Understanding Nodes in Color Grading // Davinci Resolve 18

hey guys in today's video we are going to talk about notes and what notes are how they work and why they are so great for color grading compared to something like in Premiere Pro where you have lumitri color which is in my humble opinion sorry about that but it is you can still do fine color grading in Premiere Pro and lumitra color you can probably do the same in Final Cut Pro as well with something similar but to be honest notes in DaVinci is it's been such a game changer for me and it's so great for color grading so if you've seen my previous videos on let's color grade you've probably already seen notes and they might seem a little bit frightening in the beginning it's a different way of looking at it but we'll go through it step by step we'll talk about what the different nodes are at least the basic ones and how they work we wanna we're gonna talk about how they kind of match and mix into what our common understanding of layers are if you've done some video editing before and don't worry if you don't know what notes are at all we'll go through the very basics in the beginning and take you through it all and I'll show you my kind of basic workflow on how I do color grading as well and why it makes so much sense to do it in notes and split up the color grading process as you go through it so without much further Ado let's just jump straight into DaVinci on the computer and get started we are inside of DaVinci now and we've jumped right into the color green tab as that's where we will be working today and as you see when you open the color tab for the first time you have one note already so this is a node it says 01 on this one already because it's our first node and right now when we hover above it it says no color correction because we haven't done anything at all on the left we have our image this is our log image from my Canon R6 it's shot in C log3 that's just first before we do anything talk about what I noticed so a note is basically where all your controls for your color grading lives is where we do all our adjustments and we've color grade it in Final Cut Pro or in Premiere Pro before this is kind of similar to lumitri color and whatever they have in Final Cut Pro as well similar to other tools where you can Video Edit as well you have all these controls where you can do like curves and you can do usually you have the lock wheels with shadows mid tones and highlights all this stuff is what lives inside of this and if you worked in Premiere Pro before so I have lumitri color is kind of similar one millimeter color is kind of similar to one node and where it gets super super useful to have these notes you'll see in just a minute when I show you why you need to split or why you should split your color grading into different notes and how they work together and how that's such a great workflow so the first thing I'm gonna do here is tell you what kind of note this is so this is just a simple serial node right now it lives on its own it has two Green Dots here or an arrow and a square and the same thing with the blue the blue ones we won't touch today these are the keyings and you can do some more advanced stuff with these along the lines but for our simple understanding of what a node is you don't really need to to understand what the blue ones does for this quick tutorial so the green ones is the input this is what goes into our node and the green square here is what goes out of our node and right now it's fixed into our timeline so this is our input and this is our output so these needs to be combined all the way through for our signal to go through and our color grade to go through to our clip so the first thing I want to do is create another serial node and I'll drag that all the way to the right and that's because I want it to be converting our log image to rec 709 so I'm going to apply a transform tool here to create it from log to rec 709 and if you haven't shot in log this doesn't really apply that much to you but it the gamma input or the gamut is Canon Cinema Gammon that's what I've shown in and it's shut in Canon log 3 so that's what we're going to select and we're going to transform it into Rec 709 and we are gonna make gamma 2.4 our gamma so you can see essentially it's just made it from a less flat image into something that our display understands I'll make a video very soon on the basics of color management and what all this means so if you haven't shot in lock just know that this is the basics and this doesn't really have anything to do with the node in particular but what we need to understand now is that we have two nodes and these are as I said before serial notes so we click add node and then we added a Serial node we have these different nodes so we have serial we can add one after and one before then we have parallel notes layer nodes and outside notes and these are the ones that we will go through today but let's just start with the basics and start with our serial notes so right now we have two notes we have the one that transform our image and then we have one node that right now does nothing so if I click command d that disables it and it enables it again and you can see nothing happens if we do the same on our second node you'll see that it turns off the conversion that we did and turns it on again so right now these two nodes are combined but nothing happens in node one so let's add another serial node and just not care about what's now node free over here this is our conversion so let's just focus on what's going on in node one and two now if I was going to start creating this image I would probably start with creating some contrast so I'll just go into our custom curves and make a simple this curve here