How To Color Grade ANY IMAGE - DaVinci Resolve Color Correction Tutorial

[Music] hey guys Casey Farris here thanks for checking out another video of mine here on YouTube today we're gonna go over the basics of how to grade absolutely any image here's the thing it seems like this really scary awful I don't know what I'm doing thing but we're gonna try and break it down as simply as possible so you can get some understanding and start making images that you really like and before we get started I want to say big thanks to Craig Capello and Patrick Carney for the use of this amazing footage shot on the Matic - and without any further ado let's get started it may seem really overwhelming when you're looking at a tool like DaVinci Resolve because you have all these different tools and panels and stuff in front of you color wheels you have color sliders and log wheels and color match and Camera Raw controls and curves and qualifiers and all kinds of stuff not to mention this junk with nodes up here like what are we even what is that what who is that but just for a moment forget about the tools and we're just gonna look at the idea of color correction and why it needs to be done and how to do a good job the long and short of color correction is that you have an image and it doesn't look the way that you want it to that's it if it did look the way you wanted then you don't have to do anything to it so that brings us to our first point is that color correction is kind of subjective there are some technical guidelines and there's a lot of ideas of what is generally considered pleasing or considered a stylized image but for the most part you're going to be asking yourself a question do I like this image and if the answer is no then you have to figure out what aspect of the image don't you like is it that it's not bright enough not dark enough the colors aren't bright enough you can't see a certain tone or does it look too foggy or too washed out there can be like a million different things but it all starts with that question now one thing that can guide you is looking at color scopes if I go down here and DaVinci Resolve I can open up my RGB parade and I'll break this out here so we can talk about it if you don't know what scopes are here's the deal I'm gonna switch to my waveform can just switch it to brightness only the color scopes are something that again looks really scary but honestly it's just a graph okay so if you've done any kind of graphing in school this should make a lot of sense to you and the waveform is just a graph of the brightness of the pixels versus the horizontal position so the things on the left side of the image are going to be on the left side of the graph if they're bright they're gonna be up towards the top if they're dark they're going to be down towards the bottom it doesn't matter where things are up and down in the image that's not going to be graphed in the waveform it's just brightness versus horizontal position let me show you something even if you don't know what's going on here that's okay I'm pretty much just gonna make a selection on our image and brighten it up and I'm gonna move this circle around where it's really bright you'll notice on the left side of our waveform we have this big spike right here those are the bright pixels inside of this circle now if I move it up and down you'll see it doesn't really change things a whole lot but if I move it to the left and right we can see that graph moving to the left and right so who cares why is this useful this is useful because it can tell you the technical levels of brightness for what's in your image so if you have any question about whether something is really black or really white you can take a look at this waveform and know the dark parts of this parking garage look pretty black to me on my monitor but we can see on the scopes that they're not actually pure black they're just really dark gray because pure black is down here at zero if I were to darken this image down which we'll go over a little bit in a minute I can bring this all the way down to zero and that's where those start hitting actual black so the Scopes are a technical way to figure out what the actual values of the colors are in your image without having to rely on your eyes or your own monitor or your own opinion now let's take this up a notch this waveform if I go to parade we can see a similar graph but there's three of them one is for the red channel one is for the green Channel and the other is for the blue Channel and so that's the same exact type of graph but it's split out the red green and blue values in the image what that means is if this image has a particular color cast let's say really blue the blue channel in the image is going to be a lot brighter which we can see in the parade is definitely the case so the parade is just three waveforms but instead of the overall brightness of the image it's for the red green and blue channels this is super nice for figuring out not only the brightness of something but the actual color cast to it for example if somebody shot this with the wrong white balance it may come in looking something like this which again is okay if you like it if you're going for kind of a cooler look you could leave it like this but if you're looking for a neutral white balance you can look at the Scopes and pretty quickly realize that the blue and green channels are a lot higher than the red Channel which means that the image looks cool so the Scopes give you some valuable information that you can use along with your eyes and your opinion to figure out if the image is what you want or not the last scope we'll go over is called the vector scope and I always turn up my brightness to about midway and the vector scope and this is a different type of