Resolve’s Secret Look Building Tool | Color Grading Tutorial

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(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 for more epic tutorials. Be sure to follow us on Instagram 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)
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Channel: Waqas Qazi
Views: 60,832
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: davinci resolve, davinci, davinci resolve studio, davinci tutorial, davinci resolve free, resolve color grading, color grading davinci resolve, colorist, color grading, color correction, davinci resolve tutorial, blackmagic design, davinci resolve color grading, davinci resolve effects, theqazman, davinci resolve 17, resolve 17, davinci resolve 17 tutorial, davinci 17, davinci resolve 16, davinci resolve 16 tutorial, waqas qazi, davinci resolve 16 color grading, film look
Id: t4lGtOTAYZg
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)
Published: Mon Aug 02 2021
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