(upbeat music) - What's going on guys, this is Qazi. Welcome back to another epic video, and today I want to talk
about the most common mistake that every beginner colorist makes. And it just does not fail, okay? Anyone that I've seen
messing around with Resolve, this is the first thing that they do. So I'm going to tell you
what it is, first of all, and then we're gonna correct it, we're gonna do it the right way, we're gonna do it the
industry standard way, so get super pumped about that. This is going to change
the way you work, okay? This is going to make you
so much more efficient. So the tips that I'm gonna share here are not anything you haven't seen, but in this context, is
gonna make a lot more sense, so get super pumped about that. If you're a beginner
filmmaker who wants to make their work stand out, color grading is one of the
most effective ways to do that. If you're coming from
Premiere Pro or Final Cut 10 then looking at a node-based
software like Resolve will just confuse the heck out of you. In this free training, you're not only gonna learn
everything about nodes, you will also learn to
build the perfect node tree, regardless of the project
you are working on. I will end the session
with an extended QnA, these questions came from you guys, click the link in the description to sign up for this free training. And, let's go back do talent spotting, something that I was doing
a month or two months ago. And this time, I want to give
a shout out to Nick Watson. He is an advanced photo retoucher. He is a colorist, and he's worked with some of the biggest
brands in the business. Vogue, Giorgio Armani, Burberry,
I mean the list goes on, so make sure to give him some love. Check out his Instagram page, and if you're looking for a
colorist or a photo retoucher, maybe hit this guy up
'cause he is freakin' epic. And if you're enjoying the content, please go ahead and
smash that like button, subscribe to my channel
if you haven't already. Make sure you're following
me in Instagram if you like behind the scenes, before and afters, and all that good stuff. Let's roll the into. (upbeat pop music) - [Qazi] All right, let's
get this show on the road. I'm gonna be playing two
different parts in this tutorial. The first one is gonna be
from a beginners perspective, the second one is going
to be an expert's take on this particular shot. So, first things first, as a beginner, people don't really
know what camera footage they're working with, okay? 'Cause, I mean, I can click
right here and look at it, and it only says Apple
pro res four two two. It could be from any camera, and then trans coded into
pro res so we don't know. This is mistake number 1.
You have to figure out, somebody knows, down the pipeline, when it comes to production, what camera was used to create this. So I dug up the information, and figured out that this is shot on a Black Magic pocket 4K
camera in log, obviously. But, an amateur wouldn't know that. So what's the first thing that they do? If they don't know that information, they can't properly convert this image to rec.709 or anything, so they're just gonna jump in, and this is the first step
that they're gonna take. They're gonna do a minor primary change, they're gonna start off
with with their lift, and then go up with their
gain, something like that. And this is not something
that I'm making up on my own, I'm telling you, I have
seen way too many times, amateurs doing this in my master class, when I'm giving them feedback. And just in general,
this is just something, you will know, if you are a beginner, you have done this in the past. So, this is where we are right now, and that's what a beginner would do, and then they would jump
right into their qualifiers. So they're gonna start
doing something like this, they're gonna go, pick the sky, and then they're gonna come out of there, and they're gonna crank it. They're gonna give it saturation, okay, so the sky is looking nice. And then they're gonna take their gain, and maybe give it some different colors, so maybe something like that, okay it's looking really nice. Then they would go and create a new node, and then this time they
would grab her skin, and then obviously they won't, they will have limited
experience with keying, so they won't be cleaning it up because they wouldn't know how to do that. And then they'll do that again, where they're gonna crank
saturation, and then, just take their gamma and move it where they think the skin looks good. I'm telling you, like this is not something that I'm exaggerating. I've seen that time and again. And then they will just go
ahead and they'll grab this bag. And they'll key it, because they just go, this tool is so powerful, why not do this, because it gives you
the flexibility to just, pick whatever you want, however you want. So then they'll do something like that, again, they'll give it saturation, and they'll ya know, just
accentuate that color a little bit even more. So something like that,
it's looking nice and juicy. And they'll create another node, and then here, they'll just
grab the asphalt, the road, and they'll go, okay let's
just pick up just the road. It's okay if we pick up her dress too, cause I mean again, I don't
think they're gonna be so particular to like, key
something out like that. But let me just take it a step further, and then they'll go let's
bring this down a little bit and just give it a little more shape. Not too much because the
key is breaking, right? So they'll park it somewhere around here. They'll create another node, and they'll, ya know, grab her dress. And then go okay, so now
we have her dress selected, let's just give it some saturation, again, so it looks nice and blue, give
it the right color of denim, something like that, and this
is looking amazing right? So there you go, this is where they sit. Again, it's not made up, it's something that I've
seen time and again. And they're gonna be like
okay, this looks perfect, like we graded it, this is great. Now, the problem with that is, not only it's a terrible way to grade, this is gonna be impossible to
copy/paste from shot to shot. And now, let's start looking
at the mistakes we're making. So, let's start off with the sky first. So if I go turn this on and
off, you see like these edges? How nasty they are? And if I go back and
forth, you're gonna see, that that posterization is there, that posterizing effect is
not going anywhere okay? So now let's go and check out the skin. So here's the skin, and
if I do before and after, not to mention look at what's
happening with the lips. Okay? So if I do before and
after, and I play it through. Look at how unnatural and weird it looks, like what's happening in the shadow areas. Like in the dark areas, like
on the edges of her hair. Okay? And then once again, let's
go back to this sky node, and look what's happening
here, look at these edges. This wasn't there before.
