- Hey everyone. Welcome back to another video. In this one, I wanted to simply walk you through a free power grade download pack that you can download and install for your color grades
within DaVinci Resolve. This pack's available to download for free using the link
in this video description. Now this pack is just a collection of a few tools that I've
developed myself using the tools within DaVinci Resolve and I've set these up as power grades. And I use these on 90,
95% of my color grades. I feel like there is enough variety in the contrast selections of these four contrast
curves that I've given you for most color grades and
they're a great starting point if you want to use these to tweak and then obviously create your own looks. It's important to note that these are designed for DaVinci Wide Gamut Intermediate
as a working color space. If you don't know what a
color managed workflow is, I've got videos on my channel about that. And there are plenty of other good videos explaining a DaVinci Wide
RGB color manage workflow. And the reason that's important is 'cause these tools or these
contrast curves are set up for the DaVinci Wide Gamut color space. So these contrast curves don't
affect the overall exposure of the image as you're applying them. So simply, I've just got eight clips
downloaded from Artgrid. All of these clips have been put into DaVinci Wide Gamut
as a working color space. So now you can see the
display referred image, which is essentially a rec 709 image piped in from a variety of
different raw or log flavors on these different cameras. We've got red, RE, black magic. Now, this pack you can
see under element tools, there are seven power grades and each of these power grades are a selection of nodes with the DaVinci
Resolve adjustments. Now, for sake of example
today, these eight clips, we can pretend like they
are part of the same program and so we've just grouped
them together under a group post clip and we can start
applying these power grades. The foundation to any good color grade is a good contrast base. So that's the thing I like to apply first. So you can select one of these
four contrast curves to start and you can drag it over and you can see here it applies that power grade. If we disable that and apply it, you can see it has added
a nice amount of contrast. And each of these curves have slightly different characteristics. We'll just cycle through these. This is before, after, before, after, after, before, after. Now what you will notice is
as it's increasing contrast, it's not actually increasing saturation, which is important to note. If you head to the
vectorscope, before and after, you can see there's no saturation
shift in the vectorscope. Now I've set this up because I like to control my saturation separate
from the contrast curve. If you do wanna see what
the contrast curve is doing to the saturation organically, you can show the compound node and then you can see it reveals our
contrast curve down here, which is just simply a custom
curve adjustment there. And then we've got a pass
through node at the top, merging into a layer node. So the custom curve is applying over the signal using a
composite mode of luminosity. So simply put, if we had just applied
this curve to the image, it would apply a huge amount of contrast and a ton
of saturation as well. I don't like that saturation, personally. And so what I like to do is be able to control the contrast
and give a huge amount of contrast to the image without
affecting the saturation. That's why we create
this little setup here where I'm applying the luminance value of this curve and just applying that only without affecting
the saturation at all. Now what we can do is start to use this film set power grade. So you can drag that in straight away and it drops two nodes onto the node tree. And if we disable these and enable them, you can see it's added
a really nice amount of what I would term as filmic saturation. Traditional saturation, if we were just to add a
saturation node and just turn up the saturation slider,
which you can see down here, this look here is increasing saturation. But if we use this node structure, which I'll explain in a second, it creates a much more
cinematic, filmic saturation. I find just turning saturation up itself is a little bit harsh, a little bit digital looking. So what's happening
with these two nodes is there are two different color
spaces working together. We've got HSV color space. So if we right-click, we can change the color space of any node. We've chosen HSV, and
if we go to channels, we've removed channel
one and channel three. So we're essentially just
targeting the saturation of the HSV color space. HSV means hue, saturation, and value. Now the second node is exactly the same, except we are in the HSL color space, hue, saturation, and lightness. The reason these are different is because they play off each other. So with HSV, I can use my gamma and gain adjustments to raise the value of the saturation channel within the HSV color space. And when we raise the value, we're actually creating
density within the image. So if we just turn off
the HSL for a second and we reset this, so I'm just gonna reset my
