How To Use Saturation in DaVinci

in this video I'm going to show you the two things that you need to understand about any saturation tool before you use it and once we understand these two things we're going to take a look at several different options for manipulating saturation inside of resolve and we're going to evaluate them through the lens of these two parameters or Dimensions that we're going to break down right now now in order to do that there's something that we need to understand about saturation as a concept as a visual concept it's quite intuitive right if I tell you to up the saturation you know what I mean or if I tell you to decrease the saturation same thing but saturation interestingly has no single explicit correct definition it's something that is derived or calculated from our ground truth of RGB and there are actually many different ways to perform this calculation none of which are necessarily more right than the other but Each of which can produce a very unique result so that really leads us to the first of the two parameter is the two first of the two Dimensions that I want to talk about today and that is the question of how is saturation being calculated or derived by the particular tool that you are evaluating because the answer to that question can have a really big impact on the results that you get out of working with that tool so that's number one how is this tool calculating saturation in the first place number two now that we've calculated saturation we need to do something with it right that's the whole point of calculating that component in the first place is so that we can manipulate it up or down so the second question is what exactly are we doing to that component once we've calculated it and it again can have a really big impact on the final visual result that we get and just like the way we calculate saturation in the first place there's many different ways that we might go about expanding or decreasing our saturation component and depending on what we choose we will get different results ounce so now that we have these two dimensions in mind let's take a look here inside of resolve and get a feel for how some different tools relate to these two Dimensions that we are talking about so I've got a practice project opened up here I've already got my color management set up as I always do I've got a little bit of a look going on here at the Timeline level of my node graph these happen to be two Luts that come from my Voyager Lut pack these happen to be from the essentials pack and I'm kind of mixing and matching Nirvana and Omega here to get a little bit of a baseline look but I want to go back over to my clip level and focus on the Node graph here and in particular focus on my secondaries branch which is where I typically will do saturation adjustments because while saturation does live at least some saturation knobs live down here in our primaries I tend to think of saturation as sort of like a quasi-secondary it's something that I'm going to focus on after I've got a good foundation established by my Exposure My ratio and my balance but it is something that for almost every shot that we color grade at some point we're at least going to want to give a try to increasing or decreasing saturation and seeing how that feels so I want to equip you to fill out that part of your toolkit with the exact right tool for your creative intent so let's start with the simplest saturation tool that we have inside of DaVinci Resolve that's our saturation knob I'm going to go down here to the saturation knob and I'm going to bump it up to say 75. okay and before we even talk about our two dimensions and evaluating this knob in terms of those two Dimensions let's just look at what we're working with here visually what is the appearance of this how does this feel to me this feels rather video-ish for a lack of better term kind of garish I don't love the way that this image is getting more colorful I would agree that it is indeed doing its job of feeling more saturated than it did before but I don't really love aesthetically the way this image is being rendered and if we start to Now look for a better understanding of that by looking at these two parameters that we just defined we can first observe that the saturation Channel or component in the case of the saturation knob is being calculated in what I would call a video style of saturation formula one of my goals today is to give you kind of some shorthand for the different ways that saturation can be calculated or formulated without you necessarily needing to go off and get a color science degree or learn a bunch of complicated math someone try to give you some shorthand that helps you to delineate and distinguish between different saturation formulas without necessarily needing to get into the weeds with the math and the science of it so with the saturation knob the the saturation channel is being calculated in a very traditional video-esque type of formula for determining what in this image represents its saturation component okay so that's the first parameter and sort of how the saturation knob overlays with that parameter second parameter what are we doing to that calculated saturation channel in the case of the saturation knob what we are doing is applying gain that's the exact type of gain that we would apply here in our primaries with our gain wheel and if you've hung out here on the channel for a little bit you might have heard me talk before about how gain is really just multiplication one of the properties of gain or multiplication is that it is going to have the greatest effect on the highest values in that Channel or component so what does that mean that means with a saturation Channel we are going to see the greatest change in the highest saturations of the image so that means the saturation knob is going to have the