How to Color Manage using Nodes in DaVinci Resolve

in this video I'm going to show you how I set up my color management using nodes and how this benefits my color grades as well as my color grading process now if you're a little shaky on color management or you're not super confident with the Core Concepts that's totally cool we're actually going to end up getting a pretty good primer on color Management in the course of today's video and we're going to end up covering the fundamentals the building blocks of color management with the process that I outline for you here today so before we dive into resolve let's just get a quick recap of what color management is what is our basic goal when we are color managing essentially we want to take what the camera saw and transform it into what our display can show or to put it maybe an even simpler way we want to get a basic reproduction of our image that looks like what we would have seen if we had been standing there at the moment that the image was photograph so that's the whole goal of this entire color management this entire scene to screen journey is is to get that basic accurate reproduction that gives us a great Foundation that we can do our creative color grading on top of okay so we're going to go through how I set up that pipeline in nodes here inside of resolve right now all right so I've got a timeline here with images that come from a couple of different cameras and because they come from different cameras they are going to require some different treatment but let's start by focusing on these first three shots these first three shots happen to all have been gathered with a Alexa cameras using the Airy wide gamut log C3 color space now right off the bat a question that often comes up when we're learning about color management is how do I know that color space what if I don't know that color space there's actually uh some great recommendations in my color management cheat sheet I will leave a link to that in the description for today's video for how to navigate that process of figuring out what your color space is and how to use it inside of resolve but for now let's say that we know what our color space is and in the case of these first three three shots it's a wide gamut a log C3 okay here's what I'm going to do with these first three shots I'm going to take advantage of resolves group function and I'm going to hold uh tap on shot number one and then hold shift and tap on shot number three to select all three of these shots I'm now going to rightclick and say add into a new group and I'm going to label this group Alexa now before I hit okay I want you to take note of the two dots that are currently sitting above my node graph here these represent the clip level of my node graph where I currently am that's where I can do clip level adjustments that are going to be specific to the clip in question and this other dot if I were to tap over to it is the timeline section of my node graph we're actually going to be making use of the timeline section of the node graph in just a couple of minutes here but for now I just want you to notice there are two dots here one represents the clip level one represents the timeline level and the reason I ask you to pay attention to this is once I hit okay on this uh group that I'm creating here that number of dots is going to increase from two to four so now instead of just a clip and a timeline section of my node graph I also have group pre-cp and group post clip group pre-cp is really why I wanted to use this group functionality this is a great place for us to perform the first of our two steps in our color management Journey that first step is to get my image regardless of its original camera color space into a common working or grading color space or what rolve sometimes calls a timeline color space that working space that we are going to be using today that I virtually always use when I'm color grading is Da Vinci wide gamut intermediate so how are we going to go about this what we're going to do is we are going to go to our effects and grab a color space transform and drop it onto node number one here at the group pre-cp level of this group now I just want to call out this group pre-cp level whatever I'm doing in here is specific to the group I'm working within so if I have other clips that are not in this group then they will not be subject to nodes that I'm creating or adjusting within here but any clips that are members of this group are all going to receive the adjustments of this node as their very first operation before I even do my color grading and that's perfect because I want to do all of my color grading in the working color space of D Vinci wide gamut intermediate okay so for this we're going to say input color space Area Wide gamut 3 are log C3 output color space d Vinci wide gamut D Vinci intermediate and I'm going to set my tone mapping To None we generally don't need to do anything in these sections when we're going from a camera space to a working color space and this is also a great place to point out that you'll often hear discussions about oh I color manage in my project settings or I color manage using csts or you might even hear someone say oh no I don't color manage I just use csts and I want to emphasize something CST color space transforms versus color managing in your project settings that's actually the same exact thing it's the same math it's the same science driving the operation we're just invoking it or applying it using different mechanisms okay so it's different paths to the same outcome so I'm going to label this node in and this is now my input that is taking all of my area material into my Common working space of D Vinci wide gamma intermediate but as you can see while I'm having an effect I haven't exactly accomplished the goal of getting a normalized image