what we're affecting and outside we're not affecting so we want to only affect the outside of the image so we're going to make the power window really nice and soft we want these adjustments to be the least noticeable as possible and then I'm going to turn off my highlight and I'm going to turn off the power window but I'm still on the Node because I think it's easier to adjust the image without the overlays happening and so now I'm just going to bring down my gain and as I do that you can see the background is just totally going away um so basically we want to find a balance um where it looks natural um but we want to take away the brightness of those areas of the image on the side I'm going to click back on my power window and I might I want the top to get a little bit darker too so let's do this and we're just going to adjust it until I feel like we're getting a pleasing looking image so this is before this is after so we've kind of just brought down the edges and we're kind of creating a really big vignette on the image we're going to go to node number two and I'm just going to create another power window and this one is going to be for her face so we're just going to size it down rotate it a bit and then we're going to make it nice and soft make it a little bit smaller we want to make sure we're not affecting the outside of her face and oftentimes you don't want your power windows to be too noticeable like say for instance we do something like that now we can really see like the edge of the power window so you want to really try to hide the edges and make sure it's the least noticeable as possible let's try that and for this one what we're going to do is we're just going to bring up the gamma which is basically acting as kind of like a fill light for her face and then we'll bring up the saturation a tiny bit and then we might even decrease the mid-tone detail a little bit to make it a little bit more flattering if we zoom in here you can see this is before and this is after the next thing I might do is just bring up the Shadows so that we can see her eyes a little bit more this is before and after so it's looking really pleasing her skin is looking nice and soft and we can see more of her eyes and more detail in her face and now if we go back and we just turn these on and off we can see this is before and this is after and you can just feel your eyes go straight into the middle of the image first thing you look at is her face now whereas before you're just kind of looking at the whole scene in context and now we're kind of almost like shining a spotlight on her face I feel like the face node is a little strong so we can go back to our power window and we can decrease the opacity a little bit so we could set it to like 75 or something and go back here before and after and then maybe just increase the saturation to like 58 or something so this is before and this is after and so now we can see there's a huge difference the last thing that you can do because this is a shot that moves is we can track the face window and so we're going to go to our tracker and if you just hit this track forward and reverse button it'll automatically track it to her face and now if we play it back we can see that the window is perfectly on her face we don't need to track the large window because it's just kind of an overall exposure adjustment on the sides but now you can see this image is looking a lot more engaging and we're directing the viewer's eyes to go straight to her face not focus on the background or anything else so for this next example since it was shot in log this was shot on the s1h Panasonic in v-log I figured we could use a colored managed workflow for this and see what it looks like so I'm going to go back to my project settings and we're going to switch to DaVinci y RGB color managed we're going to work in HDR DaVinci wide gamma intermediate and we're going to Output Rec 709 gamma 2.4 we hit save and I've already tagged this clip the input color space as Panasonic V gamut v-log so we're all good there so now on this first node I'm just going to do some basic adjustments and so now since we're working in color managed on a log clip we're going to use our offset to bring down the exposure and I feel like this clip is also a little bit warm so I'm just going to adjust the offset to look a little bit more realistic somewhere around there so this is before and this is after maybe bring it down a little bit more go back to our parade Scopes make sure we're good bring down the gain a tiny bit so we can go ahead and call this node primary and now we can kind of create our game plan for what we want to do to this image using power windows and so I'm just going to create a new serial node and then I'm going to create a new parallel node and then let's do one more parallel node and we're going to label these nodes grass subject overall and then I'm just going to create a next node we're going to call this look and then we're going to create one more call it vignette so my two goals for this clip is one I want it to look a lot more Dynamic and dramatic and two I want to direct the viewers attention to kind of this area of the image with the subject in the red jacket and then this beautiful mountain in the background first thing I'm going to do is go to the grass I'm going to open my window palette and I'm going to use the gradient tool and I'm basically going to just darken this grassy area of the image and the way I want to do that is to just put this gradient power window down here and kind of adjust it so that it's darkening in this area and then this is the fall off of where it's making that adjustment kind of like there's a shadow going across the entire bottom of this Ridge right here next I'm going to go to my gain and I'm just going to bring down the gain of this area and I don't want to bring it down too far because I don't want to start clipping these Shadows but I want it to feel nice and soft so this is before and this is after so I've kind of just taken the attention away from the bottom and I'm pushing the viewer's attention to these areas of the image the next thing I want to do is go to my subject and I'm just going to create a really soft power window