How to use the RGB Mixer: Advanced Look-Building as a colorist in Davinci Resolve 19

welcome back to the channel today we are going to be looking at one of the most underappreciated look buing Tools in Da Vinci resolve and uh divin resolve 19 beta which is out now has added a little extra functionality to it we're going to talk about the RGB mixer so the way we're going to do this is first I'm going to show you kind of how to use the tool and some of my mentality behind using it and then afterwards I'm going to show you some of the fun upgrades that are coming in V resolve 19 now as a heads up I did record the first part of this video about a week and a half ago before I started growing some of this facial hair here so uh don't get a jum scare when I do this transition one of the common problems we run into when we're color grading is how do we pull a a cohesive looking image out of what we're given uh and this is especially true when we're working on projects that we don't have art departments dressing every single set element or person in the frame so the example I'm going to use is of a uh a promotional piece for uh a town that did a like a Marty gr celebration it was kind of like a recap celebration and promotion for the next year in a situation like this it's closer to a documentary than a feature film we can't tell everyone running in this race to show up with these specific colors one of the tools I found helpful in this situation is the RGB mixer in Da Vinci resolve let's jump in and take a look at first of all how the tool works but then secondly how can it help us generate a look and generate a more cohesive image so what I have here is a couple clips from this uh promotional film and basically what I've done is I've set up some basic color management and some you know contrast curves uh but since the focus of that is not in this video I I kind of grouped them into a compound note so we can focus on the uh The Matrix here but if you want to know more about color management you can check out some of the other videos I've done but for for now we're focusing on this uh RGB mixer what you'll see is it's kind of grouped into these three categories we have the uh the red output green output and blue output and what you'll notice is that the uh the red Channel or whichever the primary channel is is being represented as a one so the blue is one uh you know z0 for uh red and green in the blue channel the green is one and then the red is one here the way this is we can increase the Green in the image through uh through three different methods and we you can use the green channel to add green the blue channel to add green and the uh the red channel to add green now that might seem confusing at first but uh maybe this will clear it up uh if we look at this image we realize that the uh the red channel is only going to contain the red information so uh we're going to have more red information maybe in this uh kind of like yellowish block of this Arch than the blue and in dein resolve we can actually take a look at what the red Channel looks like so we can say you know uh what does the red Channel look like what you'll notice that there's uh the the white is kind of representing more information and the black is less we have more red more red Channel information in these yellow pieces uh than in the blue up top and you'll see that if we go over to the uh the the the blue channel the opposite will be true we have more information in this uh this section of the arch because that was blue and less in this one because it was red so let's go back to the uh the screen there what we can do is we can take that information and apply adding red green or blue in different ways so let's say here I want to add green to the image but I primarily want to add Green in the areas that are blue what I can do is I can add green primarily using the blue Channel information so just as an example here let's really do kind of an extreme example I'm going to make this uh 0. five here and as you see I make it 0. five uh the image gets super out of whack so in order for the image to maintain its neutral points we have to make sure that these three numbers end up equaling one so what I might do is I might say you know 75 here and I might take red and go .25 if I disable this adjustment you'll see that uh in the Blues as I enable it we add a lot more green to those parts of the image so let me add disable and then enable now I I don't love this as is but what you're seeing is is we're adding green to the image but primarily in the blue areas so we can actually use this tool to generate a slightly more cohesive hole for this image cuz some of the problems that I'm seeing in this image is things like I see this guy's wearing kind of a bluish gray shirt but that bluish gray doesn't really line up with the uh the blue in the arch here and you know there's a couple different uh Hues of blue in the background we also have a bunch of different types of Reds and yellows here like I see this guy's shirt in my opinion that shirt really clashes with uh this this kind of um orangish yellow section of the arch and these various popping colors throughout the uh the group here they don't they don't pull together nicely it doesn't doesn't feel like we have a cohesive image and the the 3X3 Matrix here this this RGB mixer can help us with this one of the things I did for this piece though is I said well it seems to me that we want some of the warm parts to get warmer and the cool parts to get cooler so uh one method of doing that could be well we're going to in we're going to increase the warmth primarily in the red areas in the image so instead of just one here I might say you know 1.1 we're going to add that but in order to keep the neutrals in place we need to uh balance out the the green and red channels so I'll say .05 and then in the blue Channel I'll say .05 as well so there we go it's it's really subtle but if I disable it and enable it you'll notice we have a slight bit more I especially noticed this in the uh the skin tones here let me get a little lower so if I disable it you'll notice we're not getting as much in the skin tones and if I enable it we're getting a little more of that pop in there which I think is a nice addition so that that slightly increased the uh the the presence of the red and the worm channels let's do the same but a little more extreme with the blue so we want the blues to get Bluer so I'm going to say 1.2 here and uh one of the other things I know uh just because I experimented a lot in this piece is I also wanted the greens to get a little Bluer so I'm going to just add uh 0.1 to the greens as well but in order to get this back to uh one we're going to have to subtract three from it there we go the next thing I wanted to do in this piece was uh slightly bias some of the cool tones a little bit Greener