How advanced colorists use qualifiers in DaVinci Resolve

if you've spent any time here on my channel you've probably heard me talk some trash about qualifiers you might even know why it's because i generally prefer to work with broader softer gentler tools than the qualifier but one thing that we've never actually done is to explore situations where we might need to use a qualifier and look at some of the potential alternatives that's what i want to do today looking at three examples of tasks that we would commonly pull a qualifier in order to accomplish let's take a look here inside of resolve and talk about qualifiers and their alternatives so here on my first shot i have an ungraded shot all i've done thus far is what i do at the beginning of every project which is to set up my color management and my template node tree so i've got labeled nodes set up in a configuration that i like but nothing's actually happening inside of them if you want to learn more about this process that i undergo for every project i take on i've got dedicated videos on these subjects that i encourage you to check out for now let's dive in and talk about what we might want to do with a shot like this and for the moment let's assume that i've kind of done my basics i've done my primaries i'm happy with that basic grade i feel like that's in a good place and now i want to focus in on details i want to focus in on my secondaries which i have a dedicated sort of branch of my node tree for down in this lower sort of half of my node graph and specifically what i want to take a look at is the flowers back over here i feel like the flowers are just a little bit oversaturated i want to bring them in just slightly that's the kind of thing that i often would pull a qualifier for early in my career you go in you eye dropper that region you refine the key maybe soften it out a little bit and then you could pull some saturation out pump some saturation in if that's what you wanted to do you have full control over just that region of your image that you've qualified instead i want to show you a different approach all we're going to do is go over to our curves and look at our hue versus sat curves and i'm going to zoom in onto this portion of the image and try to eye dropper a nice broad region within this flower kind of wrap up all the different hues that are within it and you can see i'm given these little goal posts as a result and i can grab this middle point in between them and start to pull downward like so so i'm starting to desaturate that flower and one thing i'm often going to pay attention to when i'm doing this exercise is i'll kind of overdo it and then just look at where the edges of my hue boundary are and look at maybe opening things up a little bit just to make sure that i don't create any breakage or kind of nasty behavior in the course of making my adjustment so something like that i think is going to probably work better for me and i'm just going to check this edge as well and especially because i'm not actually even going that far i can feel really good about the sort of how clean this operation is let's now zoom out and take a look at the image on the whole now you can see i'm having some effect here on my skin and i just want to point out i'm actually good with that i'm okay with that if anything i can back this off if i want to have slightly less effect on my skin but that's one of the trade-offs that's actually one of the benefits of working in this fashion is we're going to get broader and softer results you're going to have influence on neighboring areas or neighboring hues neighboring colors that you're trying to manipulate and that's actually a good thing because it means that you're working nice and broad and soft i'll take this 10 times out of 10 over seeing an edge or getting a chattery mat no viewer is going to know that my hue versus sat happens to be touching my subject's skin a little bit but viewers notice all the time if there's a chattery edge even if they don't notice consciously they know something's not quite right with the image so i would far prefer a broad adjustment that doesn't do anything nasty to break the image or to create artifacts or tearing in it so easy first example of swapping out a qualifier for a simple hue versus sat adjustment it's having almost no effect anywhere in the image except exactly where i want it to and yet it's also a nice broad soft adjustment that i don't have to babysit or worry about getting noise out of let's take a look at shot number two now and talk about another scenario similar but different in this case as i look at the image i really like what i see in this image same kind of thing let's assume that i'm pretty happy with my primaries with my exposure my ratio my balance all that good jazz but what i'm seeing here that's kind of bugging me in this image are these traffic lights back here and in fact if i go deeper into this shot and look at the tail we're going to see a motorcycle come buzzing through here and it's just at the bottom frame but those lights are kind of hitting in that same kind of overly aggressive overly garish red register for me and i want to pull those in alright let's go back over here to the head of the shot and we could start by doing a version of what we just did just say all right let's eyedropper this region within our hue versus set and start to pull that down like so now i'm going to need to go further with this because it is more oversaturated than in my prior scenario and i have to say in this case i'm not so okay with the influence that is being had on neighboring areas in particular i feel like i'm kind of pulling the life out of my subject's skin and we actually need to broaden this out a little bit you can see