graph this again is taking all the pixels from the image and plotting them but this time it's in a circle and the direction of the circle is the hue which means the color and the farther away these data points get from the middle the more saturated they are so let's test this out let's say we have an image that is very saturated red we can look on our vector scope and see that this cloud of data here is pretty far away from the center and it's up towards red which you know in this case is a pretty obvious example but if you have something where the white balance is slightly off one of the ways that you can tell is to see if this little cloud is off-center you can adjust various things to bring it back to the center and get a more neutral look this also works for individual colors if you have somebody who's wearing say a bright t-shirt you can tell generally how saturated it is technically by how far away it is from the middle so those take some experience kind of getting used to and playing with definitely open them up and see how they react to different images but the Scopes are a tool to give you more information about your image on the technical level so let's reset everything here and now let's take a look at this untouched image we want to look at how it actually appears on our screen as well as the data that we have in our scopes usually I start with the parade because it'll show me the levels and the color cast and for the most part I would say I like the exposure that's just how much light has been let into the camera I don't feel like anything is too bright where I can't see it and I don't feel like anything major that I want to see is too dark the darkest parts are here in the shadows which I'm not really that concerned about so the exposure for the most part is good although as we talked about earlier the shadows in the parking garage could probably go down a little bit if we're going for a neutral look with kind of normal-looking contrast we could bring that down same thing for the whites there are things that look like they should be pure white and those right now are just kind of a light gray I know that because it kind of looks like gray on my screen but also the Scopes here again kind of the brightest parts of the image aren't really up towards the top they're kind of they're down about 10% or so so I'd say first of all we could bring the white levels up and the black levels down that's gonna give us a little bit more contrast I also think I want these colors to be a little bit brighter I feel like the colors and the trees are pretty muted even cars that are probably bright don't look very bright to me so we'll probably need to add a little bit of saturation to our image now as far as the white balance or the color cast of the entire image it looks pretty good to me it's pretty neutral I would say if anything is just a little bit warm the reason I think that is just because again it looks kind of warm on my screen compared to like the neutral Gray's that are inside of resolve and also if I look down on my scopes I see that my blue channel is down just slightly from the green and the red and when you have less blue you pretty much have more yellow so this whole thing is cast maybe slightly yellow but I don't know if I mind that it might look really good just a little bit warm so we've looked at the image we've decided what we like and what we don't like now it's time to fix those things this is where the tools come in and the good news is that you can accomplish these things in a variety of ways there's no one right way to adjust a black level or a white level or saturation or contrast there's a bunch of different ways to do it the way that I like to do it is use --lift gamma and gain which are in the color wheels inside of resolve and these correspond to the three different tones in the image gain is the brightest so like white through bright gray gamma is for the mid-tones and lift is for everything kind of on the lower end of the brightness scale so kind of the darker gray through black and you have two controls for each one one is the color wheel which adjusts the color cast of that portion of the image and the other is the little slider under the wheel which has to do with the brightness of that part if I'm trying to adjust the blacks what I'm going to do is go to lift because that's the darkest parts of the image and if I want them to be darker I'm gonna grab this slider and roll it to the left slowly and I can look over at my scopes and I want the bottom of my scopes just barely barely above this zero point that's gonna give me some nice rich blacks in my image if that's what I'm going for similar thing in the gain I can roll it to the right and bring the top of the image a little bit closer to that 10:23 mark and here we have a lot more contrast in our image here's where we were and here's where we are with that one correction remember the other thing that I didn't like was the saturation adding contrast does make things appear a little more saturated so part of that has helped but I feel like we could still boost that up a little bit if we need more saturation it's as simple as going to the saturation slider down here and again dragging to the right and I usually just drag it to about where it looks good on with my eyes which I'd say maybe is about there but I'm going to check that by switching to my vector scope because I don't want this cloud to be like way too big so like here is too saturated because we have parts of the image that are just going towards the outside of the circle you want the most saturated things in your image to be kind of where these squares are or less I can look at this right now and say hmm there's probably some things that look a little bit too bright looks kind of