How to Color Grade a Whole Project Start to Finish in DaVinci Resolve! + Color Grading Resources!

I get a lot of questions about color workflow and how the heck do I color a whole project how do I approach that that kind of thing well here's the answer with a sample project huge thanks to Art list for sponsoring this video here we are in the color page of DaVinci Resolve and we have our edit here and I just have a color space transform on it just so that we aren't editing with nasty gray footage you want to see the edit I'll show you the edit here I'll make a little room and we can see the edit let's take a look at it shall we [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah nice little wholesome thing pretty neat so by the way all of this footage is from art list who is sponsoring this video I get a lot of stuff from art list and just everything they have is beautiful and art list is a pretty good deal you get unlimited downloads you get all these assets royalty free they have quite a few bundles this Max Pro one is 39.99 a month has footage up to 8K covers personal to commercial use you can also do this Max social which is 29.99 a month for your social channels so that's Facebook YouTube twitch Instagram podcast Tick Tock super good deal for unlimited footage in HD covers a lot of what you'd need if you're looking for practice color grading footage you can get the footage in templates Pro which includes raw and log footage super great deal if you're learning how to color grade man you can go in here and go to shop type and select raw and log and you have all these different scenes that you can download and practice color grading and it'll tell you what camera was used Red Raven was used for this one and man you have these beautiful shots you could really just download a bunch of this footage and color grade it and put it on your color grading reel and probably get a job doing color grading man such a good resource and if I turn off my color space transform here that I had on the whole thing this is all shot in log in bmd film Gen 4 on the Ursa mini pro and I know that because you can look it up on Art list isn't that neat so if you want some practice color grading footage this is a great way to get some ungraded really professionally shot footage bring it onto your system make a little edit like this and do some color grading in fact that's what we're doing right now anyways for this project or any project the very first thing that I'm going to do is set up my color management now there's a lot of ways that you can color manage footage I think the easiest way the nicest way is just to group all of the shots that are from the same camera so I'll just shift select everything in here that happens to be all of my Clips if you have two different cameras you can group each camera as its own group and then right click on one of the clips and I'll say add into new group and we'll call this Ursa mini 4.6 K all right by the way I'm not going to be explaining every single thing that I do here I'm assuming a little bit of knowledge of the color page if you don't have knowledge of the color page check out the color page crash course video right here that's going to help you understand what the heck is going on anyhow so once I have my group made I'm going to go up to the upper right hand corner here where we have these four dots this third dot if I'm on a clip that's in a group is going to be the group post clip these are going to be nodes that are applied after the clip nodes for every clip in the group so if I make this really pink that's going to make every clip in the group really pink after our clip notes so if I were to take the saturation all the way down it's going to be a pink flavored black and white image right I'll just reset this real quick if in my clip node I were going to make this really pink and then in the group post clip make it black and white it's going to end up black and white everything's going to be black and white no matter if I made it pink first or not because the clip nodes happen but before the group post clip notes see post clip it's after the clip right cool so in this group post clip I'll just go back to our clip and reset everything in the group post clip I'm going to set up a node that takes this from camera space into Rec 709 which is the color space that will actually look good on our monitor now I'm going to color grade in camera space because our camera color space is plenty robust enough to give us some room to color grade the other thing that I could do is transform all of this footage to something like DaVinci wide gamut first and then color grade and DaVinci wide gamut and then go into group post clip and change this from DaVinci wide gamut into Rec 709 if you guys want to learn more about that way of doing it let me know and that's what we'll do in the next video but in this one I'm trying to keep it simple and so the simplest way is just in the group post clip to go to effects and color space transform and input color space we're just going to go to the color space that this was shot in if you don't know the color space you have to find it out okay this is going to be Blackmagic 4.6 K film gen 3 and the input gamma is going to be Blackmagic design 4.6 K film okay and that should if this is right and we turn this to rec 709 I'll change our tone mapping