Stop Making This Davinci Resolve Mistake

vignettes are one of the most versatile Tools in a colorus Arsenal so why am I standing here telling you to stop using them well here's my theory like nine times out of 10 when we have the impulse to throw a vignette onto an image it's actually standing in for a more nuanced more contextual more photographic stronger choice that we could make for our image if we would just think about what we're doing in a slightly different way let me show you what I mean here inside ofal so I've got a timeline out of three or four Clips here and I've gone ahead and set up my overall color management using notes I've got a dedicated video on that if you want to brush up on how I've done that I've also got an overall look happening here at the Timeline level of my node graph this one's called Nana comes from my Voyager Essentials pack and I've also gone ahead and done some basic grading on these individual shots setting up things like exposure contrast ratio color balance Etc but I'm now at a point where I want to start thinking about my secondaries and at a point where I might want to look at something like a b yet and just to be clear let's look at what a vignette actually is in its sort of stock application I'm going to go down to the secondar branch of my node graph as I just have and I'm going to create a new circular power window in a new node and I'm going to zoom things up widen things out soften things out and then I'm going to invert this power window which you can do in your user interface just by tapping this little uh circle inside of a square icon like so and I'm actually now going to tap away from my power window pallet here because I want to see my adjustment without seeing the power window I don't care about the shape of the window I care about the result of my adjustment through that power window that makes sense so the way I'm going to do that is just go over here to this lower left corner and click off okay and now I could use any number or any of my primaries that I want to I can use my gamma I can use my lift I could use my gain my go-to tends to be gamma so I'm going to start with that and just begin to gamma things down like so okay and if we go off and then on we're looking right now at like the fundamental challenge of a yet I'm going to narrow this aspect a little bit like so and let's now go back over to our primaries with that turned off the fundamental challenge is this if I go before and then after the after feels better and the after almost always feels better on any shot that we throw it onto because a vignette is creating spatial contrast and it's guiding the eye toward the middle of the frame and it's creating that contrast from the corners of the frame toward the center of the frame so a vignette is a really effective tool for creating spatial contrast but I want to show you a slightly different approach that we can take by thinking about this in a slightly different way so let's go ahead and grab a still of this and I'm going to delete this node and we're once again going to create a new node in a new circular power window and before I start adjusting things and moving this shape around I'm going to stop and look at the image and think about what's happening in this image in terms of the light the direction the quality of the light and in terms of the overall composition we're going to focus on light for our first few clips and then we'll talk about the composition as we close out this video today so if we look at the light in this image what is the direction what is the quality of this light well the light is definitely falling from right to left and it's kind of coming from the upper corner and a bit behind our subject right so this is something that you can just get into the habit of throughout your grading process every time you land on a new shot pay attention to the light try to assess where the light is coming from the quality of the light the direction of the light okay and now that I've kind of logged that my mind I'm going to go about a similar thing to what we did a moment ago but I'm going to do it trying to pay attention to that lighting scenario okay so we're just going to create a vignette that is sort of tailored to the direction of the light in this image like so and I really want to encourage you that the shape of the window may not be what you think it needs to be to get the result that you're after so don't get too fixated on the shape of the window just draw the shape and then adjust and see how it feels now what I didn't do just now is invert my power window so I'm going to go back over to my window section here and invert and now I can go back to my primaries and Gamma things down just like I did before okay and maybe I can go back to my window here and zoom things in a little bit if I feel like it's not having enough of an effect and go back to my primaries and look at my before and my after very similar result to what we were just looking at right but the main difference is that this has been tailored to this shot and tailored to the lighting scheme of this shot so it's not a canned cookie cutter Vin yet it's got a little bit more context it's got a little bit more of a photographic quality to it because I'm paying attention to this particular frame as opposed to doing the same thing regardless of the frame that I'm looking at so this is effectively a vignette in a sense but it's tailored it's customized and when I think of vignettes I think when most of us think of vignettes we think of a static shape that has all four corners knocked down and isn't doing anything in the center of the frame right so this is a more nuanced version of a vignette and I want to take a look at a couple more examples of how this can go in some other shots let's go over here to shot number two I'm going to go to the secondary branch of my node graph add a circular power window and again before I start making too much adjustment with the window pay attention to the Dynamics of the shot where is the light coming from what is the composition in this scene so in this case the light is coming from the left hand side and maybe kind of from the lower leftand side right so once again I'm going to do a similar thing zoom up soften out widen out but I'm now going to sort of position this window in a way that higgy backs off of the lighting scheme that I am inferring by looking at the image something like this going to go ahead and invert go back over to my primaries and we can gamma down like so if I go off and then on I'm still getting that Pleasant vignette like quality that's guiding my eye toward what's important and that's giving me spatial contrast as I move from edge of frame to middle of frame but once again I'm honoring the Dynamics of the scene and uh using a bit more nuance and uh a bit more specificity than a cookie cutter shape right let's look at shot number three here shot number three is interesting because it shows that sometimes it's not that easy to tell where the light is coming from I mean maybe you're better at this than I am but it took me practice uh for a while when I was first learning color grading to assess in shots like this where