Spatial VS. Non-spatial tools in DaVinci Resolve

every tool that we use inside of DaVinci Resolve falls into one of two categories spatial or non-spatial knowing the difference between these tools can mean getting this image versus that image I'm going to show you how exactly that shakes out how that works inside of resolve and explain the difference between these two types of tools right now let's take a look so here inside of resolve I've got my color management set up I've got my template node Tree in place I've got a look in place all those good things that I like to start every project off with and what I want to walk you through now is kind of an extreme example of something that you are going to see more subtle expressions of in your color grades so we've been talking recently here on the channel about things that we want to do and things that we might not want to do within a parallel node structure like you see me working with here today and really talking about how we don't want to do spatial things inside of our parallel node structure spatial things are things that change the texture of our image that that's things like blur noise reduction mid-tone detail texture pop things like this I'm going to leave a complete list of spatial tools in the description for today's video but the spatial tools that I want to show you today are tools that you might not know are spatial tools and those are your highlights and your shadows High hiding out right here in your primaries tab so what I want to show you today again is a kind of extreme example of something that can sneak into our color grade in all kinds of subtle ways if we're not careful so all I'm doing right now is dropping my Shadows or rather raising my Shadows up to 100 and dropping my highlights down to a negative 100 and really what I'm doing here is effectively reducing contrast right Shadows are coming up highlights are going down distance between those two things is getting shorter and you can see in this case that by going all the way top floor with my shadows and all the way bottom floor with my highlights I've also kind of changed the net exposure of this image quite a bit so just to compensate for that just to give us a kind of level comparison point to where we started I'm going to go back and pull my offset down just to get my exposure back to kind of where it was and then I'm also going to go up to my ratio node here in the top section of my parallel node structure and add some contrast back so that I'm recovering what I pulled out with my highlights in my Shadows so without getting like forensic about it theoretically what I've done is ADD contrast in the top section of my node graph up here and reduce contrast down here in the lower section right but I want you to check out what happens when I go off and then on big difference between those images right and it's not as simple as saying oh the contrast is way higher or way lower in image a or image B and we could even go in and refine this a little bit if we wanted to get a bit closer match in terms of our saturations I'm just going to turn my saturation knob to the left a little bit so that our before and or after is a bit more similar now it's probably even easier to see if we zoom in on our subject's skin and apologies to our subject for this very unkind treatment of her that we are demoing today if we go off and then on you can see all this texture that's getting introduced into the image so what does this mean because we didn't do any texture pop we didn't do any mid-tone detail we didn't do any anti-blur what exactly is happening here well what's happening is something that many of us don't know is incorporated into those highlight and Shadow knobs namely that when you go positive with your shadows or negative with your highlights you're also effectively increasing mid-tone detail that's built right into the behavior of the tool and if we think about that for a second it makes sense because those tools are designed to affect the lower and upper end of the image where you are likely to get clipping and where you're probably going to want to see a little bit more texture if you have gotten clipped out in camera so the highlight and shadows knob are trying to help you out they're trying to give you this sense of texture the sense of detail of information in those extreme ends of your image and that can work out great and you guys have probably gotten good results with your highlight and Shadow knobs before so this video isn't about why you shouldn't use highlight and shadows but it's about the importance of understanding whether a tool is spatial or non-spatial and in the case of highlights and shadows it turns out these are actually spatial tools so what does that mean that means two things first of all we don't want to be using these tools here inside of our parallel node graph because we're going to run the risk of getting haloing or ringing or fringing like we talked about in my recent video on Parallel nodes and the mistake that I've been making with them and what this also means is that we want to be aware of this spatial aspect of our highlight and shadows knobs and to choose another tool if we don't want to see more detail get added into our image and again I'll emphasize we've intentionally made an extreme example here today so you're probably not going to see results this extreme because if you did you'd probably go whoa what's going on what do I need to do to go in there and change that but what's even sneakier is when you don't see an extreme result but you are subtly sharpening your image in a way that you don't want it can be a real challenge when that happens and it can be tough to figure out what's happening or even worse to not notice what's happening and get a compromise you didn't even see when it found its way into your image so there's a couple things to think about when it comes to uh understanding spatial tools versus non-spatial tools ultimately it's a question we should be able to answer for any tool that we reach for inside a resolve does this have a spatial component or is this a purely non-spatial tool that's going to affect where in our node graph we use that tool and that's also going to affect when we use that tool what situations we use that tool in this situation for example is one where I absolutely would not want to introduce additional texture additional sharpness into the image because it's perfectly well sharp there's nothing really clipped in the top and bottom that I want to recover and in fact I would like to keep the texture of my subject's skin more organic more natural to the way it was actually photographed as opposed to altering it in even a subtle fashion like we would see with lower levels of our shadows or our highlight knobs so like I said I'm going to leave a full list of the tools that fall into the category of spatial operations here in the description for today's videos You'll also find a link to the looks that I'm using here at the Timeline level of my node graph that despite my unfortunate shot level grading decisions at the global level I'm getting some nice stuff going on here so you can find all that stuff in the description for today's video and we're going to go even deeper on this subject in our next episode of grade school my live show that we do on Friday mornings where you can come in and ask any questions you like about the topics that we've been discussing in the week's videos that preceded that Friday so hope to see you there and if not I'll see you back here on the channel for our next pre-recorded video

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 7,376

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Id: tIk2R7yPKjo

Length: 7min 0sec (420 seconds)

Published: Sun May 14 2023