to luminance and our gamut mapping the saturation compression if these settings are right if this is shot well it should look pretty good it should look pretty good it should look how it was shot so it might not look really pleasing but it should look correct it shouldn't just be obviously terrible okay it should look somewhat reasonable so if we did it right it should look reasonable and that definitely looks reasonable looks like kind of an overcast day looks like it's exposed well we don't have a bunch of clipping in the highlights or the Shadows it's not just insane okay so that's a good starting point even this underexposed footage doesn't look terrible you can still see in the shadows and everything which means that we probably did our color space transform right okay again I know these settings because I looked up the camera that this was shot on and made some educated guesses if this isn't Ursa Pro 4.6 K this is what those were generally shooting on a little bit ago so I tried a couple and this seems to be the one okay let's label this as CST for color space transform and that's all we have to do for our color management here so I'll switch into clip for our nodes and now any adjustment that I make to these nodes are just going to happen to One Clip at a time all right from here the first thing that I like to do is set up my node template now everybody has different node templates for how they color grade something I like to keep mine really simple okay so I'm going to label this exposure because I want to adjust exposure in the first node and then maybe we'll do contrast and then saturation you can make Arguments for doing these in parallel nodes if you want to learn more about that let me know I'll make a video on it okay but generally I like to attack exposure contrast and saturation in fact actually saturation and temperature as the main big adjustments for the shot okay after that we get a little more granular do some tweaks here so we'll just call this sex secondary one and then I'll make a parallel node for secondary two right click cleanup node graph I like this kind of structure because without getting too crazy and doing you know 500 notes this gives me a lot of wiggle room especially for kind of a shorter simpler project like this all right now I'm going to select all of the clips here just by hitting Ctrl a and then I'm in a middle button Mouse click that's click down with my scroll wheel on this shot that I've already made this template on and then I'll say replace and that's going to copy this over to my other shots now nothing's happening these are just the empty nodes without anything happening in them okay so now not only do we have the same structure for each clip but we also have sort of a to-do list like we're going to adjust exposure then we're going to adjust contrast then we're going to adjust saturation and so on but the first thing I like to do is pick a shot that's representative of the rest of the movie so we can kind of dial in our look and you generally want a shot that's usually a wide shot just because you can have more subjects in the shot if there's people you want to have the most people in the shot I think something like this is pretty nice where we see the colors of the shirts and their skin and we have the TP and the leaves and everything so maybe something like that maybe this wide shot yeah I think this one right here this is pretty representative of the rest of the film and so what we're going to do is just focus in on this shot for now and we're gonna make this look the way that we want this whole thing to feel okay so just under our color space transform I like to adjust my exposure if it needs it I don't feel like it needs it maybe it just needs a little bit so I'll take this offset and push it up a little then let's move on to contrast and I'm just asking myself what does this need as far as contrast does it need more or less contrast well it's kind of gray so I think I'd probably do more and there's a couple ways you could do contrast one is grabbing this contrast slider and pushing it to the right that's going to add more contrast and that's a pretty easy way to do it you could also adjust the contrast with something like an s-curve here and that gives you a lot of control so I think just for this shot I'm going to just push up the contrast a little bit until I feel like it's starting to look Poppy I feel like that's about right and when you're using this contrast slider you can also adjust the pivot slider and that will adjust kind of what it thinks is bright and dark in the shot and so you can kind of move this back and forth to dial this in I wouldn't be afraid to go a little bit harsh on the contrast you don't want to do something like this but you don't want to leave it flat like that either so I think just a little bit stronger than flat so somewhere in there so here's before the contrast and here's after so there's a huge huge difference look at that wow okay might go back to our exposure and mess with that a little bit I think I do like it a little brighter than this mess with the pivot just to bring that down yeah so something like that so here's the difference our exposure is making we're just pushing the exposure up a little bit pushing the contrast a lot and man that looks really nice now let's adjust our saturation and temperature