around this area where I'm just going to bring up the light a little bit bring up the exposure so with that power window there I'm just going to go to my gamma we're just going to make it just a tiny bit brighter with just a tiny bit more contrast so that's before and that's after so it's kind of like shining a spotlight onto that portion of the image we can always adjust these later once we finish with all the power window adjustments next I'm going to go to My overall and I'm just going to make a really big overall sweeping adjustment and this is going to be an outside power window and I just really want to darken everything around here and just really direct the attention to this area of the image so with this one I'm just going to bring down the gain and until it gets to a point where still feels natural but isn't overly crazy and maybe make it a little bit softer and then over here let's make this bring this down a little bit and then let's see what we have here so I'm going to turn these off that's before and that's after before and after so instantly you can see before your eye is kind of searching it's kind of wandering it's like oh look at those mountains oh there's a person there oh that looks really nice in the background oh the sky looks really nice but after your eye just goes straight to this area it sees a person walking for scale and then you go instantly to these beautiful peaks in the background and you're not really looking at these other areas of the image for our look node I feel like I kind of just want this to feel a little more dramatic in the color separation Spectrum so I'm just going to bring up the Hue and I'm going to turn this grass kind of like orangey and then I'm going to make the sky a little bit more teal and then I'm going to decrease the saturation of the Blues in the sky so I'm just going to bring those down quite a bit and then next I just want the overall scene to have a bit more contrast so we're going to increase the contrast and the pivot I just want this to look like really dramatic and then I'm going to create another node let's just call this adjustment and in the adjustment node I'm just going to bring down saturation a little bit and then finally in the vignette node let's create another power window and we're just going to scale it up to be kind of the size of the image and I'm inverting it and I'm just going to bring down the highlights of the vignette as well so that's before and after all right so we just did a lot there we basically brought down the grass in the foreground we brightened the subject a little bit we brought down the overall exposure in the other parts of the image and then next we created a look we adjusted it and added a vignette so without any of these extra adjustments with just our primary adjustment let's see what it looked like before and then this is what it looks like after and if we want this scene to look dramatic really intense really beautiful this is the exact look that we want to go for this feels just like a beautiful day just walking through the mountains this feels like an intense journey across a mountain range if we look at just our power window adjustments this is before with the overall look and this is after from here we can make some slight adjustments like say I want this to be a little bit brighter maybe it's a little bit too intense so I can bring this down a little bit um maybe the overall needs to be a little bit softer we could even add another parallel node and just make this peak look really insane so we could even like increase the contrast on this peak and just make it look a lot more like menacing uh let's bring that down we just make this like really really soft so that's before and that's after so we're just making it look like a lot more intense so now this is before and this is after and you can go as far as you want with these looks um you know there's no limit to how many parallel nodes you can make doing exposure adjustments you just have to remember how much time you have and you know you don't want to go overboard but it really depends on the subject of the piece and what you're working with so if we want to look at our image completely before this is our converted Rec 709 image since we're working in color managed mode and then this is the after doing all the adjustments the next thing that we would just need to do is make any tracking adjustments so we definitely want to track this window onto the top of this mountain and it's not moving a whole lot but it's just good to make sure that it doesn't move and then our window on our subject I think it's okay because it's actually moving with the subject our grass is okay because we're not moving up or down at all but if we wanted to track that we totally could so we can just track forward and then we'll track in Reverse now we can make sure that it really does look like a shadow on the hill because it doesn't move at all and our overall we're good to go there as well so now we have our clip and our attention goes directly to the areas of the image that we really want the viewer to care about and we still have the context of the rest of the image but we've created a lot more pleasing a lot more dramatic and a lot more engaging looking of an image using power windows finally for this last example and for this one I'm just going to drag on the color managed workflow node tree so I'm going to hit apply grade now we have a pre-built node tree that we can work with so with our primary adjustment we're just going to make sure it looks okay I think it's a little bit warm so I'm going to bring down the color temperature a little bit and then I'm going to decrease the saturation a tiny bit so that's before and that's after maybe make it a little bit warmer so my basic idea with this shot is that I want it to feel a lot more dramatic and I don't want viewers to look at anything but the middle of the plate so I'm looking to make this area look extremely pleasing very contrasty very saturated very um very enticing and then I just want to direct viewers attention away from anything that isn't this plate so in this first node I'm going to make another outside power window so we'll invert that there and then we're