(upbeat music) - What's going on guys? Welcome back to the channel. My name is Jake, and in today's video, we're highlighting the RGB Mixer tool. It's a very versatile tool that honestly just isn't
talked about all too often. And after using it as a method
of increasing saturation in a recent video, we had a ton of requests to do a dedicated video
diving a little bit deeper into what this tool is all about. So today I'll be explaining
how the RGB Mixer works and how you can use it
to get better results while correcting and grading your images. - Most people explain ACES in ways that turn it into rocket science. I'm here to change that. If you've been curious,
then get super pumped. I'm gonna be doing a live webinar on Monday, August 9th at
11:00 AM Pacific Time. Plus, by signing up, you will be automatically entered to win my Freelance Colorist Masterclass. I will be picking three winners
at the end of the training. This webinar is gonna be
broken into three main steps. Number one, what is ACES
and why you should care. Number two, how to set
up your project in ACES. Number three, how to grade
your footage in ACES. I guarantee you, after you're
done watching the training, you will be ready to grade
your first project in ACES from start to finish. We will end the session with an extensive FAQ's and live Q&A. So don't forget to bring a notepad. Free registration ends soon. Click the link below to sign up, and I will see you in the training. - Well, you know the drill. If you're enjoying the content, be sure to smash that like button, subscribe to the channel
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and let's roll the intro. (upbeat music) So, as you guys know, we like to keep things pretty simple here, we don't like to overcomplicate anything. And so in that nature, I'm not gonna be giving you probably the most technical definition of how the RGB Mixer works, because there's just a lot
going on behind the scenes. But what I will promise
is that after this video, you're gonna know enough
about the RGB Mixer to walk away, use it to correct images, and to build better
looks for your projects. So essentially the best
way I have to explain the way the RGB Mixer works, is we're gonna take the RGB Parade and bring this over to
set it right above them. And now you're gonna see that they do actually correlate here. We have the blue output
right below the blue channel, green output below the green channel, and of course the red output
below the red channel. Now I tried to think of an
analogy to help explain this, but honestly just came
up short every time. So the best explanation I have
for how the RGB Mixer works is that essentially
we're using information from one of the three RGB channels to amplify or reduce the output of the same or separate channel. So in application, what that looks like is for the blue channel, we're changing the blue output here. We can just raise the blue channel up and you see what that
does to the blue channel, of course it increases the intensity. And we can also take information
from the green channel and send it through the blue channel. Same goes for the red. We can send red information
out of the blue channel. So taking a look at the
opposite end of the spectrum, go to the red channel, we can increase the red, or we can take green channel information, send it to the red channel,
and same for the blue. And so that's why whenever you see if I increase saturation by bringing up the red, green, and blue output
of the respective channels, the end result is just an
increase in saturation. And so you notice that's a
totally different concept as opposed to the primaries. Here, if we start adding red to the gain, we're just gonna get red, but that's not necessarily
gonna be the same result over in the RGB primaries. So they do two completely
different things, and they should be used
for different scenarios. So one great way to use the RGB Mixers is to do a better white balance whenever you have a situation where the white balance was
particularly bad in the scene, or just the lighting
environments were not ideal. A lot of times you'll find
you can get better results by manipulating the RGB Mixer, as opposed to messing with
the temp and tint sliders, or trying to use offset. You're effecting the image
in a little bit different way using the RGB Mixer, as opposed to those other
tools I just mentioned. So let's go ahead and close this down and let's start building our look here. Now looking at this
image, playing it back, it was shot on Arri Alexa, and I wanted to go for
this really underground, grungy, almost toxic look. So we're gonna Alt + S six times. We're gonna take our last three nodes and then bring them down just so we can recenter these and have this blown up as much as we can so you guys can much more easily see which node we're working on. Now let's go ahead and
start naming these nodes. First up, we're gonna
have a CST, not an FST. And then our next node
is gonna be primaries. Next up, we're gonna have a glow node, and then we're gonna have our film LUT. Pretty sure every look I've
made in the past six months has had a film LUT on it. And the next up, this is what we're gonna
be doing our RGB Mixer and a few other look tools, and then we're gonna have a grain node. So our first step here is taking
the color space transform, we're gonna drive that on to our CST node, and for our input color space, we're gonna set this to Arri Alexa 'cause it's shot on Arri Alexa. Input game is gonna be Arri Log C. Output color space, leaving
that as use timeline, which is Rec 709 gamma 2.4. And then output gamma, we're not gonna do use timeline 'cause we don't want it
to be converted to 2.4. We are gonna be sending
that to Cineon Film Log. And the reason for that, I've mentioned this a
couple of times in the past, but can't stress it enough, our film LUT's built into Resolve, they are expecting a