there's kind of some blotching happening here that's a result of being a little too narrow with my goal post so i need to broaden this out and make sure i'm getting a nice broad range included inside of these goalposts something like that okay i'm not afraid to go broad by the way as you can see broad beat soft i'd rather go broad and as i look at the image and if i feel like all right there are things happening in here that i don't want to see then we can do something about that and i want to show you what in this case in this case i'm going to break my own rule we're actually going to use a qualifier but we're going to use it in a broader softer simpler way than if we had just gone in and immediately pulled a key on that traffic light so what's happening right now if i look at okay i'm accomplishing my goal with the traffic lights they're sitting in a much more pleasing kind of filmic register now i just want to limit the operation to the traffic lights as well as to those tail lights buzzing through my image here at the very tail of it right which right now it's hitting them fine i just want to limit the operation to only affect those things now maybe i could do a power window or a couple of power windows and track those things but in this case i think the cleanest thing to do is going to be to complement this hue versus sat operation which is nice and broad and soft with a qualifier only on a single channel so this is the first thing i want to point out to you you can use qualifiers well or you can use qualifiers poorly and the first sort of rule of thumb that you can think about with qualifiers is to use as few parameters as possible so i will virtually never use all three of these and i will generally try to stick to just one of them and my preference for that one if i can accomplish my goals with it is to use the luminance channel or the luminance criteria because it's going to tend to be the cleanest of these three channels so if we take a look here and say what if we limit this operation by its luminance i'm going to flip into my highlight mode here and i'm going to go to the low adjustment here on my qualifier and just start to walk it in until i'm flagging this adjustment off i mean really the thing that i'm most concerned about is my subject's skin i don't i'm i would like to get this adjustment clear of most of the rest of the frame too just in case but it's really my subject's skin that i want to make sure is not receiving this adjustment because i don't like what it's doing to my subject's skin so i'm going to kind of find a sweet spot around here and then same thing we're going to go nice and soft as soft as we possibly can without inadvertently including things that we were trying to take out in the first place so something like this and if i zoom out and turn my highlight mode off you can see i'm now having a nice targeted effect here on the traffic lights and if i look toward the tail i should see the same thing here in the brake lights of the bike over here and in fact maybe i need to adjust my luminance qualification because it does look like it's actually being excluded from the deal so i'm going to open this back up a little bit like so and i may need to lower my softness and let's now go back over here and make sure that my skin is not being included which it is so i'm now going to walk it back over you can see it's kind of a balancing act right takes a little more time but the results are going to be cleaner and softer so i'm going to find a decent balance here and i'm going to say if i can clean up the traffic lights here i can live with a little bit of a hotter register on those brake lights okay that's going to be my trade-off i'd rather work broad and soft i'd rather keep this adjustment off of my subject's face and in exchange for that i can live with at the very tail of the shot these brake lights that are halfway in frame remaining in that kind of higher more saturated red register i've done most of what i wanted to do and i've done it cost free i've done it without damaging or creating artifacts or problems in my image okay so that's the idea there with shot number two let's take a look now at shot number three and talk about another way that these things can go so here in shot number three i've got a couple things that i want to do the first thing that i would like to do is tame in the luminance on these practical fixtures here inside of the environment now i don't want to adjust the luminance on this nice daylight that's spilling in from outside i kind of want to leave that where it's at so once again my first move here could absolutely be to pull a qualifier to go in an eye dropper and qualify for these fixtures but instead i want to try something slightly different instead i'm going to create a power window as a starting point because you'll notice these lights all live well below the level that i see here for the light pouring in from the ceiling so i'm going to create a circular power window and what i'm going to do here is actually go to my control surface and set my aspect all the way up to 100 so that it's effectively a horizontal grad and i'm going to confine whatever i'm going to do next down into this region so that we are well flagged off of the daylight pouring in from the ceiling and we've got plenty of softness happening there as well and now i have a couple different things that i could do but for starters i could just go to my custom curves and i could zoom in on one of these fixtures and take my eye dropper and tap in there and see where i'm living with those right so now i can start to pull this in you'll notice i've got my editable splines turned on to get a little bit more control i'm going to start pulling this one in as well although