so one is how bright are the colors and are they the right color so if we assume that this tent is white which I don't know if that's safe or not but if this is white then this should be about equal on our Scopes here so in our parade scope we have our tent here in the middle and it's just a little bit warm white which I would say is probably reasonable so that like canvas kind of tends to be a little warm so I would say this is a reasonable white balance so it's it's correct I wouldn't say this is overly cool or warm there's a lot of warm in here but it's supposed to be because we have a lot of plants and stuff as far as the kids go I feel like they look good I think I might just push a little bit of saturation in just to pump those colors a little bit so here's before and here's after just pumping that a little bit we might take that down later I like the things to start out nice and Poppy and then we might take them down later okay so that looks pretty good and we'll deal with our secondary Corrections later I'll just turn those off for now so that looks pretty nice as far as just a correct shot now let's ask ourselves okay does this look and feel the way that we want it to feel and when we go into feeling we're really kind of working on a creative look and I like to do the Creative look over the entire project so I'll just go back into the group post clip and any kind of creative look stuff I'll do right before this color space transform so I'll just hit shift s that'll make a Serial node before that color space transform unless you're doing something really specific that you would kind of have to know what you're doing you generally want to do things before the color space transform that's the last thing you want to do in your whole pipeline okay but let's say we want this to be a little bit warmer so maybe we'll just push the gamma a little warm maybe we want to push our lift up a little bit just to kind of give ourselves a little bit of that kind of retro Vibe oh this is looking uh very Moonrise Kingdom I like that so here's before and here's after we're just pushing it yellow and boosting up the Shadows a little bit let's do this let's break this out so we'll say yellow and then I'll make another serial node and we'll call this lift and I think this time I'll just lift it with the curves and we'll lift it until it just starts to be too much so that's probably too much and then maybe we'll just take this down a little bit so we're just kind of crushing the blacks into a gray sort of at the bottom of our signal so we're just kind of lifting up these darker Shadows so here's before and here's after we're just lifting that up just a little bit okay that's kind of cool so we're adding a little bit of contrast but we're also lifting it up a little yeah something like that that looks nice the other thing I like to do is think about do I want to color the Shadows at all and I think it usually looks pretty nice if you just make the Shadows a little cool you don't have to go crazy and do a big teal and orange look but let's just call this cool shadows and what I like to do I think the easiest way to do this is just go into our log wheels these are a lot like our primary Wheels but you can control how much of the image it adjusts so if I take this Shadow and just push it super blue okay this is only going to affect the darkest shadows and I can change how much this affects with this range right here so as I boost this range up it's going to affect more of the shot if I take it down it's going to be less so I like to maybe just take this up to where I just start to notice it in the deeper Shadows there so it's just there so here's before and here's after so we're just pushing those a little bit teal and it's way too much so I'm going to take this Shadow off now that we have our range adjusted and we'll just push this a little bit teal just a touch okay before after so it's just very subtle if you're gonna color grade something I would always err on the side of subtle because things tend to look better when they're subtle than when they're really strong especially if you don't quite know what you're doing you don't have the experience to understand when something is too subtle or too strong so there it might be even a little hard to notice I might even take this range up just a touch just so you guys can see a little more there we go so we just have that really slight kind of teal look in the shadows then we just got to ask ourselves do we like this look is this helping I'll select all of these and hit Ctrl D to disable them so this is like normal what the camera sees and this is with the look and I think that looks really nice I like that kind of vintage looking Vibe the only other thing I might do is take these red threads down a little bit they feel like they're a little bright let's play with it at least so I'll hit alt s and we'll say Reds and we can do this a bunch of different ways one thing you can do is grab the color warper and we could just take the Reds down in saturation with the color warper like that that's a nice way to do it so here's before here's after that's maybe a little strong so maybe we can just reset this and add a couple more spokes like this and I'll just take just the Reds down a touch so here's before and here's after so it desaturates that bright pink and that red a