Cineon Film Log input. So it takes the Cineon Film Log image, and then through the LUT, it converts it to Rec 709. So we're gonna right click
the node, squared onto LUT, and then in film looks, we're gonna select the Rec
709 Kodak 2383 D60 LUT. And so now we have a proper conversion using our color space transform and the film LUTs built into Resolve. So if you have Resolve,
you have these LUTs, you should have pretty much
everything you need there. So, now in primaries, as I mentioned, I wanted to get this really warm look, and we're gonna do that using
a couple of different tools. And one main thing I wanna stress is that when building this look, we want to avoid having to
go into any secondaries. So we're not, we don't
wanna qualify the skin and then work on the skin specifically. So to do that, whenever
we're building the look, we're gonna keep an eye
on the skin the whole time and make sure we don't mess up
the skin in the first place. So we're building a look
around things like the skin or any anchors we have. And in this image, those
anchors are pretty much just our skin and this jacket here. So let's hop into our
wheels and you can see here, this is just our primary wheels and we're operating in that log space. And there's two ways to
work with the RGB wheels. Now if you don't have a panel and you're working on
a mouse and keyboard, I highly recommend at least just giving
the primary bars a shot. They're the exact same thing
as using the primary wheels, and they're the same tool right here. It's just a different
interface on how to use them. So for example, in our gain, we just crank the green right here, we hop back into the primary wheels, we see that we've affected
it the same amount. These values here, all staying the same. Now hopping back into the
wheels, as I mentioned, I really want this warm look. So we're gonna start bringing
some red up into the gain. And the way I'm gonna do that, instead of clicking and dragging, I'm just gonna hover over this. I'm go ahead and zoom in
for you guys to see this. Hovering over the red channel and then using my mouse,
just scrolling up, and scrolling up of course
is gonna increase red and then we can decrease blue just by scrolling down
on that mouse wheel. Now I'm gonna use the primary bars here just to sort of fine-tune this look. Just gonna add a little
bit of green as well. Not looking too bad. You can get rid of that window. And maybe in the gamma, let's see. Adding some green to the gamma is kinda getting me where I want it, and we'll add some red as well. And then a lift. Let's come down just a little bit, we're just gonna click and drag. Pulling that lift down,
refining our contrast. And let's add a little bit of blue, and add some red. That's looking pretty good right there. Now one thing I do wanna mention, let's zoom in, we'll
scroll through a little bit 'til we get to really see his skin. And this is such a subjective
part of the process. We don't want his skin to
look a hundred percent perfect and realistic because if you do that, the look's gonna be boring. And so we don't want a boring look, we wanna pushed look. And if you look at many
films, any film grabs, if you wanna go online and check out how skin
looks in different scenes, you'll notice that the
skin doesn't always fall right on this line here,
the skin tone line. The color of the skin
is gonna be influenced by the light around it and
the scene that it's in, the environment that it's in. So you have to keep that in mind whenever you're building a look, that you don't want the
skin always perfect. Now, in this instance, I think one thing we should
do with the skin though, we're gonna happen to our
Hue versus Hue curves, and let's just, while
keeping an eye on things, maybe bring up the yellow in the hue and just shift it towards
red a tiny, tiny bit. You can do that by clicking and dragging, or you can go into hue rotate, which is gonna give you a little bit more refined movements there. And then in the Hue versus Sat, let's bring down that red
saturation a little bit. That's probably gonna help
us out a little bit later. Not that much, just a little here. Right around there. And that's gonna do it. So let's go ahead and take a look at the changes we've made here. Just gonna go ahead and zoom out here. So you can see, we started to
add that warmth to the image. We don't want a super clean, neutral look. We want a pushed warm look. And so that's looking pretty good. So now we're gonna go into our glow and just continue to push this look. I'm gonna pull back up our RGB Parade and we're gonna scroll down to glow, drag this on here, and you know the drill, we're gonna take our shine
threshold, bring it to zero, composite type is gonna be soft light, and they're gonna take our global blend and pull it back just to touch. We don't want it quite that strong. And let's take our colorized tool, we wanna give the glow its own tint, so we're gonna overlay
some more red warm tones over this image. And I'm also keeping an eye
on the jacket and his skin, looking for the right color here. And right in here, kind of that red tone is what I'm looking for. That's pretty good. All right, so now we are
hopping into the RBG Mixer, I wanna bring up the vectorscope again, 'cause that's what I'm gonna be using to really just keep an eye
on things, technically. I know that I want the image overall to be a little bit more yellow than red, and I wanna bring these cyan tones to be a little more green. So using the RGB Mixer, there's not necessarily
a super refined way to know what your goal is and just start moving and know exactly
which sliders to move and how far to move them. A lot of it just comes
from trial and error. So to get started, we do know that if we subtract
blue from the blue output, we're gonna get more red. So if we pull down on the blue, you'll see how we're
affecting the image here. And keep in mind, this
