The biggest color grading mistake on YouTube

one of my guiding principles as a professional colorist is to always seek greatest gains for least efforts that means that if I'm grading and I have three different adjustments that I could make next I always go with the one that Nets the biggest move toward my end goal for the image and the same thing applies when we are studying color grading the best thing for us to learn next is always the concept or the technique that Nets the biggest positive impact on our craft now if you are new to color grading or you've been picking up things here and there on YouTube I virtually guarantee that your next greatest gain is going to come from today's discussion this is something that virtually all beginners and even most teachers get wrong and when we get it right it is an absolute game changer for our color grading practice so let's take a look here and resolve at the biggest color grading mistake on YouTube so right now I just have a new resolve project that I've set up but I haven't done anything in it I've done no grading whatsoever I've just got some images pulled in that I want to work on to demonstrate this biggest mistake that we're talking about today so let's take a shot like this one this shot number five that we're looking at this shot is in a camera log state which is a state that we will often receive our material in when when we're working as colorists and we need to do something right off the bat with this image don't we it's very low contrast very low saturation and before we can even begin to think about the more nuanced aspects of The Craft of color grading we just need to get this image looking decent on our display don't we I'm going to show you the way that I was taught to deal with this issue when I began my career as a colorist many years ago I'm going to go for my primaries which in my case are here at my fingertips on my control surface but they're also available to us in resolve here within this primaries tab in the lower left hand corner and all I'm going to do is go down to these primaries and start to drop my lift that's my shadow area stretch out my highlights you can see the effect that I'm having not only on the image but on my waveform I'm just stretching out this image and somewhat normalizing it I'm going to go over here to my gamma which controls things in between shadows and highlights and try to get a better looking result there maybe I'll go to my saturation knob start to add some color into the image and you might not love what I did it here and there's certainly more that I would want to do before I would deliver this as a final shot but that initial step that I just talk about of getting an image somewhat normalized or looking decent on my display has been accomplished if I look at where I was versus where I am now right I've got this image somewhat normalized now however far we are into this discussion today or this demonstration we're 30 seconds in and have already made the biggest mistake has anyone spotted it does anyone know what I did wrong image looks okay doesn't it what could be so wrong about what I've done so early what were those teachers who were teaching me how to color grade so incorrect about when they said you need to tackle this with your primaries well what I've done wrong is something that is often the culprit when we do things that are not optimal in color grading and that's not so much that I've done something so terrible than that I've missed an opportunity I've overlooked a better way of achieving my goal in this case the fundamental goal if we sort of rewind and turn off this adjustment the goal is to navigate a journey from what my camera saw to what my display can show and in 2022 those are often not the same thing more often than not what our camera saw versus what our display can show are not going to agree and we need to navigate that Journey as colorists but we want to navigate that Journey using the benefit of color science we don't want to do it by hand and by eye in the way that I just did because what I'm describing to you is at its foundational level a technical challenge a technical task not a creative task so in other words what we're looking at right now this image isn't a mistake nobody made a mistake nobody forgot to put contrast into the image it's just that the camera saw something different than our display can show and we need to make that mapping we need to make that Journey or to use the term for what I'm talking about we need to employ color management that I've intentionally held off on using that term in this discussion today because so many of us are intimidated by the topic of color management and color science when we start to bring it up however there's no reason to be afraid of it you don't need to understand color science to take good advantage of color science and you don't need to be an expert in color management to take advantage of color management so let me show you what I mean let's go ahead and turn this adjustment back on because I'm going to want to make a comparison to this in just a moment and I'm going to grab a still of this let's go ahead and reset and we are now going to set up some color management which is going to facilitate that Journey from what the camera saw to what the display can show we're going to go over here to our color management section of our project settings and for my color science I'm going to select DaVinci yrgb color managed now I'm going to work through these settings fairly quickly and they can look big and complicated and intimidating at first but I promise you that they're not and I can also promise you if you want to go deeper and learn more about this everything you need to know lives here on the channel I've got a great series on color management called DaVinci wide gamut workflows we talk about color Management in almost every video that I do so if you have an appetite to really dive deep on this then the material is out there for you to do so today I just want to give you a flight an overview of the concept of color management so here's what I'm going to do I've got my color processing mode set to custom I'm going to set an input color space which agrees with the format of my source images in my case that's area log C3 in your case it might be something different but this should be what your camera saw color space is in fact how we characterize what the camera saw or what the display can show in this case what the camera saw was Airy log C3 next I'm going to look at my output color space to describe what my display can reproduce in this case my calibrated reference monitor is set up to show Rec 709 gamma 2 4. so I'm going to leave that setting where it is and then for my timeline