little more and it kind of leaves the yellow so what do we feel about that so here's before and here's after yeah I feel like that feels more refined than having those Reds just blazing so that's one way we could do it let's actually try this a different way too in the custom curves you can select Things based on their Hue let's actually go to Hue versus saturation and select this red and then we can take the saturation down of the red and we'll widen this out it's good to have it wide something like that again here's before here's after it's doing basically the same thing the difference is I could go over one more and hue versus luminance and grab that same Hue and bring the luminance down just a touch and for the red that might look pretty good the pink might be kind of a problem here's before here's after so we're taking that red down just a touch maybe we want to keep the saturation but just take it down a little that's kind of nice so we can play with that and just kind of adjust that red to be a little less bright okay I feel like that looks really nice as far as our look so this is kind of going to be the main shot that we match everything to so I'll right click on this and say grab still and that's going to add a still to my gallery that I can compare things to later and now we can go back to our clip and this shot is pretty much done okay now it's a matter of going through and making sure that the rest of our shots look and feel like this shot so not all of these are going to look exactly like it because they aren't going to have the exact same trees and tent and kids and everything but it should look like it lives in this world let's just start with our first shot here and we already have the look on all of these shots but but we don't have the corrections that we were making to make them kind of actually work so this and this don't really match even though they have the same look applied in our group post clip we haven't messed with the exposure and contrast and everything in this shot like we did with the other shot so it's a matter of going through and fixing what's wrong and again we can use this node template as a to-do list so exposure is going to make the biggest deal so let's take the exposure up a little bit on this one and I'll just close our Clips because I can hit up and down on the keyboard to move in between the clips I can also click this button right here which is our image wipe and that will load our still that we have selected in our gallery into our shot and so I can just grab like a little piece of this to have a general idea of the feeling we're going for now because we're inside this isn't going to feel exactly like it but it should be sort of believable right so it should be roughly the same brightness maybe just a little darker because we'll give it a little bit of realism here and just let it be dark in the van it just shouldn't be way too dark like this right so we'll brighten it to be believable okay next we'll do kind of the same thing I'll grab this offset and push it up again to where it's believable okay that looks pretty nice next see this exposure I would say is probably pretty good might just need a tiny touch but that contrast is going to bring this right into where we want it to be bring up my Clips because all of these are probably going to take the same grade I'll just shift select these and middle button Mouse click to copy that over looks good so far and the name of the game here when you're going through the whole movie is to keep moving quickly you don't want to get stuck on a shot and take way too long because your eyes kind of get used to the shot and you start to say oh you know what it's not that bad so you usually have like five or ten seconds to decide what needs to happen to the shot okay so we're just going through pretty quick this looks pretty good I would say this doesn't need any exposure neither does this neither does this this one maybe just a touch this one looks pretty good this one maybe just a touch usually your first kind of gut feeling for a shot is right okay this one could just take a little more and so we're just making sure all the shots are bright enough okay and then it just doesn't look terrible okay all of these need more contrast especially these kind of outdoor ones but they're relatively bright enough next let's move over to contrast so even this shot that's really kind of dark it still feels like a little kind of gray and washed out so we could push this contrast up a touch and maybe bring the pivot down so now here's before and here's after so that's just kind of adding a little bit of richness here maybe go back to our exposure and pump that up a little more yeah somewhere in there looks pretty good to me so far again we're moving quick here so same thing contrast probably push the contrast up a touch and the pivot down to where we're getting that nice detail between the shadows and the highlights and it doesn't look blown out it doesn't look crushed and it doesn't look gray I might just even take the Shadows down a touch somewhere in there okay this same thing we can just pump that contrast and I bet we're gonna get a pretty good match as it is that looks pretty good let's wipe this yeah that's looking nice that definitely feels like the same Feeling Again same thing we'll just copy this to all the other shots