Power Window Principles: Pro-level imagery using powerful secondaries

if you had just one tool set to grade with in resolve what would it be for me that's an easy answer i'd go with my primaries the descendants of the tools that have been used to master cinematic images from the beginning but if you give me just one more tool beyond those primaries without hesitation i'm going to go with power windows why power windows are an incredibly potent way to shape the frame guide the eye and gently finesse the lighting that was done on set but the truth is most of us lack the proper concepts and technique to take full advantage of this tool so today i want to talk about three principles that we can apply anytime that we are using power windows to get better results so let's take a look here inside of resolve and talk about some power windows so right now in this project i have only done a couple of things i've only done the first few things that i always do at the very beginning of a new project first i've set up my color management and second i have applied my template node graph to all three of the shots here in my timeline so this just means that i have a template with no actual adjustments within it it's just a template that i'm going to fill in now if you want to learn more about color management or about template node graphs you don't know what the heck i'm talking about don't worry you're in luck i talk about this stuff all the time here on the channel a great place to start for color management would be my davinci wide gamut workflow series where i show you how to set up the exact color management that i'm using here in today's project and you can also check out my recent video on nodes if you want to learn more about setting up a template node graph we're going to spend a lot of time today here in the bottom section of this template node graph because we're working with power windows and power windows are a secondary and that is what this bottom section is designed to host is all of my secondary adjustments so if you want to learn more about those subjects go check out those videos today we are going to stay focused on power windows let's talk about the first principle that i want to share with you today let's look here at shot number one and consider that i might want to do something about the lining of this subject's mittens here i feel like it's a little hyper saturated a little electric a little bit garish i'd like to pull that saturation in a little bit this is something that i might choose to use a power window to do right i could go over here to my window palette grab a circular window and sort of draw a rough shape that i'm going to use to outline the area of the frame that that lining of the mittens is inhabiting right now within this power window i could tackle the task of desaturating the red lining on the mittens in any number of ways but the simplest would be to just simply pull back my saturation and if i do this sort of at the right strength i'm probably not even going to notice the fact that it is indeed desaturating the other contents of this frame because the red lining is so much more saturated so it's going to respond the most quickly to this adjustment right so this would be one way of going about making this adjustment to the lining on these mittens and i could go even further if i wanted to right but this is the first principle that i want to talk to you about the first thing that i want you to think about when you are breaking out a power window in your grades i want you to ask is a power window even the right tool for what i'm doing is a power window even the right candidate for the adjustment that i want to make i'm going to suggest to you here in this case that it's probably not because we're really not trying to alter the spatial dynamic of the frame we're not trying to fill in the fill side of someone's face or bring up the key side we're really just trying to target an object that happens to be in a particular location but if these mittens were here or up here i would be no less inclined to want to pull back on the saturation of the red lining right so rather than use a power window let me show you what i would do here just as a quick aside instead of this power window i'm going to do a new serial node and i'm going to go over here to my sat versus sat curves and zoom in and take a sample of this hyper saturated red lining and look at the control point that i'm given next i'm going to draw another control point right off to the left and just start to bring this control point down and then take the upper control point and bring that down as well okay so i'm now targeting that hyper-saturated red and because it's not a power window i don't have to track it i don't have to follow it i don't have to worry about where in the frame this mitten lining might be happening or moving through because this adjustment is going to follow it wherever it goes and it's worth noting that this adjustment is actually going to follow any color that reaches this level of saturation even if it's not red but in this case i'm good with that i like that i actually don't want any color to reach the level of saturation that i was seeing a moment ago on that red and let me just fine tune this a little bit because it's bugging me i'm going to bring this control point in just a hair and maybe pull this one out just a little bit like that but this is a good example of situations where we might initially think oh i'll use a power window when there might be a better solution to what we're trying to do because even though i love power windows even though i just got done sharing if you put me on a desert island with nothing but my primaries and one other tool that other tool is going to be power windows we need to be aware of the fact that power windows are sort of like kids they require babysitting right the moment that you draw a power window for the rest of that project for the rest of the life of that shot inside of that project you're going to need to be aware of that power window and what is inside of it and what may be moving through it so that you don't end up with an adjustment that works when the mittens are here but not when the mittens are there for example or even worse with an adjustment that the audience spots they go oh that's interesting that mitten looked one way a moment ago and then when it moved over to the other side of the frame it looks another way those are all very undesirable outcomes we never want to tip our hand as colorists right so power windows may be a great tool but we want to be mindful that they are the right tool for our particular needs which they are not in all cases and one such case would be this one right here let's move on here to shot number two and talk about a case where we would actually want to use a power window and some principles that we can use for the application of this power window so here in this case i do want to use a power window to actually change the spatial dynamics of this frame all right what i would like to do is sort of draw the contour a bit more dramatically of the difference between my fill and the key side of my subject so i would like to see a bit more contrast between key and fill okay so what i'm going to do is do a new node and create a new circular power window i did that with option c and in this case i'm going to go over here to my aspect and set that to zero what that's going to do is effectively give me a vertical grad i could of course have just gone to my gradient power window but you'll notice that in general i tend to work almost exclusively with circular power windows because i can accomplish everything that i want to with them generally speaking and it saves me on having to contemplate which window and flip between different windows if i can