weird even if I didn't look at the image I could just look at the scope and think that and of course if we look at our image we have a couple things that are maybe just a little bit too bright one of them would be these umbrellas another might be this red car these yellow parts in the lights that's too saturated so what I want to do is roll that back to a point where those are not getting so crazy maybe somewhere in there so here's where we were on our and here's where we are now it's a lot nicer looking now to me for the most part this looks pretty good this is kind of where you get to the point in color correction and color grading that is subjective if I'm not losing a bunch of detail if things aren't too bright or too saturated technically the image is correct everything else comes down to your preference and what you want your viewer to feel and experience while watching your project this is a pretty neutral grade and so if you're wanting to show something that's like real life kind of maybe it's for a reality show or a documentary this might be a really great grade if it's something that's supposed to be a little bit more dramatic you might want to mess with things a little bit and that is done the exact same way it's looking at the image deciding if there's something that you don't like about it and then fixing it so if I want this to feel dramatic I think one thing that might help is to add a little bit more contrast and I think this time I'm going to use the curves the reason I want to use the curves is because I want a little bit more control over what tones in the image are adjusted I don't want to just adjust the black and white levels because I feel like those are pretty good kind of adjusting the in-between parts so if you've never used curves before it's kind of like a graph and it remaps the brightness of the image right now things that are black or black things that are white or white and things that are mid brightness are amid brightness but I can take this and kind of move it around like a rubber band and move it up to make the mid-tones brighter while not adjusting a whole lot of the top or bottom of the image so what I like to do with contrast is make two points one about a third of the way down one about a third of the way up and I'll make the brighter parts a little brighter and the darker parts just a little darker and this really starts to add some character to our image here's what we had before and here's after and that's already feeling a little bit more dramatic and again any time that you add contrast the saturation boosts a little bit so I might take the saturation down just a little just to keep things tasteful and now we have kind of a dramatic grade over this image so here it is with the neutral correction and here is kind of more of a dramatic grade over it and every time you do a step just look at the image and ask yourself if you're happy with it if you are you can move if you're not then fix it so I look up here in the buildings and I feel like those are too bright I feel like everything's kind of just a little bit too bright on the bright end so I'm gonna bring the brightness down on the top of this curve maybe make the mid-tones a little brighter versus the high mid-tones and now I think I like that just a little more so I'm pretty happy with this look just as an example you might hate this and that's okay that's why we work on different computers and different projects and things like that you can correct things the way that you want to but that's the process it's looking at the image figuring out if you like it and if you don't fixing the parts that you don't like and you can get really really complicated you can do that process 50 times you can do all of that process with how this blue car looks you can get really detailed but that's the long and short of color grading learning the tools takes a little bit of time but the actual concepts of it are not that difficult so let's take everything that we've learned and apply it to a couple more images and we're gonna move a lot faster here's some footage of a tree very cool we're gonna look at it and see what we don't like first of all I feel like this needs more contrast I'm thinking these shadows could maybe come down a little bit I also feel like this whole image could be a little bit brighter and I'm gonna see if I like the saturation after I make that correction so I'm going to bring up my game to brighten this up a little bit and I'm looking at my scopes and I don't want this guy to be blown out so I'm gonna push that kind of in-between 896 and 10:23 and I'm gonna bring my lift down just a little bit so I don't think it needs to come down a ton but just just a smidge so now we have I feel like it's pretty good I want to check my saturation with my vector scope and I'd say it's probably pretty good we can see what it looks like with just a little more but we get into kind of more of a surreal look which again if if that's what you're going for might be totally appropriate if it's not you might want to back that off so I'm gonna back it off just a little I'm gonna probably split the difference and just boost it just a tiny bit the other thing I notice is that this whole thing looks really yellow not like the white balance is off although I feel like it's maybe cast a little bit warm and I feel that way because I feel like this sky is just a little bit warm if we go to the parade we'll see the blue channel is down a little bit let's see what this looks like with this guy neutralized I'm gonna grab my gain wheel and I'm gonna pull it more towards the cooler tones and I'm just gonna do it slightly and I'm gonna look at my parade and try and balance that sky on each of these graphs so on the red it's about half way up between 896 and 