Pro Colorist Explains: CSTs vs Resolve Color Management

in this video we're tackling one of the most common questions that I get here on the channel resolve color management or color space transforms which one should I use which one is better what's the ideal workflow for color managing my images well let's dive in and take a look and do a side-by-side comparison of these two approaches here inside of resolve we're going to start with resolve color management okay so right now I have nothing happening in my timeline whatsoever we're starting from zero I just have a timeline of some log images here okay I'm going to go to my project settings I'm going to go to my color management and I'm going to send my color science to dvinci yrgb color managed and I'm going to flip automatic color management off so that I can exert the control over this process that I need to in order to make the most of resolve color management I'm going to go down here to custom and for my input color space if I look at the material I have in this timeline some of it is Airy uh and actually most of it is Airy so I'm going to select that even though my current shot is red because I'll be able to tag that shot differently in just a moment here so I'm going to say a log C3 timeline color space I'm going to set to D Vinci wide gam and intermediate timeline working luminance I'm going to set to custom 10,000 that's my preference it essentially ensures that I'm not clipping anything out in the high end of my image before I even had a chance to grade it input DRT is going to be set to none because I won't need this uh given that I've set my working luminance here and for my output DRT I'm going to choose luminance mapping because that's my preference and for my output color space I'm going to say Rex 79 gamma 2.2 okay let's now save this and get a look at what we've got here now here on this image because I've set up my color Management in my project settings I actually don't need to and can't even change my uh input color space setting for this clip because it is an r3d raw clip which means resolve is going to handle things for me under the hood automatically and it doesn't need my help and in fact won't let me give my help for color managing this image okay if we look at the rest of our images some of these are going to need to be manually Tagged so I'm going to right click and uh I'm actually clicking on shot two holding shift clicking on shot six and I'm now going to right click and go to input color space and all in one stroke going to set these to project area log C3 okay so I've now set up my color Management on these images and let's just park on this image I like this one uh as a sort of test case and I'm going to grab a still okay so this is a functional example of setting up resolve color management and giving ourselves a foundation from which we can begin to do a creative grade right okay let's turn everything off I'm going to go to my project settings I'm going to set my color science to divin yrgb and I'm going to set my timeline and output color space to Da Vinci y gamma intermediate Rec 79 gamma 22 but before I hit save here I just want to emphasize I could set these things however I want to and it would not change the image that I'm about to see no matter what I flip these settings to now that my color science is set to toin yrgb once I hit save I'm going to return to seeing my image in its original camera log State okay so this is not directly controlling color management this is controlling metadata tags that are involved in some other processes in resolve okay so let's hit save and watch what happens as predicted I'm back to my log State and now let's set things up using csts I'm going to go into my open effects and go to color space transform and I'm going to say this is AR wide gamut 3 AR log C3 and I wanted to go to D Vinci wide gamut D Vinci intermediate no tone mapping and I'm going to label this in and now let's do two new nodes and in the third node we'll say color space transform from my working space d Vinci wide gamut D Vinci intermediate Rex 709 gamma 2.2 okay I'll set my tone mapping method to luminance same way and I'm also going to use some custom mapping here and set my gamut mapping to my preference now this is setting up my color management using nodes using csts and I would simply do all of my grading here in the middle in between these two nodes now let's do a quick comparison what difference do you think I'm going to see versus what we just did in our project settings if by wipe let's just go to another image make sure we're wiping full frame which we are like so and I'm now going to wipe no difference at all right this is the punchline this is what I wanted to share with you guys I guess I could have made it a little bit faster and just started by saying RCM versus csts no difference end a video see you next time but I wanted to actually prove it out to you and show you that resolve color management and color space transforms are actually the same thing resolve color management is simply utilizing color space transforms under the hood so which one is better is a bit of a misleading question because neither is better they do fundamentally the same thing now there are of course differences in the way that we got there in our project settings versus here and if you want my take or you want to know how I like to set things up in my actual practice we talk about that Lots in other videos but to make it simple here for today all I would do to tweak what we've got here I would keep this workflow I like to work using color space transforms or what we would sometimes call node-based color management that's my preference because I like to be able to see my entire Journey spelled out and get to control my journey if I need to and really the only tweak that I would make from here is I would use resolves group function to free up some real estate in my node graph so I'm going to do that same trick of clicking on shot two holding shift and clicking on shot six to grab all these shots and I'm going to rightclick and add into a new group call this log C3 okay now I'm going to go over here to the shot where I set up my input transform or my IDT I'm going to tap on this node and hit command C to copy it hit delete to get rid of it and now I've got another set of dots another pair of dots up here in my no graph because I've added these clips to a group called log C3 and I'm going to use this group as a way of input mapping all of my uh material for the same camera at the same time so I'm going to go in this case to the group pre-cp level this is the section of my group node graph that applies operations before I even get to the clip level which makes it perfect for what I want to do which is to apply my initial input transform and you can now see that all of my AA material is a member of this group and is receiving this input transform and now to finish things out I'm going to go back over to the clip level of this shot tap on my out node and hit command C now I'm going to hit delete and I'm going to go to the fourth Dot from the left here from the timeline level of my node graph create a new serial node and hit command V so that I've now got the same output transform for all of the shots in my timeline so this just like I had a minute ago is identical to what I have setup in my project settings I simply prefer to work this way I like to be able to see every step in the Journey of my color management and I like to be able to control it and alter it if needed be in uh certain edge cases so that's my preference just in terms of process but if we're talking about the reproduction the character of the image that we get using uh resolve color management versus using color space transforms the end reproduction if you are doing things correctly will be identical if that's a just a refresher for you and you already knew it then I'm glad to refresh for you if that's news to you let me know in the comments I think this is something that might be secretly confusing a lot of us I know it confused me a little bit when I was first learning these things inside of resolve so let me know in the comments if this this is old news to you or new news to you and if you find this helpful in your workflow and which of these you feel uh you're going to have better luck with or you're going to want to use in your color grading workflows going forward

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 15,459

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Id: QCRVwkhxDzw

Length: 7min 51sec (471 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2024