Get Better Color Balance pt. 2

today we're going to continue our series on building better balance and here in part two we're going to take the concepts and techniques that we discussed in part one where we were looking at our primaries and the different effects of offset lift gamma and gain on our image when we might want to use which and in what setting and we're going to look at a practical application of performing an initial balance as we go through a couple shots in a timeline here inside of DaVinci Resolve so my focus today is really to get Hands-On and take the concepts that we talked about in part one and really begin to apply them in a practical and real world context so let's get right into it and talk about balance here in this shot or this scene rather that I've pulled together here in resolve now where am I at right now what's currently going on I've set up my color management as I always do now if you are jumping into this video and you haven't watched part one in the series definitely encourage you to start there similarly if you are not familiar with color management or don't know the color management settings that I'm using here today definitely encourage you to check out my da Vinci wide gamut workflow Series where I will show you the exact color management that I am using so what do I have in place right now I have my color management the other piece that I have in place here at the Timeline level of my node graph are a couple of my core elements Luts in particular I have a tone Lut here and then I have a pallet Lut here that's just giving me a little bit of a shaped color palette and again this is something that I want to have set up right from the outset so that I can grade with that context as opposed to adding it on later and seeing some of my balancing decisions likely shift when I do that so that's the context that's the framework that I have here and the last thing is that I have set up my template node graph there is no grading currently happening in these nodes but I have a template ready for me to fill in as I start working through things at the shot by shot level so let's talk about how we're going to balance out this scene and let's just initially kind of flip through the different frames in this scene get a feel for what we're going to be grading and I'm indeed going to go back to my very first shot not only because it's the first shot in the timeline but more specifically because it is the widest shot in the scene that's almost always where I want to start when I'm doing an initial pass when I'm thinking about balance because that's going to give me an anchor if I can get my image looking as I want it to in that wide shot then I'm going to have a very easy time as I get into more tight shots matching those tighter details to that wider frame so I want to start on the widest frame possible that's a good concept to emphasize right off the bat and if I look at this image I'll sort of emphasize something else very early on here this image to me is feeling a little cool a little bit greeny and if I were to look at my Scopes I could see that somewhat sort of confirmed by looking at the fact that my signal mass is sort of living or biasing I should say toward this kind of southwest corner of the vectorscope however I am not going to do any of my balancing today using my scopes my Scopes are there to help me they are my flight instruments I am the pilot okay so that's something that I remember getting hung up on very early in my career is thinking oh there's a correct way that my image ought to read on the Scopes in an incorrect way and if it's incorrect I need to correct it in the Scopes as opposed to simply looking at the image not true look at the image go by your eye if you're having trouble if something is confusing you if you don't know what needs to happen to the image that's when you look at your Scopes and say oh I can see that we're actually coming in a little bit greenish and then make a sort of informed contextual decision from there so if we look at this shot I'm going to kind of skip over my exposure and contrast adjustments that I would typically start with in my initial pass on a grade and go right to the balance part that we are talking about today and all I'm going to try to do is get a little bit away from Green and just get a little bit warmer just because I think that looks nice that's where I'd like to take it maybe that's where my client wants to go and this is an area where I am using primarily my eye but I will keep kind of one eye Softly on my Scopes and try to make sure that I'm not going too far in this direction toward magenta but that I am indeed starting to pull away from Green and if I turn that off and on I think that's a pretty good start there right let's go ahead and grab a still of that this is going to become my anchor now my anchor may change I may decide after going through my first pass oh I don't want to go this warm or I actually want to go even warmer but for now for this first pass this is my anchor this is what I'm going to continue referencing to as I move through my shots okay so let's go here on to shot number two now shot number two is a great example of something that I really wanted to emphasize to you guys today which is that often when we feel like we have a matching problem and here I'm going to go ahead and wipe back to this saved still and I'm actually going to turn my gallery off so that this image itself is a little bit bigger often we'll think we have a matching problem or we will be sort of uh immediately gravitated toward matching our colors but the most important thing when we're matching shots is actually exposure and contrast and in this case I'm a little moodier at least by my eye than I am here I'm a little more under just because of the sort of contents of the frame so I actually am going to start with my exposure here go to my offset and open things up a little bit that's going to give me a much better starting point and here again is some place that I can use my Scopes look at my histogram and see if my signal here is actually getting closer to the signal in my reference or further away and in this case it is indeed getting closer when I go from here to there that's got a somewhat tighter match to what I see in my Scopes over here okay so I've got that little exposure adjustment and now I'm going to go over to my balance node and if I wanted to I could try my hand at just copying that same balancing adjustment that I did in shot number one in this case I'm just going to sort of freehand It Go by eye I'm going to continue wiping back and forth now again it just so happens that my scope my sort of signal here in the vector scope is stacking up really nicely but if it wasn't I wouldn't be particularly concerned about that as long as it feels good to my eye that's something else that I want to emphasize about balance is and scope specifically it's an opportunity every time you're doing a color grading pass to get better at doing things by eye so I know you may be watching this and going like I just don't have the confidence or I don't feel like I have the skill to do this by eye and I need to rely on the Scopes but if you keep doing that you're never going to get better at matching by eye and matching by eye is a core skill that you have to possess if you're going to have a serious color grading practice so take the opportunity get better it's okay if you're not awesome at it you're not going to get any better unless you practice so practice at it take every grade every project every scene that you work through as an opportunity to get better at eye matching so I think we're in a pretty good spot now with this frame maybe I've gone just a hair too far toward magenta and let's continue going forward here and look at shot number three shot number three is another great example I have a hunch by the time I get my exposure up the balance is not going to be too far out so let's again go back to this anchor