the light is actually coming from cuz the light's pretty soft it's not terribly uh sidy or toppy it's fairly frontal so it's not that easy to tell where the light's coming from but I'm going to give you a good trick that you can use in situations like this if we zoom in you can actually look at your subject's face assuming there's a person in the frame and look at where the shadow is falling in relation to their nose there's almost always going to be a shadow that is below or to the left or to the right of your subject's nose wherever that shadow is is the opposite side of where the light is coming from so in this case it's subtle but you can definitely see a shadow on this Frame right side of her face right so I know from looking at that that the light is coming from frame left okay what I'm going to do here is something slightly different let's reset whatever inadvertent qualifier I did here once again going to create a new circular power window and what I'm going to do now is set my aspect to a zero so that I'm effectively getting a vertical grad this is something I do all the time the way I prefer to create vertical grads because at any point if I want to give a little bit more shape back to it I can increase or decrease my aspect and because I don't have to juggle between multiple window shapes I can pretty much always live with circular power windows so I've created this vertical grad I'm going to pan things over like so I'm going to zoom zoom zoom until I'm covering the right side of the frame soften things out rotate this so I'm kind of hugging the Contour of her blouse I don't really want to hit her blouse very much with what I'm about to do and I'm just going to do something like this go nice and soft and once again hit my gamma in this case maybe a touch of gain as well don't feel like you always have to use the same single adjustment you can use any of your primaries to get the job done gamma is a great place to start but gain is usually my second stop if I want to kind of slow down the brighter elements uh in my windowed region and in this case I'm basically just piggybacking off the light and trying to create more of that contrast from the light source as it falls off from the frame left to the frame right side of the image like so and I feel like that looks really nice and I'm going to play through it and see if it holds my preference with shapes like these is to draw them in a broad and soft enough way that I don't necessarily need to track them even with movement of camera or subject so this is a slightly different example of how we can use this idea of a vignette but approach it with a bit more Nuance a bit more of a photographic frame of mind and pay more attention to what's happening in the shot okay and I'm actually now that we're looking at this wide uh end of the shot I'm going to walk this window a little bit more more over to the left soften things out a little bit more okay let's look at one final example here in this example I feel like the light might be even more subtle in terms of its source and its direction than it was in shot number three when I play through this the way that I can tell primarily where the light is coming from is just from Context Clues of looking at them and knowing they're outside and it's daytime so I know the light's got to be coming from somewhere up above right but if I didn't know that from cont text it would be kind of tough to tell Because unless I zoom way in the shadows are pretty tough to spot under their noses although they are there if we zoom in you can see that that trick is working for me in terms of telling me where the light is coming from it's below his nose so we know the light is coming from somewhere up above so in this scene the light's coming from kind of like above and maybe slightly to the right but I would argue in this case like the light is so soft and so diffused that there's really not much directional to queue off of when we're drawing our uh spatial contrast window so instead I'm going to try paying attention to the composition of this image and I'm going to try to simply draw a shape that collaborates with the composition of this image and helps guide the eye to the areas that I think are important and helps create some more Dynamics within the frame so here's what that looks like let's go down here in my secondaries Branch add that circular power window and I'm once again going to do a straight up zero aspect grad circular power window window soften things way out and I'm kind of seeing when I sort of soften my gaze and I look at this image I'm sort of seeing like a diagonal that runs from upper left to lower right here because I've got that little patch of sky at the upper left and then it runs down to the lower right and I'm seeing this diagonal that I kind of would like to keep at its exposure level but I'd like to knock things down around that diagonal so because of that I'm going to try something like this going to rotate Zoom position soften maybe rotate a little bit less I'm going to try something like this somewhere around there and then I'm just going to invert that and let's just try taking our gamma down off on what I'd like to do in this case is I like what's happening in the upper right hand corner but what I might do to get uh a bit more of the shape that I'm after is add another shape within this same uh node so I'm going to go over here and I'm going to add another circular power window I'm going to set my aspect here to 100 again go really soft and I'm going to bring this down and kind of create a bottomer like so and this is the fun thing about kind of starting to like get more advanced with creating the spatial contrast is you can piggyback shapes like this and if you wanted to get really fancy you could even say like well I actually don't want to knock down those foreground shrubs as much as everything else so I can take the opacity of this window down a little bit like down to say a 50 and now it's not going to receive quite as much of the gamma adjustment as the rest of the image so something like that I feel like it's looking really nice let's go back over to this first shape and maybe finesse that rotation a little bit more and just kind of try to sweeten it to where it's feeling really good okay something like that it's again the same basic ideas of inette create spatial contrast guide the eye toward the middle of the frame create that uh fall off as you move from middle of frame out to the frame edges but this is customized it's tailored and it's helping me to collaborate with the shot as opposed to feeling like I'm just throwing the same thing at every single shot that I encounter and in doing so getting kind of stale and getting really compromised results to what I could because I'm just doing the first thing that sort of accomplishes what I'm looking for as opposed to thinking more deeply about what exactly I'm trying to do and how best I could accomplish it for whatever shot I'm grading

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 19,735

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Id: 4JCPxsw04lQ

Length: 13min 5sec (785 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2024