Fusion Color Management - The Ultimate Guide w/ Cullen Kelly - Davinci Resolve Fusion Tutorial

in this video we're going to be going through the ins and outs of color management inside of fusion I'll be talking with my good friend colen Kelly who is a color scientist SL genius when it comes to color management and we're going to get the scoop on how the heck you do color management inside a fusion for visual effects or Graphics or whatever you might be using Fusion for by the way if you're just getting into Fusion I would definitely check out the fusion Survival Guide it's a free video course that I have available in the description below make sure to check that out and uh let's uh let's get in with col and Kelly shall we in this video we're going to be learning about color management and I have such a I have such a great person to show us this the wonderful the amazing colen Kelly is going to show us how to do any kind of color management inside of fusion because it's I don't know it's confusing to me and I would assume it's confusing to you or else you wouldn't have picked this video so um tell me for for anybody who doesn't know Colin like what is color management okay so color management is essentially the idea of managing the bits and bites that make up an image in such a way that the thing that you saw when you were standing there and you took the picture or your role to take actually looks like that thing when you finally look at it on a screen at the other end depending on the camera that you shot depending on the display that you're looking at there are different variables that need to be accounted for if you want to pull off that magic trick yeah so when it comes to fusion and stuff I mean it's not the color page we're not talking about color correction really so why do we need to worry about color management fusion and VFX compositing Graphics in general is an area where color management is actually really important because you are concerned with bringing stuff together and so often those things don't all belong to One Source color space if you want to account for those things that is color management like by definition and if you don't account for those things stuff's going to look weird okay so can you give us an example of something kind of looking weird or you know what what would happen if we just didn't worry about color management yeah so looking at a pretty good example right now where we've got these two elements that we want to integrate we've got uh you know like our beautiful castle here that we want to integrate into this shot but there's a problem here even above and beyond like oh we would really need to feather that into uh the scene and all kinds of like masking some you now that's a solid mask I took three or four minutes to try and mask that that is big kid Roto that is big kid Roto that is some solid Roto honestly that's better Roto than I can do so I cannot throw any shade whatsoever your masking skills all right good yeah so setting aside the fact that uh we've got this beautiful Roto here in place we got a problem in that like the color space of these two elements doesn't match so there's nothing else you're going to be able to do in your composite to make these things feel of one world until you manage their colors and get them onto level ground yeah I feel like a lot of people would Cod would um look at this shot and they would just kind of take a color corrector and um take down the contract and the saturation of the castle is that the right way to do it or no you could do it that way that would be typically what I would call Brute forcing it and it's a solution that is going to give you mixed results and it's one that doesn't have much science behind it and is going to like I said give you kind of mixed results so a better approach would be to Avail yourself of some pretty basic color management that I'd love to show you guys uh today so that you can kind of get those consistent results really quickly all right let's jump in so there's really two things that I want to focus on here if we're going to talk about looking at this comp through a color management lens the first is something we already talked about I want to get these things so that they're in the same domain color spacewise before you begin your comp otherwise your comp is going to be an uphill battle that you're never going to win that's the first thing the second thing is I want to get a functional viewing context for uh this comp right now we're looking at really two problems we've got two elements that don't have a matched color space and of those the larger one the background plate the element with the person in there it's in a log space that really isn't even designed for me to look at at all so we've kind of got two color management issues that we need to solve if you're going to be successful in your comp so you really so basically the the colors don't match is first of all and then we're also not looking at this uh like we're there there's no way to kind of tell what this will look like when it's color graded absolutely and this is something that comes up a lot for me when I'm color grading is when a comp actually comes to me and it's viewed through a color grade and a viewing transform there's stuff that you simply couldn't have seen for that doesn't look right yeah I think I think we've we've all been there if you're trying to do a comp and you haven't haven't messed with