Every Hollywood Colorist's Go to Tool in Resolve

what if I tell you that the most powerful tool in resolve is also most accessible and used by every professional but you so in this tutorial we're not going to just unleash the potential of that tool but also I'm going to show you common mistakes that you might be making when using it and guys there's about 51 of you that are not subscribed to the channel so enough with window shopping smash the like button subscribe to the channel and let's jump in so if we look at the definition of the primaries color wheels it says that it affect your brightness and Hue of the image based on specific luminance ranges so what does that mean thank you all right so now we're inside resolve and here's a grayscale image we're going to be focusing on these four little guys right here lift gamma gain offset all right lggo start with our lift and see what it affects on the image so Focus right here and also on the Scopes so if I go down in my left you can clearly see that it is biased toward the bottom right how it's affecting the image so it's really affecting the shadows and then it's lifting the shadows and now if I reset that do the same thing with gamma let's bring it down you can see that it's a lot more gentle and it's anchoring the shadows and the highlights and it's not necessarily messing with that reset that let's try with gain and just like what we saw was happening with lift same is happening with the game see like how it's coming down it's bringing it down and then it's pushing it up okay so all of that is making a lot more sense now why is that important that is extremely important because beginners usually without knowing what each knob is doing they just kind of go in and start doing things but now looking at this you can start making sense to like what exactly part of the image that you're affecting by searching each knob going back here there's one more aspect to it which is our offset so this tool if you look at it at the beginning looks very similar to what gamma is doing but you start focusing on what's happening on our anchors meaning look at the shadows and how they're being lifted well that's not what was happening with gamma right like let's try gamma again and that's not happening the the behavior of this is going to be very different on a footage but I want to show you on a grayscale image so it's like very black and white what happens when we add certain Hue values in a specific part of the image so let's try that now so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go in my lift and I'm gonna pump in tons of magenta so let's park our magenta right here so the image looks like this if I do before and after you can see the dark areas or getting a lot of color Okay so this this is what it looks like so let's go ahead and grab a still so I'm going to right click here and say grab still so we have that here now let's reset that and let's try to do the same thing with our gamma now so I'm gonna try to go up in the same area where we were and if I do before and after we're in the same exact area and if you look at when we pump Magenta in our gamma the results are very different than when we did that with our lift I see so many beginners creating extreme looks and their Shadows are very contaminated and it's probably because they're doing a lot of heavy lifting in their lift and it's adding that color into their blacks whereas when you affect your gamma and try to push a certain Hue it's not necessarily affecting your blacks as much okay let's save that now reset it and this time we're going to do the same thing with game so if I were to take my gain in a similar area and do before and after you can see even compared to our gamma now we're comparing it with gamma that right here we're adding a lot more color in the upper mids compared to what happened with gamma gamma kind of lived in this range right the Hue values and they were very subtle like nothing was breaking whereas in the game there is a pretty strong shift that happens right here then I'm not a massive fan of but time and place right like sometimes you got to add highlights like warmth in your highlights to create a certain mood so all these things are very important there is no right or wrong answer but looking at it right here on a grayscale image starts to make a lot more sense like when you're actually grading your footage which color or hue you want to introduce in which specific luminance value right let's save this reset it and now what happens if we do the same thing in our offset and the results are going to be very different okay so if I do before and after now you can see it's actually darkened our overall image too because now it's happening on a global level right like offset is basically making a broad change it's not twisting or turning Hues it's just shifting the entire image into that space so the closest match for offset technically should be gamma so what if we bring that up and look at it with gamma if I do this the Luminous value kind of stayed put right like where we set it and then everything else kind of shifted in the middle color wise or hue wise but with our offset it's actually bringing the luminance down and then taking everything into um that specific Cube that we're adding very important changes to see on a gray scale to start making sense of like this is what happens to my image when I do it on my actual footage which leads us to now go into our footage and uh let's come out of our reference and now here we are we recently did a survey majority of you regardless of the skill set or struggling with shot matching skin tones balancing and working with 8-bit footage so I created a one hour long free training that covers all of that plus we'll wrap up the training with an extensive q a and you'll also get a link to download the practice footage power grades and some of my personal Luts this is shot on red so all I did is just went from lock direct79 so I did that conversion here so the thing that a beginner would do or a rookie would do is this like they would make very literal changes like very linear changes so what do I mean by that they would just look at the scope and go I want to Max it out so they're going to go on their gain and they're going to kind of lift it up and they're gonna go in their lift and they're gonna pull it down like you know let's take full advantage of this waveform they're looking at the waveform and they're just kind of going with that and they'll be happy with something like this whereas a pro would do the opposite like if I'm looking at this going nah man this just looks a bit too digital like I want to pull this thing out like if you look at like movies everything is very gentle and perfect roll off so what I would do here is I would massage it so I would take my gamma and gain and simultaneously go in reverse so I'm gonna lift my gamma and I'm gonna pull my gain down look what happens so I'm gonna do this right and if I park it here and if I do before and after look at how much of a difference I made and now we can kind of split the difference right so now I'm going back and if I do before and after still massive change nothing is looking murky like the the whites are not looking gray they're not looking fake everything is looking good uh What happens if I take my lift now and kind of pull it down just a little bit not too much so if I do before and after so then that's gonna add introduce a little bit more contrast on the low end and and with the technique that we use with gamma and gain we create a really nice roll off on the top end by bringing the lift down we added some contrast on the bottom end so we're still giving it we're taking contrast out on the top end adding it ingesting it a little bit more on the bottom end a perfect harmony to create an image that we want and now if you look at the two it's just a lot more filmic cinematic