on my screen getting an image on my screen that feels like it could be what I would have seen if I'd been standing there when the image was captured in the first place right still feels kind of flat still feels kind of logishetty playay color space and because that working color space is always going to be D Vinci wide gamut intermediate and that output color space is always going to be the same for any particular project that I'm tackling at that moment we are going to do this at the Timeline section of the node graph that I mentioned a moment ago so essentially what we're saying is that by the time my image reaches this point in its signal flow it's already received an input transform that has gotten it into D Vinci wide gamut intermediate it we've already done our color grading we've already done our creative macro level transform which we're going to talk about in a moment and we're now ready to get out to our display how are we going to do that you guessed it ppace transform same exact mechanism that we used before only this time our input will be da Vinci wide gamut intermediate because that is the color space that we last moved into over here at the group pre-cp level and the output is going to be Rex 709 gamma 24 okay okay now because we are going out to a display color space now and really to a display with a finite color volume and dynamic range there's a few more settings that we want to get correct here in order to get a consistently pleasing image on the screen first thing we want to do is use some tone mapping I'll show you what I like to do this isn't the only valid solution but it's one that works really well for me project after project and you're welcome to use this or experiment with doing something else what I like to do is use luminance mapping set my custom Max input to 10,000 and a custom Max output of 100 and here under my gamut mapping I'm going to say saturation compression and really what both of these things are doing is ensuring that as I reach the limitations of my display in terms of the brightest pixels that it can show and the most colorful pixels that it can show that we are gracefully decelerating to that edge and nothing is crashing or clipping or uh looking really strange as a result of there being too much color in the source image that makes sense and then the last thing here that I'm going to leave turned on is this forward ootf ootf is uh shorthand for opto optical transfer function or what's sometimes called system gamma we could do a whole video maybe we should do a whole video just on tone mapping gamut mapping and the ootf but for now suffice it to say is these are the settings that I virtually always use in my color management they work really well they're a really good template to operate out of and you can experiment with them uh as you wish uh in your adventures with color management okay so this is our output transform I'm going to call this one 279 all right now my first three images are good to go I have accomplished that goal of getting a reproduction of my original scene as it would have generally appeared to me if I'd been standing there at the moment this image was photographed right pretty cool that gives me a great foundation for beginning to perform my creative color grading because I've got a baseline of accuracy and I have a somewhat normalized image for my display but there's a couple of other shots that we need to De that we need to deal with here right the next two are not in the area log C3 color metric at all are they these are actually in Red so we need to handle the first leg of the journey a bit differently we need to get these into D Vinci wide gamut intermediate so that by the time they reach this point in their signal flow they are feeding the proper image State into this color space transform Okay so we are going to set up another group for our red material I'm going to go over here to the clip level of my node graph right click and I've just uh held down command or uh clicked One Clip and then held on shift and clicked the second one to grab that range and I'm going to right click say add into a new group and we'll call this one red this one is going to require something different here at the group pre-cp level and before we even do our group pre-cp settings there's something very important that I want to call out here these shots are r3d or raw files okay now this is one area where there's a little bit of extra diligence we have to do when we're color managing in nodes versus color managing in our project settings when we are color managing in nodes we need to make sure that our image is being debed from its raw State into the proper color space so I'm going to go to my project settings and I'm going to go to camera raw and I'm going to go to my red raw profile and you can see I've already got my debayer settings set up as I want them to be I'm using ip2 Color science I'm using the red wide gamut RGB color space and the log 3G 1010 gamma curve okay these are Red's recommended color spaces for decoding raw material and this gives me a sensible point that I can color manage from in the group pre-cp section of uh my red group okay I'm also going to check my ISO and color temp to make sure that the metadata that the cinematographer or the operator was using using are being carried forward through my grade I'm going to hit save here and now here at the group pre-cp once again color space transform we know where we're going right d Vinci wide gamut Da Vinci intermediate I'm going to turn my tone mapping off and my inverse ootf off because I don't need those things and here in this case my input is not a log C3 wide gamut 3 it is red wide gamut RGB like so and red log 3 G10 these are the exact color spaces that we just reviewed in our project settings right so we've now got our mapping from camera color space into