like so to create some contrast in our image now what's going on now is that this node inherits whatever is going on in node one so you can kind of see him as layers so if we put them on top of each other we can even add another one node free these work as our layers this is how you understand it in common editing tools that doesn't that are node based this is kind of like our bottom layer our second layer and our third layer so if now we wanted to adjust the exposure we can go to our primary wheels and we can just drag down the offset a little bit to kind of balance in the image and make sure that the exposure is correct that everything lies more or less where we wanted inside of our scope down here so what happens here is that whatever happened in Node 1 will now be taken into node 2. so if I turn this off you can see that this these two are now the same and also on node free nothing happens if we turn off node 4 now we don't have our conversion but we still have our exposure changes going on if I turn on node 2 again this still happens so everything that happens down here will continue into the next node that's why they are serial nodes let's just turn on everything again and the way you can really see how this works is that if we were to say okay let's take Note 3 and node four by the way I just clicked option s to add another serial node it's the same thing as right clicking and adding a Serial node okay so if we take node free and we say okay let's put saturation to zero that means our image is basically black and white this no colors left now if we go into node four you can see saturation is back to 50 which is the starting point but if I turn it up now nothing really happens because we don't have any colors in our image at all that's because we took out all the colors in node free and everything that happens after that is taking the output from node free and everything that happened before putting it into the next node and that's what we're working with now so we don't have any color left we can't really go into our Curves in here and say okay I want the the Green Point to be changed changing nothing happens and you can see there's no graph down here you know because we don't have any color left inside of our node so basically right now from node free and onwards we only have black and white to work with we could still go into our custom curves and add more contrast that will still work but we don't have any colors to work with so just to understand how serial nodes work the previous node everything is taken from that and what happened prior to that putting into the next node and then that's what we're working with so that kind of goes into how you're stacking together your edit and kind of the progress of how you want to do things as well so let's just reset node free again and now we're back to our starting point so understanding serial node is quite easy you can see them as layers so layer one well the bottom layer layer two layer three layer four we're just building on top of that but just understanding that if we take away something it will not be there in the next one but the great thing about notes now are that because we just did our desaturation here we can go back in and change that so now we have no saturation left again and if we go to Note 4 and we say Okay um I want to add some yellow into the midtones I can do that and you can see that we slightly have some yellow tones coming in but even then go in and say okay I actually want my saturation back now or even more more saturation so let's crank it up to 100 that that looks nice but because I have put it into notes I can go in and individually control everything that's going on so I can also go in and adjust our curve here say Okay I want some more contrast I can do that and you could put everything into one node so let's just remove these notes again and say okay so this is now the note that I want to desaturate put it down to 25. we only have half the colors that we had before now and we can even go in and disable this one and say okay let's just crank down our offset here and now we basically have the same image as before even if we go and put the saturation back these two nodes are doing the exact same as what we did before with the offset but now if I turn this off you will go back to only having the rec 709 conversion that we did over here but nothing else going on and going in to adjust this is going to be kind of confusing you can see that when we hover above it we've done something with primary offset and we've done something with custom curves and we have the small dots up here showing what we've done but if we keep stacking on top of this we'll just keep adding more stuff and when we disable it and try to figure out what's going on we can't really see what's happening so the great way of doing this is to build them as kind of layers and feeding into each other and that way controlling what you're doing and you have an easier time going back and nitpicking what you're doing okay so that's where serial nodes come in handy and you could say okay I could just stack lumetri color inside of Premiere Pro and that would be the same and yes in theory that would be the exact same so why on notes then so powerful and why am I talking about them like it's some crazy cool that you all need to know now just deleted Note 4 and now let me show you another note so remember in the beginning we talked about having these different notes now we've covered serial notes and how they work they feed into each other and then feed into the next one and they inherit whatever happened prior to that note okay now let's add a parallel node this node goes underneath the first node and what's so cool about the parallel nodes is that they are both feeding