How NOT to Balance Highlights and Shadows | Davinci Resolve

welcome my name is avery Peck and today I'm going to show you how not to balance your highlights and shadows here I have a shot with some pretty significant green contamination in the shadows and we can see that on the parade as well now of course ideally these three color channels should be even so let me show you something kind of interesting if I pull my saturation down to zero you'll notice our color channels are now perfectly aligned and it kind of makes sense if there's no color information present in the image then it's impossible for there to be a color cast so what if we could use this principle to balance out our shadows and highlights and make sure that they're perfectly neutral so let's try it I can go over to my luminance versus saturation curves and I can click on these shadow and highlight points right here and then what I can do is bring my black point and my white point all the way down to zero so I'm taking the darkest regions and the brightest regions of my shot and pulling the saturation down to zero and if we look at the parade we can see that indeed our shadows and highlights are now perfectly aligned so now we're done okay not quite in reality without sending too harsh this is probably the worst possible way to balance your shadows and highlights and here's why there's a fundamental difference between balancing and desaturating balancing means that you're moving color information around to appear neutral desaturating on the other hand means that you're just removing color information entirely so knowing that there are two big problems with this method the first of course is that we're losing a lot of color information if you look at the skin tones as I turn this note on and off you can see how much of that rich red color is just becoming kind of this nasty muted gray the other big problem is that even though this curve is sort of hiding the green cast the green cast is still fundamentally there this isn't actually balancing the footage at all and if I try to bring this point over and get rid of more of that green color you can see that we're now desaturating so much of the image that this shot is pretty much unusable so now that we know that this method doesn't really work what's the correct way to balance our highlights and well actually inside resolved there are several correct ways to do it so let me go ahead and reset this node and probably the most popular option is to use the primary Baris so here we have our usual lift gamma and gain controls but instead of a color wheel we have our GB bars and this is convenient because it lines up perfectly with our parade so in this case we need to bring the green channel down in the shadows so we can take the green down in the lift and so now the green and red are pretty close to even but the blue is a little bit high so we can take some blue out and that's looking pretty close and then if I want to I can even bring a little bit of red out of the mid-tones since it seems a bit high and there we go so just for fun let's compare this side by side with our desaturation method so you can actually see what's going on here so here's the desaturation method and here's balancing the shot using the lift gamma gain you can see there's a tremendous difference this saturation method leaves these really nasty looking skin tones whereas the lift gamma and gain controls retain all of that information and present a much more naturalistic and pleasing image now there's one potential downside to using the lift gamma and game controls and that is they're very broad which works well for color correction but not so much for color grading typically when you grade you just want to balance out your darkest shadows while leaving all of the other colors untouched and we can do that using the log wheels now the log wheels are unique in the sense that we have a low range and a high range parameter so essentially we can adjust the exact luminance range that each one of these wheels effects and let me show you that right now if I push some wild color into my shadows and I take my low range down you can see how that color is now only entering the darkest shadows and as I bring my low range up now that color is affecting more and more of the shot so what I can do is reset my wheel and can bring my low range down a fair bit and then I can start to balance out my shadows so if my shadows are green then I need to add the complementary color magenta so I'll go ahead and push a little bit of magenta into my shadows and that to me is looking pretty close to neutral so now we have these nice neutral blacks but that green tint is still present and the rest of our trade is maintained I hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you'd like to get in contact with me and stay up to date with future tutorials you can follow me on instagram at Avery Peck official thanks for watching and I'll see you all next time [Music]

Channel: Avery Peck

Views: 109,975

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Id: PDdh6IYNpDk

Length: 5min 9sec (309 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2019