that's affecting too much of the rest of my image so i'm going to leave that put and just look at kind of finding a sweet spot for i want to delete this control point actually and we're going to just kind of try to find a sweet spot for bringing in these peak highlights i'm holding down option to walk this control point a little bit further down the tone scale without actually moving anything and let's just keep refining this until we feel like we're starting to affect these peak highlights now this is probably going to be a little bit tough to view over youtube but i'm getting the result that i want here i'm starting to tame these in and i'm going to go a little bit further than i might in an actual grade just to make it easy to see so something like that is going to be a good start for sort of taming those in and you can see i'm starting to kind of get a little bit more shape into those i also want to explore another idea let's say we don't want to do this curves adjustment because we want to have a little bit more control over what we're doing here and we actually would like to add a little bit of blurring into these areas as well to soften them out even further so let's wipe this out and once again contemplate using a qualifier in tandem with a power window so i'm going to go to my luminance channel once again turn on my highlight mode and just qualify that zone look how easily those qualified just with this one luminance qualifier i'm not touching either of these criteria and i'm again going to go as soft as i can stand as soft as i can go without introducing things into the image that i don't want to see and then maybe choke that in a little bit further like so and now i've got control not only over my intensity on these fixtures like so i'm now pulling my gain in but i've actually got the ability to blur these areas as well so let's kind of zoom in here see how we're doing and let's go over to our not rgb mixer but our blur over here and let's start to look at increasing the radius of our blur and even at this level you can see i still need to soften out this qualifier even further or maybe i just need to move its low point a little bit like that so how about that i'm making a really nuanced adjustment just to those sconces and maybe i'm getting a little too soft because you can see i actually am affecting the areas below the fixtures in terms of their luminance so again this is that kind of push pull that that part you need to feel your way through that effectively means i've gone too soft with my softness i said as soft as i can afford to go right so i'm going to keep adjusting the softness until when i flip this on and off i only see a change in the area of the image that i expect to and then in sort of tandem with that i'm going to look at bringing that low point up because i really don't want to include some of that stained glass window that's in there so it's more of an iterative and sort of feel driven process than just slamming a qualifier or pulling a quick key and starting to make adjustments we really want to be more nuanced than that and it takes a little bit more time but the results tend to be better so if we take a look at where we are now we've got a nice really soft key that we've pulled here we're flagging off any of this daylight from coming into the equation and in fact maybe i can even sweeten the deal a little bit more and bring this down and let's just see what happens if with the frame in terms of its motion that's all going to be totally fine if i wanted to i could track or manually animate this window so that by the time we're here it's moved down to the bottom of the frame but in this case you get the idea all that we've done is create in a really really broad soft way this adjustment on those lights without needing to pull a narrow qualifier more about worry about blurring the key and all the stuff that tends to attend qualifiers so i hope this starts to kind of like open up your mind a little bit to the possibilities of choosing an alternative to a qualifier or using the qualifier in partnership with other tools allowing you to pull a gentler qualifier because we use the qualifier in two of our three examples today but we only had to use a single channel of the qualifier it happened to be the cleanest of the three channels the luminance channel and by simply partnering that with an hsl curves or a power window adjustment we're getting a much broader softer result that we need to feel our way too a little bit more but once we have we don't have to babysit this adjustment in the same way as if we had initially pulled a three channel qualifier using our eye dropper so i hope you find that interesting i talk about qualifiers all the time usually to talk trash on them as i said and i want to be clear i use qualifiers all the time as well but i use them more in this fashion than in the traditional drop an eyedropper on there and start making really hard adjustments uh type of workflow that you'll see a lot of that you're honestly tempted to use because of the way the qualifier is presented to us so this is a more nuanced more interesting more filmic way of employing qualifiers in my opinion and i'm excited to go even deeper on this subject in our youtube live grade school that we're going to be doing this friday at 10 a.m pacific where we're going to spend the full hour talking about qualifiers and further exploring how we can get the absolute best results out of them and ensure that we're doing absolutely no damage to our image looking forward to seeing you then

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 17,481

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Id: TNFOhCt0KDY

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 16 2022