make sure those look good yeah that definitely works again don't second guess it a bunch if it feels like it works then it probably works you can always fix it later if you decide against it okay now this shot is probably going to be very similar grade to this shot because I bet they shot it about two minutes later let's just try it middle button Mouse click oh baby that's a pretty good match okay good let's go to shot nine and same thing this could maybe take a little bit more contrast maybe bring the pivot down a little maybe bring it up a little there we go it's okay for it to be dark in this tent because what we're really doing is exposing for her and we can adjust that with the secondary later if we want to but we want her to look good just add a little more contrast here so as far as exposing for outdoors she looks a lot better in this one yeah that looks good so we'll little button Mouse click same thing we'll do it this way so we're exposing for outside that door now we might come back and adjust this we'll see we'll see all right same thing here let's add a little contrast and that's probably going to bring it to about where we want pretty good let's mess with the pivot see if that helps a little will add a little richness there bring that pivot up touch yeah looks nice and will middle button Mouse click on this one copy that to the other shots this might even take the same thing not quite add a little contrast here yeah looking pretty nice just that pivot if you bring the exposure up a little more yeah somewhere in there 16 looks pretty good let's add a little contrast yeah that feels nice 17 ooh this needs a lot more contrast she looks gray punch that contrast a little more make sure that we get those Shadows mess with that pivot a little bit that might need a little bit of secondary work we'll see 18 same thing a lot more contrast mess with the pivot a little bit this will need more saturation and stuff but we'll do that in the next bit and then 19 again same thing more contrast there we are take the pivot down so it's not so bright on our face always want to expose for skin the skin looks good everything else can be fine looks nice say maybe we can expose that up just a touch add a little more contrast yeah that looks good Okay so we've gone through and we fixed the big big problem just with exposure and contrast and as we flip through these these should all feel like they live in the same world everything should be flavored real similarly right all feels like it goes together so that's a pretty good grade so far and here's the nice thing is if we needed to send this out if our client asked for it or if we didn't have time we need to post the video whatever it is we could post this and it wouldn't be offensive it'd be okay but if we have more time we can adjust this some more go to the saturation and temperature and let's just make sure that everything feels right so this one feels kind of a little blue to me so I might just take the offset and just push that a little warmer Just a Touch yeah that feels nice this one feels good feels good feels good feels good it's matching with our reference image this one could maybe go a little bit stronger as far as saturation yeah just a little bit more saturated be fine that I think will work just fine this is going to be the same 11 is going to be the same 12 I feel like works pretty well we have this yellow grass which I think is fine it feels different than this one just because there isn't that yellow grass in there but it's totally believable that there be yellow grass that looks fine okay this I think same thing feels good feels good this one could maybe take some more saturation get those skin tones pop in a little more maybe even do more than that just a little bit I feel like maybe that contrast is just a little high now take that down a touch yeah just adding that skin back in same thing here let's add a little saturation and it's maybe Feeling Just a Touch green so I can maybe take the tint away from Green a little bit to make that feel a little more yellowish oh yeah that's good 19 again I feel this is a little darker so you're gonna see a little bit more of that teal look in it so I could say maybe push the saturation up a little bit and maybe just warm it a touch with the offset just a little so here's that needs to feel like that I'd say maybe even tint this a little Greener yeah I like that that looks nice okay so now everything should be even that much better should really feel like it sits together there should be no problems oh it looks great okay so now again if we have time let's go through and make this even a little better so I like to when we're going into secondaries when we're adjusting specific parts of each image I like to go to the ones that are the biggest problems first so the biggest problem I can see is 11 here and we got to really decide I mean is this an issue so we have this girl kind of going into the Shadows there and it's okay for people to look into Shadows it's okay for things to be dark you just don't want the things to be dark that you really want to see I mean it's okay to have it dark in here but I feel like this is maybe let's just see if we can adjust this without any big problems my first idea is going to be just the easiest one just grab a big soft Circle window put this over here and just see