going to make it nice and soft and let's just go ahead and bring down our gain to see what we're working with here make it a little bit bigger to match the plate and then so this is before and that's after might be able to go a little bit more before and after and then in our node two we're going to make another Circle power window and I'm just going to make it like the size of this bowl so I really only want it to affect this bowl and I almost want it to feel like a spotlight is coming down so this is kind of a situation where like the DP or you know they may not have had time to really adjust the lighting in this shot because they were working a kitchen or it was fast paced or they didn't have the time or the budget you know there's a bunch of different reasons but now we can actually relight this make it look a little bit more pleasing and a little bit more engaging so before we do anything to this I just want to track it to make sure that it works that's looking pretty good so that's perfect so now we have a nice kind of Spotlight in the middle of this plate or Bowl and now we can go ahead and work on the inside of this image so what I really want to do is adjust the contrast of this so I'm just going to work with the contrast and pivot to adjust the exposure of this area a little bit and I want it to feel nice and bright and maybe a little bit more and as we're adjusting the contrast it's also kind of increasing the saturation of this area I might even increase the Shadows a little bit maybe pull pull this down a little bit more we don't want it to be too crazy and we want to be careful about the edges that it doesn't affect those too much might bring up the Shadows a tiny bit more just because I want to see the red I want to see the Shadows here I just want to see a lot of detail in the middle of this image here and so with those two adjustments we've got this is before and this is after and you can just see how like when I turn it off my eyes instantly go to this countertop which is the exact opposite area that I want the viewers to look at in this image when we turn it on it's just kind of it's like relaxing and pleasing to the eye um let me full screen it so this is before and this is after before and after so instantly when you look at this your eye goes straight to the middle you're not even looking at the edges anymore and if you wanted to make this even more dramatic you could even bring down the edges even more and maybe make an overall adjustment on this one where we're kind of just making it even softer and let's bring it down even more so now we're kind of you know directing the viewers attention even more these are kind of like broad brush Strokes that we can use um to direct the attention even more and so that's looking pretty amazing and now in this node we could apply an overall look um so you know you can use anything you want for that you can use a Lut I'm going to go to my Spectra Lut pack so we've used my Fairmont Lut from the spectral Lut pack we decreased it to 0.2 and then I've made just a simple gamma adjustment to kind of offset what the Lut is doing so this Lut is basically just creating a little bit more color contrast it's making the Shadows a little bit more blue and the highlights a little bit warmer just making the food pop a little bit more in the image I'm going to leave the vignette node alone because we've kind of created it using these but let's see what we did to this image so still using the primary adjustments this is before and this is after before and after and then with just the power window adjustments this is before and this is after before and after so now as you look at this image you can see it's way more Dynamic we can see a lot more detail in the food and our eye is going exactly where we want the viewer to look we're not looking at any of the edges of the frame we're looking directly at the middle of the frame we've done all this using power windows another another thing I wanted to mention is that if you're making a vignette and you want to save some time and you don't care about adjusting it on a clip-by-clip basis you can always just copy the vignette from here and we'll just delete that node and you can go to your timeline level create a new node on your timeline level and just paste the vignette onto that and that way no matter where you go on your timeline the vignette is going to be applied across the whole thing the downside is that you don't have the flexibility to adjust the vignette on a perklet basis so if it's feeling a little bit too strong on One Clip but needs a little more strength on another you lose that ability to adjust the vignette so you kind of have to find a happy medium but it's a lot easier and it's a lot faster it's typically what I do for most projects alright so I hope that video was helpful honestly I really hope that you guys experiment with using power windows it's an incredible tool and once I finally felt like I was getting the hang of it I couldn't stop using power windows and honestly I devoted a lot more time in my color grade to making these types of adjustments over spending time on the overall look or balancing shots I kind of wanted to get through those faster and then move on to the more interesting part which is directing the viewers attention if you have any questions feel free to leave them in the comments I try to respond to as many as possible and I also sell Luts and video presets on my website called lutco you can check those out in the video description thanks so much for watching I'll see you in the next one thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Evan Schneider

Views: 193,492

Keywords: davinci resolve power windows, power windows, davinci resolve, davinci resolve tutorial, how to relight a scene, davinci resolve 18, davinci resolve relight a scene, davinci resolve power windows tracking, davinci resolve power window tracking, davinci resolve power window keyframing, davinci resolve power window not working, davinci resolve power window not tracking, davinci resolve power window, power window, color grading tutorial, evan schneider

Id: BqsKAV9aZss

Length: 30min 24sec (1824 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 27 2023