Let me go all the way back. This is before, and then this
is after, what we're creating, okay? So that's there. Now let's check out what
we did with the bag. And, first look, it looks kinda clean. Ya know? We did a good job, but then we start to
see these imperfections. Like look at what's happening
in the hand right here. Look at what's happening in the hair, and once again, it's adding
this weird, just a pop of color, but everything is done in
the worst way possible. And then, let's look at the asphalt. So very nice, we added a lot of contrast, but at the cost of this. And this only gets worse
when you do a playback. And again, trust me, I promise
you, I'm not making this up, some of you have even
done it, and you know it. This is just, and then,
what happens is that people have this experience grading, and then go grading is not for me, I'm gonna go back to the Lutz. Okay? I'm gonna go back to my
old ways and just use Lutz, and ya know, I'll be happy again. Look what's happening, okay? And then, you see these edges right here? They weren't there before.
I'm gonna go all the way back. You see, I'm gonna get close
so you can really see it, but like just look at
the edges of her pants, this is after, this is
before. So this, wasn't there. That random artifacting
wasn't there either okay? So, the reason why big Hollywood colorists and commercial colorists
and everybody will tell you use qualifiers sparingly
is for this reason. Cause you can punch in eight
hundred percent on every frame, and make sure that you
got everything, okay? So that's just not going to happen. This is not how it works
when you're grading. You have to grade a lot of
shots in not a lot of time. So, this is what we're looking
at, this is where we sit, everything looks beautiful, right? So this is an amateur's
way of handling this shot. Now I'm going to create a new version, I'm gonna get rid of all of this. And then we're gonna start over again. So let's just say, let's assume we didn't get the
information for the camera. This is how I would approach this. First of all, I would have some sort
of method to my madness. So here, I would call this temp tint. This is my first node, I'm
gonna leave it as is for now. My second node, is going
to be called contrast. This is basically gonna be my exposure. Third one, is gonna be called primary, some people call it CDL.