most impact on the things in the image which are already most saturated now that may be desirable in some case but for the most part that's kind of the opposite of what at least I'm looking for when I'm color grading generally what I'm looking for is to equalize things and fill in the lower and medium saturations and boost their saturation while keeping the higher saturations a little bit more tamed in and not affecting them as much if at all that's not what we get with the saturation knob here and when we evaluate both of these Dimensions while we're calculating saturation using a rather video style formula and we're then affecting the portions of the image which are already highly saturated it sort of makes sense that we're getting the visual result that we're getting and that I typically will opt dead last for the saturation knob as a way of introducing or removing saturation from the image it ranks pretty low in both of these Dimensions I I don't love how it calculates saturation I don't love what it does to that Channel Once calculated let's get some comparison let's get a contrast with this what I'm going to do before we move on is I'm going to just wipe out my gallery here and I'm going to save a still of this rendering of our image and then I'm going to reset this saturation adjustment and I now want to try out my color boost knob and all I'm going to do here is try to kind of eyeball myself to a similar level that I had a moment ago with my saturation knob and I'm just going to wipe to that version of the image until I feel like I'm close that's actually quite close but we can see some key differences even though the overall saturation level that I've now gotten to with the color boost is similar the main one is going to be in these ultra high saturation areas like in the tablecloth and in this flannel shirt over here things are not exploding and getting overly garished nearly as much when I introduce saturation using Color boost as opposed to the saturation knob so what gives there why are we getting a slightly better result here how can we understand what we're seeing visually through the lens of these two dimensions of our saturation tool well Dimension number one actually hasn't changed much if at all we're still calculating saturation in a rather video-esque type of formula and that's really not moving very much the difference that we are seeing with color boost is a non-linear operation is happening on the saturation channel so that we are essentially boosting lower values more quickly and higher values more slowly so what we end up with is a similar overall signal mass in our Vector scope but you can see the core of the signal mass is popped out a bit more and the extreme areas where for example we're getting red clipping already with our saturation adjustment here with our color boost we're not getting that same clipping and things are being sort of held in a little bit more so we're trending up right we're moving up I may still not love the way that the saturation channel is calculated in the color boost knob but I do think I'm getting a better result than we have with the saturation knob because we're not exploding those already high saturation values out to a really extreme position okay so we're trending up let's grab a still on that as well and what I now want to do is look at an alternative that we're going to sort of cook up in a fundamentally different way so I'm going to reset this color boost adjustment and what I would now like to do is a trick that you may have seen me do before if you've been hanging out here on the channel for a bit I'm going to right click this node set my color space to hsl now by the way everything I'm about to do right now with this color space and the channels that I'm about to flip on and off this requires that you have your color management set up correctly so I generally encourage you to set up color management I think it's a huge value add to your projects but in particular for the rest of the techniques I'm going to show you today if your color management is not set up properly you're going to get really weird results at least potentially and then you're gonna go what the heck Colin doesn't know what he's talking about this isn't working make sure you get that color management set up properly I'm going to flip into hsl here okay and I'm now going to go into my channels and turn off channel one and channel 3. hsl Hue saturation luminance channel one is H don't need that channel 2 is saturation that's what I want to operate on and channel 3 is luminance I don't need that either so by leaving Channel 2 as the only active Channel I'm now guaranteeing that the only thing I'm changing is my S or my saturation Channel and what's cool about this trick is that we're doing a fairly complex thing kind of automatically we're saying hey resolve for the duration of this node move me into hsl and then allow me to only operate on the S of that hsl and then once I'm done doing whatever I do here in this node automatically move me right back into RGB where I started that's all happening under the hood it's all being done with a couple clicks it's a pretty neat trick for a variety of applications but certainly saturation is one of my favorites so what's the benefit of that why do we come into hsl here on the first place what can we do that we weren't able to do already the main thing we can do here is we can really really control the second dimension what's being done to that saturation Channel we have a lot of control over that once we are in this hsl mode of this node we can for example do things like boosting gamma and dropping gain that's already a bit more complex than anything we could do with the color boost knob or certainly the saturation knob but we can go go even further than that I'm going to reset those we could go in and do what you've sometimes