Grading YOUR Footage!! Planet X | DaVinci Resolve 16 Tutorial

[Music] [Music] what's going on guys this is Kazi this is episode three of grading your footage and if you want to know how to submit your footage for this particular series watch episode two it's gonna be up here somewhere so let me just take you back and talk about why is grading so important especially in this day and age okay back in the day film cameras shot on film stock so you just pick the look before you went into filming whatever it is that you were gonna work on you shot it and that's the way it looked okay then you talk about Eng cameras you know cameras that were used to shoot sporting events or TV back in the day was just wreck seven or nine that was the look for broadcast and that's what of a shot in the natural look and the way you would light it that's how you're gonna get it like basically what the director or DP saw on sight that's what it looked like but that all changed after di o brother where art thou was the first movie that was fully digitally color graded and then afterwards you just the list goes on and you can easily see it that every era started to have its own look and then we moved on to the transformer look the teal in orange and then now we got Mad Max and Joker or John wick so as the time goes on color grading becomes one of the pivotal parts of storytelling okay so why am I telling you this I'm telling you this because grading without purpose is just a cheap Instagram filter you get what I'm saying like if you don't have a thought behind it and if it doesn't really support the story then it's just like flicking through like whatever look looks cool and then you just slap it on and move on and it doesn't really serve any purpose and then you're from now you're gonna look at it and it's gonna feel dated and you're gonna be like really feeling embarrassed that why did you even do that but if there's purpose behind it if you go in with a game plan that's a whole another story this is what's happening here so this is grading your footage meaning it's not necessarily part of the project that I worked on or something like that these are just shots given to me and then I get to pick whichever one I'm gonna use it for this series and in this particular exam oh I am the director I'm grading the shot I'm a colorist I am creating the narrative in my head and this particular one is inspired by the situation we're all going through so I'm looking at this as we're stuck in this pandemic it's a post-apocalyptic time and these two dudes are in the outer space on some other planet looking for a cure so what are some of the color palettes that come to my mind what I'm thinking about is interstellar when they go to get dr. Mann and then I'm also thinking about the movie Book of Eli so I'm taking these two different color palettes and I'm kind of putting them together but you're gonna see I'm not gonna be using those references this is basically based on my own database in my head how I picture those movies and then I'm gonna cook up a palette based on that and you're gonna see that where we're gonna start the word we're gonna end up is gonna be absolutely bonkers but it's gonna be probably one of the easiest grades that I've built here so in your head you might think man what just happened this must be a 40 note grade it's not it's one of the simplest things that I've done and the way I'm gonna build this you can take this and apply it to your entire project or at least to an entire scene without it breaking apart so are you guys pumped are you guys ready and for those that want to level up their color grading game check out the link in the description one hour long free training where I will show you how to get the perfect skin tones out of your Sony s log 8-bit footage how to get the clean white look it's the go to commercial look how to get the creamy film look how to fix the dreaded gamma shift and much much more link is in the description and guys three days ago we were able to hit 50k on this channel I want to thank each and every one of you this means everything to me honestly it just it's such an exciting platform and it's a new chapter in my life and one that I am having a blast being a part of so thank you so much for that make sure to smash that like button if you're enjoying the content subscribe to my channel if you haven't already check out my Instagram page I'm posting banger content there every single day let's roll the intro before we even get to grading I want to give a shout out to depicted time for hooking me up with such an epic epic clip that we're gonna be working on let's get right to it I am genuinely so excited about this particular tutorial you guys are gonna be picking up some in st. tips first of all let's just analyze the shot this particular clip is shot on the DJI X 5s shot in 4k 10-bit DNG RAW format and here is the raw tab this is your best friend here because if you look at the scopes right now in its current state its highlights are blown out I mean there's just not much that we can do with this image okay it's gone everything here is absolutely gone but this is the beauty of the raw module when you shoot something in RAW you're gonna have this tab and these options available so right now it's