working color space and just like we did for our first three shots we have now built a sound Journey from scene out to screen for our two red Clips right so we're almost home free we've just got one more clip to look at but this clip is one that requires some special attention first of all it looks really wrong doesn't it it looks really zany when you see an image like like this where things look nuked and blown out and clipped and really harsh often times what you're looking at is an image that has essentially been double transformed because it is already in re 7 or9 because if we look at this right now we haven't added this clip to a group at all we have no group pre-cp CST happening at all for this clip right so all that's happening is it's coming in and it's going straight through this output transform at the Timeline level of my node graph which is expecting Da Vinci wide gamut intermediate as its input and is outputting re 79 gamma 24 but if I turn this off I'm already in Rex 79 gamma 24 how do I know that because the image looks somewhat reasonable there's no way to explicitly know what color space was being targeted when this image was made but it's already baked it's already normalized it doesn't look flat and log the way my other images did before I applied color management to them right so this image is already in Rex 79 so what do we do is with this one sensible thought would be well if it's already in Rex 79 and I'm going to Rex 79 can't I just get out from underneath this stack just for this clip because it's already where it needs to go and that would be sensible but there's actually a better approach that we can take because even though we're starting in 709 and ending up in 709 it turns out there are some benefits to going through our same intermediate or working or timeline color space of Da Vinci wide gamut intermediate so here's what we're going to do we're going to add clip into a new group right click on the thumbnail say add into a new group and we'll call this one 709 now we're going to go to the group pre-cp level once again and we're going to do a CST we know where we're going right d Vinci wide gamma intermediate and for our input I'm going to say re 709 gamma 24 by the way this is not such a cleancut operation when you're going from a baked image or a display State image back into what we could call a scene or a working space like wide gamma intermediate so 709 is a good color space your gamma you might get better results with gamma 22 or with Rex 709a as another option or Rex 709 this is just something you can play around with I'm going to stick with gamma 24 and here I'm going to use my tone mapping kind of like we do at the Timeline level with that CST but we're going to do it kind of backwards so we're going to say luminance mapping custom Max output you could go all the way to 10,000 if you want I generally find between 1,000 and 2,000 is plenty and for my custom Max input I'm going to basically sweep and try to make sure I'm recovering all the detail that I can without just smashing the highlights and dimming them down for no good reason as you can see I'm starting to here like if I go low enough if I'm down in whatever like the 60s or the 70s you can see when I start to move this Max input up from here I'm actually recovering a little bit of detail right but if I'm going much past that point the highlights are just getting dimmer without actually recovering any additional detail okay so I'm going to set this to around 120 and say there's not much more detail to be recovered past that point and this is my input Transformer what some sometimes called the IDT for my Rex 709 material and as I said it may sound a little bit counterintuitive to say oh I'm going to leave Rex 79 even though that's exactly where I'm headed back to but as I said it turns out there are benefits to moving everything even into a common color space even if they are starting uh as this clip is in the color space that we're going to be going right back out to and I want to talk about a couple of those benefits right now now that we've got color management set up for everything the next thing in my process that I'm going to do is set up a macro level creative transform or what I call a look okay we're going to do that by prepending a node from our Upstream of our output transform and in my case I'm going to go into my Lutz folder and I'm going to go into to my Voyager subfolder and find the camera lot for my essentials pack I've already auditioned this I think it looks really nice on the shots in this timeline and I'm going to use this as my sort of Baseline preferential or creative rendering and I just want to point out like there are shots like there's grading that needs to be done this shot feels under to me right now this shot feels a little bit under this one might be a little bit open but I've got a nice Baseline creative transform here that is in place in my timeline and this is something that only works if everything is in one common color space prior to being output into re 7 or9 so that's the one of the reasons why I like to move everything into a common color space so that I can use Luts like my Voyager pack which expects end returns to VCI wide gam intermediate so that I can use those things the other main reason why I like to move everything into a common working space regardless of where it started is for Feld because when I actually get into doing my my clip level grading like say on a shot like this and I need to expose this up I'm used to working in d Vinci wide gamma intermediate I know how to make this image look and feel good really fast I know what my tools are going to do in my hands before I even reach for them because I always work in this space the feel is consistent if I were grading this image in one color space and shot six in a different color space I would