color management um it looks fine and then you bring it into color and you're like stuff starts looking weird and things that you thought match don't match anymore and then you just contemplate why you even exist and you know it's kind of that whole existential Deep dive yeah the pit of of Despair the pit of despair yeah the pit of despair yeah let's avoid the pit despair let's all right so we got two problems which one do we go at first here we're going to work our way from sort of scene to screen if you will so the first thing I want to do is get these two elements on level ground aligned with one another so here's what we're going to do we're just going to use color space Transformers by the way there are different ways to color manage in Fusion there are different ways to color manage in like every corner of resolve we're going to color manage in the way that I recommend anyone color manage when they're first learning these principles whether INF Fusion or elsewhere which is using color space transform nodes because you can see the kind of building blocks what you're doing it's not some hidden process yes good so here's what we're going to do Downstream of uh our tree that is producing this uh top element here I'm going to do a color space transform like so I'm just uh going to Spotlight up and find that like so we're going to add that I had shift space bar to add that into the Chain by the way and when I double click that it's going to pull up the inspector here and what I want to do is map this into a space that both images are going to be able to upate and is this the same kind of effect that's in the color page 100% yep exactly same science exact same math just available to you here inside of fusion awesome so here's what we're going to do a good thing to do when you're doing color spaces is it's kind of like uh you know when you're doing the SATs or like one of those hard tests in high school where you don't know all the answers fill in the answers that you know and then like come back to those like head scrap you know or you can leave them blank like I did a lot of the time anyway in this case the thing that we know or the thing that I'm going to fill in first is I want to have a space that both images can live within and that I can do do my compositing within that's typically going to be a large gamut linear space okay so that's the context we want these things to marry in that as we're going to see is going to make for a really zany looking image but we're going to solve that in a moment first I just want to move into that large gamut linear space which I'm going to do as Da Vinci wide gamut for my color space and I'm going to do a gamma of linear now that's going to look super weird some crazy town yep and we're going to do a couple other things that are really not going to have much context at the moment but we're going to see why they're this way in just a moment I'm going to tone map this because one of the mismatches that we're dealing with right now is I have a log State image here with a pretty high dynamic range this is like a cooked burned srgb image with a very low dynamic range and if I want to get these things into a more aligned space I want to try to stretch that dynamic range back out a little bit that's what this luminance mapping business is about so I'm just going to say a luminance map from a custom Max input of 100 that's generally kind of like the peak dynamic range of a earned srgb 79 graphic and this uh custom Max output you could play with it and find a level that suits but like generally anywhere between a th000 and 2,000 is fine you could go the way up to 10,000 if you wanted to but typically you're not going to need to and so far I've succeeded in making this look wor insane than we started this person is crazy so thank you we're going to go and end the video now and find someone who can explain this more confidently and get it looking better IDE yes this is this is way worse yeah and by the way this is a thing that happens in color management especially when you're color managing for compositing and you're involving linear color spaces it's typically going to look zanier before it looks better yeah so once we get it built out it's going to be looking a little more sens so we've got one half of our first task complete we've moved on yeah we are whatever math that shakes out to 25% of the way done yeah into that SP so real quick this tone mapping that is that's taking like the the maximum level from like srgb and it's putting it towards the maximum level for like d Vinci wide gamut that's exactly right yeah into more of like a scene type of dynamic range which is a lot larger than a displays dynamic range so it's stretching out yep stretching it back up exactly exactly I didn't know that I I always thought that that would that was only useful for put crunching things down going from a bigger gamut to a smaller gamut yeah and we're going to see an example of that in just a moment because it turns out we're going to do this same business in reverse when we've actually got to get all this stuff looking reasonable on the display okay uh but the good thing is we're halfway through our first task of getting things aligned into a similar space and this is the trickier of the two color managing what I've referred to thus far as baked assets it's always a little bit harder than color managing like log or linear assets so this is a little bit harder the other