do everything all with one kind of window right so i've got this effective grad that i've drawn here and what i'm going to do now is two things actually i'm going to think photographically about this image so i'm going to be mindful of the way the light actually is hitting the objects in this frame and the direction of the light and i'm also going to think reductively i'm going to think about knocking things down because today we've sort of fast forwarded past the primaries part of our grade right which is always where i would start in the real world in an actual real world grading context i'm always going to start start by setting exposure by setting balance by setting a contrast ratio that best serves my subject right so by this point if i'm working a power window and starting to draw a power window in this frame it means that i am perfectly satisfied with the exposure and the ratio and the balance that i've arrived at for my subject here so what does that mean why am i emphasizing that well that means that if i now draw a power window where i want to add things that doesn't make much sense because i should have already optimized the exposure on the most important thing in my frame so what that means is i'm far more often going to want to knock things down than to build things up because i should have already built things up for the important things in my frame in my primaries adjustments right so what that means is here in this case rather than working the key side and bringing this up i'm going to work the fill side and knock this down and i could do this here in my primaries and just use my gain right let's turn this preview off let's even turn our clips off so that we can see this a bit larger and just look at the effect that we're having on our frame so we're making a nice photographic adjustment and we're also making an adjustment that is reductive or subtractive in nature as opposed to trying to add things i'm not going to say you can never do an additive adjustment with a power window but it's far more rare than knocking things down then reducing things that's generally what you're going to want to do when you are drawing power windows is thinking about how to knock things down around the important elements that you've already exposed exactly as you would like to see them all right let's go into shot number three and we're going to sort of continue this conversation and build on it we're actually going to look at this shot and scrub a little bit deeper into it and i'm going to do something similar to what i just did i'm going to create a new serial node with a circular power window by hitting option c i'm going to set my aspect to zero i'm going to soften out my feather i'm going to widen this way out and i'm going to sort of position this on the fill side of my subject's face and start to think once again about knocking things down on this fill side and assume that my primaries are exactly where i want them to be or if they're not that i need to go back and readjust those as opposed to building on top of a incomplete or a faulty foundation right there's a couple further things that i want to emphasize when it comes to drawing these power windows the first one is that this what we're looking at right now the outline of this power window it actually doesn't matter at all because no one's ever going to see it i'm going to see it you're going to see it no one else is ever going to see it they're only going to see the results of that power window so i want to remind you not to get too fixated on where this shape lies or what it looks like what matters is what it actually does what it feels like when we turn the window off so let's do our same kind of adjustment let's just drop our gain down and then let's turn the window off and see how it actually feels so that feels fine there's nothing terribly wrong with that but i just want to point out that it doesn't really matter what that shape looked like to me because no one else is going to see it right and sort of along the same lines there's a real danger of getting too literal with the shape of our windows or in general trying to be too perfect with the area of our frame that we are affecting with an adjustment if you think about lighting in the real world and you think about trying to be a sort of complement or a supplement to the work that was done by the cinematographer for the images that we're grading if we think about well what would this have actually looked like on set on the day to bring in some negative fill well depending on how that negative fill is positioned depending on where it's positioned how close the material that's being used it's going to have a much broader effect than just narrowly targeting the fill side of the subject's face right so oftentimes the best thing that we can do to give our power windows a feeling of organic photographic adjustment is to be a little bit less precious and a little bit less perfect with them so what i just did here nothing wrong with it but what i might do instead and i'm going to use my control surface for this is walk it over here a little bit and then rotate just a hair i'm still honoring the basic photographic intent of the image i'm not fighting against where the light is coming from but i'm just being a little bit less perfect and a little bit less precious and if i turn this off i feel like i actually prefer that that just feels a little more dynamic a bit more messy actually but in a good way messy in an organic way messy in the sense of like well light is messy light is not clean light has a broad effect on our image when we add a new source and when we adjust a source it doesn't have a narrow impact it has a broad impact right so we want to be messy we want to be a little bit imperfect we want to seek organic results as opposed to being able to high five ourselves because we drew such a perfectly tightly aligned power window along the middle contour of our subject's face no one's going to see that all they're going to see is the result so make the result feel lifelike feel organic feel like it was something that happened in camera as opposed to something that we did and just to sort of round out that thought let's remind ourselves that this shot actually moves so i'm going to turn my clips off here and reset my view and turn the window off and let's see what happens if we just play through this another temptation that comes along with that temptation of sort of being perfect with our power windows is we think the moment that we draw a power window that's interacting with an element in the frame that if that element moves either because of the camera or because the subject is walking or whatever the case may be oh we need to track that right we go over to our tracker and we make sure that we are hugging the contours and maintaining the relationship between the subject that we are interacting with and the power window that we initially drew but again oftentimes the most cinematic the most photographic the most organic thing that we can do in our grade is just to let the power window ride and i would argue in this case it feels really really nice to let the subject sort of walk into that position without worrying about moving the window along with them okay so these are just a couple of top-level principles that i'm always keeping in mind when i'm grading and we're going to go even deeper on this subject in our next live session our next episode of grade school where i'm going to show you some other ideas and concepts and techniques that i apply with my use of power windows in my professional grading practice see that

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 16,341

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Id: ycozQTdX9LY

Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 26 2022