color space I'm going to select DaVinci wide gamut intermediate why because it's a big convenient working space that I can app any Source into I can even map more than one source into it and again that's something that I go deeper into in other videos but for now trust me DaVinci wide gamut intermediate is a great timeline color space to select here regardless of what you've selected here or down here and these other settings I'm going to leave all at their defaults right now I could go in and tailor and tune these and again in other videos I will show you how I like to tailor and tune these to get the optimal result but right now I just want to get some broad basic color management set up so that we can evaluate the difference between color managing and what we were doing a moment ago so let's pay attention to this log State image when I hit my save button here look at that we've got a normalized image we've got exactly what I was trying to do by hand a moment ago but it's happened automatically and it's significant to point out that a moment ago when I made that adjustment that maybe took me 10 seconds 20 seconds 30 seconds this adjustment happened instantaneously once I set those parameters up and furthermore it is affecting every single shot in my timeline not just the shot that I'm on as opposed to this hand adjustment that I did before that's something that I have to redo By Hand by eye on every shot now in a timeline with nine shots in it that might not sound like such a big deal but if you operate as I do in the context of professional color grading and you might be working on anything from a commercial with 30 shots to a feature film with 2500 shots as that shot count starts to increase you are looking for ways to cut down on your time and on your labor and to get an equivalent or Superior result by putting less time into the process that's one of the reasons why color management is such a significant gain to your workflow when you start to incorporate them so this has been rippled across all of my shots as opposed to just one of my shots let's also take a look at the difference here let's wipe to what we had before I just got a better reproduction here my Shadows are holding better I've got more color happening in this image or at least more color separation more pleasing color I've got a more sensible bass line that I didn't even have to work as hard for and again because I know that I'm supported by good color science I am closer to what the camera actually saw when it was capturing this image I'm getting more of the cinematographers creative intent the filmmaker's creative intent bi-color managing then by being a hero and doing things by hand and by eye so this is the alternative to that biggest mistake that I see on YouTube it's the mistake that I made for many years in the early part of my career which is to be the hero and to step in and think that I need to take every image from its original state out to its display state by hand with no support and with no foundation and what I find interesting is when you are grading by hand in that sort of first method that I showed you one of the reasons why we can Overlook the compromise that we are making is because we have no frame of reference until I show you this what I'm looking at here doesn't necessarily seem like a problem but once you see this and you go oh it's actually that's where the exposure was meant to go there and I'm still getting a healthy level of contrast and separation with a more Moody exposure it's only then that you go okay not only is that better looking that's more aligned with creative intent and definitely the direction I'd like to take this image without that frame of reference it's really hard to know what's good and what's bad that leads me to one of my favorite quotes that I think about all the time from a colorist friend of mine everything looks good until you see something better so you want to have a foundation in place that you can set up quickly automatically across all your shots and then your grading can happen from this point so right here with this color management I have not actually even begun to grade I haven't done anything on this individual shot yet but now that I've got my color management setup I have a new Foundation that I can build on top of as opposed to having to do things from xero so color management is a non-negotiable if you're looking at building up a really world-class efficient color grading practice that consistently produces great results you got to be color managing and anyone who tells you different is really not guiding you in the proper direction okay now a couple things I want to briefly talk about that are going to accompany your shift from working and what we could call a display referred Paradigm where you are literally referring to your display for all of your grading decisions into this color managed or seen referred Paradigm that we're using now a couple things that are going to change when you do that first of all what I've just done setting up that color Management in my project settings that has to happen at the beginning you can't do that halfway through the process so there's a bit more table setting that has to take place and if you fail to do that or if you do it wrong really the only option at that point is to go back reset your work and get it right and Start Anew so you got to get it right from the outset and that means that if you're used to diving right in and starting to adjust knobs and make creative manipulations you're going to have to be a little bit patient because you have to set the table correctly at the outset the second thing that you're going to notice the moment you move into a color managed environment is all of your controls are going to feel different now great example here is I turn my Offset you can actually see I'm getting a really nice sort of exposure-like response from this wheel very different from what I would have gotten if I just turned this knob prior to setting up my color management but it is a big difference even if it is ultimately Superior it's a big change that your eyes and your hands are going to have to get used to so expect that and welcome it and know that when you get to the other side you're going to have a much more useful set of tools than they were when you were working with them in the more display referred model that's number two last one I saved the best for last maybe the worst for last depending on how you look at it we got to talk about Luts if you are used to using Luts in your workflow the bad news is that more than likely the Luts that you are accustomed to using will not survive the journey into your new and improved color managed workflow why is that is it because