Learning Color Management In DaVinci Resolve 17 - Sp Guest: Daria Fissoun

[Music] hey everybody casey ferris here i make videos on davinci resolve here on youtube and today we are talking about color management with our good friend daria how's it going daria it's going great yay darya if you don't know if she actually wrote the book on color correction you know the black magic book but it's fine so daria i'm really excited to talk about color management because this is something that i've sort of ignored for a little bit and i kind of hate to say that so i don't look like some hack you know but honestly it's it's really intimidating and i feel like i can get good results without color management because i mean i've been color correcting stuff for like years without it and it seems like it works fine so can you give us a little intro on just what color management is and why it's useful so it's a pretty broad question uh but i'll try my best sure so as you're probably well aware uh different cameras uh shoot in different color spaces or different color standards so for example consumer cameras um you know things like uh smartphones or you know the consumer like um camcorders that you can get tend to capture things that are ready for viewing you know so they're rich in saturation and contrast you know they're pretty much like ready to show your friends and family prosumer cameras are slightly more you know advanced to professional cameras tend to assume that you're not just going to be ready to view this footage right away they assume that you want to process it a little bit maybe spruce it up you know usually make it like more pretty so instead of capturing colors and light the way it looks in reality they instead try to capture uh footage with like a bit of a tonal lean known as you know a log curve that will allow us to preserve much more light data or luminance data within the image and that gives us a lot more latitude for grading and preserving detail and then you have like the super professional gamers that capture raw which don't even bother you know applying any kind of log curve but instead just capture several stops worth of light and allow you to play with those after you've already captured the footage instead of doing it in camera so there's a lot of different ways of capturing media you know and a lot of different color spaces in which it can be represented even at just the starting stage another sort of stage that we have to consider is the deliverables which also have a range of color standards so you have like rec 709 uh for broadcast television but then you have another standard for cinema projectors which are able to display a different range of colors a wider gamut and then finally you have i suppose like more advanced signals like hdr for example like right 2020 or rec 2100 what i'm saying with all this is that there's a ton of different color uh standards a lot of different ways of capturing and representing color and luminance and one way that we can sort of simplify things for ourselves is by having a project color managed you know under the hood so to speak and that's what the settings in davinci resolve allow us to do the color management project settings it allows us to remap our starting point or footage into a certain standard that we can work in and then deliver that into another standard our deliverable so all in the background doing it for us and it also like allows us to preserve the maximum signal integrity all the way throughout it's a way to take different cameras that shoot and they all look different basically and kind of bring them into the same space and make them look good somewhat automatically is that right yeah yeah so if i had to describe the benefits like in threefold number one is what you just described so being able to work with multiple camera types multiple types of footage and have them all pretty much rerouted into the same working uh color space you know so there all the tools are operating predictably on the color page number two would be that it also allows you to deliver multiple project standards so let's say you finished editing your film and now you want to send it to sundance but then you also want to send it to television you know after it gets picked up or approved or whatever and then finally you want to edit a trailer for youtube instead of having to create a brand new project for every one of those deliverables you can just change your output color space and send it to those different standards finally i would say the third benefit with the latest version of resolve is that it also now allows us to work with certain ultra wide gamut color working spaces or color standards so asus has been around for quite a few versions but now we also have the davinci white gamut which is starting to extend beyond the visible representation of color or light which means that it's allowing us to future proof our projects it means that we can now color grade our media with the anticipation that maybe in 2030 there might be a new color space standard introduced something beyond hdr and we will be able to open up an old project and simply remap it to this new standard that will always be smaller than davinci white gamut and deliver to that man that's that's crazy so it's like taking all of the colors that exist and putting it into a big bucket and then taking whatever you need for whatever screen you're delivering to out of that that bucket of colors yeah yeah you can think of it as like resizing images you know in an image editor so you start with like a gigantic poster size and then you can turn it into a postcard or you can turn it into like a an a4 piece of paper or etc and it just resizes to smaller so you're never losing quality basically when you're doing it that way you know from a wider gamut that sounds really powerful i mean because usually you look at footage and it's only just a slice of what you can see you know something's overexposed something's underexposed or whatever and