How To Color Grade LOG! - DaVinci Resolve Color Correction Tutorial

[Music] hey guys Casey Faris here thanks for checking out another video of mine here on youtube today we are talking about log I've gotten a lot of questions about how does log work what is log how do I shoot log how do i grade log first of all there's a whole bunch of different types of log footage and it's honestly not that magical it's kind of like this confusing thing that's scary for people but here's a really basic explanation about what log is let's pretend that this is real life this is just what your eyes see this is an HDR picture so we can see a lot more brightness than we normally would be able to see with a camera so this is like real life something like what your eyes would see okay there's a whole bunch of different brightnesses here that our eyes can see everything from stupid dark to really dark to dark getting darker well little darker than mids to middle brightness to definitely not bright to not very bright to kind of bright to bright and even silly bright everything is on this spectrum of brightness and this spectrum is called dynamic range so it's the difference between the brightest thing in the shot and the darkest thing in the shot pretty much the point of log is to record as much of this as possible so normally when we shoot video a camera can only record like a section of this just because technology even though it's 2018 we don't have magic things yet so we can only record just a little chunk of this so depending on your exposure it's somewhere along this spectrum maybe you'll have a shot that can only record things from kind of bright to middle brightness and moving this up and down is the exposure so that's kind of how this works so normally with video we're shooting in a very limited range of brightness so what log does is try to squeeze a little bit more into this same range and so so instead of having kind of right through middle brightness we can get the bright stuff and all the way down to getting darker still can't get the whole range but it can get a little bit more and squeeze it into that limited range that a camera can record the way it does this is by decreasing the contrast before it's recorded to an image and that gives you information to record even though it's a little bit more compressed in a much wider range of exposure and when it does that it comes out looking like this here's a pretty high dynamic range shot we have a lot of dark tones here we have some light outside of the window some highlights here and so this is a range from pretty darn bright to some kind of deep shadows here in her shirt and in the furniture and it's basically a lot more exposure squeezed into an image which ends up making that image look frankly kind of ugly same thing here this is shot and lug a little bit brighter but trying to keep some detail here in the background as well as in her face and in our hair squeezing all of that brightness into the limited brightness that we can actually record this one here is a little bit less contrasty of an image but we're gonna take a look at how to grade that since it's also shot in this same log mode I'm going to bring up my scopes so that we can take a look at what's going on and we'll bring up the parade so grading log is pretty much like grading every other image you just kind of have a scarier starting point so I have pretty much five steps that I take to grading a log image the first one is rough it in we pretty much want to like take a big stab at grading this image and you can do this two ways you can either use a lot that's designed for the type of log that you're shooting there's different types of log there's s log there's C log there's BMD film there's V logs in a like D Sena style protune and they do different things to the image but it's pretty much that same idea of squeezing a bunch of information into what you can record so the first thing we're gonna do is rough it in alright we're gonna take a stab at this one thing I know it needs to happen is I want things to actually be black here so if I look at my scopes we'll see that all my blacks are lifted here so I'm just gonna bring my lift down just roll down so that things are actually black alright this might not be exactly how we want it to be at the end but it's a starting point next thing is I want to make sure that anything that's supposed to be right white is pretty much bright white and we're just about there I might just boost the gain just a little bit and the thing is if I start to boost the gain too much we start to lose detail here in the table and we can see on our scopes if I bring these up I'm cutting off some information here at the top so don't want to do that this might not be exactly how you want it to look but it's good to see kind of the range that you're working with next thing I like to do to rough this in is rough in the saturation and so I'll just push the saturation up a little bit to see where that lives I can bring up my vector scope make sure my brightness is turned up and I can add quite a bit of saturation and it still looks pretty good so there's a rough grade for the shot that's one way to do it the other way is you could use a lot either way I like to have this second note here be a way to rough the image in so this is just a manual grade right I'll make a new version of this grade by hitting ctrl Y reset that node and go down to 3d lut and load an S log to rec.709 let this is available for free grant control color comm and I'll call this LUT and there we'll have a pretty similar result the only difference is I let is a pretty general adjustment designed for a well exposed shot and so if you have a lot of dark things in your shot or your exposures off you'll have to adjust it a little bit so this one we do have a lot of dark stuff and so I might boost my lift a little bit you'll notice when I do this under the LUT let me bring this up and I bring my game down look what happens right here I recover some of that information okay because a lot is not perfect and again I'm just kind of roughing this in and I want to see I want to see how the shot looks so now I have good saturation good contrast decent exposure for what I want and that's the first step the second step is to see what you got pretty much what I do is I look at this shot and I decide okay what things do I have good exposure on what things interesting and I kind of take note of that first of all I have this window I have information there it's not blown out but it isn't particularly interesting so I don't know if I really care that much it's just like their deck outside so the middle is really nice obviously the person writing is what we want to focus on this stuff looks nice here and so I'm just seeing what is in the shot and taking note of what's interesting what's useful that's the second step third step is to decide what to keep and what to lose this step is somewhat optional because you might be able to keep everything and what I say keep I mean keep detail and