Luts just can't work in color management no it's because most Luts I'll give you an example let's go over here to my Luts folder here in resolve my film look here inside of resolve if I apply this Lut here I'm even going to turn off this first node for now or reset it rather and let's try this Old Faithful Rec 709 Kodak 2383 d65 you've probably tried this let out before maybe gotten some interesting results out of it let's see what happens if we apply it now well that looks insane that looks terrible right that's not something I'm ever going to be able to work with so all these Luts that you might be accustomed to using are now going to be effectively useless to you in color management that is because a lot like this one is set up to not only apply a creative manipulation but a technical transformation from a film log state in this case out to rec 709 and because we have color management that is already making that transformation we effectively have a double transform that's why the image looks so strange and unreasonable so that's the biggest shift that comes along with shifting to a color managed workflow the Luts that you are accustomed to using probably will not work but don't worry there is good news here as I said it's not that Luts can't work in color management it's that some Luts can't work in color management many of the most common Luts can't work in color management however let me give you an example of a lot that does work in color management let's just try flipping over to a new shot just for the heck of it here's another shot that's already been normalized from its camera log State even though I haven't even looked at it yet in our demonstration today it's already happened automatically under the hood because I set up my overall color management now within this I'm going to go into my CKC folder in my Luts folder and then I'm going to go into the PFE subfolder here and I want to look at my 2383 DWG to DWG V2 Lut and double click on this is a lot that I created as an adaptation of the Kodak 2383 Lut that ships with resolve it's aimed at getting that same emulation of a Kodak 2383 print stock but it works nicely inside of a color managed workflow this lot is available for free and a link that I will leave in the description for today's video so you can download it and try it out and see for yourself that Luts can still be phenomenally useful and in fact I use Luts in almost every color managed workflow that I tackle however we just have to be more selective of the Luts that we use and we need to make sure that they are set up to succeed inside of a color managed workflow this free Kodak 2383 Lut is a great example of a Lut that will give us the creative character of that Kodak 2383 without also netting us that double transform to rec 709 that makes the image look so crazy another great example of Luts that do play nice here inside of my DaVinci wide gamut color managed workflow would be my element which I created for this workflow as well in this case we have a tone as well as a palette Lut that we can drop on and mix and match we can even change the order of them if we want and end up with very different results some of them are more subtle than others some of them are more bold but it's meant to give you different creative options that you can leverage within your color managed workflow where you are already getting more sensible more sound more balanced images than if you're trusting yourself shot after shot image after image to bat 1000 effectively in this setup when you are color managing you've got that solid foundation underneath you automatically and quickly and then you can layer in a good look like I have here with my elements or this Kodak 2383 that I've made available for free and at that point you can by the time you start grading you haven't even be gun grading though thus far by the time you begin grading you're already so much further ahead than you were before your images are already balanced and dialed into a pretty consistent place and you can that much more quickly start to work on the nuance and the really fun details of color grading that separate okay color grades from really really excellent color grades so working color managed is a non-negotiable for me in my professional practice if your goal is to be an excellent colorist or even a professional colorist it should be a non-negotiable for you in your practice as well and we've really only scratched the surface of color management here today we're going to go much deeper on it in my next Friday live session that we do on Friday mornings at 10 A.M Pacific we call it grade school we spend an hour talking about whatever subject we've discussed in the video that preceded that session so this week we're going to be going deep on color management or it's alternative what we've called display referred color grading why one is better than the other the various benefits that we can get from the other and how we can tackle our challenges inside of a color management setup as opposed to a more traditional display referred setup and I also just want to close by saying that if you've learned things the way that I learned things by using your primaries or you have a teacher who you like who teaches with this method nobody's a bad guy here nobody's done anything wrong it's a very understandable mistake because until you have a frame of reference until you see that something better it probably looks pretty decent and the reality is until fairly recently until the last 15 or 20 years doing everything by hand and by eye was actually a fairly reasonable thing to do before we had this proliferation of different professional and prosumer cameras that shoot in all kinds of different color spaces and have all kinds of different latitude and dynamic range and color volume for us to negotiate prior to that point it really wasn't unreasonable to take a more color correction approach and simply make little adjustments to our image using the tools of color correction today we gotta level up our our game we've got amazing cameras that can shoot amazing images we've got displays that have different characteristics than those cameras and we want to navigate that Journey with the help of good color science with the help of good color management so try these things out go download that Lut play with these Concepts play with these techniques and I hope to see you in our next session of grade school loaded up with questions that we're going to tackle in the full hour that we have dedicated to this topic when we get together see you then

Channel: Cullen Kelly

Views: 49,330

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Id: eS0VZ-NkSjs

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 19 2022