this is capturing as much as the camera can capture in raw let's say the biggest range that you could take but it's basically keeping all of that range throughout post-production and letting you pick a part of it like at the very end of your pipeline is that right i don't know if you'd keep a part of it you'd remap it essentially okay so you're still preserving the whole signal you're just kind of like down scaling into the available color space that you have sure yeah it's not like your nap have to clip stuff but it's like something that is you know way too bright for you to normally see you can turn that into just the brightest thing that you can display right exactly yeah the background processes right now we have the like the display render transform controls which will automatically roll off your highlights in the shadows right so you're never really going to see things that are like ultra overexposed in your viewer anymore everything will be rolled into your viewable range so if you're working on a 100 net monitor which most of us are like a computer monitor then it will already look good to your eyes and you're not gonna have to like worry with like that whole step of pulling down the highlights you know either with the curves or with like the gamut mapping uh open effects um you can just basically have all the under the hood processes taking care of that and then when you output like you said you know it could be output to hdr which is capable of displaying much brighter whites or you can output it to just standard broadcast television or youtube and that will just remap to those available standards okay well we got to jump in and look at this because you know i it sounds like we're living in the future and i i'd like i'd like some of that okay so here we are in resolve 17 in the color page we have a whole bunch of different shots here most of these are shot on blackmagic raw there's a couple that are shot on a dji here's one shot on a red normally i would look at something like this and i would probably you know go to the camera raw stuff and maybe fix any problems but then i'd go over and start doing my color correction just in the primaries wheels or maybe the hdr wheels so how is the workflow different when you're using color management the process doesn't have to be too different if you don't want it to be you could for example use color management purely as a means of future proofing your project so if you prefer to grate from log color spaces for example you're absolutely welcome to but you could also choose to remap this media into a more like a viewer friendly color standard like rec 709 and just you know get a jump start on the contrast and saturation and start grading off that but it's not going to clip your video data in the way that you know transforming to rec 709 usually does you know during transcoding so it will still give you full access to all the raw data that's within the signal so this sounds kind of like what you would use a lot for at this at this point a little bit the benefit of working with color management is that you're still working in a 32-bit floating point space so it's pretty much like limitless latitude for color grading unlimited latitude whereas with luts or lookup tables there's tables of values tables of data that you are transforming from into so you are still limited by the amount of values that you have and if it's the low 32-bit floating point which usually lets r they're usually like i think tap out of 12-bit you know feel free to correct me which means that there is a possibility of some of your values being like not necessarily clipped because that implies that only the top part of like the waveform is going to get affected yeah but it's more about your colors just being averaged you know so that if there's you know with a raw signal for example there's going to be a lot of data there so eventually once you reach the limit to the amount of values that a lot can represent it's just going to start going for the closest possible value you know sure it's limiting the amount of processing it can really do yeah with a lut but where this it's based on math rather than looking up a sample right exactly okay so if we're going to use color management to make these shots look good what would we do first first let's jump into the project settings okay and we'll have to go to color management and on the left hand side all right so the way to enable uh color management is simply to set your color science from davinci yrgb which is the display referred to color managed which will then be scene referred which means that you are now the one to communicate color information to resolve as opposed to resolve deciding for you gotcha so color management now is reading the majority of your video data and determining the input color space based on things like internal metadata based on like the container type but you have the ability to overwrite that if you want yeah so you can go to custom and exactly so you have all these controls but what's really nice about the presets is that uh they pretty much represent the best of the best settings for those specific uh standards so whenever you select one of them you'll see a short description underneath saying hey this is good for you know broadcast for example or streaming so you've got like all the most popular standards already in that list and then beneath that you have your output color space which is determining both your viewing environment or monitoring environment and your deliverable standard so let's say uh you know you had a grading monitor then you could choose the standard that you are capable of viewing if you're collaborating on a computer screen again then you probably want to stick to rec 70924 maybe gamma 2 2 if you're in an uncontrolled lighting environment if you're on an apple monitor then you might want to go for srgb for to match its internal color space okay and the idea is that you know as you deliver different versions of your project