set to the project setting I can also set it to camera metadata or the cinema DNG default so that is what another setting or even better we can set it to clip which is what I want I want full control here okay so I want it in this and then I want to change the color space I don't want the color space to be rec 709 I want it to be black magic design so it's analog very cool now we can work with this it doesn't look blown out it's not out of control anymore that said it's still not perfect because you see these straight lines that does show clipping okay so even if it's giving you the illusion that it's not clipped you can see clearly here that this shot is clipped so what can we do to go around it this button right here your life will never be the same when I hit this button look what happens to the top end of this shot boom and just even look at the image right here so let's do it again I'm gonna turn it off look it's just greyed out and it's mushy I click right here boom it just opens it up it opens it up so much not all the way you can still see a little bit of like a straight line there but god it's so much better than this alright so this is what we have to work with let's just jump right in and let's analyze the image for half a second and see what am I trying to here okay so we have plenty to work with you can really see the dynamic range that's been exercised right so we got the hottest point we got pretty dark points you know in this black part of the clothing that they're wearing and then we got dark skies and then we got darks and so there's so much that we can play with now as I said that I'm gonna be creating something really dramatic as if they're on a different planet then at that point the sand doesn't need to look like the color of the sand and that's exactly what's gonna be happening here we're gonna be manipulating all these colors should get something really surreal out of this world potential things that can really take this look to a whole another level that you have to watch out for when you're building really creative looks is what you can latch on you know so here I see a great opportunity right there in the sky I can do so many cool things and add so much color into the sky and just really make that the highlight of this entire shot and then have the rest of the shot be say a supporting cast if you will our characters are wearing white which means it's gonna be pretty easy to sort of isolate them and really pop them out in the image if necessary right or we can just go there Roger Deakins and Mitch Paulson route and just have a very natural feel other than overdoing everything let's just jump right in after keeping all these things in mind okay so first note is gonna be my exposure so I'm gonna leave that for my exposure next node is gonna be my balance after that I'm gonna do some desaturation so d set and then after that we're gonna work on our sky and then I'm gonna do a parallel and this is gonna be my look note okay this is where we're gonna create a really cool look and then afterwards we're gonna have another node now this node is gonna be for my talent and outside node by right-clicking going to add node outside node and then this one is going to be a vignette and this time I'm gonna leave it at that okay so it is a very clean very streamlined node tree structure that you can easily apply to your entire scene if you are creating this extreme first thing that I'm going to show you you've seen me use the contrast tool as a starting point I always showed you that what we never messed around with or as much is with pivot and think of pivot as time so when it goes to zero I want you to think of zero as high noon and as the numbers go higher it gets darker okay so if I give it some contrast I'm gonna give you just for the sake of it let me just give you an example so let's just add some contrast like so let's just keep it somewhere around here cool contrast right if I take this and like I said high noon if I go to the left look how much brighter it gets let's undo that if I go to the right look how much darker it gets so you get what I'm saying think of it as time this will really really help you okay when you go to the left it's noon that is gonna be the brightest part you go to the right it's gonna get darker so this to me is a sunset Sun is going down and I don't want it to be really bright so what do we have to do we have to go to the right I am going to form a starting point set it at somewhere around seven okay and now this is looking pretty good I mean this is like deacons ask Sicario if you will you know it's it's looking pretty good I can go into my contrast and so I'm moving it around a little bit to see if I want to take it somewhere else but really I like something like that and then I'm gonna pump the contrast a little more not too much really gentle okay I think this is a great starting point tons of detail just look at that nothing is lost nothing is crushed it's really good great starting point I'm gonna go into my balance and now I'm just looking at this and I kind of want to just balance my image out like I want to bring the reds down and you know not have so much red dominant image and just balance it out so I'm gonna start with my gain first I'm gonna lower