How to Get Cinematic Saturation

i talk a lot about the untapped power of the resolve primaries tab and how we really need to be maxing out its tools before we move on to narrower or more complex adjustments but there's a knob right within this primaries tab that i very rarely use or talk about that knob is saturation is that because i don't care about this aspect of my grades no it's because i don't like what this knob does to my images and as a result i've developed other techniques for manipulating the overall colorfulness of an image when i'm grading today i want to show you a couple of those techniques and talk you through a couple of the principles that i like to keep in mind when i'm manipulating saturation in my images let's take a look here inside of resolve and talk about saturation so i'm currently in a brand new project where i've done nothing at all except for the same two things that i always do at the very beginning of a project i've set up my color management and i've set up the template node graph that you see here on my upper right hand side now if you're not familiar with these things you're in luck i talk about them a ton in fact if you've been following my channel for a while you're probably tired of hearing me talk about them but you can check out my da vinci wide gamut workflow series if you want to get up on color management or get a refresher and you can check out my recent videos on node graphs where i'll show you how and why i set up the node graph that i'm using here today for now let's focus on saturation and some principles and techniques that we can apply to getting better saturation in our images and the first thing that i want to emphasize before i even begin looking at how i'm going to introduce saturation into the image is that balance starts to become really really critical when you are manipulating the saturation of an image especially when you're increasing saturation essentially if you have a small imbalance in your shot a little too red a little too green whatever it may be that imbalance is going to begin to be exaggerated as you start to add color into the image so the first thing that i do when i'm going to add saturation into the image is i'll revisit my balance node and just make sure that i'm really really happy with it because i know that if i'm not before i can even begin to evaluate whether my saturation adjustment is working i'm going to have to go back to that balance node and recalibrate to get a proper starting point so i'm just going to go to my balance node here and use my offset ball and just sort of optimize my balance and i'm going to use the same criteria that i always do which is that i want to optimize my skin tone and i also want to kind of max out my color separation and a good rule of thumb for that is to look down here at the vector scope and try to get the signal mass so that it's straddling at least two separate quadrants so an example of what we wouldn't want to do if i'm all the way up here my separation's starting to become really low right because everything's crammed up here into this upper left quadrant same thing if i go down to the upper right but if i reset this and just kind of try to straddle the two with this signal mass while preserving my skin tone that's the first and bigger consideration if i can kind of find a sweet spot with both of those things when i turn this off and on i've got some better separation i've got some optimized skin tone and this is going to put me in a much better position for adding saturation into the image and getting good results okay so with that out of the way let's add a new serial node after my balance node i'm going to do this with option s and let's start by just looking at the saturation knob that we began this conversation with and let's really pump some saturation let's say that i or my client have decided we really really want to max out kind of the color pop in this piece whatever we're working on so let's go kind of crazy and i'll ask you the question as i'm going here at what point have i gone too far at what point am i really no longer getting visually enticing results you know like somewhere around here i can keep cranking this sat as far as i want i'm almost maxed out on it but i can go as far as i want and in terms of like a pure technical metric if i turn this node off and on i can see in the vector scope yep i'm expanding saturation i'm getting more colors spinning or spreading rather in all directions right but there's a point past which the image just doesn't really look good anymore right it feels garish it feels weird it feels very video-y so we've kind of got that outer boundary that i'm always trying to pay attention to when i'm saturating it's not just about getting a signal that looks good on a scope it's about getting an image that looks good right so let's say that this is sort of as far as i'm comfortable going with this saturation knob and let's go ahead and turn on our gallery and grab a still of this i'm going to delete this old still so we don't get confused and grab a still like so let's now turn this node off by hitting command d for disable and i'm going to turn my gallery back off so that the image is nice and large for us and i'm going to do a new serial node and we're going to try implementing saturation in a very different way we're going to do a couple things here stick with me i'm going to explain what i'm doing so let's right click on this node i'm going to go to color space and i'm going to select hsv i'll tell you why we're doing that what that means in just a moment next i'm gonna go to my channels and turn off channel one and turn off channel three okay so what have i just done what i've just done is tell resolve just for the span of node number eight just for the span of this node here i want to move out of a standard rgb color space or color model and into an hsv color space or color model in an rgb color model we are specifying a particular color by saying well there's this much red this much green and that much blue in it and that's how we specify any color that we can think of right within hsv we can specify that same color in terms of what its hue is what its saturation is and what its value is which is loosely equivalent to brightness okay and there are a number of reasons why we might want to do this but one of them is so that we can explicitly manipulate that s channel that saturation channel because that's exactly what we're here to do aren't we we're here to