gamma and gain adjustments. As we increase gain and push it too much, what we can do now in our HSR color space is we'll reset this as well. We can now use gamma and gain to pull back on the gamma and gain, and as a result, we're decreasing the saturation because it was too much
just in the HSV color space. But the net result of doing both of those together
is creating a really dense looking image when
it comes to saturation. So this is before and after. If you just look at the skin,
now, this might be too harsh, but the point is just to
illustrate what's going on here. This is before and after. So we've not only increased saturation, we've also created
density within that color. Density with saturation is associated with a film stock or a filmic look. Now, with this particular image, we might wanna back
off on the gain a touch just to allow a bit more of
that saturation to come through. And if we go back to the HSV space, I'm gonna increase the gamma
even more and the gain. And so here we have the net result of HSV. We've pushed HSV a little bit too hard, 1.5 in gain and 0.06 in gamma. And then in HSL, we have reduced the gain and then we've also reduced the gamma. This is the net result
of these two adjustments, contrast and saturation. Going to grab a still of this. Then what I'm gonna do
is disable the saturation using these two nodes. And I'm actually going to
decompose this contrast curve here and actually go ahead and
turn off the pass through. So if we were just to
apply the contrast curve, that's what we would be getting in terms of the contrast
along with the saturation. However, if we play this still, remember, this still was the contrast curve along with the additional saturation. This is before and this is after. You can see how nice that
contrast and saturation is working together. The next thing I wanna show you is just the split tone power grade here. So after saturation, what we can do is start building a really loose look and we can go ahead and add this split tone curve in there. Now the point of this
is more just to start to show you the power of custom curves. And if we lock the mid grade point here in DaVinci Wide Gamut, what we can actually start to do is push the highlights and the shadows into complimentary color zones. And what that will do
is create some really interesting looks and
depth into our image. So what we've done here is
given it a creamy highlight, definitely more warm highlights. And then down in the
bottom, we've reduced red, which is ultimately giving
a blue look to the shadows. This is it before and after on this image. Before and after. Let's go this size. Before, after. So that right there is a
really great starting point for any color grade. Creating a strong contrast curve that has the essence of the look that you're trying to
create is really important. Having control over your saturation independent of your contrast and then obviously split
toning is just the beginning of creating a look or moving the colors into the world that you
want to move them in. From here, what you can
always do, obviously, is go ahead into the curves or the custom curves and
start to tweak this yourself. So you can start to play around with all of these nodes and see how such
a subtle shift, for example, what I'm doing down here, can have really big effects on your image. So if you really like that, for example, you could go ahead and
save that as a custom curve power grade and start building
your own library of tools. This is what I've just
done and this was before. So all that's done is
lifted the shadows a touch and you can see the
result in the image there. With every color grade, once I've built out my look
using tools such as this, what I like to do is go into the clip and apply a fixed node tree. I've provided a really
simple fixed node tree starter for you here. So if you're just using exposure,
for example, with offset, you can quickly boost through all of the shots and just
dial the exposure we want. So just by changing exposure, white balance of each
shot on the clip level, and using a really interesting set of contrast curves, split
toning, and saturation, you're starting to create
a really great look with very little effort. So this is before and after. Before, after. So that's basically it for this video. This was just a really quick insight into this element tools download
kit that you can download and apply to your own color grades. I'd love to hear how you're using these. As I say, they're starting points. They're tools that I use all the time, but often when I'm applying,
for example, the saturation, I would apply it and then
obviously tweak it based on the footage and the source
footage that I'm using. When it comes to the contrast curve, I'm always using references and trying to create a
custom curve that really matches the reference to pull
the footage into that world. So I can't emphasize enough the power of a really good contrast base. I hope this was helpful. I'd love it if you could
subscribe to this channel. That would really help. And also head over to the link in the video description to
download this pack for yourself. For now, we'll see you in the next one. Peace out.