keep information in everything but odds are you probably want to focus on something for this shot definitely definitely the subject is what we want out here I don't care if we blow that out or not one thing I do want to do is probably not blow out the desk and so that's something to consider too so now that we've looked at this and figured out what we like figured out what we want to keep information for I ask myself like what what do I not like about this shot first of all I don't know if I like that I see out the window it's not particularly interesting I don't know if I like that she's so dark I would probably brighten her up a little bit over here looks nice so if it stays like that that's fine don't want to blow out the desk and now we're actually gonna do something I'm gonna make a new node in between my lut node and my first node here you could also do this between your manual adjustment node in your first node and I'm gonna bring up my curve and just see what I can do with the curve one thing is I bet the mid-tones are gonna have to go up so I push the mid-tones up in the curves just a little bit and that's gonna start boosting up my shadows and so I don't know maybe I can move this under the curve down to kind of adjust that maybe I'll move my point around and see where that feels nice and I'm still moving the bottom part of the curve because I want to keep black things black the problem is if I do this too much this starts to get really noisy and awful and so you don't want to go too crazy with this but to a certain point you can kind of adjust how this looks and also if this is really dark I don't really need the detail there I can push it down a little bit to kind of make it a little cleaner and so this is before and this is after just with my curves adjustment and that's pretty good I could add some saturation if I wanted to but that's a decent grade for our shot this is the log version and this is the grated version if I wanted to I could also add some windows here could add a window here to brighten her face I could put one here to blow out the window those are all things that I could do but that's the basics of how to grade a log shot let's do the same process with this shot first of all I'm going to rough it in I'm going to use my let again s log to direct 709 and here we see the colors are pretty darn yellow might take some yellow out of the gain a little bit might push the gain down on my first node to see what I have and we see yeah I have a little bit more information up here in the highlights I also might push my lift a little bit cooler to balance that out a little bit and again we're kind of just playing with the image right now to see what we can deal with it that's looking like everything's really way too cool and so I'll probably push my game back up warm might even desaturate it just a little bit maybe push the gain up because if I lose this Sun it's okay I can lose the Sun it's the brightest thing in the solar system it's probably okay if it Clips a little bit I'm gonna push my lift down a little bit to give it some contrast there I've pretty much roughed it in I've seen how the footage reacts to playing with it I'm going to decide what to keep in Toulouse it's okay if I lose a little bit more of the Sun I don't care about that this stuff is pretty interesting right here I definitely want her face and so I'm gonna add a node in the middle and again I'm gonna just play with the curve see what I can do and adjust that a little bit that looks pretty nice I'll bring my shadows down to be nice and rich there maybe add a little saturation back in that's looking pretty good one thing I might do also is add another node and I can add a window to her face this is something that's a little bit easier to do in resolve and I have a lot of tracking tutorials to show you how to do this but that's something that I would do for this shot and then again I can grab my curve and see what looks nice there maybe warm up in the gain a little bit just to bring a little bit of attention to or a face this might be a little bit too big and there we have a finished shot let's do it one more time on this shot this time I'll do it manual you'll see on my scopes nothing's really clipping everything's pretty much in the middle and this is something pretty common if you shoot a shot that isn't a super high contrast like high dynamic range shot in a log format everything pretty much just lives in the middle and that's okay because we can just push the lift down a little bit push the gain up a little bit if there's anything that's really bright like the side of this jar that's a little spike right here on the parade I can push the gain up until that starts to touch 10:23 that's something pretty bright and I'll push my lift down a little more maybe add some saturation so there we go we've kind of have it roughed in we have the brightness contrast and saturation pretty roughed in let's see what we got maybe I'll add a little bit more contrast with an s-curve here I get pop a little more I like that it depends on the look you're going for that's pretty good so we brough tit in we've kind of played with the image a little bit see how it reacts now we've got to decide if we need to keep or lose anything I think we can pretty much keep everything and it'd be alright so anything we don't like about the shot say maybe the only thing is that I feel like right here on her neck is a little bit bright it's also kind of bright over here we could darken the corners and I mean that's just a stylistic thing again it depends on the look you're going for in stuff but maybe we could just darken right there a little bit maybe I'll add another gradient to this side just darken the edges a little bring some focus in just a little bit you could do this in two different nodes but I'm gonna try it in one node and if these are soft enough I probably don't even need to track them honestly yeah so here's the difference pretty subtle if we wanted to track those windows we could but that's the general idea so again here's what we had and here's where we are now so yeah that's pretty much the basics of grading log pretty much it seems really scary because you're starting with this D saturated really flat looking image but once you start to play around with it it's not all that bad so hope that made sense hope that helps if you have any questions or comments leave them in the comments below if you like this hit like and for more post-production and color grading tutorials subscribe to my channel here on YouTube also if you're looking for lots to help you grade log we have a whole bunch of free Luntz available at ground control color comm okay that about does it for me my name is casey ferris i will catch you next time [Music]

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 164,000

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, log, s-log, slog, d-log, cinestyle, protune, resolve 14, resolve color grading

Id: mRE1eCsHQ5U

Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2018