all you have to do is change the output color space to match that standard now the general rule here though is you want to start with the widest possible color standard and work your way down so previously i used that analogy of you know working on say an image like designing a poster let's say you had to design a poster for the side of a building but then the campaign would also run in i don't know magazines or flyers and things like that yeah you probably start with the largest version of the file and then scale it down you wouldn't begin with like this postcard size image and then scale it up for the building because then you end up like you know yeah macro blocking um so that's the idea with the color spaces you want to choose the widest gamut uh for your first delivery and then work your way down okay so what would you what would you choose then i mean if this is something that maybe could be like i mean if you're working on a short film let's say i want to actually show this in a theater of some sort would you pick p3 first if i had the ability to monitor p3 i would okay otherwise i might want to leave that to yeah rec700 as is i've got like a flanders that i've got set to gamma 24. but what would be more important is changing my resolve color management preset to match the p3 standard so now i'm working yeah in that wider so yeah broadcast or cinema for projection okay um i believe that would set it to d60 if i'm not mistaken great okay okay so really it's like right here you just kind of pick what you're planning on doing yeah essentially yeah you determine your project working space and then the output is basically where you're setting up your deliverables as you start to render them yeah because you can change this later it's not really a big deal right exactly you can change output at any time it won't really affect the project but you do not want to change that preset mid project yeah i wouldn't imagine so tell me about davinci wide gamut so the davinci white gamut is an ultra wide gamut that's been introduced in davinci resolve 17 in which you can actually see how much color the gamut can represent and you'll see that it extends beyond you know the visible representation of color on the cie 1931 graph which means that if you start working in a project in the davinci white gamut you're future proofing it for foreseeable monitoring and projection standards like if you don't really know what it's going to be and you want it like to be the most future proof would you just pick davinci wide gamut here yeah absolutely like is there a disadvantage to just picking that versus the other ones i suppose the only disadvantage i've seen so far is people who are used to working in a certain standard like let's say rec 709 they might feel that that latitude is sort of affecting the way that the color page tools perform so they might just not be used to some of the controls that they might see in you know the primaries or the hdr palette or the curves so if you know that you're delivering in rec 799 and you're used to working in it then you may as well just stick to rec 709 there's no kind of need i suppose to expand the gamut so far i've been doing everything in white gamut and i've been very happy uh with the results okay so let's say if we switch to that and our output space is gamma 2.4 so that's just like a normal monitor we'd set it something like this would we do anything else you're pretty much good to go uh if you click okay to confirm you can now go into the color page and you'll see a shift uh in the footage in the viewer oh yeah it looks great so it's already been like yeah a slight change so the good news by the way is that for all the raw clips that you have their color space is automatically detected by davinci resolve and it's automatically remapped yeah that's why they look look pretty good you know yeah wow that's really neat but then you can also for further accuracy go into the clips that are not raw and start to adjust their individual input color space to make sure that the transform is accurate yeah so these clips these were shot on black magic but these aren't raw these are transcoded so how would i do that anything that's been transcoded it's not able to read you know the original yeah that makes sense it has no idea what it is right so you're going to need to right click the clip or eclipse and choose input color space and then choose it from this list it seems like it's pretty important to know that if you're going to do it this way yes absolutely so if you're going to be using resolve color management oh that looks nice then you should be fairly confident about what standard the footage was shot in best way to find out sometimes is to contact the dp or whoever gave you the footage and say hey can you tell me anything about the camera or you know the colors that this was shot in color standard but if you have no way of finding out so sometimes i work with archive footage and i just don't know i could just bypass it all together and grade it like the old school style okay so there's a couple of ways you can bypass color management number one is if you right click and you go into input color space okay you can see that at the top underneath the project settings you have bypass okay now doing it this way will mean that the clip is still part of the color management pipeline so it will still be affected whenever you change your output color space gotcha and that's probably the ideal way to do it in fact right now it looks really good because resolve was able to read the starting point of this footage so it already looks nice and contrasted and saturated but then you also have the additional option of bypassing color management all together in a clip and it's also in the right click contextual menu so you can see yeah just bypass the downside of two management oh okay so then that just comes in as log then exactly that just completely switches off the process but the downside is that you're not going to have to kind of