it I'm gonna take it to the left and just really get it in the ballpark somewhere around here then I'm gonna take my gamma and I'm gonna try to keep that in the center go back to my gain balance it out go to my lift and something like that go to my gamma level it out a little bit more and then back to my lift gain can come down a little bit and gamma can go up a little bit something like that I mean just look at the white line and how even the lower parts are balanced out a little bit and top is balanced out a little bit and we can see how we pulled out the red out of the image a little bit and even like their clothes so this is a good balance okay this is where I'm gonna leave it now what I want to do is I'm gonna click on the second tab and I'm gonna pull my color boost back quite a bit okay I want to get a lot of the color out of this maybe somewhere around here okay now if I do before and after you can see in the sand and in the sky and just anywhere where we had a little gunky color going on or red cast going on that's all leveled out and we can see it right here see the white points everywhere now the image is way more balanced and quite honestly almost monotone which is perfect because this is where we're gonna start injecting a lot of color now I'm gonna go under my sky and I'm gonna go under my log wheels I'm just gonna take my highlights and start moving it towards that salmon that I want to add in my image okay so even something like that now this is looking pretty good let's move the image somewhere around here and now see what it looks like and maybe I can pull it back a little bit but something like that you know another thing that I'm gonna do in this node or actually in my exposure I'm just gonna take my highlights and I'm gonna bring it down to like negative 15 so this way it gives me a lot more give with my color now I want to Park this color somewhere around here maybe I can go back into my exposure and I can go into my highlights and I can raise them back up something like that so this is what we created in our sky right maybe I can dial back on the salmon a little bit and just add a bit more orange like something like that so it's not too exaggerated and it just feels like it belongs now one thing we can do is we can go into our arrange and we can start playing around with it so I can either open it up or I can close it down so I mean I kind of like that that kind of looks cool but maybe it's too much so I'm gonna restrict it keep it somewhere around here and then if we want to change it even more we can do that but I feel like it blends a little bit better and then I'm gonna go under my look and this is gonna be a plain old primaries wheels action okay so I'm gonna take my gamma I'm gonna start bringing it down so I want to create like really cool [Music] complimentary vibe okay with what we had going on I kind of like that to be honest now I can go back into my log wheels and maybe add a little bit more salmon just ever so slightly like this and now if I go back and forth and look at it I mean this looks really freaking cool I can go back into my high range and play around with it and see if I like it less or more honestly I like it when it's restricted like something like that I don't mind that let's play around with our colors here a little bit more okay so I'm gonna go back into my gamma and I'm gonna start taking it more towards that sort of like a steely vibe you know like add that in there I'm liking that even more I want to go back into my exposure I want to take my highlights and bring them down because I don't want to touch them to the top like I want to keep it under and now it's looking really good I mean if I just like let's play it through I mean it's King really it's really really nice so if I park it here in my talent node this is what I want to do I'm gonna go create a very subtle window okay it's gonna be something like that like just watch it's literally just around my talent something like that and what I want to do is I want to go under my curves and let's make this bigger and I'm gonna lift them out so something like that and now I wanna blend it in okay so I'm gonna go in here and I'm gonna start adding softness until it just blends it really nicely so if I do before and after it's a really nice difference okay now the only problem with that is that is taking out the juice from my sky and I do not like that so what can we do to get that back it's pretty simple I'm gonna show you a really cool tip creating keys like that is never gonna mess up with anything that you're doing okay it's gonna be really clean so high soft I'm gonna raise it up a little bit I'm gonna hit shift edge so we can see what we're doing I'm gonna take my highs I'm gonna start bringing it down let's turn on the node so we see what's happening and let's pull it back pull it back until we grab everything but the sky so something like that now if I do on and off it's only affecting my guys it just pops them out hence the talent node and it leaves everything else as this so once we pop our talent out we don't even have to keyframe it because look at it they're always gonna be in the middle okay so this is pretty clean but now the coolest thing is remember we did an outside node this is where the