the input from node two so whatever happened up until node 2 here our exposure change in the offset and our exposure or like our contrast in the custom curve that has happened here but now both of these are fed from that so that means if we change something inside of node free it doesn't change that in Note 4 or at least the input that note 4 has has not been changed let me give you an example of why that's great so let's just delete this node again so let's just add another note again go back to this structure and then say okay for node four I want to select in our qualifier I want to select all the darkest Parts in here so let's just drag down illuminance click shift H to see what we're doing right now we're not selecting anything drag it up and now you can see okay now we have the darkest part we could just soften it out and okay so now we kind of have selected the darkest parts of our image including our subject here that's great now I want to go in Click shift H again see what we're doing and now I want to make all of these Shadows blue not that that makes much sense but let's just turn down the temperature and see what's happening okay minus 3 000 just to make a symbol this is what's going on now so Note 4 now is changing all the Shadows it's not changing the highlights it's changing all the shadows and we could even go back and say okay we want a little bit less so now it's only like the darkest parts of our image but now if we go back to node free and say okay I want to go back to our primary Wheels here and then just increase the lift and look what happens now now nothing is turned blue or at least it's very very little that's turned blue so if we go out to a selection here and click shift H we'll see that we almost have nothing selected now and that's because node 3 feeds into Note 4 so what we selected before was the darkest Parts but those parts are not the darkest anymore because now we've brightened that up in node free and that changes everything so that's where parallel nodes come in very handy so let's just reset or delete these two again create a new serial node here and then create a parallel node underneath it let's try and do the same thing so for this node we will go in and or let's say node four we'll go in and take the darkest Parts again click up the softening and then just drag it up and so we have something that we like something like this that's something that we have before let's say we want to go maybe not as extreme this time but let's go one minus 1000 just to cool it down you can see the changes that we've done here but now if we go in to node free now and say okay we want to do the same thing we want to lift up the colors here maybe not as extreme but like so you can actually see that we still have made all the parts blue or cooled them down as we're doing with the temperature as we did before because what we are selecting in node 4 down here hasn't changed at all these are stay still the exact same things that we have selected but now we're also brightening it up in node free but we we're keeping that blue on that cooled tint that we made to the darkest parts of the image because what we're doing to both notes feeding from node two so that's where nodes come in and they're really really strong because we can put things on top of each other like this and it doesn't really work as the layers per se with these parallel notes because they're mixing things together so you can see how that's mixed together that we both brighten it up and we've made the blue that's really really strong you can see that this is a parallel mixer so as you remember we had layer notes so this is the second one and actually it'll do the same thing it'll just make another note underneath the first one and then feed the inputs from the previous nodes which are node two in this case but we can also click on this one and just morph it into a layer mixer node which is essentially doing the same thing and an interesting thing happened here that now we have actually only brightened up the darker parts not as much as we did before because now the layers are being put together and a way to show that is if we go back and say okay let's just stop this say okay I wanna now we haven't brightened up this part we still have our second node everything in the darkest parts of blue but now I wanna warm up the image you can see if we warm it up to a thousand it's only more or less these parts here that are being brightened up and not the not everything going on node file if I turn off node four you can see that everything is now being warmed up by the temperature but if I turn it on all the parts that we selected that are the darkest parts and because we kind of soften it out we can just remove the softening again now you can really see what's going on right so because we don't have the softening there's no blending going on at all whatever we're saying here is that this is the bottom layer this is a little bit confusing so let's just cover that real quick you can see this feeds into the first input this feeds into the second input and contrary to what we just talked about before and what layers normally are and how they understand the bottom layer is usually the bottom layer inside of these layer nodes is actually opposite so the top layer is the button layer and then so forth the bottom layer will be the top layer it's a little bit confusing but just remember that and you'll be fine honestly I don't use this layer notes that often but they can be quite handy if you want to split something if you want to isolate the subject do something to the background this can be a very great way to do it because then you will make sure that nothing happens to the subject at all only whatever you're doing here and then