thing the other color management that we're about to do here on our background is going to be a little bit easier okay so I'm going to do another color space Transformer and same thing I'm going to cheat I'm going to do the easy answers on the test first I know where I want to go now right where do I want to go V by gamut yep and linear that's right same exact space that's our whole premise here is that we want to get these living in the same world so now we just have to Circle back to the harder problem of the test in this case this is a piece of r3d media that I've already set up in my project settings to debay into the ip2 uh you know like color space red log 3 G10 red wide gamut RGB so this is information that you need to know you know like whether you're working with a log quick time or a piece of r3d you need to have this information which is why I saved it for the end of our test yes but as long as you know it then you're going to be able to color manage into that space like so and the cool thing is here we don't need to do any of that tone mapping business because we're in a big scene space we're going into a big scene space nothing needs to happen on that front at this stage of buiness okay yeah am I right in saying that uh those kind of levels and everything are um easier to kind of scientifically expect rather than just some srgb thing that you got and so you don't really necessarily have to tone map it because it kind of knows where it's at is that making any sense or no yes that's exactly right like you're you are the the fancy color science term would be domain these two occupy a similar domain in terms of what you would expect the brightest thing in the source image to be versus what you would expect the brightest thing in your linear space to be those are already kind of low with this this srgb with this graphic those are not level at all the brightest thing in the graphic is going to be around 100 nits generally speaking the brightest thing that we can do in linear it's actually as bright as we want but much much brighter seeing levels of dynamic okay so could you with the srgb could you skip that tone mapping and do it manually and kind of stretch it out manually is there anything wrong with doing that no you certainly could do that frankly the only reason to do it here is because the best tool for stretching out dynamic range is this because it's going to take those highlights and unroll them while leaving like your middle exposures and your lowend contrast in Fairly fixed position just does that does that in a little nicer way yep exactly Okay so we've got both pieces now being mapped into D Vinci wide gamut linear and I've somehow made it look even worse than we were a moment ago we're just going downhill just awful but the good thing is we are in a common color space we are now in DiVinci wide gamut linear for both of these elements that's a really good space to compos it in that's like the most common space to composite and the linear part of it that is D Vinci wide gamut is fairly interchangeable with any number of sufficiently large gamuts but now that we're here the only thing that we need to do to make sense of what we're looking at now is we're going to do a final color space transform to get a viewing context right now we're looking at a linear image which is not the way our monitor set up so that's why it looks so crazy so we're going to do one more color space transform here and this is going to be applied Downstream of this merge where we are bringing everything together yeah so this is applied to the entire image all together post composite yes and once again easiest questions on the test first where are we coming from where do we know we're coming from di w g linear and linear yeah we know that we got that answer just so much okay yeah you know it's all right we're we're inching somewhere interesting and now I'm going to go out in this case to Rex 709 depending on like what your monitoring how you're monitoring you might want to go to gamma 22 or gamma 24 not much difference between those two I'm going to go to gamma 4 because that's how my reference monitor is set up here and we're going to do our opposite luminance mapping in the same way that with this graphic at its source we needed to roll it back out unroll it actually into a larger dynamic range now we've got a scene linear image which has a potential domain of zero up to something super super bright way brighter than the show crazy bright yeah exactly so now we got to roll that down so that it compresses in a graceful way within the limited dynamic range of our display okay so we're going to do kind of the opposite of what just did here I'm going to set my custom Max input to 10,000 just cuz that's like my insurance policy to make sure that everything Maps properly and then uh I'm going to set my gamut mapping to saturation compression that's going to do a similar thing for colors as what we were doing for tones here we're basically just ensuring that as things approach the edge of what the display can do that's happening somewhat softly and gracefully doesn't chop it off and look like a AET trip or something exactly exactly awesome and then I'm just going to apply my forward ootf here okay what does that do the ootf we could have a whole separate conversation about this this is effectively another term for something that's usually called system gamma what it basically means is that in that