Master the HSL Curves in DaVinci Resolve - Change Colors of Any Object

the hsl tools are some of the most powerful and versatile tools that you can use as a colorist they're kind of like the wrench of color grading allowing you to tighten up colors make localized adjustments or put together an overall look for your project in comparison to the qualifier tool which is oftentimes used in similar scenarios the hsl tools are much faster and easier to set up and are generally more gentle on your footage in this video I'm going to demonstrate where they are how they work and show you some examples of how you would utilize them on real footage alright so we're using resolve 18 but this tool has not changed positions in as long as I've been using resolve so in future versions it's probably going to be in the same place so to find these tools you'll want to look at these icons in the top here you'll want to select the curves icon right here and then this will bring up kind of the default curves tool but if you look up here in the top right of this window you'll see these icons representing the other hsl tools so if we click here we can see we've opened the Hue versus Hue tool then we have Hue versus SAT Hue versus loom loom versus sat sat versus sat and sat versus Loom I usually end up working mostly in Hue versus Hue Hue versus SAT Hue versus Loom I sometimes go to these other tools but the first three are the main ones that I work in so with each tool the first word represents the input and the second word represents the output for Hue versus Hue we are selecting an input Hue and we're changing the Hue of that Hue for Hue versus SAT we're selecting an input Hue and we're changing the saturation of that Hue for Hue versus Loom we're selecting an input Hue and we're changing the luminance of that Hue for luminance versus SAT we're selecting an input luminance so this would be low luminance High luminance Shadows highlights mid-tones and we're changing the saturation of those luminance values for sat versus SAT we're selecting an input saturation level so this is less saturated and more saturated and we're changing the saturation of those saturation levels for sat versus Loom we are selecting an input saturation level so less saturated more saturated and we're changing the luminance values of those saturation levels so on each tool the middle line here represents neutral meaning no changes right now nothing is happening to the image until we create anchor points and there's three ways to create anchor points on the graph the first way is to simply just click and I've created an anchor Point here but you can see that with only one Anchor Point I'm adjusting the entire range of Hues so I'm literally just rotating the entire Hue value and it's no different than just using this slider to change the Hues so you have to use at least two points but usually three points to actually make a selection and change a specific Hue this is where resolve really shines in comparison to the tools in Premiere and Final Cut because first you can simply just click on the preset colors in the bottom left which is what I recommend starting out with so say I want to change the blues I can just click on this and it automatically creates three anchor points two on the sides and one in the middle and now I can simply just drag this up and down and I can change the Hue of just the blue tones if I undo that and if you want to be a little bit more scientific about it you can use the Hue rotate tool so that you're not changing the input Hue you're just changing the rotation of that Hue this gives you a little bit more control this method is the best to begin with because it requires the least amount of work to get set up and it's much less likely to introduce color noise or tearing in your footage and it's the most gentle method to use so I'm going to reset this and the second way to select a color is to use the eyedropper tool and you can get to the eyedropper here using the qualifier and say I just want to change one of the green tones so I can just go over here and I can click on the viewer and you can see that it's created three more anchor points for me this Anchor Point in the middle represents the value that I just selected so now I can drag this up and down and you can see this kind of shows you the range of the values that I'm affecting using these outer points so if I want to affect a wider range of colors I can simply just select each of these points and adjust the input Hue so as I drag that over I'm affecting more and more Hues and this line represents kind of the roll off so right here I'm not affecting anything and then for these values I'm pushing them a little bit more until I get up to this anchor where I'm adjusting them the most then I can go to this side and I can also adjust the input Hue for this and you can see that as I drag it out and as this line becomes less steep I have a more pleasing gradient and I'm being a lot more gentle on the image and this goes for any of these tools using the eyedropper tool is great when you want to achieve very granular detail and really dial in or fix a color for instance when you're working with skin tones finally you can literally just set your own inputs by clicking and making points on the graph and you can just drag those up and down and do any adjustments that you might want to make this is a great tool for creating broad sweeping curves or creating a specific color style now I promise you this will all make sense in a minute when we start going through examples one thing to note is that whenever I am adjusting and using the hsl tools I'm always