whatever's going on on the layer beneath will not affect the subject so you can see now that we didn't soften anything on our luminance selection here what's going on is that all the dark spots are just turned blue and it kind of oh rules overwrites whatever's going on in node free so that doesn't impact this node at all but we still mix them together in the sense that whatever happens in node 3 is fit in here and what happens in node 4 is put on top and not affected byte node free but if we had done it in the serial way we can actually quickly just show that if we turn off these notes add note add serial node just put this one aside add another serial node and I can copy from node free to node 6. turn it on you can see that's the exact same thing as node3 did before just warming it up by a thousand then taking Note 4 putting it onto node 7 and turning it on now you can see that they're blending together but what's going on now is that it's taking the already warmed up image from node 6. and then putting applying the darkest Parts which are still our selection because we haven't changed in luminance we've only changed the temperature and then applying the coolness on top of that kind of putting it back to zero and it was not feeding from zero it was just going back so that's still where the layers can be very strong so let's just delete these two again select these and click command D now we're back to this so that's how the layers are understood and work and if we switch this back to select this and switch it back to a parallel node now we can see that they mix together it very much looks like exactly what we did before with the serial notes but they're just feeding from this one so they're mixing it together in the same way cooling it warming it up and cooling it down and kind of like where they meet in the middle is where it's just normal so you can see that these parts are being more blue this is kind of neutral and then everything that's not been touched by the darkest parts are being warmed up so we're spraying the image that way and that's fine this is not really usually the ideal case of using it the ideal case would usually be something like okay let's say we wanna warm up the right side so let's make a power window and make this feathered out say that okay our right side of our image is more warm so let's do something like that and then do the same thing here maybe do a squared mask and say okay we want our left side to be cooler feather that out and then do like that so that's where it really makes sense to start using the parallel notes and these are just blending very well together now because it's a parallel mixer so now we've just basically cooled down this side and warmed out this side and that's the only thing that's going on but both a feeding from this mixing it together and then feeding it onto the next step in the line which is really great so the last note that we're actually missing here is the outside node so if we select this on our node here you can see that if we click shift h the only thing we have selected here and also because we've only selected the darkest part so let's just remove that for a second now we only have like the left side because we blended it in remember like this we just feather it in and feather it in a little bit more and this is the only Parts we've selected so this is now being cooled down but what the outside node does now is connect that with the blue string which is the keying which we're not going to go into in this but it just to know what it does in this particular instance it takes whatever we key it in here and Mast and so we can look at the key here and you can see this is our gradient this is what we've selected this one is doing the complete opposite so you can see it fades here and it's selected everything on the right but what we can use this note for now so let's turn off node free for a second and say okay now we have node 4 is selecting this part and cooling it down and follow the example sake of what we're doing let's just warm up the right part so now that was only by 100 we want to do a thousand to see the effect now you can see that this node node 6 is doing the opposite of Note 4 or selecting the opposite and now that we warmed it up it selected everything here but what's cool about this is if we go into this mask and say okay we want to push it a little bit further ahead you can see that it changes the output or the input for node 6 immediately as well so now that only selects this part and if we go back put it even further now you see that now we even made it to the edge over here so let's just drag that in now you can see now we split the image kind of in half but we're only doing it with this one so outside nodes are really great way and strong way to kind of say okay I've selected this now I want to select everything else let's just do one more quick way of showing what you can do with those so now we've reset both of these nodes they are still this is still an outside node just to say we want to make a vignette kind of feel for this particular image filter it out quite a bit say okay this might look good we want to increase the gamma in here so I just want to increase the look here and the gain a little bit as well just brightening up this part making it look a little bit nicer maybe and then we go into this one and say okay I just want to do the opposite here I just want to kind of make a vignette and kind of the more extreme I go the more you can see what we're actually doing here you can see we're creating this kind of vignette because we're selecting everything that's not being selected in the first one so as we control this as well this effect on the second one will be less as well what we've essentially done is just kind