right and uh where everything is sitting and so that is the first thing rookie versus Pro now we're gonna move on to the second point which is let's say we're creating a teal and orange they're gonna start at this point and they're just gonna jump in so I'm gonna go under my Gamma or lift I'm sorry and I'm gonna do something like this okay and then I'm gonna take my gain and I'm gonna do something like this and I'm just trying to create like a very extreme look so if I do before and after and if we look at our colorized waveform we can see that we're starting to create something really cool the problem here is that if I move forward and you look at it and if I really punch in and show you something is that there is so much teal seeping into my blacks that it just started to look really fake like look at the eyebrows like look at the under eyes and it's just I don't know like look at the uh facial hair like there's just this teal weird color kind of seeped into it and that's just not real life so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to save that version and I'm going to undo all the color changes that we made so we're gonna go back here and as a professional what we would do is we would look at our Vector scope and go well the image needs to be balanced first and if I want to create a worn teal and orange look I'm not going to balance it perfectly I'm I'm still gonna keep it in that world a little bit and that's the little sauce okay you don't always have to balance your image to perfect whites to whites because if the director or the client wants a warm look inherent warm look then you can even your balancing could like be biased toward that warm look but not this crazy this is almost like monotone because if you're looking at my image waveform right here it's just like it's just warm that's it there's nothing else to it so what I'm going to do instead is I'm gonna this is where I'm gonna use my offset lggo I'm gonna use my o here and you can see right here what I'm gonna start doing literally looking at this Vector scope and just countering how much it's sitting right here so I'm gonna start taking that in the other direction uh I personally like to always go too far and then kind of just like come back I'm just looking at his skin tone where does the skin tone should fall for a Caucasian male right so this is kind of looking good but like look at how much we did like look at where my white is sitting now but it's still has a little bit of the warmth and if you look at my Vector scope they're still leaning toward that but by the changes that I made look at the Teo automatic teal that I introduced right here so you see like how rookie had to artificially create those colors me taking the image that we have and making these broad changes without twisting the Hues we already effortlessly put everything there so now we're not deteriorating the quality we're not introducing any artifacting any banding and we're just playing off of like what was there that is base okay and that's all created using liftgam again you're just seeing that I'm I'm very restricted to only these tools and not using anything else now let's introduce a little bit of that teal and orange and not go over over the top so what I would do is like I would just like literally in my lift uh just nudge it a little bit you know so like cooler tones I'm taking it down there and now I'm gonna take my gamma and I'm gonna start adding a little bit of warmth I'm warming up the image just little touches little touches right I'm gonna let's take my lift a little bit more and I'm Gonna Keep it right here I'm gonna take my gamma and I'm just gonna keep warming it up like I'm stylizing it at this point okay this is where it just get that questioning thing like oh I liked it better before qazi that's not the point that was color correction this is color grading so we're we're like stepping into that like you know La La Land World right like now we're just gonna not La La Land the movie but like a la la land like now we're gonna start having fun and create something can I go more like push it more a little bit like that I'm not minding it right because again the way we built it if I do before and after like this was like such a icky warm now we still have like a really warm image with Harmony we created something that is a perfect dance and now I can actually go in my offset and let's just say if I want to lean the whole thing toward that now I'm just doing that like look at what I'm doing with my offset I'm driving the whole thing there but the beauty of it is that because we created that little separation with our lift and game that little dance right like we cooled off our lifts and we warmed up our highlights or our game so we created that split toning um between those two luminance ranges then we can go in on our offset and then just tilt the whole thing like a seesaw like now where do we want to put it so that's what's happening here so if I do before and after that's pretty cool right like now now we can get into like our uh gamma and game can we create a little bit more contrast because that's going to add a little bit more color but before I do that I want to just like compare it with like the rookie version at the time it was kind of looking like we were creating a lot of color separation and it was pretty good but that's the rookie version and then that's our version right so if I do before and after and like really swipe it and you can see the difference primaries people sleep on it people sleep on it because it's available in your Lightroom it's available in your uh Premiere Pro Final Cut 7 Final Cut 10 has their funky thing but even Final Cut 7 like I'm saying back in 2006 2007 had color wheels so then we just feel like ah how good can it be let me jump into magic mask let me use depth map let me use uh you know the the re-lighting effect we we over complicate our grades but you are just sleeping on the most powerful tool that you have at your disposal whether you're using paid or free version of results and then the final thing that I want to talk about is this rookies they would do a lot of granular changes so instead of like making these broad big changes they're always doing like these too many small changes and then what happens is that when it comes to shot matching it becomes a game of whack-a-mole because you go to the next shot and you're like oh my God like I did these 18 things how am I gonna match it how am I gonna match it like you just go crazy you've done so many little granular things it's going to be impossible to copy paste it from shot to shot and it's going to take you so much longer compared to like boom these massive changes not to mention that it also keeps your image so much cleaner twisting things right like too much unnecessarily that comes later when we're creating looks it's all this interesting to structure a video in a way that makes the most sense when you're watching it from start to finish so hopefully this video accomplished that and you guys have probably seen so many videos on primaries and I hope that from this video you've seen information that never really clicked before and now you can apply this stuff and get crazy results check it out love you guys until next time

Channel: Waqas Qazi

Views: 105,483

Keywords: davinci resolve, davinci, davinci resolve studio, davinci tutorial, davinci resolve free, resolve color grading, color grading davinci resolve, color grading, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve color grading, davinci resolve effects, theqazman, davinci resolve 17, davinci resolve 17 tutorial, waqas qazi, color correction davinci resolve, davinci resolve 18, davinci resolve 18 color grading, davinci resolve 18 tutorial, davinci 18, resolve 18.5, resolve beta, resolve 18

Id: BC22_Qupm3A

Length: 14min 52sec (892 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 17 2023