That's gonna be my third node. Here, I'm gonna have HSL, now, mind you, I'm gonna try to keep this
as simple as possible, I'm not building my regular node tree, that's not what we're going for. Okay? So let's not get confused,
let's just stay right here. First of all, I'm gonna
go under my contrast, and let me just go back and
park it on my hero frame. That's very important, that's
another thing a pro would do. They would always have a
hero frame within their shot that represents the entire
shot in the best way possible. So first thing that I'm gonna do, I'm gonna start off with my contrast. I'm gonna leave it somewhere around here, I'm gonna take my pivot and I'm gonna open it up a little bit, not too much, so something like that, and
that's enough for the contrast. And that's where I'm gonna
park it, okay? First. Then I'm gonna go under my primaries, I'm gonna take my lift, I'm gonna bring it down a little bit, I'm gonna take my gamma,
open up the image, I'm gonna take my gain, I'm
gonna pull it down a little bit. I'm gonna take my gamma up,
gain down, something like that, and then lift down, just to
keep that contrast going. Gamma up, gain down, something like that, so let's just leave it here for now. And now I'm gonna go
ahead, take my saturation, crank it all the way, one
hundred percent, okay? My saturation is at a hundred percent. Don't freak out yet, okay? This is why we have the HSL node, because I'm gonna show you
what we're about to do in here. Okay? So instead of using
all these qualifiers and control our colors, we will still be able to do a lot of that, but in a much more clinical way. So I'm gonna go under my
hue versus saturation. And here what I'm gonna
do is I'm gonna say, hey, take my yellow and pull it down. Because it's looking just a
bit too digital for me. Okay? And keep it somewhere around here. Now, I'm gonna park this here, and now I'm gonna jump
back to my node number 1. Let's do a little bit of temp and tint. You know, even before we do this, let's just turn this off, let's go here and do a
little bit of temp and tint. What are we feeling here? It looks that this is a bit too warm. The image is a little bit too much on the yellowish green side. And we can see it in our vector sculp too, it's not very well balanced,
if it's well balanced, it should be right in the
middle, somewhere, okay? So what we can do here is that I will go under my temp and tint, and I'm gonna cool it off a little bit. First I'm gonna go too far
and then I'm gonna come back. I'm gonna leave it somewhere around here, then I'm gonna take my tint, and I'm gonna add a little bit of magenta. Okay, I'm gonna go too far,
I'm gonna pull it back. And I'm gonna leave it
somewhere around here. I'm gonna take my temp and I'm gonna leave it somewhere around here, okay? So now if I do before and after, you're seeing the difference. And all of a sudden, now we're seeing colors that
we weren't seeing before. So before, there was this weird tint. Now we see that the car is white, you know, her hair is
red, the sky is blue, there is white in here. Ya know? There is like this brick
color that we see now that we weren't seeing before. So it was all a weird green tint. Ya know? So now we're seeing our colors. Now let's go back into our HSL curves, and now we see that we don't need to pull our yellows down as much. So I'm gonna go back under
my hue versus saturation, I'm gonna pull my yellows up a little bit. I'm gonna say maybe keep
it somewhere around here. Don't crush it all the way. So this is, this just takes
the sting off a little bit, gives it a little bit
of like, a "film feel" so we can keep it here. But now what I can say is that hey, take my cyan hue and
start swinging my sky, because I wanna have a
little bit of teal in my sky. So now I'm putting a little
bit of teal in my sky, and I can take my blue
channel and do the same thing. And just put a little
bit more teal in my sky. And now, if I wanna give
it the illusion of like, a better dynamic range, what I can do is I can go
under my hue versus luminance and I can go hey pull my
cyan down a little bit. And be careful with that, don't overdo it. And I can say, grab my blue and pull it
down a little bit too. And now, just look at
this area right here, if I do before and after, see? And you can even see it in my parade, that it feels like we're just creating so much more dynamic range
if you will from our image, just by doing this, and
it's a very gentle curve, nothing is cracking, nothing is breaking, we don't have to worry
about it frame by frame. This is all under control. Okay? What else can we do here? So, we can go back into
or hue versus saturation. Let's take our cyan and
pull it up a little bit, and then let's take our blue
and pull it up a little bit. Okay? So what is that doing? Like, look what it's doing, it's bringing out our dress right here, it's bringing out the sky
quite a bit, like look at that, how big of a difference it's making. And again, it's very
natural, nothing is cracking, nothing is breaking, and I'm taking my time
to show you these tools, but once you know to do it this way, you could be lightning fast. Okay? So this is where we sit so far. What else can we do to it
to really accentuate it? A couple of things, we can
go back in our primaries and see if there is any more room. But ya know, before we even do that, I would just do this, I
would bring this down, and weather you're a pro
or an amateur or whatever, this is one skill that
you should really learn. You know how much I
really love using glow, but let's just say if you're just like, dude, we still gotta bring her out, she's still in the shadow, so that's okay. This is where we go in here, and we drop this down to soft light, we pull this, and we go all the way out, and we take our spread