I'm going to periodically look at the prior frame whatever the prior frame from what I'm currently on is but what I'm mostly concerned is aiming everything at a common anchor like we talked about so I'm going to continue aiming at that initial uh sort of still that we grabbed here on shot number one and just keep finessing my exposure until I feel like okay I'm really getting a nice alignment there like so and now my balance is not that far off I'm just going to go kind of by I move maybe a little away from Green maybe a little warmer like so and just see how that feels something like that I'm going to turn this off and on I think I'm moving in the right direction there something else that I'll emphasize as we're going through here I'm not trying to score a perfect 10 as I work through these images my goal in this first pass is to get every single image closer to where it needs to go closer to matching with its neighbors I'm not trying to get all the way there I'm trying to get some meaningful portion there so this shot in particular just to my eyes as I'm looking at it with you guys right now something doesn't feel quite right to me I feel like ah there's still another kind of 20 left to go there and to be honest with you I don't quite know what it is right now and I'm not going to get hung up on it and spend the next 10 minutes trying to figure it out because I can do this in passes and in fact I should do this in passes the longer that I Linger on this shot the longer I stay here the more perspective I'll lose the more deceiving my eyes will be to me so I'm trying to move everything a little bit closer but I'm not trying to make everything perfect trying to make everything perfect ends up making everything pretty terrible here's a good analogy that I like to use in this setting if you're trying to iron a shirt and you're thinking like oh if I just go slow enough I can get it perfectly ironed in one pass of my iron what's going to happen if you do that you're probably just going to set your shirt on fire right so it's better to go in passes just like you would with an iron than to go so slow that you end up setting the Garment on fire get it closer move on to the next shot get it even closer in the next pass okay let's go on to shot number four here now this is a fun one because we have very highly what I would call overlapping frame contents so what I mean is that I've got a subject in my outgoing frame and a subject in my incoming frame I've got a wall behind the the frame contents the frame itself is very similar so I've got sort of a higher bar for matching but also I'm going to be more critical of my work because I feel like I need everything to really line up and when I say I'm going to be more critical that's not necessarily a good thing so we want to recognize that this is a trickier matching uh scenario and we also want to recognize that we are probably going to be too critical of ourselves in this setting so again get it closer to where it needs to go don't get fixated on getting it all the way there so in this case I'm just going to look at my offset exposure is lining up pretty well here and actually these are matching pretty well to be honest with you I'm going to try nudging this just a hair warmer and just a hair less green like so and I'm good with that for now you know same kind of thing these type of settings are really easy to get critical and go like oh but it doesn't feel perfectly matched or perfectly weighted that's okay another thing that I will uh emphasize here is as soon as I get through this first pass I want to play Down the whole sequence and see how it feels when you're moving at 24 frames a second I promise it does not feel the same as when you're wiping and going frame by frame so for now I'm totally happy with this match that I've achieved and let's just go over here to shot number five for our final adjustment and I'm probably honestly going to do something similar to what I did here in shot number four go over to my balance and I'm going to go a little bit less green and a little warmer and reference back to my hero and just see how that's feeling so that's sort of an initial pass how I would think about taking my initial pass of going through a balancing uh adjustment on my image and to be honest from here I'm going to continue doing more of the same I'm going to try to keep my Pace pretty fast so I'm not spending more than say 30 60 seconds on a shot once I get through this pass I'll probably take a break walk away go look at something different go grab a glass of water whatever come back play it down with fresh eyes take hands off of the wheel and just look at how it's feeling make some mental notes about the shots that are feeling the most bumpy the furthest out from where they need to go and then go back in and continue with the same operations that I'm talking about and it's really just a matter of finessing the same adjustments we've already made where is that exposure sitting where is that balance being produced by offset sitting and continuing to dial in and refine there until we've got a match that is feeling really really good all the way throughout so that's a common workflow for working through a first pass and how I prioritize balance how fixated I get on it the role that Scopes play in the operation and the role that speed plays in the operation and we get into part three in this series we're really going to try to connect everything together and look at some more advanced matching workflows for when things begin to get tricky some more advanced techniques that we can Avail ourselves of and round our conversation out by looking at those sort of like upper limit edge cases where we really need to break out the fancy moves but if you can get really good at what we've talked about here in part two log some hours put in some practice time this is the bulk of the work of balancing images when you're working as a colorist it's being able to move quickly it's being able to match by eye it's being able to have the confidence to say okay I know it's not all the way there but it's getting there I'm going to get it in the next pass that gets even trickier when you're in the room with clients who may be as demanding or even more demanding of the color grade than you are right but the fact remains color grading has to happen in passes you can even give them that analogy if you're working with a client and they're trying to get things perfect in that first pass give them that ironing the shirt analogy and explain that you don't want to set their garment on fire you want to get things done in passes and make it look really good so I hope that's some helpful stuff for you to think about in your next color grade when you're trying to dial in your balance and we're going to go further on this subject of sort of working our way through an initial pass in our next episode of grade school my live show that we do on Friday mornings here on the channel where you can show up ask any questions that you might have about the workflow we've explored today or problems or challenges that you're experiencing in your grading and we're really going to get the chance to go a little bit deeper into this topic than a quick video here on YouTube really allows for but this is a great start if you can work on this focus on getting really good at this part of the grade this is a huge part of finding success as a colorist and really enjoying what you do so I hope you'll take these ideas to heart and uh and you know see see where they lead you in your color grading Adventures I hope to see you guys in grade school our next episode where we're going to go deeper on this subject and if not there then I will see you for part three in this series on building better balance

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 16,322

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Id: kovcRqa7r70

Length: 14min 18sec (858 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 05 2022