have more difficulty connecting with my image and knowing where it needed to go and what tools I needed to use to get there so work in a common color space is excellent for feel and for getting a intuitive sense of how to push your image quickly and effectively in the direction that it needs to go okay so that's how I like to set up my color Management in nodes by the way this is actually how I do my color management I prefer to color manage in nodes versus in my project settings and I want to talk just briefly about some of the reasons why that is because we've already highlighted like there's a little bit more involved with this right and you kind of have to get your duck in a row and have things in an organized Place otherwise it just seems complicated and it can feel more difficult than setting things up in your project settings which can almost feel like just a couple clicks and then you're there right but here's the couple things that I really like about color managing using nodes number one when you are learning or you're wanting to firm up your understanding of the concepts and building blocks of color management it's a lot easier to learn them when everything is spelled out in notes if I look at any shot in this timeline right now I can see its full Journey it's going from areawide gamut 3 log C3 into my working space of D Vinci wide gamut my color grading whatever that color grading may or may not be is happening here at the clip level and then over here at the Timeline level I'm going through a creative look which expects and returns Da Vinci wide gamut intermediate and finally I'm flowing to my output transform which takes me from Da Vinci wide gam intermediate out to Rex 709 gamma 24 those same exact things would be true if this color management had been set up in my project settings I mentioned that a couple minutes ago however it would not be so easy for me to visually see those building blocks because they're kind of under the hood and hidden away when you're setting things up in Project settings so I think if you are learning color management or if you're wanting to firm up your understanding of color management it's really good to set things up in nodes in this way because it's going to help you to build that understanding of the flow from scene to screen that's number one similarly when you're talking about being able to very quickly call up and walk through that process this can be really good for troubleshooting like for example if I was looking at my image right here and going like gosh why does it not look right why doesn't end it look normalized for my image well if I can walk through things and go from A to Z and look at my input transform here and say oh my camera didn't shoot in Rex 709 as its gamma it shot in log C three it's very easy for me to troubleshoot and identify problems and adjust those in a way that can sometimes be more difficult when it's just some different dropdowns and Abstract parameters that are hidden inside of our project settings so those are some of the benefits that I see to color managing in nodes in terms of seeing those building blocks here's the other really big one that can be huge depending on what you're trying to do when you are color managing using your project settings you have no ability to get to the left of this node this input transform or to get to the right of this node you have to do everything in your working color space and that's not always a bad thing in fact that's most of the time exactly what we want that's why we call it a working color space that's where we want to do our work right however there are any number of situations where you might want to access your image in a state prior to mapping into that working space or after being uh mapped out to the display space and if you want to do that you have to color manage in nodes you cannot get there by uh color managing using your project settings so if you want that greater control and flexibility in terms of how you can manipulate your image that's a great reason right there to consider color managing in noes so I hope you guys find that helpful on a conceptual as well as a practical level in terms of what color management works or rather how color management works when we are doing it in nodes how that flow Works to get from scene to screen how you can set things up in nodes so that you have easy access to visualizing the full Journey while at the same time being able to grade without much distraction as you can see here I can now proceed like grading each of these shots up individually and not having to look or think about my color management at all because it's living off in uh group sections pre-cp section or in the timeline section and I've got a free and clear node graph for doing my clip level grading so it's a good combination of giving me easy access to that Journey when I want to see it without it cluttering my node graph when I don't and there's overall some greater flexibility to the process as well as greater ability for me to visualize the journey troubleshoot the journey and customize the journey beyond what I can necessarily do in my project settings so hope you enjoyed this we're going to be diving even deeper into this subject in the next episode of my live show that we do here on the channel grade school so if you have questions or something that's confusing to you about this hope to see you in there and uh we can dive even deeper into the subject of color managing using noes

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 20,928

Keywords: davinci resolve, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve color grading, color grading tutorial, nodes davinci resolve, color nodes davinci resolve, group nodes davinci resolve

Id: RuYBk-YvCZE

Length: 22min 42sec (1362 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 18 2023