endtoend system that I talked about at the beginning of our conversation we see something and then we want it to look like it did we show it on the screen the ootf is uh a we we could we could uh call it a it's like a little agreed upon increase and contrast that we generally like to see in between the scene the final reproduction on the screen it's like an accepted convention in motion Imaging even though it's technically a little bit less one to one to the original scene it just adds a little pinch of contrast that generally makes the image more legible okay real quick on there so a lot of the time um I've been setting output gamma to rec 709 and it looks weird when you hit when you hit the apply forward o ootf does that am I doing that wrong or is that no you're not doing that wrong confusingly gamma 24 plus forward ootf is identical to Rex 79 with forward ootf unchecked so why don't you just go to Rex 79 because I'm used to going to C 24 with a forward OA okay and because I like seeing explicit check boxes for things that makes sense you know all that stuff but yeah that's it's a great thing to touch on they're literally identical just making sure every time I see you do that I'm like why don't I do that yeah I mean my stuff looks pretty good I think but and you get that all like imposter syndrome you guys don't wait my wait am I am I a huge fraud that also probably goes on a long list of things that are the the primary like thing to blame is that that wasn't a thing until more recent versions of resolved yes and my muscle memories cooked in a different direction that's the it's like the the same reason why I feel like all the colorists I I watch use a circle Windows instead of anything else yep just because they didn't have anything used to be all we had yeah we're we're coming from from color grading poverty y um all right so we've got things somewhat set up up here and I do want to go back over to our CST our color space transform for this side and looks like I actually didn't fill out the tougher question on the test in the case of this piece of material so I'm going to go ahead and do that okay we're going to say input color space re 709 and input gamma of gamma 22 now how how am I saying gamma 22 versus gamma 24 versus srgb honestly when you're dealing with baked assets like this it's totally cool to just try some different ones see what works yeah there's no single correct unbuild for this to get it back to scene space you just want to find something reasonable and use tools like these that are going to do a better job uh than like a simple color corrector would yeah and so the reason you don't quite know that is because they could have done anything to that image and given you whatever result they wanted to that may or may not have been scientific you know they might have just put some curves on it in Photoshop or whatever and now you're kind of just taking your best guess on decoding that absolutely you can think of it like you know if I give you a cake which actually you might like would you like a cake I do like cakes okay so if I give you the cake I'm like okay before you take a single bite of that cake I need you to tell me every ingredient in that cake and the temperature and the duration that it was cooked in the oven for sure like I can take a guess at that it probably wasn't cooked for 16 hours but like you that's all you can do is take reasonable guesses as to the ingredients and the preparation of that cake but you can't unbuild to a single solution of the only way it's possible that this cake could have been produced yes similar type of thing gotcha gotcha okay so whereas whereas like a footage from a camera the camera is going to build that in a very specific way and if you haven't touched the footage then when you add your color transform that's you can reverse that in a very scientific way exactly there are published standards there's published math that every camera manufacturer puts out that says hey here is how the pixels that our camera recorded relate to other Coles so that we have a path so that's the big challenge here that we've now got into a better space with and by the way we talked about OTF a second ago something else that you can just play with and let your eyes guide you on is this inverse ootf thing here sometimes you'll want that on sometimes you won't need it on right now I want to at least audition what it looks like to turn that on I feel like that might be beneficial in the case of this graphic just in terms of getting me a baseline that feels more aligned so that's reversing that contrast bump that is put in when you when you make an image on the computer right exactly it's it's saying I'm going to assume that someone impose that little pinch of contrast and I'm going to unbuild it the idea there and if it looks good then you should use it and if it doesn't look good then you should leave so that's sort of an optional thing and that's basically when you're going from something that's already re 79 srgb into a wider gam right yep exactly okay exactly whereas the other one is more of a yeah you should do this or you shouldn't do it yeah I mean here's the thing like that the the shoulds are kind of tough to come by in color management there's a lot of options here even with that like technically even a color scientist couldn't tell you that you're wrong for doing gamma 24 and leaving this off that one once again is probably going to be