Secrets to Cinematic Color Grading

in my 10 plus years working as a colorist i can count on one hand the number of times someone has told me they want their image to look less cinematic virtually all of us are looking for a more cinematic aesthetic in our grades and yet this search often leaves us dissatisfied and confused i see two main reasons for this first the word itself cinematic has been so overused in filmmaking and pop culture that it no longer has a clear meaning it's become a catch-all to describe any image we find generally pleasing but if we really want to nail this cinematic look we need a smaller target so i'm going to give you my definition cinematic describes an image whose key visual qualities are consistent with those of printed film why printed film because for the majority of film history this was the primary medium for consuming cinema so the aesthetics of a film print are inextricably linked to our collective palette for movies and thus to our idea of cinematic second imaging in general and color grading specifically are in a bit of an adolescence at the moment because our technology is evolving far faster than our creative culture contrast this with the color timers and engineers who worked with film prints for all those decades they had a very limited tool set but what they did have was time to perfect their craft we have the opposite problem a rapidly expanding tool set which we haven't quite figured out how to use so as we're synthesizing all these new possibilities it's important to be informed by the creative culture that came before us these ideas are the foundation of the three secrets to cinematic color that i'm going to show you today inside davinci resolve let's get into it so let's dive into my three secrets for more cinematic color the first secret embrace strong contrast contrast is your friend guys and you can't be afraid of it you have to be willing to put strong contrast into your image let me show you what i mean i'm going to go into my curves palette here and i'm going to draw a nice bold s-curve down here and then we're going to work on this and talk about some key concepts that come along with it so i'm going to do something like this something kind of further than you probably would normally go and if we look at this image our immediate reaction that is often going to accompany strong contrast is we're going to feel like oh man it's just blasting too hot in the highlights or on other darker images we may feel that it's getting smashed too far down to the bottom but you have to stick with it the contrast is not the problem here the problem is we need to sweeten our exposure so i'm going to do an upstream node from here and because i'm working in a log space my offset wheel is roughly akin to exposure and i'm going to drop this down like so and i've talked about this with you guys here on the channel before that oftentimes when we feel like we need less contrast actually what we need is an adjusted exposure to really nail that middle exposure and make that strong contrast really sing so just with that simple adjustment my contrast is looking really good and it's looking stronger compared to something like i might get out of running this area image through the normal airy rec 709 lut like so if we'd started off by looking at this we would have gone oh yeah it looks pretty good looks pretty balanced but this first secret is really all about embracing the bold nature of cinematic imagery and really embracing strong contrast and finding ways to work with that strong contrast rather than backing off of it at the first sign of trouble so that's number one embrace strong contrast number two i want to talk about the way that we create colorfulness and depth when we're working in a more cinematic mode so let's start by pasting our curve that we built on this last shot onto the next shot because i want to build as we go along here so now we have embraced some strong contrast and we've got some good looking contrast in this image now what would you say if i said i want this to be more colorful you might reach for your saturation knob and let's just see what that looks like if i pump in a good healthy amount of saturation like so let's even grab a still so that we can reference that in a moment's time i'm going to reset that saturation for now and we're going to skin it slightly differently i now want to create my colorfulness and my depth and my overall kind of visual interest using a technique you guys have also seen me work with before which is called split toning that basically involves pushing cooler colors into the shadow and warmer colors into the highlights so i'm going to go back to my curves here once again and i'm going to use an option click on my individual curves i'm going to ungang my yrgb so that i can work on the individual channels i'm going to go to my blue and i'm going to use option clicks to park these kind of unity positions here so that i can confine the range of the curve that i'm affecting so i've got an option click here and now i'm going to grab to the left of that and just make a little rainbow with my blue like so now i'm going to go to my green channel do a similar thing arch it up just not quite as far as the blue and now i'm going to go to my red channel option click to kind of choke things in and then i'm going to nudge it upward just a little bit this one happens to be very touchy but i'm not worried about going too far at the moment because there's a good way to dial that back which we're going to