maybe a little more cyan than uh kind of the I think we're sometimes getting a little bit of a almost like magenta Hue in some of the Blues so so let's do that let's say that we want a little more green in the uh the blue areas of the image so I'm going to crank this up to something like let's say3 and then I that means I need to subtract uh you know eventually .3 from these other two so I will say you know 085 and then .15 there we go uh and so as as I look at this image uh let me scroll in a little bit you'll notice that a lot of these blue tones are now kind of nicely coming together as I look at the the blue of this Arch and the blue of his shirt and some of the people in the background we're starting to have an image that is more congruent and although this shirt uh isn't perfect with this Arch I certainly think it's a lot better than before I think that those two are really ugly there and we're starting to pull them a little closer they both share a little more of those those warm tones and this is evidenced in the vector scope so let me pull these adjustments off you'll notice how the image has a a bunch of different Hues in it but when I enable it you'll see that we're starting to stretch this image along this warm cool axis now at this point uh personally I feel like this image is slightly oversaturated for for my taste at this point and one of the things we can do is we can uh disable this node and just take and take a quick snapshot so I'm going to grab that still then I'm going to enable it and what you'll notice is that before and after we're we're adding saturation to the warmth and the uh the cool tones what we can do is we can put a node uh before that Matrix I'm just going to call this daat and we can drop the saturation out so that the uh saturation levels are similar to before so here are kind of the before saturation levels there's the after let's start to uh pull the saturation down I'm going to do a little comparison that seems pretty good right there I'm going to just add a little bit more in so now uh we're more like refining the image rather than just adding saturation so here's kind of let me take both these off so here's the before some a very a very disjointed feeling image lots of uh magenta tones the the warm tones aren't lining up either and here's the after uh we see that there's a little more of a consistent cyan theme throughout it although there is still you know purple over here and this guy's shirt doesn't match perfectly it it's a nice broad stroke adjustment that's moving Us in the right direction and one of the great things about the uh the RGB mixer here is you're not going to break the image super easily as long as all these uh groups are ending up totaling up back to one so let me just take off this desaturation just to show you I can jump around to other images in this piece and you'll see it does a really nice job of emphasizing these similar tones so uh you know we're kind of emphasizing some of the more orange and some of the more cyan Blues here uh and even like at night right we kind of have some of the the cyan tones and the the the orange and warm tones the production team didn't ask everyone to to fit with some certain aesthetic but using this Matrix is allowing us to pull some of these colors in a at least a similar Direction so what's new with the RGB mixer indin resolve 19 well I'm going to use my laptop here since uh it's still in beta and I never want to use the beta on my main workstation but in resolve 19 you'll see that there's this new icon in the top leftand corner of the red green and blue outputs so right now it's off and it operates just like it did previously so if I Make This 1.2 the whole image gets super red and if I'd want to neutralize it I'd have to take the green and blue down so I'd have to keep all the numbers adding up to one right so I'd have to say like .1 here and then .1 there well to save you a little bit of time if we enable this Auto up top what this is really doing is it's normalizing it for you so if I come here with the red and I all of a sudden bring this up to 1.2 you'll notice down here uh it's already taking these numbers and neutralizing the image for you so same thing if the on the blue Channel if I go and grab the blue and push the blue up really high well Auto off at the moment so it just biases the image blue I click it and there we go it's automatically Bringing Down the red and green Channel it'll also attempt to intelligently understand your uh input so if if I'm over here and I adjust the green you'll see that's trying to adjust the blue channel here now that's not always the right Instinct so sometimes you will want to turn off the auto feature and just adjust these manually but I really like that this is being included because I think it will be a more intuitive way for people to start embracing and using the tool so there you go there's a quick look at how to use the RGB mixer in your projects I would just encourage you experiment a lot with this that's the easiest way to start to wrap your head around how this tool works I find that I am often using the RGB mixer uh a lot of times when I'm doing documentary work or work where there isn't necessarily an art Department that has been able to coordinate every single thing in the frame it can really help us if you're going after that more you know warm and cool look it can help us stretch the image along that axis in a really Pleasant way uh also make sure when you're messing around with this to keep an eye on your vector scope it will help you understand what it's doing to your image now the RGB mixer can be used for more than just look creation it has a bunch of different purposes uh and let me know uh down in the comments if that's something you would want me to address in future videos I just think that this tool is something that is not talked about nearly enough and it can create some cool results in different ways than uh than other tools in resolve deal with it so have have you used the RGB mixer before let me know uh some of the practical ways that you found it helpful if you enjoyed this video go ahead and hit the like button and uh subscribe to stick around for more content like this in the future all right I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Barrett Kaufman

Views: 12,947

Keywords: davinci resolve 19, beta, 19 beta, RGB mixer, rgb mixer, colour, colour grading, colour correction, DaVinci, davinci resolve 17 tutorial, davinci resolve color grading, davinci resolve studio, davinci resolve tutorial, davinci resolve effects, davinci resolve 17, color grading davinci resolve, davinci resolve, resolve color grading, davinci tutorial, colorist, resolve 17, davinci, color grading, color correction, film look, resolve 19, davinci 19, colourist

Id: Tel2M6kdSiE

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 19 2024