Why Colorists love THIS Saturation Technique | DaVinci Resolve Tutorial

hi I'm Salman and I've worked as a director cinematographer colorist and editor for over 12 years now and during this journey I learned a saturation technique a unique ingredient that changed my grades forever and I'm here to share that technique with you today applying this saturation technique instead of the default saturation technique will instantly make your shots look much more cinematic and richer in colors in the first part of the video I'm going to explain you the logic behind using this specific Advanced saturation technique that is called HSV and in the later part of the video we're going to find how to you know actually achieve that thing let's take a look at these charts so one on the left is basically graded using the default saturation technique using the saturation knob and the one on the right is basically graded using the advanced saturation technique HSV now you can find the clear difference between both of these the one on the right clearly looks much more denser in colors and it seems much more cinematic now obviously you can differ on this with me because it's a very subjective art form but if you like the image on the right you can follow along the video and I'm going to show you how to achieve this now saturation is a very important ingredient when it comes to color grading you keep it too low the image doesn't look nice you push it too far the image doesn't look nice now when we see images from the cinema and when we see images from the popular movies we find one thing in common that the colors are much saturated and they look much denser but when we try to achieve that kind of a saturation our images look much more bright the colors don't look that dense and they don't look that authentic now this is where this HSV technique comes in now before we jump into that technique I would like to give you an example from a famous colorist Cullen Kelly which he mentioned in one of his videos about the saturation HSV technique and he said that take an example of two apples one of them is light red in color and the other one is dark red in color now which one of those apples is going to reflect more light so in reality the Apple that is light red in color is going to reflect more light and hence it would look brighter right the one that has dark red color is going to reflect less light and hence it's going to look much darker in color now that is what we are after when we are creating that kind of saturation in our digitally shot images so what we need to achieve is that if we are increasing the color the saturation in some parts of our image those parts those saturated Parts should actually look darker to give you that realistic kind of a look however the default saturation knob in the primary color wheels actually increases the intensity of color mathematically and in perception it makes it look brighter and HSV saturation technique on the contrary actually makes the more saturated portions of the image image and look darker and hence give us that dense colors now let's get into resolve and let me show you how easy is it to saturate your images using this technique so we have this clip which is already graded and the only thing that is left in this clip is adding saturation so I have left this node empty for the saturation and let's use the default saturation technique in the primary color wheels and let's add in some saturation let's push it a little bit so that we can find that dense color look now bear this thing in mind that I'm going for an exaggerated saturation just for the purpose of explaining the concept in reality you might like this image a little less saturated now let's grab a still from this so that we can compare it later on with the other technique let's add in another node and let's add saturation on this shot using the HSV method Hue saturation and value value is roughly the brightness of that color so let's label it HSV and let's disable the first technique that we used for saturation now on this node what we need to do is that we need to convert the color space from RGB channels to HSV channels right so right click on this node and go to color space and select HSV now because we want to Target just the saturation Channel now what we can do is that right click and go to channels and turn off channel one and three because we are specifically going to Target the saturation Channel Once that is done just simply go to the primary color wheels and you can increase the saturation by increasing the exposure in the gain wheel so let's do that and roughly try to match it to the original saturation so around here it looks similar to what we did before and now let's wipe it and see the comparison so as you can see that the first method that is on the left hand side is basically making the image brighter along with in perception along with adding the saturation but this one that we have used which is on the right side actually makes the image look much more you know dense in colors and much more cinematic so that is what we want to achieve now with this technique you can actually go a lot fancy and you can go in detail perhaps you know you can go to the log wheels and adjust the saturation in just Those portions where the Shadows are or in just Those portions where the highlights are and you can also work around with the saturation using the curves to be more specific old saturation now this one obviously feels more like video-ish and this one in my opinion seems more cinematic right so you can use this technique wherever you want and it can instantly enhance your color grading enhance uh you know the look that you're creating and it would give you much more denser colors now another cool benefit of using the HSV technique is that you are going to avoid all that noise that would normally come in the you know the dark regions of your footage when you increase the saturation with the default controls that you have in the primary color wheels if you like the video drop a comment down below and let me know hit that like button also subscribe to my channel because I'll be making much more videos like this in the future

Channel: Salman Nafees | Academy

Views: 11,834

Keywords: Davinci resolve 18.5, Tutorial davinci resolve, effects davinci resolve, color grading davinci resolve, cinematic Saturation, hsv saturation technique, denser colors, colorists, saturation technique

Id: -cM3ZZsTP34

Length: 6min 39sec (399 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 12 2023