Top 9 Most Underrated Resolve Color Controls

hi I'm Alex Roldan from lone color grading and film simplified calm I work with a lot of starting filmmakers who are just starting with resolve and I noticed a very important pattern when everyone you know when you start with resolve and you open resolve and you want to work with it you get sucked in by flashy controls like for example when you open resolve you have the cover wheels from a beginner's perspective it looks very very interesting then you move to the color bars and they look unbelievably more interesting and flashy and you get drawn to them then you see curves and you go Wow unbelievable and then you see the hue versus you curve which looks really cool so you get sucked into all these very cool looking effects however there are another set of effects the other effects are very important very powerful but they just don't have flashy controls so I notice that a lot of filmmakers they just start with the flashiest thing they can start with like the opened image and they like color wheels now so now we're going to be taking a look at some of the other controls that aren't as flashy but they're very important very powerful and pros use them all the time so let's start [Music] so let's take a look at the result interface here these are the color wheels look very flashy and interesting however just below the color wheels you have these basic controls and these controls are divided into two separate sections in the first section here I have things like contrast vivid saturation hue or luma mix however if I click the number 2 here I open another set of controls so you have temperature tent mid-tone details color dual shadows and highlights the problem these controls face is that they don't look very prominent they don't look very sexy and frankly when you look at them most new filmmakers would totally ignore this part here however let's take a look on how these controls can really make your work much faster so the first thing I want to do here is to explain every one of these controls and then we get back to saying how they work together how you can use all these controls together to work with your image so let's start the first control is contrast I'm pretty sure a lot of you are already familiar with contrast contrast simply make the bright areas in the image brighter and the dark areas in the image darker it's as simple as that the white objects will become whiter the dark will become darker the next control is pivot pivot determines it the point will contrast look at and consider you know what everything about this point I'm gonna be considering white and just move up and everything below this point I'm gonna be the Syrian dark and just move it down so this changes that particular point so for example I'm going to increase contrast a lot in this image here take a look at the image and now take a look when I control the pivot controller to the left or right note how I'm making the contrast adjustment emphasize a certain part of the image for example not when I got the pivot all the way to the right now the contrast adjustment is emphasizing the window the area outside the window however if I go back to a pivot and pull it to the left now I'm emphasizing his face and if I pull it even further I can for example emphasize his clothes so pivot determines the point that contrast considers to be the middle point and it pushes everything pour down from that particular point let's reset the next point here is saturation which I guess is pretty self-explanatory just more saturation less saturation in the image and we're going to be skipping hue and luma mix here because it's very rare for these two controls to be used in standard color correction or grading then let's take a look at the second set of controls I'm simply going to click on number 2 here and I just opened the second set the first controller we have here is temperature which simply controls how warm or cool the image look so if I pull it to the left the image simply becomes more blue cooler image and if I pull it to the right it's a warmer image let's reset then we have the tint controls the tint control simply works the same way as temperature however instead of making the image cooler or warmer it just controls how green the images just look at it this way it's simply balances green with magenta however most of the time you're going to be thinking of it as the green controller so if I come to tint here pull it this way this is a greener image pull it to the right this is a LESBIAN image which automatically makes it look more magenta we said then we have the mid-tone detail controller here think of mid-tone details as a variation on the contrast adjustment it just adds contrast around the edges in your image you can simply pull it to the right which gives the image more of an HDR look course this is pseudo HDR we're not really working with actual Utley our material but it gives this HDR look to the image and if I hold it to the left I'm actually reducing the contrast and the image around the edges which is a different look so let's reset then we have the color boost controller now in the beginning color boost will look a lot like saturation so if I increase color boost I'm increasing saturation lowering color boost and lowering saturation now color boost is really different than the unsaturation however in this particular case we need to understand one thing about color boost is that color boost mixes the original colors of the image with the modified colors what does that mean for example I'm simply going to come to temperature here and make the image new yellow so I changed the colors of the image and I made it really yellow now I'm going to go back and click on the first set of controllers here to open saturation and reduce saturation all the way and notice that when we reduce saturation we ended up with a black and white image now what does that tell you it simply means that the saturation controller happened after we changed the temperature so we first made the image really yellow then the saturation controller when we reduce it it just reduced all the colors in the image however let's reset the saturation controller by double clicking on it and then going back to the second set of controllers to color boost and now notice something very important if I reduce color boost all the way down we do not end up with a black and white image we actually end up with a yellow image and if I increase color boost I'm getting a lot of the original colors from the image back which means that in this particular case you can simply think of color boost as a way to balance the original colors from the image with the new changed colors of the image then we have the shadows and highlights controllers which as his name implies let's reset control the shadows and highlights these two controllers are really useful for shadow and highlights recovery for example sometimes you might go to contrast and add a lot of contrast until you lose information and highlights let's add more contrast here and note that now we lost information and highlights however I can simply