Understanding the HDR wheels in DaVinci Resolve 17

welcome my name is avery peck and today we're taking a look at the new hdr wheels in resolve 17. now in many ways the hdr wheels are kind of like a new and improved version of the log wheels that we've had for years but there have been some significant expansions and improvements in the way that these new wheels work now first things first the hdr wheels can be used with any material and on any project you don't have to be working on an hdr project to take full advantage of these new wheels so i want to start with my personal favorite which is the global wheel and it's basically the new version of offset so if you're like me and you're a fan of using printer lights or offset to get an overall primary balance of an image then i think you're going to really enjoy using the global wheel so the question is how does this new global wheel differ from offset offset is a very simple control if i turn off my display transform here you can see that taking a look at the parade that as i move the offset wheel around that it's just shifting my color channels up and down in a nice uniform way now the thing about this is there's actually a difference between mathematical uniformity and visual uniformity meaning that as i move colors around in rgb the visual changes that i see in the image are not always going to be uniform or consistent so blackmagic has now addressed this in the hdr wheels by implementing something called a perceptually uniform color model now what this means is that instead of moving colors around directly in rgb instead these wheels move colors in a way that's designed to be visually uniform so colors are going to change in a way that's more photographically natural and you'll also see better independence between color components so for example making a shot brighter or darker will not affect the hue or saturation of colors there's one other big aspect that separates these wheels from the traditional log wheels and that is that the hdr wheels actually take into account your working color space and gamma so for example i shot this footage on the ursa mini pro g2 and in the raw tab i'm decoding this using the blackmagic wide gamut color space and a log c curve so if i go to the hdr wheels and i click on this little ellipsis here down at the bottom we have settings for selecting a color space in gamma so if i select the blackmagic wide gamut color space and i set my gamma to area log c what this means is that these controls are now mapped to our camera's color space in gamma and many of these adjustments are actually akin to doing them in camera so on the global wheel if i increase my exposure by one stop and i grab a still of this for reference if i go to the raw tab and i make the same adjustment by setting my iso from 800 1600 you can see that comparing these two stills that they produce identical results and what's also cool is that if we're working in a project with different cameras and different color spaces that the behavior of these wheels will be mapped to each color space individually and they'll produce much more consistent results across different cameras now it's also worth noting that if you're working in a color managed timeline that these wheels by default will use whatever working space you've selected in your color management settings so now let me show you this new global wheel on an actual shot so here i have an image that was intended to be a daytime scene but it was actually shot at night and you can see that it's considerably underexposed and also has a noticeable yellow color cast so using the global wheel which has already been set up i'm going to take my exposure up and then i'm going to neutralize that color cast by pulling my wheel away from yellow and you can see already just in a few seconds we have a really nice starting point for this image so just for fun i'm going to grab a still of this for reference and reset my global wheel and let's try to do the same thing using offset so i'll go ahead and play my still and i'm going to try to actually match this back wall since this wall is pretty close to gray so i'll bring my exposure up and then adjust the color here a little bit all right so those are now fairly close but you'll notice that our shadows are significantly lifted and have a definite blue tint so now i need to grab the shadow wheel and basically bring our black point down and also take care of that blue cast by pushing in the complimentary color so now we have an image that is a pretty close match but let's take a close look at this so here's what we're getting with offset and here's what we're getting with the global wheel now on the surface they're similar but there are some subtleties in the way that these tools are handling different colors so for example with the offset wheel we're getting kind of this garish yellow color in the hair we're also getting some magenta tones in the skin that are sticking out and they're a little bit strong and with the global wheel we can see that the global wheel is moving colors around in a way that feels more natural we're getting better gradations between colors and i think overall the global wheel is giving us a starting point to this image that visually i think is a little bit more natural and that's thanks to that perceptually uniform color model that we talked about earlier now one other unique thing here is that in addition to having a color wheel and an exposure control we also have a saturation control here on the global wheel and it functions basically the same way as our regular saturation control but it takes advantage of this new color model so you'll notice that colors will pick up saturation a little bit more evenly and you'll also notice that the hue and perceived luminance of colors remains more constant as colors become more or less saturated another interesting thing is that we actually have individual saturation controls for each color wheel which we'll get into more a little bit later on now as useful as the global wheel is it's really just the tip of the iceberg so as i said earlier conceptually the hdr wheels are quite similar to the log wheels in the sense that each wheel has a certain range or a zone that it's mapped to and we can adjust those zones as needed now with the hdr wheels this idea has been expanded upon and we actually have a new interface called the zone graph to adjust the zones that each one of these wheels is mapped to so to access that we can click this little histogram icon