- What is up people? Danny here and today we're
gonna be taking a look at my personal process for color grading inside DaVinci Resolve. So grab your Color
grading beverage of choice and let's get into this. (upbeat music) So the other day over on my Instagram where you should
definitely be following me. I posted this photo and a couple of people with a keen eye noticed that
I was using DaVinci Resolve. This is something that I've been doing for a couple of months now, I've been doing all my YouTube videos from start to finish editing, color grading, audio, everything, and I absolutely love it. Especially the color grading features because it's so powerful but a lot of people get intimidated because they don't understand nodes, they don't understand what it looks like, it's totally different
from what they're used to, in other non-linear editors. So today what I'm gonna do is go through my color grading process and how I've been approaching it and maybe kind of demystify
a little bit about the nodes cause it's really not as
difficult as you think it is. And it's so powerful but first a couple of quick disclaimers. First of all, I am not
a professional colorist. I do this for my YouTube and for any client work that I get, but that's about as far as that goes. Second of all, Resolve is so powerful there's so much more that you can do than just what I'm going
to show you in this video, but it should get you started
as far as color grading within the program itself. And thirdly, all these lights that I've got going on around me to film this video, I wouldn't normally have them on while I'm color grading. I would probably have a much darker room so that I can focus just on the colors of what's
going on in the shot. Anyway, let's get into this. Right, so what we've got here
is a finished shot of my wife, we were out for a walk the other day. She's just blocking the
sun from hitting her face and we've got the finished version and then we've got a blank slate so I can show you how I got there. And just for fun, I'm not actually gonna
reference that other one. I'm just gonna show you my process, so we'll see how close I actually get to the other version as I
work through the process. So as you can probably tell this is shot in S-Log3. So the first thing that we're gonna do, is add a couple of nodes. So you can either add nodes by going right click, add node, corrector and then you can connect it, like this. Or you can just hit option or Alt+S and it'll automatically
connect at all for you. We're actually gonna hit four of these and we're gonna start by labeling them. The first one is going
to be weight balance, the second one is going
to be called prelog, the third one is going to be called log and the fourth one is
going to be called postlog. And I'm gonna explain
all of that in a second. Now these are what are
called serial nodes, so what happens is that one
feeds into the next one, feeds into the next one
feeds into the next one. So when you're starting with, let's say this first one if I make it all blue, you can see that it affects all of them. And then when I go into the prelog node, when I click on that one
and I started adjusting it, I'm starting from the place that left off from that first node. So it's very much like layers would be in any other non-linear editor but it just looks a bit different. So we're starting here and then we're moving into that one and to this one and to that one. So if I start changing this one, it's only affecting the ones after it and it's not affecting
the white balance one. We reset all of these. Funny enough, the first thing that I do, is go to the third one. There are two ways that I approach this. First of all, if I shot it specifically
to use the Leeming LUT which is a specific LUT pack and they have a specific way that you set up your shot, then I can go to my Favorite LUTs which I put it in there and I can choose Leeming LUT for S-log3 and that has converted from S-log3 to Rec 709 in a specific way. Now what I'm gonna do for this one, because I didn't specifically shoot it with the Leeming LUT in mind, I'm actually gonna go to open effects, I'm gonna choose Color Space Transform and drag it on there. And what this is gonna do
is essentially transform it from that S-log3 into Rec 709. So it should make it look
more like a normal image. So we're gonna go Input Color Space. We're gonna go down and
choose S-Gamut3.Cine and you can see how it changed the color ever so slightly on that. And then we're gonna go to Input Gamma, and I'm gonna go down and choose S-Log3 and then our Output Color Space currently the timeline is set to Rec 709, so it's already doing it, but just in case let's go down and choose Rec 709 on both of these. So if we look at the before, of course it looks like an S-Log3 and looking at the wave form, you can tell it's
squished into the middle. If we look at the after on that log node, it's stretched it out a little bit. Now we're very bright and so this is why I have a prelog node because now I can have some changes going into that log node. And just so that it said that log node, prelog, postlog those are just names that I made up that helped me remember what I'm doing. You can name them whatever you want. So remembering that all of
the nodes are now in order because these are serial nodes. We're going to affect the prelog which is going to change anything going into that color space transform. So what we're gonna do is make it darker, at this point before the log. So what I'm doing is I'm looking for anything to the black. Now you can see her glove here should have some pretty dark parts on it. And I'm gonna go to my
Lift and pull that down. You can see down in the wave forms here that this little chunk here, that's where her glove is. And if you really want you can
go to here and show Extents. And then that's showing me a
nice line where the bottom is. There's even one that's dipping
a little bit further down, must be in her jacket here or something like that. So we're gonna bring that down until we're very close to black here. And then we're just
gonna bring the gain up, just a little bit to make
the bright parts brighter. So we're just stretching
it out a little bit further and then I'm gonna bring my Gamma down. So basically I'm just
trying to get it to kind of a neutral place where
it looks kind of standard almost like we didn't use
a picture profile at all. Now working backwards one more time, I'm gonna go back to