of brighten up the middle and make the corners darker okay so that's essentially the different nodes that you can use in here but for simple purposes and simple use let's just delete these the serial nodes are a great way to start and the the things that I use the most often are these notes so this will be the structure if you have log converting that in the end will make a separate video on why you need to or why you want to convert it as the last thing that's to do with color space and color management but leaving that aside we have the contrast we have our exposure now we can start doing our creative editing or our creative color grading so let's just do something very simple maybe take the Blues in here and turn them a little bit more teal take the warmer tones here and turn them a little bit more warm and kind of like stylizing our look a little bit here maybe even taking the luminance doing the same thing just make these Dots here and say okay we want to darken the Border I'm going to brighten up these parts here and kind of it's very subtle we've done a very subtle change here but that could be a way of using the serial nodes so now we have our structure of like color correcting or correcting our image first then putting some creative power onto it you can even go a little bit further so let's create another serial node maybe put them below each other so now we have a structure that says this is our correction this is our grading just pull in a little bit more teal into our darker areas and then pull in some more warmth in our brighter parts or in our camera maybe even a little bit in our brightest Parts with the gain as well not that this looks particularly good I will admit that but just styling it in a little bit here we could do a lot more work for this tutorial that's not really necessary it's not the best look but this is what we could be doing then we could be adding another serial node and say okay now we want to do some masking so let's just do a few parallel nodes here and then do the same thing as kind of what we did before we want to create some more light or brightness over here so just Feathering into this end pulling up the gamma pulling up the gain grading some more some more brightness up here maybe emulating that there's kind of like a sun here and then doing the same thing opposite with a squared mask over here pulling this down Feathering it in pulling it over to the side clicking shift H to see what we're doing and then we can just like kind of darken this part down a little bit maybe even go into all the curves and drag up Black Point just to make sure we're not losing too much detail and now you can see very quickly we've just kind of controlled the light as well we're feeding both node 5 and node 6 from node 4. and thereby just selecting what's going on in the image now we're making masks so we're not really selecting anything in particular that we would change over here but we're still mixing them together very nicely making sure that everything Blends together in the correct way and that we are not cooling down anything or darkening anything here that's already been warmed up or affected here we're basically taking all the information from node 4 and doing our adjustments here blending them together and then feeding them into the final output so not that this turned out as a great great what a sentence to say but this is kind of like the basic structure of the notes and how they work together and I hope that gave you a basic understanding of yeah how it works and why it's so great if you have any questions or any thoughts on this video and notes in general and why you should use them why you shouldn't use them all that kind of stuff leave the comments down below and I'll be happy to answer them maybe make another video If this wasn't comprehensive enough I see that this is already around 30 minutes so I'll stop it here and I really hope that it helped you because the notes was my biggest fear when I walked into DaVinci for the first time and it kind of seemed a little bit overwhelming but understanding it on a basic level and starting to work with it and starting to split everything that you do into new notes makes it very easy to go back and see what you've been doing earlier and then correcting small things and adjusting along the way rather than going into something like Elementary scope or a lumita color or going just one note and trying to figure out what was the small dial and you can't really see the difference of what you're doing because when you're turning it off and turning it on again it's turning off everything and turning on everything and then you have to maybe just remove it completely and turn it on again with command C but that's not really a viable option as well isn't it so thank you so much for watching if you made it all the way through remember to click the Subscribe button and like this video if you liked it that really helps out my channel a lot and helps me bring a lot more videos to you guys so we're on a street right now creating a lot of videos here in December so I'll probably see you tomorrow as well if you follow along and no matter what take care and have a great day [Music] oh [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Alex Bjorstorp

Views: 210,397

Keywords: Color Grading, Colour Grading, Color Grading Nodes, Nodes, Nodes Davinci Resolve, Color grading Nodes Davinci Resolve, Davinci Resolve 18, Learn color grading, Understanding nodes, Basics of nodes, node based color grading, node-based color grading, how to color grade, how to use nodes, how to use node-based color grading, how to learn color grading, how to learn nodes

Id: YfyriApWIJY

Length: 29min 21sec (1761 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022