keep an eye on this clip and if you change your deliverable standard this clip won't be affected so it's not ideal yeah so it kind of gets rid of the advantages of that which i guess is still better i mean because you might have to go back and do a trim on like one clip you know or one scene versus the entire movie but i prefer to just bypass the input color space as opposed to the overall color management and it still looks pretty good so what does that do then how does that know what adjustments to make all right so we're now seeing the effect of the drt the display render transform happening in the background if you go back into uh project settings okay you are now ready to graduate into the custom settings so once you've set up your preset once you click custom you unpack that preset so we're still in davinci white gamut but we're now seeing all the background processes so right now the input color space is set to rec 709 but remember if you're working with raw media it is able to read and determine its own input color space so it will overwrite whatever you've set up there sure okay most of the time if i'm working with multimedia projects i just set my input color space to bypass and i will set up individual color management on the clips on the timeline okay but then more importantly you have the timeline color space also known as the the project working color space and you'll see the white gamut represents the color the intermediate is the tonal distribution or the the working luminance okay and then underneath that you have the timeline working luminance which i also find very useful if you're working with a raw media with like several stops of light you know in an image the kind of stuff that you usually have to fix with gamut mapping or with you know reducing like maybe the gain or the top of the custom curve the timeline working luminance will do that for you it will assume a very high dynamic range right of the brightness and it will automatically kind of roll it off for you roll off the highlights uh so you get like a nice gentle slope into the 100 minute range that you're currently outputting to yeah so this is really what's yeah protecting that but what's remapping the tonal ranges which is what you were asking about a second ago is the input and output drts at the very bottom okay so right now they're both set to davinci but there's a few other like um standards or like algorithms that you can use to perform that mapping da vinci is the recommended setting because it tends to be the most intuitive it's able to read the tonal map of an image and remap it in order to create consistent behavior across the timeline no matter what type of footage you're working with even if you're working with mixed types like hdr and sdr so then you kind of end up with similar distribution in your waveform which means that the tools operate similarly in the color page and the contrast looks very similar okay it's like automatically just trying to color correct it basically am i understanding that right yeah it's it's looking at the waveform and it's redistributing it based on whatever the input is it's either stretching it out to fill you know your scope's height so it's almost like the auto color kind of thing yeah i suppose it is like a mathematical operation except it doesn't affect color it only affects tonal distribution so really it's doing its best to kind of give you a good result anyway if you bypass the input color space on something that you you just don't know the the input for or isn't raw exactly just tries to spread it pretty evenly across your scope so if you look at the waveform right now you can see that it it's pretty much filling it from black to white yeah gotcha pressure yeah so this is bypassed so then it's just stretched it out in the scopes from black point to white point it's not as good as the one that like i can pick like this one i feel like that looks maybe a little better it's a little flatter but it still does a pretty good job it still definitely takes away a lot of the work that i would be doing you know doing just a primary on it yeah if you had like a whole bunch of log media in there that would be automatically distributed you know which will create contrast you know via that kind of distribution and the advantage is that it it does it non-destructively right so it's not like clipping stuff out like you would if you just threw a lut on something yes absolutely and because of like the latitude of the um the white gamut like the working space it's really difficult to like clip or destroy anything unless you start to get funny with you know the intricacies of the waveform itself and you start to like maybe be aggressive with your contrast or stuff like that man so this comes in just completely clipped at the top this was shot a bit hot uh so you can address that with the raw palette yeah and then also adjust it with the hdr palette as well or any of the other primaries do i have to take the iso down or can i just bring it well now that you have highlight recovery enabled you should be able to yeah just drag the waveform down with the primaries and yeah you should see that data come back oh it's no it's not no no it's the iphone actually i always get confused with this stuff i'm like where do i need to do the first one but yeah if you take that down yeah i guess it was clipped anyway that that's what it was anyway i think yeah this particular clip it's been intense yeah it's not throwing away information you can still get to it through the various palettes which i think that was always what i was scared about when it comes to color management when i feel like it started seeing tutorials on aces and stuff like that i was like man why would i do that like why would i automatically put a preset on everything that's going to ruin half of my stuff that just seems bad like the more i work with this the more i'm like well actually like a lot of this i mean for the primary it's like 80 or 90 there it does most of