may have heard me refer to in the past as a saturation curve and I can say well I want my SAT to take off really strong and then flatten out and then climb again and then finally roll over up here at the top that's probably more complex than is ever really going to be necessary and not something I would typically do but it serves as a good example of the level of control that I now have over the what am I doing to my SAT Channel part of the equation by moving my node into this hsl mode so there's kind of a trend happening here right we start up at the SAT knob that was ranking pretty low in both categories we moved up to color boost that was ranking higher in the what am I doing to the SAT Channel category and now we've moved into an hsl node that's ranking even higher than that in the what am I doing to the SAT Channel category how however we haven't seen much movement in any of these cases in terms of that first parameter how is saturation being calculated it's still being calculated in a fairly videoesque type of formula not going to say it's identical in all three cases it differs slightly in each but it's pretty similar and it's not necessarily the ideal and to really give you a context for what I mean when I say that we need to look at a fourth option here's what we're going to do next I'm going to reset this custom curve and I'm going to right click and I'm going to flip this color space now into HSV and now as a compromise between control and sort of ease and efficiency I'm just going to go over and do that gamma gain trick that I talked about a moment ago and I'm going to start to gamma up and gain down and I hope you can see before I even make a comparison that this saturation feels different and now if I wipe to say our color boost version of things a moment ago I'm going to go even further with this to make it a fair fight really push that saturation up and if I wipe to my color boost version this is a very different rendering isn't it now I want to emphasize at this point I'm going too far with these saturation adjustments on purpose I would not Envision going much further than 50 percent of what I'm doing here today in any practical context but I'm going this far for a reason and it's because I want to exaggerate the difference between these approaches so that you can see the more subtle differences that you are going to end up creating or the more subtle difference between approaches that may go by unnoticed when you're color grading because they are subtle but the net of a compromised choice in terms of your sat knob across the course of a project or across the course of a year of color grading that adds up really fast and that's the whole theme the whole premise of this build you toolkit series is I want to give you the ammunition to select not just a functional but an Ideal tool those are the kind of selections the kind of enhancements to your process that over time make an absolutely massive difference to the quality of image that you are able to put up when you're color grading okay so we're going too far on purpose but you can see even when we do that if I compare the HSV approach to the color boost approach for me there's not much question and certainly if I compare the HSV approach to the saturation knob approach really no question if you look at the tablecloth or at the color patches anything more saturated in this image the SAT knob version is really a non-starter for me and the HSV version even at this kind of extreme level of saturation still has a certain organic and filmic quality and what you'll notice with this is that as you're increasing saturation the luminance of those colors will either stay the same or actually darken which is more consistent with a subtractive filmic type of saturation so I think this is a better foundational position a better default for me and my practice now I want to emphasize here you don't necessarily have to share my conclusions you might love the way that the saturation knob renders and now being armed with the knowledge of how saturation is being calculated and how it is being manipulated once calculated you might say hey saturation is great that's the thing for me and that would be awesome my premise here is not to indoctrinate you into my aesthetic my premise is to give you the tools for evaluating the different saturation knobs and methods and adjustments available to you so that you can select the tool that best supports your creative agenda and this is one of the best things that you can do for yourself in between projects is to start looking at what are my candidates what are the options available to me and evaluating one against the other staging a shootout as we've talked about throughout this series and figuring out before your next project before the next itch to add saturation before the next note to add saturation comes up what your go-to is what feels best to you what works best for you because again if you think about every saturation adjustment that you were going to make in your next project or in the next year or in the next 10 years if you can improve the quality of each of those saturation adjustments by five ten twenty percent that's a huge gain that's the kind of gains that we want to make when we are color grading that's going to take you from consistently okay color grades to consistently excellent color grades so I hope that's a helpful primer to you for how to start to lens saturation adjustments and how to Stage a shootout between them and evaluate what's happening on each side and get a feel for which tool supports your creative agenda better and which tool may not be ideal for your creative intent for your projects

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 14,187

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Id: eDapOB6cyN0

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 05 2023