viewing it through a vector scope as well so say in this first shot we want to change the color of this purple jacket the best advice I can give for these tools is to start Broad and then work into narrow adjustments you can also see that overlaid on the color spectrum is the actual input values and you can actually adjust these using these three dots over here so the histogram you can set it to show the input or the output I prefer to keep it on input because that way I can see like okay this is the Blue Sky the blue sky is right here and I can also see the purple jacket is right here on the histogram the purple jacket covers a more broad range of tones so we want to be aware of that when we're selecting specific colors because if our range is too narrow then we can introduce some weird color artifacting in the footage so for this jacket the first thing that you can do is you can use the eyedropper and you can simply just select the color that you want to adjust now this method is very good at targeting specific colors however I find that it usually creates too narrow of a range so this is where these tools at the bottom come in really handy and we can adjust the Hue rotate up and down so as you can see as I adjust the Hue rotate the color of the jacket is changing and if you look on the vector scope here it's rotating around the vector scope as I'm rotating the Hue so if I rotate it up it's going more towards blue and if I rotate it down then it's going more towards red and if you use these wheels as a reference just looking at the outside colors you can see that if the jacket is purple here and we rotate the Hue clockwise so we're rotating in a positive direction it'll go more towards blue and then if we rotate in a negative direction to the left it'll go more towards red so this is obviously an extreme example and I wanted to do this to show you how important the selection range is because you can see that there's values of colors in the jacket that we did not rotate there's a couple ways to get around this the first way is to simply just select these and drag them over but I don't really prefer this way because you can see when I drag it it's hard to keep it centered on the line and I'm actually rotating the Hue on axis it in and so I'm just going to undo that and what I prefer to do is just select the point and then adjust the input Hue to make the range bigger and you can see as I do that I'm picking up the other Hues that are in the jacket and I can do that for the other side so I'm increasing the range of the input hues and then I can kind of adjust this point and if we zoom in here the colors are a lot smoother and we're getting a much better result using that tool obviously we want to be tasteful with it so maybe let's make it like an orangey red type color and as I'm adjusting this I'm keeping an eye on the vector scope because this helps me figure out which color I'm actually going towards so this little Point here is my 75 saturation red Target and so I'm just going to try to point it in that red Direction and I can use that to make sure that it's accurate and I can also use that in other shots to make sure the jacket is the same color I do want it to be a little more saturated of a red color and so I can simply go to my Hue versus SAT this is selecting a specific Q value and adjusting the saturation of those Hues I'm just going to make sure that I don't bump the saturation I'm going to make a similar range and I'm just going to increase the saturation of that range and so you can see in my Vector scope and in the shot as I do that the jacket is becoming more saturated and everything else is staying at the same saturation level that it was before so this shot works particularly well because there is nothing else in the shot that is in those same ranges of Hues like everything else is either blue or green or black like there's not a huge range sometimes when you use this tool you have some overlap so say the thing that you're trying to change there's some other things in the shot in those situations you would either have to create a window around the object and then track it I would go to my tracker I would track the window to the subject and then I can simply just adjust the window to cover that area and now I'm only affecting whatever is inside that window and we can simply zoom in here and if we play it we can see that we have been very gentle with the footage we haven't introduced any major artifacting or extra color noise so now we have a pretty great looking shot and if I ever wanted to go back and dial in the Hue versus Hue like say it's a little bit too saturated I can just simply bring down the saturation of the jacket so it kind of matches the sky a little bit better and there we go so we have changed the color of her jacket from purple to red and then overall adjusted the image to look good in context and now we have a great looking image that we've changed the color and we haven't introduced any other artifacting or tearing so another really great use of the hsl curves is to use it to dial in skin tones I'm going to go to my Hue versus Hue curve and I'm just going to click on a section of skin tone usually on the forehead or the cheek is best so I'm just going to click right here on his forehead and it creates a range for us automatically we can kind of test it out by you know going a little crazy with it and we can further figure out the range better by adjusting our input Hues to make sure that we're affecting and we're not causing any other damage to the image we want to be as gentle as possible and I'm just going to reset the Hue rotate and