the primary for you and then you can just go on and kind of fix problems with it yeah exactly and it's not like the hard values that are being transformed or clipped in any way so you still have access to the original signal at every stage of the workflow yeah if you really feel like it's ruining something you could bypass it right like absolutely yeah you can just go to input color space bypass and it's like it's gone brighter or you could turn it off right bypass color management and then just work with the log footage so worst case is you feel like you just can't work with it it ruins something and then you can just bypass it yeah one other thing i wanted to touch on is the tools work a little different when color management is on is that right yes the hdr palette notably was designed to work with resolves color management enabled and in particular was designed for the wide gamut one thing that you're going to see that's different is the global wheel now pinches the signal at both the black point and the white point oh yeah now what's wonderful it means is that you never see clipping right in the black point or the white yeah even though of course if you drag it far enough it will kind of perceptually start to look like exposed but it's not like it's crunchy like like it can be so that's good behavior not just for the exposure but i find for a lot of the other global controls in the hdr palette so for example saturation will now be focused to like the mid ranges as opposed to affecting you know the white point of the black point oh yeah so those will be kept looking more natural and you can push that pretty hard and it's still like oh i mean you know it's not natural but it looks it's still it doesn't look terrible you know and then all of the controls like by the way in the adjustments of the hdr tool at the bottom those are all global controls too you will once again see that you know things like shadows or speculars or you know like the very brights are not affected as dramatically yeah because i mean man you can push this really really heavy warm and it's still you know you still have whites yeah which that's great because that saves you work again it's like man that's that's really nice not to mention that you know the control point in the color wheel itself will also affect the image in the same way so the uh black point white point remain pinched so not as much impact on the shadows so if you see under the car right now it's still relatively black whereas in the primaries uh palette that would have gone brown by now or red the primaries uh palette is one of the tools not affected by the white gamut yeah so that's what i wanted to talk about is that this is how the hdr palette will work uh with color management enabled but there is a setting inside of the project settings okay in which you can ask other palettes to behave in the way that the hdr palette is behaving and that is the color space of wear grading tools so you see how you have that option what the hdr palette is doing that's a little bit unique to to that tool is it's automatically remapping its function to the tonal range of the media that you're working on so if you're working on raw media you know that means it's got like several stops worth of light and it's remapping itself to all of that data or if you're working with sdr that's of course a much narrower range but it will operate similarly as the hdr so it remaps itself to every single clip that you have none of the other tools do that by default unless that setting is enabled in the project settings in which case the curves and the qualifier will pick up that behavior so you will notice that the curves maybe behave a little bit differently when you have color management enabled and you have that setting ticked okay oh yeah it still pinches it at the top right yeah it is rolling off in particular it will be remapping the functionality of the curves to again the the tonal range of the image this is really fascinating stuff i feel like this is definitely going to change the way that i work and even though a lot of this is better implemented in resolve 17 um this kind of process isn't isn't really new right i mean they've kind of been doing work with this uh with like aces and stuff for quite a while is that right yeah the asus is probably the more standardized format that are you that is used for professional deliverables and also in a lot of post houses certain clients also demand the projects be delivered in aces but resolve color management i have seen picking up more and more throughout the years there's certainly room for it and professional workflows and absolutely room for like personal projects this is really exciting and thank you for for walking us through it and just showing us how to actually use this kind of stuff because man it there's so much to learn i mean resolve has gotten so complex over the years and there's so many different parts to it that it's kind of hard to keep up sometimes and so it's really cool to kind of have a little bit of a deep dive here in how it works so thank you very much yeah absolutely thank you for having me of course that's it for this video guys make sure to say thank you to daria in the comments darya this has been this awesome thank you so much for taking the time and hanging out with me yeah absolutely it's been my pleasure you

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 57,550

Keywords: Learning Color Management In DaVinci Resolve 17 - Sp Guest: Daria Fissoun, color, management, davinci, resolve, 17, blackmagic design, tutorial, color correction, color grading, new features, how to, color page, using resolve, color footage, davinci resolve 17 tutorial, new in resolve 17, davinci resolve color grading, resolve color management, color management, whats new in resolve 17, davinci resolve color correction, davinci resolve 17 color grading, resolve 17 tutorial

Id: gbrJGA5c8GQ

Length: 27min 41sec (1661 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021