Subtractive Color Grading in Davinci Resolve (Part 3) including FREE Film Density plugin tutorial

welcome back to part three of our discussion on subtractive color in case you missed it in the last two videos what we talked about was the theory behind additive and subtractive color as well as understanding what most people mean by the term subtractive in filmmaking today I'm going to demo for you a plugin for creating some of these Transformations as well as mentioning some of the built-in tools right into resolve let's start with the plugin it's a dctl from pauldor called film density if you're new to dctls they're basically mini plugins for resolve you can download it drop it into your Lut folder for resolve and then resolve will be able to see it and use it add the dctl effect into a node and select film density the first slider controls the effects intensity so what the tool does is it darkens colors the more saturated they are so if something's gray nothing will change but the more saturated something is the greater the effect will be now often we don't want to mess with skin tones and that's what the weight sliders are there for if you want to decrease the effect in the Reds move the slider down and this same can be applied to Greens and blues there's also a very handy limiter for preserving low saturation and low Luma elements of your frame you can preview the areas of the fact with the display Alpha box Paul door is a brilliant color scientist if this is your first introduction to him welcome to the fan club next let's address cmy color adjustments if you prefer balancing by adding cyan magenta and yellow it's as simple as looking at your offset tool the opposite of red is cyan so negative red will give you cyan and it's also perceptually darkening the image at the same time the same can be applied to the other sliders the opposite of green is magenta and the opposite of blue is yellow just drag the sliders down rather than up and you're working in cmy it's that simple if you prefer moving the sliders up for the same effect you can always invert the color before and after the node so that moving the sliders up will add cyan magenta and yellow respectively either way you're working in a manner that darkens the image in cmy hello subtractive color finally it's worth remembering that the saturation knob in resolve may not be your preferred method of adding colorfulness especially since it perceptually brightens the image changing the color space you work in affects how saturation is added a very common alternative is to work in HSV which is the example I used in the first video to add saturation in HSV just drop a new note into your tree right click on it and find the color space tab then select HSV Now by using the green channel of your gain you can add or decrease saturation in your image you only use the green Channel because by changing your node's color space red green and blue are now operating as Hue saturation and value or HSV to make life even easier you can right click on that node again and find the channels tab then deselect channels 1 and 3. this disables the potential for us to accidentally mess with the Hue or value channels and only affect the green Channel or saturation in this case now you can just use your whole gain wheel to adjust saturation rather than worrying about only selecting the green gain Channel also don't mess around with lift or offset Tools in this node it creates really wacky results just stick with gain while this is by no means an end of all you can learn about subtractive color and color theory this does wrap up our miniseries check the resource Link in the description to find a free download of Paul's dctl if you want to see more content like this hit that like And subscribe button and let me know your thoughts down in the comments I'll see in the next one

Channel: Barrett Kaufman

Views: 7,780

Keywords: subtractive color, color grading, colour grading, color theory, colour theory, film colorist, colorist, masterclass

Id: JddjjjmO1BA

Length: 3min 31sec (211 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2023