cover in a moment now i'm going to option click similarly and do about half the amount of green as i did of red like so and immediately i'm going to need to back things off because this is what i want it's just far too much of it i can do that with these sliders right over here so i'm going to back off starting with my red and green i'm going to back those off to about 60. and bear in mind these sliders their effective range is actually from 50 to 100 not 0 to 100 so if i were to back this down to say 20 i would actually be creating an inverse curve of what i've drawn over here that's not what i want so i'm going to back it off to 60 which is effectively about 10 strength from where i started and it's funny because when i back it way off there you barely can see it until we enable disable and now we're really creating some nice depth and colorfulness but without going in and cranking that saturation knob like we did a moment ago and getting that kind of result so we've got a much better much more cinematic image by tackling it this way so that's secret number two is we want to create our colorfulness and our depth using some kind of split toning scheme like this one as opposed to just painting it with a strong twist of the saturation knob finally let's go to this third image and talk about the third secret to cinematic color grading and that's to change the way we think about colors and their luminance so one of the cornerstone properties of a film print which again is for me so much of the basis of this cinematic aesthetic we're discussing is that because of its subtractive color system colors can be bright or colors can be saturated but colors really can't be saturated and bright in a film print so consequently if that's something we can pay attention to in our grades and mimic that's another ingredient that we can use to really create a cinematic vibe so let's paste everything we've done so far onto this image and it's worth noting off the bat a couple things first of all my saturation even without directly manipulating my saturation knob is a little high for my taste right now so i want to tame that in before we even get into this last secret so i'm going to do a slightly different thing here on my split toning node now i'm going to go to my key output and i'm just going to back off the overall output of this to say 75 0.75 like so and i'm now even going to go upstream and actually reduce my saturation to around a 43 and even though i've reduced my saturation i've ended up with a nice vibrant colorful image so don't be afraid to do that after you've introduced your strong contrast curve and your split toning you may find that you have excess color that you actually want to scale back so now that we've done that let's look at this third secret which i'm going to tackle in a new node we're going to once again go to our curves and this time i want to find my hue versus loom and i'm looking at the blue of the shirt that my talent is wearing here and i feel like it's a really nice hue but i want to reduce its overall luminance in keeping with that principle of film prints which we just discussed so i'm going to go down to my presets here and i'm going to look for my blue preset and i'm going to try to use that for this operation because if i can target things in that super broad way i'm less inclined to get artifacting than if i were to go in and eye dropper that particular color so i've got my blue preset pulled up and i'm going to grab my control point here and i'm going to drop my luminance this vertical axis downward like so and let's flip that on and off and get a feel for what it's doing it's very subtle but it's definitely helping with this cinematic film print aesthetic that we are focused on today and lastly i actually want to go back to my number three note here where i backed off my saturation and i think i can back it off even a little bit further and still have plenty of color and plenty of life in this image and let's once again compare to what we would have gotten if we'd satisfied ourselves with running this through aries standard alexa to rec 709 lut probably wouldn't have been mad at this if we had done it at the outset but we've landed with a much more cinematic much bolder look by embracing these three secrets so i hope this gives you guys some cool concepts and some cool techniques to think about and break out the next time you're looking to get a more cinematic vibe out of your grading there's a lot more to talk about when it comes to creating cinematic grades but you can go a long way using these simple secrets so instead of trying 20 different knobs or plugins or luts on your next project focus in on one or two of the ideas we discussed today and really dive deep if you put in the time to experiment and to learn i guarantee you're going to start to see better results before i go i also want to thank everybody who's been getting active in the comments and encourage you to do so if you haven't already color grading is a skill that's learned much more in dialogue than by passive listening so exchanging ideas and asking questions is the best thing we can all do to develop our craft i'm especially eager to hear from anyone who has ideas they'd like to see covered in future videos this content is for you guys and i want to make it as valuable as possible see you in the next video

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 44,542

Keywords:

Id: dly2IA22Hrk

Length: 10min 48sec (648 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021