10:23 same with green and same with blue now let's take a look at our image do we like that or not it's really up to you I'm going to double click to reset my game the other thing I noticed is that this road looks maybe a little purple and so in my lift I might just kind of move it away from purple just a little bit just needs a little little touch here's where we are now here's where we were here's where we are now and I feel like I like it without the purple tones so that looks nice again if you're happy with the image you're done if you're not then fix what you're not happy with I'm gonna call this one good for now now let's go to business man from business land doing generic business first thing I noticed about this image is it might need to be a little bit brighter I feel like the blacks could go down just a little bit and it definitely needs saturation because I feel like his skin just needs a little bit of color to it so I'm gonna bring my left down just a little bit to bring those blacks down to being a little more rich I'll bring my cane up just a tiny bit here's the difference we've made here's before here's after just a little bit more richness there and I'm gonna grab my saturation and boost that a little bit see where we're at yeah I'm thinking something around those lines let's check the vectorscope I think that looks pretty nice businessman now there's other things that I don't like about this image for instance I feel like his eyes are a little bit dark which depending on the tools that you're familiar with you may have a way to adjust that one way that I know to adjust that is to make a new node and make a selection with a window inside of resolve and then boost up the mid-tones a little bit now if you don't know how to do any of that that's okay I have other videos about tracking about secondary Corrections about how to use windows check out my channel for all kinds of awesome insights about that but that's something that if you don't like it and you know the right tools you can fix it I'm gonna call that good for now and move over to this shot of forest and start with the same question do I like this I don't like this I feel like it doesn't have enough contrast it looks foggy which it it might be foggy if that's what I'm going for okay but I don't think that's what I'm going for so I need to bring the blacks down a little bit it doesn't look like there's anything that's actually black in this shot but I do want them to come down a little so I'm gonna grab my slider under my lift and bring that down maybe not all the way towards black but a little more so it's maybe closer to 128 than it was it was up between 128 and 256 now it's down more towards 128 now it looks a little bit dark I want to boost up the game and I'll just boost it up so it's about Midway because the brightest parts are already blown out there on the other side of these trees looks like a sky and so we're not gonna get those details back so I'm just trying to set the brightness for the forest and the trees and and everything that we can see that looks a little better to me I'm also going to boost some saturation contrast and saturation is what most shots need if they're shot in a log format like this this was shot in s log two on a Sony camera so it usually needs those adjustments in some way and we're definitely getting in the ballpark one major thing is this looks super purple to me like pretty much everything looks purple so what I'm going to do is try out adjusting it in the gain and just bringing the gain away from purple I'm just moving it away moving that color wheel away from the purple side and more towards the greening yellow side very very slightly and that's done a lot I might also kind of bring some warmth into my lift again just very slight the reason I'm doing that is because I feel like the darkest parts of the image we're a little bit cool so that's looking pretty good I feel like that could still do for a little bit of saturation so I'm going to add a new node by hitting alt s and real quick if you're not familiar with nodes it's basically just a group of corrections everything that you do down in these tools lives inside of this little box so everything that we just did to this image lives here in this node and then I'm going to do some more stuff so I'm just going to do a new group of Corrections right so let's say I want to make this super orange that lives in that second node and I can turn it off or on if I want to I have a bunch of videos about nodes if you want to learn more about that cancel that horrible orange correction and I'm just going to boost my saturation a little more switch over to my vector scope and I think that's looking okay I think it's maybe a little much that's something that I like again I could get more crazy but that's basically the workflow of color correcting color grading any image hopefully this was simple enough and made sense if you have any questions or comments leave them in the comments below if you like this hit like and for more color grading tutorials and stuff about DaVinci Resolve make sure to subscribe to my channel here on YouTube my name again is Casey Farris thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 77,149

Keywords: lumetri color, lumetri color tutorial, lumetri scopes, lumetri color panel, davinci resolve, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve 12, how to color grade videos, how to color grade in premiere pro, color grading tutorial, color correction tutorial, how to color grade in davinci resolve, color grading in premiere pro cc, color correction basics, color grading basics, color correction theory, color grading theory, color theory

Id: xK9x-S5eUYk

Length: 21min 13sec (1273 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 09 2019