is a very different look or change that we're making to the image, than if we were to go into
something like the offset and just start warming things up. Not the same tool, very different effect, and leads to very different results. So that's why I wanna highlight how important understanding
and using this tool can be. So now we've actually subtracted
some of the blue there, and I'm liking where it's heading, but I think I still wanna
get this yellow tone to be a little more saturated and possibly a little more green. So let's go into the red output
and let's add some green, or subtract some green,
going the wrong here. And now we're starting to
get there and let's see. Yeah, adding some green
to the green output is also doing what I want. We'll subtract some red. Subtract some red from the blue output. And like I mentioned, a whole lot of this just
comes from experimenting. So really I recommend just grabbing some of your favorite clips, throwing them in Resolve, and start messing with the RGB sliders 'cause you can watch tours all day long, but you're really never gonna grasp the understanding of a certain tool unless you just start
applying it and using it. So learn and apply, learn and apply. You hear it all day long and we mean it. So I can't stress enough
how important it is for you to actually get
your hands on Resolve, it's free software, if you
don't have the full version, and actually start working on
some of this footage yourself. It doesn't matter where
the footage is from, doesn't matter what kind
of camera it shot on, but bring it into Resolve and
start playing with these tools 'cause they're free, they're out there. There's no excuses. Just start working with it. Now one of the downsides
of using the RGB Mixer, is we might notice here, kind of in our shadows and
just overall our neutral tones is that those neutral tones, they are affected by the overall cast that you put on the image. So you may wanna neutralize that, there's a couple of
different ways to do that. One would be using the color warper tool. You can grab the center point here, which is gonna be your neutral tones, and you can pull this in
the opposite direction that their tint is to
kinda counteract that cast. Another way you could do
that is using the RGB curves. And for our situation, we're actually looking at kind
of a tint in the highlights, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. We kind of want that yellow
tint to those highlights. We're also looking at a
warmer tone in the shadows. So you could do this
using the primary wheels, or you can do it using the curves. I know that I want to kind of kill some of
that red in the shadows, so we're just gonna
select our red curve only, gonna click the dropdown
menu here, these three dots, and I'm gonna click add default anchors. So now we have all these
default points added and we're gonna go into the shadows here and click and pull down
on our shadows area. And this is gonna be subtracting
red from the shadows. And I might actually delete
this point here as well so that that effect continues to taper up into the lower mids. So again, we're just
pulling down a little bit and now we have a little bit
more green in the cast as well. So instead of redoing
everything on the green channel, I'm just gonna click that dropdown again and then copy it to green. And now we can select the green channel and then continue to
refine these changes here. And I like where that's at right now. Let's see if we bring down our highlights a little bit as well. Not too bad. That's kind of optional,
totally up to you, but I like where that's at. And then last thing I'm gonna
do here in the RGB Mixer, which I'll see where we're at as is, you see the changes we've made here, look at the vectorscope and then also look at
the image, just disable just before, after, before, after. And to further push this image, we're gonna go into our color warper and I'm just gonna expand it actually so we can see a little bit better. And as I mentioned, this color warper tool is almost a direct correlation
of the vectorscope here. So I'm gonna go ahead and
set this to eight points, and that gives us eight
points of saturation and hue to control. So it gives us a lot more granularity here And I just wanna grab
these kind of orange tones and shift them a little bit and see what kind of result we get. 'Cause I liked that more saturated look, but maybe I wanna saturate some of the less saturated
parts of the image, and then desaturate some of
the more saturated parts. And that's not looking
too bad right there. And that as well is another
super small change we're making, but to me that just helps unify
the overall color palette. And that's what I'm going for. So our last step here is
gonna be applying the grain. I'm just gonna close this out and we'll set this back to
Parade and close it down as well. So we're gonna grab our
film grain, drop it on here. I tend to be more heavy-handed with it, so I'm gonna zoom in a little bit and then we're just gonna keep our 16 millimeter default grain, and we're gonna increase
the grain strength and maybe sharpen it a little bit. By reducing softness, we are
adding sharpest to the grain. And I like that there,
it's a good texture to me. Big fan of that texture right there. And I think that's gonna do it for this, so let's go ahead and
check out the final look. (upbeat music) All right, that's gonna
do it for this one. I sincerely hope you guys
enjoyed this tutorial. I hope you walked away with a little bit better understanding of
how the RGB Mixer works and how you can better
implement it into your workflow. If you're enjoying the content, don't forget to leave
a like on this video, subscribe to the channel
for more awesome tutorials. And if you really wanna
take your color grading game to the next level, do not miss out on the free training linked in the description below. With that, I will see
you guys in the next one. (upbeat music)
