Top 3 Color Corrector Tips in Fusion - DaVinci Resolve Fusion Tutorial for Beginners

today we're talking about the color corrector tool in Fusion yes resolve is amazing at color correcting in the color page but we also have a lot of tools inside of the fusion page to make sure the elements in your compositions match together we'll also be looking at how we use the color corrector to fix this comp it kind of has all this purpley blue lighting and kind of make this screen match so that it all fits nicely my name is Casey I help content creators learn how to use Fusion I also have a free video course the fusion Survival Guide it's available now in the description below let's correct some colors so before we dive into this craziness let's just make things real simple here for a hot second I'm just going to bring up our Sunset photo here we can look at this cropped all wide screen all it looks epic now let's talk about this color corrector it's the fifth icon over here in our toolbar I can grab this and drag it in and I can connect whatever I want to color correct to the yellow input here that's the main input and it will automatically hook it up if you just drop it in the middle of the color corrector as long as nothing else is can connected so now I'll hit 2 on the keyboard to make sure that we're looking at our color correction here and the controls for this node just like in any node are over here in the inspector and we have a lot of different properties we can adjust we can tint this we can adjust the brightness you know with gain lift gamma if you've done any color correction before this should make a lot of sense up here where it says menu you can also flip this to levels or histogram or suppress where you can suppress like certain Hues and stuff like that very nice there's kind of a whole variety of tools just in this one node so you can play around with those and figure out basically what they do but there are some important things that you wouldn't really know just by messing around first tip for color correction inside of fusion you pretty much want to color correct before you do anything else for the most part what do I mean by that so if I'm going to do something like cut out a photo with a mask like this if I cut it out and then I color correct it like this a lot of the time it's probably going gonna work okay but sometimes for instance if I were to push up the lift like this it doesn't just color correct this Sunset photo it color corrects everything and it's very frustrating and why is it doing that it's only really supposed to color correct this part right and so this is something that we can avoid by not putting this mask on the photo before we color correct it but color correcting the photo and then masking it on the merge so now when we color correct and I push up the lift and everything it's just color correcting the photo and then we're cutting it out we're not cutting it out and then color correcting it see if I grab this ellipse and put that here it changes the background as well see the difference and so as much as you can it's a good idea to color correct before you cut things out before you transform them same thing goes for like a blur and any other kind of I mean a lot of other kind of effects basically you want to do your color correction before other stuff usually if I blur this before I color correct it I get a different result like look at that here's the color correction before the blur here's the blur before the color correction so it does make a difference and you generally get better results if you color correct before you add other stuff now on to our second tip which is kind of related when you add a color correction node and let's say we have this ellipse here like this one thing that you can do is you can go over in the inspector here under options and there's a little tick box called predivide post multiply and without getting super crazy basically this fixes that problem that we're having so when I click this it's only going to color correct inside of this mask it's not going to let it kind of bleed out everywhere else long story short if your color corrector is acting strange try taking this box because that will usually solve all the problems if you want to learn more about why exactly this happens let me know in the comments and I'll make a video on it it's a little bit technical kind of more of an advanced topic but yeah if you click this pre-divided post multiply you can add your mask before you color correct and everything will be okay however it's better and it's cleaner if you can just to mask it second anyway it's generally best practice to not color correct something that has an alpha channel that has a transparency you always want to color correct something without the transparency and then apply the mask the transparency or whatever the other tip that I want to give you about a color corrector is that you can mask a color corrector just like you would any node and kind of save a little bit of real estate and a little bit of work here I could actually take this duplicate Sunset photo out take the merge out and I could just color correct our photo and I can limit where the color corrector is affecting the image by connecting a mask to it and so we're getting essentially the same thing but we're doing our color correction just inside of the mask instead of making a separate layer and color correcting it and putting it on so you can do some really cool stuff with the color corrector you can even get pretty Advanced and do some kind of Dodge and burn sort of techniques this way a lot like you would in the color page of resolve just by adding a mask to your color corrector pretty cool so let's take a look at our example here we'll start out with our original footage this is a 3D render of a desktop and we have our screen but we don't want this welcome screen we want something a little bit nicer and so we have our hi-res image here and we're using a Tracker to match move this and do a little screen replace but we want those colors to be a little nicer so what I've done I'll just bring this up in the left viewer is I've added a color corrector to do a couple things first thing we're doing is tinting this pink and we're limiting this with a rectangle mask so I'm just kind of pushing this to the right just to do kind of the right side and then we have a separate color corrector right after it which is turning the other side blue and that just uses that same mask but in our settings here I'm clicking apply mask inverted so that turns it from the right side to the left side so that we can color correct two different sides of the screen using just one mask the next color corrector just pushes the dark Parts down a little bit and just makes this kind of sit a little bit nicer in our comp and one thing I'm doing here with this last color corrector is making sure to hit pre-divided post multiply because there's some weirdness here happening where it kind of darkens this side of the screen and look what happens when I click this off and on it changes that side of the screen again there's a bunch of technical reasons why this is a thing but again if you're having a weird problem with your color correction boom that will fix it but we're doing our color correction on our image before we're cropping it and before we're putting it into the tracker we could color correct this image it's just more problematic to do that and there's no real reason to you can choose whether you want to put it before or after might as well just color correct it before and here's our final comp with some reflection and a bunch of stuff in there to make this look a little nicer and by the way if you're looking at this node graph and you're like what the heck is going on I don't understand any of that but you want to well we're coming out with some amazing educational stuff for you in the future for now make sure to grab that Fusion Survival Guide it's down in the description below it's a free video course that teaches you a bunch of important tips about working infusion so if you don't quite understand stuff oh baby it's going to be so good any other questions about a color corrector why don't you put it down in the description and then I'll hit my mic a bunch same time how about that maybe we'll have a mic hitting party unless you have a friend named Mike you meet you be nice to that guy

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 7,551

Keywords: Davinci Resolve 17, blackmagic design, casey faris, how to, free video editor, tutorial, davinci resolve 18, resolve for beginners, davinci tutorials, editing, color, fusion, davinci resolve 18 tutorial, davinci resolve tutorial 2023, davinci resolve color grading, casey faris davinci resolve 18, casey faris fusion, casey faris davinci resolve 18 tutorial, how to color correct in davinci resolve 18, how to learn fusion in davinci resolve

Id: gQHRy9zQ8Ak

Length: 7min 16sec (436 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2023