click on number 2 here go to the highlights controller drag it down and note how I recovered some of the information and highlights take a look at the original image and the new one and I also lost a lot of information in shadows I can simply go to the shadows controller here drag it to the right and I'm recovering information in shadows and that was an overview of each and every individual effect here however how do we use these effects together because here's what happens you have a lot of control you have a lot of effects and you don't know where to start Slyke should you start with contrast so you start with saturation what should you do now I just want to emphasize that this is art and not science which means that whatever I'm going to tell you here guarding this particular thing that the workflow is my personal opinion this is how I usually do it and I'm sure a lot of filmmakers have different ways of doing this however this is my personal workflow that I usually use let's start working with this image for example I'm just going to reset here right click and make sure set all grades and nodes and now let's start working on this image huge volume my workflow is very simple I start with the first set of controller so the first page and I start this way contrast pivot saturation so I start with contrast then pivot then saturation and I do not control you and luma mix at all then I switch to the second page and I also go from left to right so temperature tint meet those details a lot of time I'll just skip it then color boost shadow and highlights so we're simply working from left to right however when you work from left to right usually these controls are connected which means that once you change something down the line it will affect something you worked on at the beginning of your work so that's why I use phases so here's the deal I go from left to right with these controllers and I call that phase 1 then I go back again controlling the same controllers also from left to right ok again for the same controllers again and that will just balance the image much better for me let's take a look an example so let's start working with this image I'll simply come to the contrast controller here and drag it left and right until I reach the point that I think is good for contrast adjustment yeah much better then I'm going to move to pivot and again left-right until I find a point that I think is good for me now one of the question here is what would you consider a good point for a contrast adjustment like for example I decided for some reason that this particular point here in pivot is actually a good place to have my pivot control this is a bit value well if you take a look at the image you have a lot of objects in the image so you need to ask yourself a very important question what's important in this image what exactly my trying to achieve what am i trying to emphasize in this image so for example I decided that this is a good point here because I was actually focused on her face so for example if I dig the pivot point to the right note that this is a great point for the window outside but her face just became a bit unclear here in this image and if I move the pivot to the left now you know it's just very bright and her face is just bright is in an unnatural way so whenever you work with contrast and pivot the number one question you need to ask yourself is what am I trying to emphasize so in this particular case I'm just going to move the pivot controller until I find a good set up here for pivot where her face looks natural then I'm going to control saturation reducing saturation increasing saturation and just trying to balance things and much better and then I'm going to ignore hue and lure mix and move to the second page here and I'm gonna start working with temperature so I click temperature pull it to the right to the left until I find a good point I guess this is a good point for me this is an image I like however again this is pretty subjective you might be working on the same image and you might click on temperature here and you decide that this meter is a better look for you there is nothing wrong with that all what's happening here is that personally I like this point here I just liked it to be a bit bluish the image then again remember 10th will control the green how green the image is so if I pull it to the left more green to the right list green and I think this is a good point here I'm going to ignore mid-tone details and I'm just gonna go to color boost again there is no right or wrong here I'll simply pull it to the left right till I reach the point that I think is good for this image and finally we can recover information with shadows and highlights so this is the shadows now this is a good point here and then highlights I'm going to pull it to the left a bit take a look at this part of the window here when I pull it to the right I'm losing information outside the window to the left and recovering information outside the window now that was phase one or one one or whatever you want to call it so I controlled all these parameters from left to right now I'm going to repeat everything one more time and I personally call this phase 2 so I'm simply gonna click on one here again go to contrast and again control contrast up or down a bit much better the pivot maybe we can change it a bit I'm just going to go to saturation now and down up yeah this is much better move to the second controller temperature yeah just a bit to the right tint much better ignoring mid-tone details for now color boost down up much better shadows I think this is a good point and highlights one more time now take a look at the original image and a new image again one more time take a look at the original image and the new one now note how much of a difference we managed to make to the colors of the image the colors looked way better again before after and the important thing is that we did all this without touching the core encode flashy controllers in and resolve so we did not use the color wheels in any way within cues curves we didn't use a hue versus saturation curve nothing this was all done with these little controllers down that most starting filmmakers usually ignore and and that's totally understandable I mean if you're starting to use a new software you're naturally going to be gravitating towards the flashy or cooler looking controls and the software so if you like this please visit us at film simplified comm where you can join our free Deventer ease of crash course which is simply the easiest and fastest way to get you started with resolve the course covers all the aspects of resolve so it's not simply about color grading you have different sections where every section is dedicated to a certain cabin resolve so you have a section only for editing a section for compositing a section for color grading audio the whole thing so please visit us at film simplify that comm thank you film simplified calm

Channel: Learn Color Grading

Views: 47,390

Keywords: davinci resolve, color grading

Id: -i1z86r3SLg

Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 02 2019