here and that'll switch us between the zone graph and the wheels or we can click this button here which will give us a nice side-by-side view so here on the left we have a list of all of our wheels and by highlighting them we can see what zones they're mapped to now for the sake of simplicity i'm going to shut off all of these except for one now the layout of the zone graph i think is pretty simple on the bottom we have a histogram that goes from eight stops below middle gray to eight stops over and then here we have the zone pivot you can think of this as like a threshold adjustment so basically if i make an adjustment on this wheel you can see that this wheel affects everything above the pivot and that's indicated by this little arrow that points to the right it affects everything above the pivot down to this pivot point and then has no effect on anything below now we can click and drag to move this around so if we want to we can you know constrain this to just the brightest highlights or we can drag this down and allow this adjustment to blend you know more into the mid-tones and eventually into the shadows now we don't actually have to be in the zone graph to adjust this either we can also adjust this with this slider here on the left hand side of the wheel so this is kind of nice you can just work a little bit more efficiently instead of having to open the zone graph every time now there's one other control we have called the falloff notice how there's this transition here into the pivot point where the adjustment kind of smoothly fades out before disappearing completely this ensures that the adjustment doesn't just abruptly end and look unnatural and we can adjust this behavior using the falloff control so increasing the falloff gives us a smoother falloff that's broader and we can see that visually as well you can see especially if i bring this down a little bit notice how there's a really gentle and smooth transition from the areas that are affected in the highlights down to the areas that are unaffected in the shadows and conversely if i bring the falloff way down now we have a much sharper transition between areas that are affected in areas that are unaffected so you can adjust this depending on what you're trying to do with each wheel if you want to isolate a very specific area and make a correction to say just the window without affecting everything else in the shot then that's a time where you might want to use a shorter falloff at the same time if you want your adjustments to blend better and to work better visually you may want to use a broader falloff and again you can adjust this on the wheel using this slider on the right hand side so you don't actually have to go into the zone graph to adjust your fall off now there's one other really handy feature and that is if we've just used a wheel if we hit shift h which turns on highlight mode you can also click this little icon in the viewer here you can actually see the regions that this wheel affects now i think there's actually a little bit of a bug in this because for some reason these shadow regions are highlighted even though they're not actually affected by this wheel but even then it's still a really useful way of seeing exactly what areas of the shot are being affected by whatever wheel we're using at that time and it's a great way to visualize both the pivot and the fall off you can see the falloff creates this really sharp transition when we turn it down and creates a much smoother transition when we turn it up now there's also a few ways of resetting these wheels if we just click this reset icon it resets everything if we hold down alt and click this it resets the color adjustment but leaves the zone controls where they were and finally if we hold down control or command and click this it resets the zone definition but keeps the color adjustment in place now the zone that we've been working with so far is called a minimum zone because this pivot point marks the minimum value that this wheel affects now personally i like to just think of this as a highlight zone because i think that's a little more user friendly but we also have shadow zones or maximum zones if you want to use blackmagic's terminology and these work exactly the same way just going in the other direction so as you'd imagine they affect everything in the shadows up to this pivot point and then they have no effect in the highlights and of course just like our highlight wheels we can adjust the zone pivot as well as the falloff and all of the color controls work exactly the same as the highlight wheels now at this point some of you might be asking okay well we have highlight zones and we have shadow zones but do we have any mid-tone zones right do we have zones that have both a minimum and a maximum value technically the answer is no however we can create the desired effect using two wheels of the same type so we can either use two shadow wheels or two highlight wheels i'll just use two highlight wheels real quick to show you this and what we're gonna do is in this first wheel in the light we'll do whatever adjustment we want in the tones and then what we want to do in this last zone is we want to counteract that adjustment we basically want to cancel it out so we're going to push the wheel in the opposite direction i'm going to push in that complementary color and as you can see that basically cancels out the adjustment that we made in the first wheel and this is actually a case where these little rgb curves are a handy visual to kind of see what adjustment you're making to the image and then of course we can adjust the falloff so we can you know give us a longer broader falloff and we can adjust our zone pivots as needed now in addition to making this adjustment by eye if you want to be perfectly accurate you can actually use the numerical controls below these wheels so what we can do is after we've made the color adjustment that we want in the mid-tones we can copy these x and y coordinates over and just change their sign so let me show you that real quick so i'll take the x coordinate i'll double click to highlight it and then i'll copy ctrl c and then i'll paste it here in the x control of the next wheel and i'm going to change the sign so if it's a negative number i'm going to make it positive and then i'll do the same thing with the y coordinate and then because this is a positive number i'm going to make it negative and there we go so now we have the exact complementary adjustment to what we made earlier and