then if we adjust this you know really carefully we can kind of just push this up and as I'm looking over at my Vector scope line I'm trying to line it up perfectly with that line now it doesn't have to be exactly on this line it just depends on who it is and what looks the best and it also depends on the context of the image in the color grade we can kind of adjust this and if you're kind of have some weird lighting or something like that and you just want to affect the skin tones and just fix those and the rest of the grade is fine this is the tool that you would use to use that over the qualifier I kind of want to bring a little more life into the skin as well and so I'm going to go to the Hue versus SAT and I'm just going to click on that same range again I'm going to make it a little bit bigger I'm just going to push some saturation into those tones and you don't want to overdo it obviously but I'm looking at the vector scope here and I'm just pushing a little more saturation in and then I can go back to my Hue versus Hue and just adjust the rotate until it looks good to me I think something like that looks pretty good and so this is before and this is after so before it's feeling very lifeless very um more green and after it's looking a lot more lively and I really love how the skin tones pop against this green color here and now we can kind of build the rest of the grade off of that we could add creative style or you know anything that you like so this next example looks really good we've already balanced I've just brought up the levels and made it a little bit cooler we want it to look really clean and a great way to do that is to have very clean highlights with very little color or tint to them after I cooled down the footage to look good for the subject and the skin tones and the detail it's pushing this back window and this light and everything kind of more blue and I'm getting a little bit too much color more than I want so a perfect tool for this would be the the luminance versus saturation tool up here we've gone to loom versus SAT so these are the shadows and these are the highlights now I only want to affect the highlights in the image the window and this white wall back here so the way that I would do that I can just simply take this last anchor here and just bring it down and if you look in the background I'm taking the saturation out of those highlights and if I go back to my parade Scopes you can see here in the highlights let's do it again so I'll reset here and as I bring it down the highlights are getting closer to matching so if they're all matching on the same horizontal line on the parade scope that means they're in neutral color so obviously we don't want to go this far with it so I'm just going to create another anchor in the middle here and I'm going to bring this up so anything in the middle here is not being affected at all and then it kind of slowly rolls off as the highlights go on so I want to find I'm going to use the histogram in the background to kind of find the point where I want it to start falling off and I'm just going to leave that there and then bring this down and I want to be careful not to affect the skin tones here very much but if I go before and after you can see I'm kind of getting that effect in the highlights where I'm muting the colors in the highlights but the Shadows are staying nice and Rich and so this is a great fast and easy way to create the clean white look where you don't have a whole lot of colors going on in the highlights it's just nice and clean and white with no tint at all and the headset even doesn't have any color cast on it either and you would put this like near the end of your node tree where anything before it is kind of being fed into it and then it's outputting a nice clean highlight saturation roll off so this is another example of just kind of a look development tool that we can use to push the image to a specific color palette and one thing that I would like to do with this image is I just want to make it look a little bit more summery a little bit warm and so I want the green tones to push a little warmer so more towards yellow and the blue tones to push more teal and what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to create a point kind of in the green tones and I'm going to create a point in the blue tones and I also usually like to create kind of an anchor point where the skin tones are because I don't want to affect those too much and simply what I'm going to do is I'm going to push the green tones up and I'm looking over at this tree here so if I push those up I'm kind of pushing the tree more towards um you know almost brownish but yellowish and then if you look over at this fence here I'm going to push the blue tones towards teal and I can even kind of compress these tones by putting one point here and then pushing the more blue tones up further so that they're kind of more the same color we're kind of taking some of the color contrast out of the footage kind of somewhere around there and then I'm going to bring it back down as it goes into the skin tones with those two adjustments you can see this is before and this is after I can even bring up the saturation of the blue tones and then kind of bring down the saturation as they go into the skin tones and this is just a broad sweeping curve that I've used to create a look I can even bring you know I can bring down the luminance of the blue tones leave that there so the blue tones are nice and Rich so you can see in just a few steps we're starting to create an overall color tone almost as if it was like a film stock or a Lut or