NEW to DaVinci Resolve? Color Grading - Tutorial

hi my name is Darren mosten I'm a professional broadcast colorist I've been using DaVinci Resolve for well over 13 years now and I did an episode last week where I introduced DaVinci Resolve to complete newbie so you've literally never opened DaVinci Resolve in your life you haven't got a clue what it even is and I just did a good overview episode and in the comments I got a lot of very positive feedback about that saying they wish they'd had this video earlier so what I've done is I'm going to do the same but specifically for the color page so this is really for people who've uh you've maybe been in the edit page you've done a bit of editing you've gone into the color page to start a grade and you're literally looking at this going what on Earth is going on here I'm going to demystify it for you in I'm hoping to do this in about 10-15 minutes we're not going to color management anything deep this is just an absolute beginner's guide to what is going on in the color page so let's go and take a look so we're in the color page this is the timeline that I used in that previous episode if you are brand new to DaVinci Resolve go and watch that episode first I'll put a link to it up in the top and I'll put a link in the description and I'll put a link in that episode linking you back to this one so you can concentrate on the color page but basically yeah this is just an overview of the color page and you just need to know that these Pages all talk to each other so the edit that's sitting here if I make an edit adjustment to it let's just trim it down a little bit that has updated automatically for me in the color page so you need to get that concept good if your color page doesn't look exactly like this it does change slightly depending on the resolution of your display that you're working on so I've got a large resolution display here but if you go up to workspace at the top and press here reset UI layout okay that will put your user interface back to default and it might look something a little bit more like this but each of these windows can be adjusted quite easily so we can take off the gallery for example we can have a look at our media pool so the media pool is exactly the same as the media pool that's in there the page and indeed the media page here all right so we can still see our Clips here and let's switch that one off and put our Gallery back on so it's back to default and you can see here that we've only got two clips these are the two clips that we used in the previous episode I want to have a look at a different edit so we can either go to the edit page and I can go to my sequences tab that I've got here and I got another one here so if I double click this sequence you see that we've actually got 11 shots in here now so if I go back to the color page that is the sequence that I'm going to be affecting you can also access those from up here okay so I've got timeline one and I've got the finished edit and all I've got to do is literally start grading so what is going on here this area here let's start in the top left corner it says no Stills created and that is our Gallery so I'm going to come to what that is in a moment we need to do a little bit of grading first to explain what that actually is you might see it like this you might have these little folders here but essentially we haven't created any Stills yet okay and a still is basically going to contain our grade this is our main viewer so if I press play I can use my spacebar I can use the play button here this has got me into Loop mode so I just literally stay on that clip and I'm just going to mute the audio because we're just focusing on color here all right so this is our main viewer so this is exact mirror of what I've got going on on my output monitor this area here is our node area okay this is where people start to get confused I'm not going to go into nodes in depth but I'm going to explain to you what a node is so down here this is obviously each of my shots so I can go through my edit like this okay this could be this could be a one minute shot it could be a 10 second shot it doesn't really matter to me it's a shot that needs grading this section here is our primary controls primary control means it affects the whole image so if I go on to the first shot here and let's just have a quick look at what these actual wheels are doing so these are your main tools to do in your main color grading so the small area in the middle adjusts the color so if I just push this towards red you can see the image gets warmer and cooler like that and this slider down here adjusts the actual overall brightness so with offsets we're adjusting the whole image okay now I can measure that easier using What's called the Scopes so if I click over here I've got this tool here which is this is measuring the brightness and the color information that's in the image so watch what happens when I move this up and down the whole graph moves up and down all right so the offset is affecting the whole image if I just reset that what I'm going to do now is adjust gain and you'll see that what happens now is it affects the highlights more than it does the shadow so the Shadows are down here the highlights are up here and obviously this area here is your mid-tones all right so if I use lift that would affect the more darker areas the shadow areas so if I pull that down you can see there that the Black Level so zero is black 1023 is white is pushing down all right so that's the basis of the grade now while we've been pressing these buttons what's been happening is our node here has been recording that information there's a little symbol here and we've now got a little colored icon around the first edit number indicating that we have done a grade now if I click the number here zero one because that's our first node that will disable that and that was the original image and this is what we just did so a combination of these tools here has given us this result okay now what I'm going to do is add another node so I'm going to right hand click on this node let's say add node and all we're going to work in is what's called serials okay so this is a node after a node and if I now click on this node here we have got some other tools here okay all these other tools here so I can go here to saturation for example so saturation is going to increase or decrease our color so I'm going to boost it up a little bit and you can see that's getting more colorful now so why so that information is recorded on node two why did I do it on another node I didn't have to I could have done all that just on node one so let me show you I'm going to reset that I'm going to click on node one oh sorry I just right click on this to reset it reset node there click on node one so this node is the active one I'm gonna do that same amount of saturation and that looks absolutely the same I've done exactly the same move but this node now contains offset information lift Information Gain information and the saturation information so that's a lot of information in just one node so for me I like to separate it out into separate things if I wanted to see what that looked like with no saturation changes it's hard for me to do I have to literally reset that saturation okay but if I did saturation on a separate node watch now I can highlight number two or just press on the number two and I'm taking off the saturation but I'm keeping this node's value so we're keeping the level adjustment that we made so that's really one of the main reasons I use nodes okay it just it just allows me to build up the look in layers which you can switch on and off and it just keeps it very managed and then