white balance down here. There's a little color picker and I'm gonna choose
something that's white. So the snow happens to be quite handy for this as long as it's not blown out. There we go so I made a slight color adjustment. So these first three are
basically just getting us from this, our S-Log3 image to kind of a neutral looking image. Now we're gonna use our postlog, and this is where we're
gonna do kind of our more creative grades. So I'm gonna decide, do I want more saturation? Do I want more contrast? Those kinds of things. And the place that I
like to start with this, is in my curves, so I'm gonna add just a slight curve, pull it down in the shadows and just push it back, in kind of my mid-tones and highlights. So just a slight contrast curve here and that's looking pretty good. I might just add some saturation, just a little bit of color going for something nice and
vibrant and bright here. And then if we wanted to get even more creative in this specific node, we could start to add some color contrast. So for example, I could go into my Lift and I could push this down into kind of
a more bluey telly thing and then I could push my Gamma up into more of a red orange kind of thing. And so now we've added a
little bit of color contrast. Now alternatively, what you could do if you didn't want to mix those together in the same node, you could actually reset those and do another node color contrast, or something like that and then do that same thing. (gentle music) And now we can see before and after that change, there's a contrast. So you can do stuff all in the same node, if you really want to, or you can split it out into as many nodes as you want. In the original version of this, I didn't split that out. I just have one postlog thing. And actually in my contrast, I'm gonna warm it up a little bit. So I pushed it a little bit warmer and I've added some contrast in that node and we've got one more
that's color contrast. But we're actually gonna
scrap that one for now because there's another way that I prefer to do my color contrast. Okay, so I'm gonna rechange
this to call it postlog. So now we've got, (gentle music) kind of our creative color grade on that. Now it looks pretty
good we can call it done there if we really wanted to, but we're gonna take
it another step further with a different way to do color contrast. I'm gonna make a new node and I'm going to take my offset, which is the entire image. And I'm gonna pump a little bit of kind of teal into it. And then I'm gonna lower the Gamma which is gonna make it
a little bit darker. If you wanna know about
Lift, Gamma and Gain, I have a whole nother video about that, so you can check that out and then I'm gonna right click on this. I'm gonna click, add
node and choose layer. Now what this has done, as you can see it took away what was
happening in that node. It's feeding from the postlog
node into both of these and then back into something
called a Layer mixer. Now the one on the bottom
is overriding anything that happens on the top. So what we're gonna do
with this bottom one, is just make a selection
with the qualifier. Make sure we're selected on this tool here and then select her skin. And if we hit shift H, we can see better what we're selecting and then just make a selection. I'm gonna hit Denoise a little bit and blur radius to soften it out. You can hit shift H again or choose the highlight
option which is here. And now you can see this
top node of our layers, is only affecting everything
except for the skin. Now it's doing a really extreme job, so that you can see the difference. But what we're gonna do now is highlight that node again go into our key. And we're gonna pull that down. This is basically like opacity, so I can pull that down. Let's say to 30%. Now it's just a slight difference, then we can rename this. Call that noscan, we'll call this scan. So then together, we add a little bit of
that color contrast. Just a different way that you can do it, and personally I like to do it this way. After the layer mixer, I'm gonna add another node. This one, I'm gonna go to my
blur and sharpen properties. We're gonna just sharpen the image, just a little bit. To find that when I shoot S-Log3 with the detail all the
way down like it is, it's just a little
softer that I'd like it. So we'll do a little bit of
sharpening add one last node. And sometimes I like to add
a vignette not all the time but if I really wanna draw your eye in and right now there's a lot of bright stuff around the edges. So we're just gonna draw
the eye in to the center. So the way that we're gonna do that, is we're gonna go to our curves. We're gonna drop this down in the middle. Actually, I might even do it. Like so. And then we're gonna add a window. We're gonna just choose a circular window. We're gonna invert it, soften it out. (gentle music) And maybe something like that. I see the vignette, just kind of draws your
attention in towards her face. And so that's pretty much
my whole chain of nodes that I like to use with
a couple of alterations, depending on which way you wanna do it. So again, if we go back to the start, we start off by adding our log conversion to Rec 709 and we do prelogs. So we're going to change the levels going into that color space transform. And we do our weight balance, and we do our postlog which is basically our grade, the heart of it anyway. Next we have our color contrast, adds a little bit of a pop where your subject comes off, especially the skin tones, and then we've got a
little bit of sharpening, and a little bit of a vignette which I forgot to label, there we go. So going from the point of Rec 709 to our finish product, I think we got a pretty solid grade there. Let's see how close it
was to the original. So the original was a lot darker, a little more stylized maybe But they both look pretty good. So that's my color grading process. 90% of the time that's kind of the layout that I use for my nodes. Hopefully that cleared up a little bit about how the nodes work. They're really not as scary
as people think they are. And if you do have any
questions about this process or you wanna hear more about it, make sure to leave a comment down below and on your way down
there hit that like button and subscribe and hit the bell notification. So you don't miss out on
future tutorials and reviews. Thank you so much for watching and thanks so much for those who suggested me doing this video. And I'll see you next time. (upbeat music)