if we can bring some of this back so I'll just take the offset up a little bit so we just see some detail there but we're keeping it dark I'm not like trying to make this the exact same brightness I just want to bring some of the detail and then maybe we'll add a little more contrast like that let's just see how that looks so she's coming in what would happen if we cut copy this from 11 or brightening that side does that look weird I don't feel like it looks weird we have a brighter side but that's okay and then when she comes in it's a little bit brighter yeah I feel like that works that's nice so I would fix it something like that see if there's any other problems here that are major it's a little dark up here but I don't feel like that matters too much I would almost rather brighten these guys a little bit so we might just take again just a soft Circle window and just kind of maybe grab our custom curves and just kind of boost that up a little bit add a little contrast a little boost there just so our eyes on the kids a little more so here's before here's after just add a little light there that's nice I think that works probably don't even need to track it just because it's such a soft Circle window that's really the key if you want to move fast in color grading just make soft Circle windows it's amazing what you can get away with with a soft Circle window this I feel like is fine trying to think if there's any other problems really I don't think so I feel like it looks pretty good so as far as like big problems we've kind of fixed the big problems from then on it's just going through and being creative and seeing if there's is anything else we want to do to this for instance maybe we want to darken the edges of this a little bit I'll just make a big soft Circle and then feather it and invert it and maybe just take the offset down on the edges a little bit so we could do something like that so it's very very subtle vignette just on the edges that just gives it a little bit more depth I feel like that looks pretty nice and we can copy that to these other shots too for this one maybe a little much maybe we'll put it over here like this so again nice and soft maybe even a little bit harsh on this one probably take this down a touch take that offset back up just so it's very very subtle yes you don't want a big harsh vignette on stuff it just doesn't look Pro man like you notice I'm not doing it this way I'm not making a harsh vignette like this and then just crunching that down like it seems like that's really stylistic and awesome but it's not man don't do this silliness okay it's obvious that you put a big vignette on it and it sucks don't do that keep it subtle keep it nice again maybe we want to do just a little very very nice soft vignette on this just to darken it a little bit very very subtle before after you wouldn't notice it if you don't turn it off and on right that's the kind of level we want to do on this kind of stuff I feel like this looks pretty good I like it and I feel like it's ready the only other thing I might do and this is totally optional is just add a little bit of film grain which you can do with an effect so the paid version of resolve has a film Grain on it I'll just call this grain we'll put film Grain on this and just to zoom in here we'll just add a little bit of grain so it's very very subtle again so here's the Grain and I think like an eight millimeter kind of thing might be kind of nice it's probably way too much take that down to 100 there we go that looks nice this is without the film grain and this is with it might be hard to see with compression on YouTube but yeah it looks pretty nice have that film green on there just kind of makes this feel like a nice family trip oh I love that nice kind of home movie sort of feel I like it a lot it's pretty nice so again here's before here's what we started with and here's after pretty cool stuff I hope you've learned a lot in this video if you want to learn more about color grading we have a course for that it's available right now at Ground Control dot film you can download footage and learn all the ins and outs of really detailed professional color grading it'll take you from knowing nothing about color grading to being able to have really professional results so make sure to check that out also again big thanks to our sponsor for this video art list if you want to get some color grading practice footage that is a great place to do it there's a link down in the description below this was a good one thanks for sticking around I appreciate it I hope that you have a great day and that your colors are pleasing that was a great outro who says I can't do a decent professional outro these days

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 13,752

Keywords: blackmagic design, casey faris, how to, free video editor, tutorial, davinci resolve 18, resolve for beginners, davinci tutorials, editing, color, color grading tutorial for beginners, davinci resolve 18 tutorial for beginners, davinci resolve 18 tutorial, color grading tutorial, how to color grade, how to color grade in davinci resolve, how to color grade in davinci resolve 18, how to color grade an entire project, artlist, davinci resolve tutorial, color grade

Id: IUJO6kGt6PE

Length: 27min 36sec (1656 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2023