I've Ignored This Color Tool for SO LONG - Resolve Color Correction Tutorial

[Music] huge thanks to art grid for sponsoring this video hey everybody my name is casey ferris i make videos on post production here on youtube today we're talking about color correction and something that uh frankly i've been kind of ignoring for a little while let's take a look here i am in resolve and we have a piece of log footage downloaded from art grid and how i've always approached color correction is something like this this is log footage which means that it's kind of gray and washed out not really enough contrast or saturation and so i do some flavor of taking down the lift until my scopes kind of reach this zero point and bringing up the gain until things felt bright enough adding a little bit of saturation maybe boosting the gamma just a little and maybe adding just a little bit of an s curve here and now we've gone from this log kind of nasty looking image to one that looks like how you would expect it to look in real life now this is a fine way to do things i wouldn't say there's anything inherently wrong about it i've done quite a bit of color work doing just this and i know a lot of colorists who have but is this the very best way technically to do this not really the reason for that is because of color spaces really what's happening when you shoot log your camera is taking things that exist in real life and it's capturing all the light it can and it's kind of squishing the brightest and darkest parts down into a range that it can see and the way it does that is with a certain math equation think of it as taking a curve and doing something sort of like this it's kind of taking all of the brighter and darker parts and kind of squishing them into an image that it can see this is kind of a gross oversimplification of it it basically tries to fit all of the brightness values and color values and everything into a little space that the camera can actually record and this little curve that it applies can be expressed with a math equation and every camera has a different math equation so what happens when we bring this footage in is if we want this to look normal and kind of convert this back to what the camera sees the best thing to do would be to just do the inverse of that math equation right for instance if it had an equation that pushed things up like this we would want to do something that takes things down like that to make it look normal again and if you don't know the math equation and you're not really working with the numbers you're kind of just estimating things by eye now again this works because you know we look at things by eye like i'm not 100 concerned whether this math is totally accurate i'm really more concerned with does the image look nice and if it looks nice then that's great but doing things by eye is not really the most precise and highest quality way to get your image looking nice even though in a practical sense it works so what's the right way well i'm going to grab a still here by right clicking and just saying grab still that's going to keep us still here in our gallery so that we can get back to it later and then i'll right click here in the empty space and say reset all grades and nodes and we'll go back to our log footage here now we're going to kind of do this the right way i'm actually going to start with a new node and we're going to apply an open effect that ships with resolve both the free version and the pay version called a color space transform so we're going to go up here to effects if this is an open click effects and i'm just going to search for color and the second one down is called color space transform let's take this and just drag it onto our second node here and we have that little fx badge that shows up to show that we have open effects on this node let's right click and label this cst for color space transform and now what we're doing is a version of color management which is the fancy scary word for doing some color math and the cool thing is that the people who make the cameras also release information about what kind of math they use to make this log image so if we know what camera this was shot on which i happen to know is ari alexa we can actually select that in our color space transform controls under input color space let's go to r alexa under input gamma we'll say re log c and i'm going to uncheck this little button apply forward ootf and now we're looking at basically what the camera saw when this was shot now does this look 100 perfect no i could probably do with this being a little brighter but you'll notice one thing that the parts that are really dark black are really dark black parts that are really bright are really bright there's plenty of color saturation it's kind of fixed all of those main problems we have some really good contrast and before and after that is a really big difference and all we had to do was apply this color space transform and now if we want to tweak this we can go to our first node here and maybe i'll do something like boost up this offset a little bit and there we're at a really nice image all i had to do was push up the offset a little and there we are let's compare this with our other shot here i'll let play still our other shots uh it looks like we had that a little bit brighter maybe we could take the gain and just boost it up a little bit now we have a pretty similar result with a lot less work in fact you zoom in here and you look at some of the skin tones they're a little bit more saturated maybe a little bit more contrast that might actually be more pleasing depending on what we're going for of course again if i didn't like that i could do something like dial my saturation back a little bit and get a very very similar result now some of you might be looking at this and going well isn't this what i would use a lut for yes this is actually how uh color transform luts have been used for a long time the difference is that a color space transform uses math and a lut doesn't really use math it's more made with kind of a sample image and it's sort of a little bit nicer version of guessing again it depends on the lut depends on the camera but you can think of a color space transform in this way as what you would use a lut for but kind of the next generation but every pixel and every color in here is remapped exactly using the math that the camera manufacturer actually reported and any adjustment we want to make we can make under that color space transform and get a really high quality result let's take a look at another image this is also from art grid and something to mention this video is sponsored by art grid and i only ever work with sponsors that i really really believe in here's why i think this is awesome not only do you get unlimited stock footage for a monthly subscription and it's all like freaking awesome it's all super well shot you can download as much as you want you can use it for basically anything you want but when you download the footage they have a bunch of different options you can do hd uhd high quality uhd and you can download the log version which is really cool because then you can do your own color grade and that kind of thing and if you click on the footage almost all of them have information about what camera it was shot with which is really convenient if you want to use this fancy new color space transform so check this out i'll just go to my footage and i'll scroll down to this clip and it looks like this was shot on blackmagic ursa mini 4.6 k so i can go to my color space transform i'll select blackmagic design 4.6k film in my color space and my color gamma uncheck apply forward and boom look at that that's nuts and again we can do any of our adjustments before that color space transform and really dial in the look that we want really cool so i've been looking at art grid for a long time obviously there's a whole bunch of really amazing footage but that's what really sold it for me it's not only do you get awesome footage but you know exactly how it was shot and you can download the log footage to get the utmost quality in whatever you're doing let's do one more clip this is from art grid and i know this was shot on red so i just set my input color space and gamma to red and boom so good so there's a little intro to color space transform something i've been a little unsure of for a long time but the more i use it the more i love it and if you want to check out art grid we have a deal you can get two months free if you use the link down below so make sure to do that hey thank you for watching this video i appreciate that and i hope that your spaces are transformed like optimus prime

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 10,429

Keywords: Davinci Resolve 17, resolve 17 tutorial, how to use resolve 17, davinci resolve 17 for beginners, Artgrid, Color space transform, color correction, color grading, blackmagic design, casey faris, color page, how to

Id: k_9R8t47FCo

Length: 8min 4sec (484 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 08 2021