an emulation something like that something that you can apply across your entire project and push it into a specific color palette so this next example I want to demonstrate sat versus sat and sat versus Loom so in this image I've pushed the saturation up to right at the 75 percent Mark and if I push it anymore it's going to start clipping on the edges as you can see kind of in this red channel here so I'm just going to push it to kind of the 75 Mark and what I want to do in this image is kind of clamp the saturation levels so I can use the saturation versus saturation tool to make sure that overly saturated values get brought down but then normally saturated values don't get affected at all so what I'm going to do is I'm going to create an anchor kind of around my mid-tone range and I'm just going to bring down this top point and you can see as I bring down this top point it's kind of clamping those saturation levels and almost clipping them before they're clipped on the outside the lower saturated values are not being affected at all so if you have a color in your grade that is just going out of control and you just want to have a node at the end to kind of protect yourself from that from extreme colors this is the tool that you can use without affecting the rest of the grade you can just bring those extreme colors back in alright so for this last example I'm just going to reset the saturation adjustment and I'm just going to delete that node and I'm going to use the saturation versus luminance tool to increase the color density of the image overall so kind of like what we did with the skin tones this is a great way to make things feel more saturated without actually increasing the saturation so in this node here as I adjust the higher saturated areas I'm going to bring down the luminance of those areas so the more saturation a color has the less luminance it has as I decrease the luminance of the higher luminance values you know it looks like I'm increasing the saturation on that umbrella but if you look over at the vector scope literally nothing is changing we perceive it as being more saturated this is before and this is after so I've decreased the luminance of higher saturation values and in doing so I've made them look more saturated like I said with this adjustment you want to be very broad I would not recommend using this tool for very localized adjustments unless you're being extremely careful but this is just kind of a cool trick using the SAT versus Loom curve so you might be wondering where you are supposed to put this type of adjustment in your overall node tree I have right here a log clip of me holding the color Checker chart and if you look at the vector scope here you can see I don't have a very large range of saturation levels everything is kind of in the middle of the graph similarly if I go to the Hue versus Hue or any of these curves you can see on the histogram I have a lot of Hues kind of in the red yellow green range but if I wanted to adjust like the blue tones in the image there's almost no data being input into that area so I would have to make massive you know crazy adjustments to for that to even do anything all of that to say I would not recommend using this tool on a log input the best way to use this tool is then on a Rec 709 or you know display referred image I'll show you in comparison if I add a Lut and now our image is in a Rec 709 color space you can see that I'm working with a lot broader range of saturation levels and if I go before the node and adjust the offset to balance the image a little bit better now we're working with a lot more color information so if I go after this then you can see that I now have data in the histogram values for blue I have data for red you know I have a lot more data to work with I don't have to make as large of an adjustment and it's making an actual difference say I go into my hsl and I really like dial in my skin tones you know I want them to look good I like go over here make a point you know do all this work okay he's looking a little magenta you know bring it down a little bit so all of these adjustments are based on the input of my CST my color space transform which is based on my primary adjustment so anything I do Upstream from my hsl um is going to be affecting the input Hue and all of the inputs into my hsl tools say I bring the offset down of this to make it a little bit darker and then say Oh actually I want to make it a little bit warmer and like green toned now I've kind of shifted those Hues I've changed the input into my color space transform and into my hsl tools and so now this input Hue may not necessarily match exactly what I did you want to be careful about when you make these adjustments and where you make these adjustments so thank you all for watching if you have any questions at all definitely leave them in the comments below I try to respond to as many questions as possible if you like this video leave it a thumbs up and I will see you in the next one foreign

Channel: Evan Schneider

Views: 7,418

Keywords: color grading hue vs hue, color grading hsl, davinci resolve hsl, davinci resolve hue vs curves, davinci resolve change color of object, hsl curves color grading, color grading, hsl curves, davinci resolve, davinci resolve tutorial, hue vs sat, hue vs hue curve, hue vs sat curve, hue vs lum curve, how to use hsl curves, hsl secondary davinci resolve, change color, davinci resolve change color, change color of object in video, hsl curves guide, davinci resolve hsl curves

Id: HViLBd6hzwM

Length: 25min 7sec (1507 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 08 2022