manipulate saturation now we've got a dedicated channel for it which we don't when we're working in rgb so that's what we did here when we were setting our channels and turning these off is if we think about channel 1 2 and 3 being h s and v respectively we've turned off h we don't care about h we've turned off v we don't care about v we've left on s because we want to manipulate that saturation channel let's take a look at what we can do now that we've set that up if i go down here to my gain wheel and just start to spin this to the right i'm getting very different results and i'm just sort of freehanding here so i don't know what point i'm going to be precisely aligning with the kind of overall level of saturation or the size of signal in my vector scope compared to what we just did a moment ago with the saturation knob but i'm going to say it's probably somewhere around here and let's now go to our gallery and wipe to this version of the image and just see how it feels that's two very different images isn't it let's even turn off this gallery so that we can just concentrate on the image now i sort of pushed both of these further than i probably would on purpose because i want to exaggerate the effect of each technique but if we look at these one feels clearly better than the other to me anyway and you might choose to disagree with me you might love the first version that i did in which case you can stop watching and you've just picked up the easiest solution for implementing saturation turn the saturation knob if you like that i feel like this mode that we've just done here looks a lot better and one of the main mechanisms at work here that's making that feel better i think is that we are getting more of what we can think of as a subtractive saturation here which by the way is how colorfulness works out in the real world if i have an apple of a certain redness a certain saturation right and then i have a redder apple an apple with more saturation standing right next to it that second apple is going to reflect less of the light hitting it it's going to absorb more of the light hitting it so it by definition is going to be a little bit darker and if we look at what we've done with this hsv node here if i turn this off and on i am indeed getting deeper or darker with the colored areas of this image so the more colorful the deeper or the darker those areas of the image are becoming so this is essentially a form of subtractive saturation that's why i like it that's why i think it's worth exploring and i think it is inherently superior to the more video style of saturation that we get here where our luminance is either staying the same or may even perceptually increase simply because of the math and the model that's being used when i twist that saturation knob okay and while we're here there's a couple of other things that i really want to show you that are some sort of fun fringe benefits of being in this nifty little dedicated hsv saturation node so let's think about something else when we look at this image let's think about the idea that when i saturated just now using my gain wheel i'm saturating everything right low saturations medium saturations high saturations they're all just getting cranked up right which is also what's happening when i turn my saturation knob but what if i want to increase the saturation of lower saturation areas and have less or have no effect on the higher saturation portions of my image well that becomes really easy to do when we are in this node here we could for starters just try out using our gamma wheel like so i'm just going to turn my gamma to the right and because of the math that's involved in a gamma operation i'm going to be increasing the strength of all of the values in between 0 and 1 but i'm not actually going to be stretching one past where it began right so i'm going to be sort of increasing saturation in the lower middle saturation areas without driving saturations that are already really hot even higher and further into perhaps an undesirable place you could even get fancier if you want turn off your gamma go over here into your custom curves and you can literally draw your own saturation curve and say i only want to saturate down here in this lower saturation portion of the image and have no effect after this point for example you could choke it in even further you could make it more gradual you could literally sculpt any saturation curve that you want to here inside of your custom curves now i wouldn't necessarily encourage starting there because that's more complicated more time consuming than simply spinning your gain or your gamma but i want to emphasize that in addition to having a model that can often feel more filmic more cinematic than the model that's used by the saturation knob by using this hsv node you've also got the ability to sculpt an overall saturation curve to sculpt where you're introducing saturation in a bit more of a nuanced way than you do with your saturation knob so saturation big subject it's something that it seems like there's one definition for oh there's a knob i twist it left i twist it right i leave it alone that's my sort of axis of movement as a colorist saturation is actually a huge subject and we can get way better or way worse results in our grades depending on how we tackle it so i'm glad we got the chance to make an initial dive into it here in today's video we're going to go deeper in my next episode of grade school my live show that we do together where you can show up and ask me any questions you have on this video or saturation in general and we can continue the conversation there because as i said it's a big one i'm always thinking about saturation i'm always thinking about how i can add or subtract or nuance it in a different or superior way because it's one of the fundamentals of color grading that the more you learn about it the more you learn that there are really no rules there's just a bunch of different alternatives and if we're empowered with those alternatives and we can select the ones that best agree with our creative intent and those of our clients we're going to become better colorists so hope you guys enjoyed this initial dive looking forward to going even further with you in our next episode of grade school

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 72,374

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Id: bAAjyNHDpyo

Length: 11min 48sec (708 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 03 2022