magic is gonna happen I want to create some drama right so how do you create drama I'm gonna go into my log wheels I'm gonna take my shadows and I'm gonna pull them down you get what I'm saying all of a sudden just a quick little stroke and look what we had to what we have now and it's believable like it doesn't look like it's coming out of nowhere it's very believable now the thing that's not believable is when we get to see this shift like lookit boom that right there that's what's not believable so I'm just gonna go here and I'm gonna soften it up until that is not so prominent so even something like that then what I want to do is we can make the size smaller of this window and another thing that we can do is that we can go back in this node and it doesn't need to be this dramatic we can pull it up a little bit and split the difference so somewhere around here now it's much more subtle so if I take these two nodes and turn them on and off just look at the difference how much we pop our characters without affecting the sky and then we add so much more drama here we shape our lighting in a very natural way now it's up to you what you want to do in the sky know what I mean if you want to add a little bit more salmon and give it a bit more color or likes such and just like really keep massaging it until it pops just the right amount and then we can go here and bring our highlights down a little bit and then in my talent one thing that I do want to try is just raising it up a little bit like maybe keep it somewhere around here and now let's go all the way through and check it out all right so I that much better so one thing that I just want to do is pull back on the colors a little bit just make it a bit more natural if you will so I'm just gonna go back into my highlights in the sky I start pulling it back a little bit okay not too much even just something like that so this is before and then this is after maybe a little bit more something like that and then I want to go into my look and I want to go into my gamma and just bring it back a little bit yeah so now if I turn these two on and off and then one more thing I want to do here is in my high range I just want to go in and let's see okay that is good so I personally think that just looks better it blends everything in and keeps it more subtle but still tons and tons of look injected into it but it doesn't scream it you know that's what I wanted to do because color grading is all about subtlety so you got to find the right balance and then let it be don't don't overdo it you got to start off with overdoing it and then pull back pull back pull back to a point where it just looks tasteful and it just looks well done so this is where I'm gonna leave it let's go ahead and kill all of this and start from the beginning but the beginning was this remember so I have a still that I'm bringing in right now to show you this is how it was when we didn't unlock all the features in our raw and then after we did that we turn it into clip we converted it into log we turned on highlight recovery so we got our highlights back then we started with our contrast showed you a really cool pivot technique here and how to properly use it then we went on to balancing our image to pull out some of this and dese added by using our color boost and then we went ahead and created a really nice look in the sky by using our log wheels went into our primaries wheels to create this color contrast with our sky and then went ahead and windowed out our talent to pull them out a little bit and then created an outside node and shaped light in a way where it just creates more drama alright I want to just go back the dish frame and then let's just look at it before and after so I mean this is what was given to us and this is what we turned it into so guys the power of color grading do I have to say anymore let's check out the final look in full screen [Music] [Music] I hope you guys had a blast drop a comment below let me know what you think so this episode probably taught you more than one thing being the creative matters the most but then technical skills also come in handy because if we didn't know how to work with the raw module there was just nothing that we could have done so I feel like having that concept in the back of your head is not necessarily a terrible thing that said I also put creativity up there creativity drove this grade and creativity will drive you to work on any project on that note smash that like button subscribe to my channel for more awesomeness make sure to check that link in the description below I will see you all in the next video [Music]

Channel: Waqas Qazi

Views: 26,234

Keywords: davinci resolve 16, resolve 16, davinci resolve, davinci, davinci resolve 16 tutorial, davinci resolve studio, davinci tutorial, davinci resolve free, color correction tutorial, resolve color grading, color grading davinci resolve, colorist, color grading tutorial, filmmaking, color grading, color correction, davinci resolve tutorial, blackmagic design, davinci resolve 16.2, davinci resolve color grading, filmmaker, how to color grade, davinci resolve 16 color grading, theqazman

Id: 53U8_4bEMpc

Length: 23min 30sec (1410 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 17 2020