and go all the way out, and don't freak out, it's okay, this is what we gotta do. Now we gotta go under our qualifier, but we're gonna use it the right way. So I'm gonna take my luminance, and I'm gonna crank it
to about seventeen-ish. So it's like very soft. And then I'm gonna bring
this down to around, to around sixty-ish,
something like that, okay? So, look at what's happening,
look at what we did. We, just check this out, we don't have to create power windows, we didn't have to do any of that. We just left the sky where it is, because if I show you
what's really happening, you can see it, like in terms of what we're grabbing and what we're not grabbing. So, we pretty much said, hey, leave everything else as is, just grab the areas that are a little bit, ya know, in the lower
mids and life 'em up. So basically, take these
and everything underneath and just lift it. And that's just what happened here, okay? And now, I can go under my global blend, and I can balance it
out a little bit right? So I mean I can go in here
and I can go under my blend and just kinda split the difference. Just come back a little bit,
so it's not too jarring. So I can do something like that, we're splitting the difference. Now look how big of a difference we made. Before and after, and look
at the contrast we added, look at all the detail that
we can see here on the bike. And this is all very natural, we're not doing anything
that looks artificial, like look at that, this
has a very nice feel to it. And, again, everything is protected. So this is our glow, and now, I'm gonna top it off by adding grain, and now there are the
steps that literally take your average-looking project
and make it look very high-end, and it doesn't cost you anything, I mean, it's part of
DaVinci Resolve's package. And again, the way I'm
showing you these techniques, it's not really hard to
use, but if you learn these and apply them in the way I'm showing you, I mean just look at the kind
of image that you've created from where we started
to where we ended up. So, this is basically it. So let's look at what an amateur created, and once again, not exaggerating,
too many people do this, where they literally have
this kind of action going on when you're first
starting out with Resolve. So what happens, you just go rely on lux because you don't know what else to do. And here, we ended up with this image, which is much more natural. Now, a couple of things
that we can do with it, is that we can warm it up a little bit. But ya know what? I personally like it, so I'm leaving it in, it has a very natural look to it, okay? So the moral of the story
is that you can do a lot without using qualifiers
and power windows, and this is my message to you guys, perfect your primary game, really learn to message your image, and try to get the most out of it by using these techniques
that I just showed you, because if you implement this process, this node tree right here,
this very simple node tree. If you apply this to your next project, I promise you, you will be
sixty to seventy times faster than what you were doing before. And, let's do this, I'm
gonna take all these and I'm gonna kill em, I'm gonna start off with our first node, which was node number 2 in this case. And we started with our contrast. Then we did our primaries,
and look at just these two, how much work was done here, and then we went into our temp and tint and balanced out our image, and we can see it here, and then, we did our a lot of heavy lifting with our HSL curves, just look at it, how much work we did in our HSL curves. You know what? Let's do one
more thing in our HSL curves. I'm gonna go back in
here and I'm gonna say take my red saturation, and crank it. That's where her skin lies, her hair lies, and this bag is. Okay? So I'm gonna crank it, and then I'm gonna park it
somewhere where it looks tasteful okay? I'm gonna go under
the yellow saturation and see if I need to mess
with it a little bit. But, I think this one
is a little bit better. It actually helps us. And now, we're gonna go into our glow, and look at the amount
of difference we've made just with our glow. I mean just look at around her face, at all the detail that we got here. Like, look at right here, the separation between the
road and her hand and her arm, right there, how much
of her dress came out, like the colors. And all the colors just got
embedded into this frame, like it gives it such
a film look and then, we topped it off with the film grain, and that's what we ended up with. Let's check out, look at
this, before and after. Let's check out the final
look in full screen. (upbeat music) - Now I gave you a disclaimer before we even jumped into that video, that there is not going to be
anything revolutionary here, but the things that I will show you, in this particular context,
should make a lot more sense. And especially for those
that are starting out and that weren't familiar
with this process, trust me, streamlining your process,
when it comes to color grading, is everything, okay? You're not gonna get as
much time as an editor or anybody else in the post production. I mean, usually everything
is going to be dropped on you last minute and you have to get it done, you have to do it right, and you gotta make sure
that it's up there. Ya know? It really brings up
the entire production quality, and all that stuff. So you can't waste time
trial and erroring, you need to have a process where you can just hit the ground running. So on that note, do not forget
to check out the training, literally one hour long training that's gonna transform
your color grading career, if you thought this was good, this is not even the tip of the iceberg. So, check out that training,
link is down below, and if you're enjoying the content, smash the like button,
subscribe to my channel, and I will see you guys in the next video. (funky synth music)