once I'm happy with what I've done I just literally add another node so let's right and click and say add node add serial you can also use option s to do that so this node here is now empty if I switch it on and off nothing happens if I switch this one off the saturation Goes Down And if I switch this one off the saturation will stay but the level change that we did is disabled all right so you can see we're just building up these layers all right so let's have a look at what other tools we've got here these are the primary color wheels this icon here is exactly the same color wheels just represented in a different form okay so you might see it looking like this and again if I just adjust my offset it's doing exactly the same thing these little icons here will reset that so this one and this one are exactly the same I'm not going to go through all of these tools because some of these get quite Advanced this is your main area so in here you want to play with your lift game again I suggest you work with your offset first so this shot is looking a little bit warm so I'm going if I use my offset and literally pull that down away from the warm colors and into these cooler colors you'll see that very quickly we've smartened that image up and if I just go to my Shadows let's just pull them down a little bit and there we go we've got a really nice looking image if you press command and D you can disable that single node as well if you press shift and D you'll disable the whole grade so that's the shot that we had originally from the edit page and there it is with our color grade if I go back to the edit page that shot is still graded actually if I press command shift shift d there's without the grade and there's the grade because it's just talking to that page all right let's add another node I'm going to add another serial I'm only going to work in sales you can move these around you can do whatever you like if I do that by the way it doesn't change the order okay the order is coming from these lines here so this Green Dot here represents the original image without a grade it goes into the first node into the and then that grade comes out here into the second node these two grades come out of here into the third node and these three grades coming out of here into the fourth node and this here is my display this is my output it's my final render if you like some other areas that's worth looking at are at the top here you've got temperature so this is oh sorry I didn't want to go onto node three I want to be on node four so here I can adjust my color temperature you've got tint uh which is just the sort of green and magentas contrast here so all these tools are there to play with I'm not going to go through all these in detail I really just want to give you an overview so you're not scared of the color page and really get over what nodes are people get too worried about nodes so just I sometimes add a node if I'm just thinking of an idea and I haven't worked out what I'm going to do yet add another node then we're if you don't like what you just did so I don't like that color temperature adjustment I just did right click on the Node just press reset and back to where I was but with keeping all the adjustments I've made so far because I'm happy up to here another area that people like to work in is What's called the curve so once we're into these set of parameters we are going into what's called secondary color grading secondary basically means that you can isolate either colors or luminance values brightness values and start really focusing the grade into a more specialized area so for example we can just start playing with these curves okay and you've got many many different types of Curves again I'm not going to show you these in any great detail at all in fact in no detail at all but for example we've got here Hue versus saturation if I click on her red headscarf there I can literally pull down the saturation just in the red you can see it's also affecting her face and her lips but you get the general idea all right so that's what those curves are for there's other tools in here as well again I'm not going into detail here but you've got things like the color warper I've done a whole episode on how the Color warper Works you've got keying tools and here you can draw shapes so what we can do is make a little window that means everything that I do only affects inside or outside of that window so that's what they're for I'm just going to reset that uh there's a Tracker there's all sorts of stuff but these are your secondary tools we've also got a whole load of effects up here so these are quite fun to play with when you're first starting if I want to apply one of these effects I want to apply it onto node four and I can't actually see node 4 at the minute so what you can do is you can right click in here and say clean up node graph which will sort it out for you but when I open up the effects it still sits on top so you can middle Mouse click and literally move your nodes around so you can see it okay or you can move it first go to the effects and now I can just drag and drop on so if I want to do a a blur I can just drag and drop the blur on and there you see it's there all right I'm going to right click and reset that what I want to do now is grab the information that I've done so far so I want to grab this footage I'm going to right hand click in the middle here I'm going to say grab it still and this now has populated this gallery that we were looking at when we very first opened the color page so what is this still this still contains these four nodes okay a missile Note 4 hasn't got anything in it but it still contains that node how do I know that if I right click on this still and say display node graph it shows me the four nodes so this still here contains all the color grading information from these four nodes so what what we're going to do with that well the beauty of this is now I can take this shot which is exactly the same and I can drag and drop that on there and there's the four notes we've already graded this shot okay so I can just do that again what else I can do is I can click on this shot here because it's the same and I can just literally middle Mouse click that one if I want to and that now has applied the same four notes I could do that here as well I could click on this shot middle Mouse click here is updated so that's what the Stills are for it's basically a record of the grade so obviously the color page gets much much deeper than this but I think that is enough just to get you going and not to be worried about it if we go back to the edit page now you'll see that this shot's been graded and this shot's been graded and I can press shift and D and remove it so that's how you start grading so if you're new to the color page I suggest just start in the primary color wheels Tab and work with offset so use this tool here for your brightness I'd use this tool here for your overall color and maybe play with a bit of saturation and maybe a bit of contrast if you're feeling like it those tools are going to get your image looking a lot better than it is to start with so I hope you've enjoyed this look after yourselves and I'll see you in the next episode

Channel: Darren Mostyn

Views: 91,879

Keywords: color grading tutorial, how to color grade, color grading, how to grade a commercial, darren mostyn, motionvfx, looks, resolve 18.1, resolve 18, davinci resolve, grading, colour grading tutorial, how to colour grade, professional colorist, pro colourist, Color Page for Newbies, Beginners color Page, what is a node

Id: YbDRl_xugJo

Length: 13min 23sec (803 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 05 2023