driven more by your eyes you're going to be like gosh that still looks almost loggy to me yeah and you're just going to arrive at that solution independently but yes I would say the rule of thumb that's I can't remember ever doing grade where I didn't have an ootf for turned on and for unbuilding or inverting a re 709 image sometimes I'll flip that on sometimes I won't yeah I've done I've done like exposure tests and stuff with the the pocket camera metered it and made sure that you know that I'm I'm shooting like a 18% gray and then brought that in and went through all the the uh color space transforms and everything and with that forward ootf on well at 2.4 then it looks correct M and it's right where it should meter right and then without it it's bumped up a little bit yep it this will plot your middle gry my favorite Topic in color science to the generally agreed upon position where midg gray should sit for dis yeah because I think like for me I mean especially when we're doing color management infusion uh one of the big things that I'm after especially doing VFX is I want this uh piece of footage when I'm done copying it to look like the original footage just with the changes that I've made yes you know I don't want it to have a lot more contrast or anything like that because then I have to chase that problem down in color yep so this is the way to hopefully ensure that and that's how in you know professional context that's always like the that's the drum I beat when I'm working with compositors is I say I'll give you whatever color space you want you can go about your thing however you like all that I ask is that you give it back to me in the same color space and in such a state that the only thing that has changed is the bfx work yeah nothing else should have been altered by the process right yep yeah because you don't want to uh have to match that and then wonder if what you're doing to match that is messing with their VFX or if they did that wrong or you know and then then you're just trying to figure out who's uh who needs to fix what yeah chasing you to yeah so we've got this now kind of all set up and in a good position and the last thing that I would say here that is again kind of unique to like like I'll give you a counter examp if our two elements here one was in the red color space metric and another one was in like I don't know a log C3 those would both be very vanilla straightforward color space transforms like this sure there would be nothing except these four parameters filled in and we would have a pretty well aligned match with nothing else in this case we've had to you know kind of finesse and make some judgment calls on our gamma and do we like this ootf do we like it off and the last thing that I actually want to do here is just add a simple color corrector to just kind of nudge it into a bit closer of a place even than it is now with the background element just a subjective thing and that's just and that's just compositing I mean that's just matching the SH now you're in the RO compositing yeah so you're you're done with the technical stuff and it's more of the subjective yep totally and we can see how those kind of like bleed uh from one to the other now that we've gotten color science to give us as big of an assist as it can now we just do vanilla compositing matching type of things and so we're viewing this essentially as a graded image right now yes as a managed image a managed you know there's been no no colorist has touched this or imparted creative intent but it is a reasonable normalized image and we do have an operational space that's sensible for the compositing that needs to happen here yeah you can make your best guess when you're compositing what it's going to look like when a colorist hits it you know totally have have a good estimation totally yeah and a workflow upgrade that you can do here if you you know like get comfortable with what we're talking about today something that I do with VFX vendors all the time is we will replace this piece of the puzzle with a l that I will provide to them that shows them here's closer to what we're actually going to do as soon as you give me a comped asset so they can get an even higher context for what it's going to do because the context changes your decisions when you're compositing and it can also help reveal you know like things that are not quite perfected yet in the com yeah because if you're if you're changing the Reds in the grade you know and take taking all the the intense Reds down or something you have a lot of Reds in here you're you're sort of guessing if you're not looking under that L totally and I think like FX often gets the short end of the stick there where you're expected to do so many things in such perfect pristine detail but you're really not being given very much context for how to make those pristine adjustments you know yeah but this is a really good like foundational position that we're in here um and we could you know like we said if you if you want we can take a look at just doing a little J in the color correction to get this better fit even still to this sure yeah let's do that but then when we're done compositing and stuff how do we how do we turn this back into like a log image and so that we can grade it and stuff yeah let's talk about that I mean this is like the cool thing about thinking about color management is we can think about things in terms of like modules of stuff