we can do the same thing with exposure too so if we say reduce our exposure here then we can just copy that and paste it and change the sign so we'll make this positive 0.55 and once again that will perfectly counter the exposure adjustment that we made in the first wheel now granted this is not quite as efficient there's some copy and pasting and some keyboard stuff that you have to do so if you're using a control panel and you're just kind of flying through shots you're probably not going to do this but it's an option that you have and it's good to at least be aware of now by default we have six wheels or zones in total three shadow zones and three highlight zones and they all basically work the same way the only difference is the pivot points and where those pivots are so the black wheel affects just the deepest shadows near the black point see that right there the dark wheel affects kind of the deeper shadows and the shadow wheel affects a little bit above the mid-tones and below and then the highlight wheels are basically the same symmetric setup just going in the other direction so the light wheel affects basically the mid tones and up the highlight wheel affects kind of the brighter highlights in the scene and the specular wheel affects just the brightest highlights in fact this scene doesn't have anything bright enough to be affected by this wheel but keep in mind that none of this stuff is set in stone you can change these pivots and these zones to be wherever you want them now there's a super cool feature here that we've never seen before with color wheels and that is the ability to add our own custom zones and basically our own custom wheels so in the zone graph if we click the create new zone button we get a real simple dialog box where we can create either a shadow zone or a highlight zone we can give it a name so i'll just call it custom and then we can give it a pivot and a falloff but keep in mind you can change these at any point and then we'll click create so now you can see i have a custom zone shows up there in the zone graph and it also shows up here in the ui and so this is super cool if you need more control than what's provided to you by default you can just add zones as needed and finally if you want to get rid of a zone you can just hit this little trashcan icon here and it will delete it now on the topic of deleting zones while we can't delete the default zones we can hide them so you can see here if i click this little button it hides that wheel in the ui now one thing that i think is important to keep in mind here is that if you have some adjustment on this wheel and you hide it that adjustment remains so this could potentially cause problems if you're not paying attention uh if you have wheels that are making adjustments and then they're hidden you know you might be sitting there scratching your head wondering what's going on so just one thing to kind of keep in mind we can also shut off our wheels entirely using this button here and that also gets rid of the adjustment so this is actually a quick way of doing like an a b for that wheel so if you want to see a before and after this is just a quick way of visualizing that now to wrap things up i want to cover this bottom toolbar here because while these tools are similar to their traditional counterparts they actually use the new updated color math that the hdr wheels use so their behavior in some cases is noticeably different starting on the left with the temperature control this behaves pretty much as you'd expect by warming and cooling the image one cool feature is that it actually follows a spectral locus so it warms and cools images in a way that's a little bit more physically accurate next we have the tint control which again behaves pretty much as expected but is a little bit more perceptually uniform now the hue control as expected rotates the hues of colors but does so in a way that's again more uniform so the perceived lightness and saturation of colors will remain more consistent now the contrast control will feel a little bit different from what you're used to partially because it's going to be mapped to your camera's gamma and also because it changes the lightness of colors but not the perceived saturation or hue so as we turn contrast up you'll notice that colors don't get any more or less saturated whereas traditionally with a normal contrast control when we turn contrast up the perceived saturation of colors in the mid-tones around that pivot point also increases it's also worth noting that this contrast control is linear it's not an s-curve so it doesn't have a roll-off to help protect highlights and shadows now the pivot point behaves as you would expect by expanding the contrast from a different point either in the mid tones the highlights or somewhere in the shadows the midtone detail control again works pretty much like the old version but is a little bit more perceptually uniform in the sense that it makes colors brighter or darker but doesn't change their hue or saturation and finally we have one new feature called the black offset and this one's kind of interesting it's used to either raise or lower the black point of an image and what's cool is that all of these other tools in the hdr palette will respect this new black point so if i crank this all the way up you can see that change on the parade right going from zero up to one it introduces a toe in the shadows and lifts that black point but at the same time if i say bring my exposure way down you can see that nothing goes below that new black point so if you want to establish a custom black point for the image this is a quick and easy way of dialing that in overall i think the hdr wheels bring a lot of powerful new features to the table and it's cool to see blackmagic continuing to innovate even with tools that are as traditional and foundational as the color wheels there's a fair bit to learn and get used to i think for beginners and professionals alike these wheels do feel and behave quite differently from the regular log and lift gamma gain wheels but i think they also offer their own unique advantages and improvements if you'd like to stay up to date on my work and on future tutorials you can follow me on instagram at avery peck official thanks for watching my name is avery peck and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Avery Peck

Views: 15,882

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Id: vtE-IZZy6BE

Length: 20min 45sec (1245 seconds)

Published: Fri May 28 2021