that's happening and because we've done our leg work here and like this is you know the the downstream result of this merge node I should say this is our new scene that we are sort of like modifying in the box but what we want this to feel like is a scene where this cast really was right there right it's in a scene domain it's got dynamic range it's got color volume it has hopefully all the durability and credibility of a camera original image it's just one that we happen to have modified in the Box yeah right now the result of that operation is a da Vinci wide gamut linear image it's in that color space what we're doing Downstream of that strictly for viewing purposes is moving from D Vinci wide gamut linear into 709 gamma 24 If instead what we want to do is have an asset that can now pass forward into something like the color page and a log image that's going to grade and feel like all the other log images we could do something slightly different here we could turn this viewing transform off and do a different viewing trans we could go from again filling in Easy questions on the test first we know where we're coming from V gamut linear so this is where like this is going to touch on your color gring workflow and the way you choose to work you could do a couple different things here you could map the whole thing back into red wide gamut RGB log 3 G10 if you wanted or if you're just working in resolve and everything else is going to be graded in D Vinci wide gamut intermediate you could pass into that log space simply by going from D Vinci wide gamut linear to D Vinci wide gamut intermediate like so and then uh your tone mapping should be able to remain off and we can just turn this off like so so again it's kind of like a really dumb simple transform just like this one we did here yeah and and now if I tab over to the color page I have a log image that is in the same metric as all my other D Vinci wi gam and intermediate stuff it just happens to have this really cool castle the idea is that then that should color grade just like the rest of your shots and it and that castle should act like it would if it were actually in the shop absolutely that castle in the same long space totally love it yeah so that's the idea there and you know like this is actually since we've taken a second to go into log here to me this is a great example of like the like cost of low context I've already been fussing for like five minutes about like oh I want to go in there and color correct the castle and make it fit better to the background that's not even that noticeable of a problem right now I don't know like I know I want to like go in there and maybe like blend it into the background a little bit more but I'm no longer noticing that subtle mismatch of contrast because I have such poor context for what this is going to be Ren exactly yeah but as soon as we go back he wouldn't even know it's a problem looking at it in the log and then the colorist comes back to you and says it doesn't feel right you're going what are you talking about you must have messed it up yeah it left my box you know yes it looked great when I was looking at just purely in log it's like oh man yeah white balance is great everything's great in log you just log lies yeah log lies log log be that way wow this is great um thank you so much for going over this workflow and and uh kind of helping contextualize a lot of this stuff man it's uh it's it's hard I mean look at just all the things in the color space transform I there's so many things to learn about this and so uh if if you're confused about this stuff uh that's okay it's it's hard I mean how long have you been nerding out on this kind of thing I've been nerding out on this thing for like a decade and Counting at this point it takes time you know so uh get yourself a friend like Colin Kelly uh to help help you make sense of all of these things and yeah if you guys have any questions uh leave them in the comments below and uh I'll B bug Colin about anything I don't know to uh to respond to you so yeah thank you man been awesome yeah glad to do it big thanks to Colin for having me out to his place and teaching me a little bit about color management and all of that goodness I hope this has been a helpful video again make sure to check out the fusion Survival Guide if you haven't if you're just getting into Fusion that is a great time we go through all the little gotas that you know might happen if you're just getting into Fusion okay so check that out and uh until then until we see you again uh Happy Trails hope your trails are happy and that you have trail mix in them and you don't get mixed up by your Trails you just get awesome trail mix what's your favorite kind of Trail Mix dude mine has like three different chocolate chips in it it's basically chocolate chips that's pretty much I just really want chocolate chips

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 6,962

Keywords: blackmagic design, casey faris, how to, free video editor, tutorial, davinci resolve 18, resolve for beginners, davinci tutorials, editing, color, fusion, color managment, color management davinci resolve, color management davinci resolve 18, color management cullen kelly, color management davinci resolve 18.5, color management settings davinci resolve, how to color grade in davinci resolve 18

Id: N1l5AxlFcMk

Length: 28min 33sec (1713 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 06 2023