You're Balancing Shadows Wrong- DaVinci Resolve 16 Tutorial

picture this you've just made a teal and orange color grade and looking through your image you can see that the darker parts of your image are not black they're coming up as blue and you can see it on your waveform easy fix go into your luma versus saturation click on this first line here and just drag down the saturation of everything that's kind of dark in your image boom problem solved but does that actually solve the problem hey guys nathan here so today we're talking about balancing out the blacks and shadows of your image and there's a couple different ways to do this and we're going to go over the benefits and downfalls of a few of these methods but before we get into it be sure to hit the like button and get subscribed for lots more videos like this i put out two resolve tutorials a week every monday and thursday anyway let's get into it so here we are in davinci resolve 16 and everything i show in this video can be done in the free version of resolve now we just have this shot and just to keep things simple i'm going to show the full grade so we're going to go through and just delete everything here and add new node with alt s we're going to start off by adding some contrast in the image and i'm just doing things quick so i'm just going to kind of eyeball it maybe bring my lift down a little bit bring the gamma down gain up just to the top because those windows look like they should be pretty darn bright i'm going to check my white balance just on his shirt yeah it's looking like it's a little bit green dominant so we can just check out our tint maybe bring that down a scooch and things look pretty good we're going to add new node with alt s and we know we're going to go pretty extreme with the grade on this so i just want to qualify out his skin so we're just going to use a qualified tool click on the skin see how we did maybe widen that out a little bit you know what i think we're going to have to draw a window around it so we're going to take a little circle here shrink it down put it up over his noggin let's go to the beginning of our shot great now we have this window and then we're just going to go into our tracker track forward and let's see how it does awesome that seems to have done a pretty good job and it follows him all the way through now we just want to clean up our key a little bit and then we're just going to denoise it and clean up our black a little bit and yeah that seems to be pretty okay so now we're gonna go out of our highlight so now that we have a skin keyed out what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna add another node with alt s and then i'm gonna press alt l for a layer node now i'm going to attach blue to blue and what we're doing is we are basically putting his skin on top of whatever grade we're adding and then with our layer node we're outputting it so that this is on top of this now this is where our grade is going to go now there's a bunch of different ways to get that teal look but i'm going to go dead simple with it i'm going to use my offset and i'm going to do it in the primary bars now i like to adjust my offset by going into color and clicking on printer light hotkeys so i can then use my number pad to adjust the red green and blue channels what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna bring the red down and the blue up so i'm just pressing four and nine on my keyboard at the same time boom that looks pretty good let's bring our green up just a scooch awesome now we have that kind of teal look that we like and we have a skin over top of it just for fun if i disable this node you can see it does really wash out of skin so that's why we are bringing this in and let's just go into our key tab and maybe bring down our output a little bit so it blends a little bit nicer but we're not getting that dead skin look so that's easy peasy next we're gonna add a new node and if we're looking at the shadows and these dark parts of the image we can tell that it's definitely blue we see the blue then we see our green then we see our red way down at the bottom now this is the part that we want to address and let's just do what we did at the beginning of the video so we're going to go into our curves go into our luma versus saturation and we're just going to click on this line here right on the baseline roughly and yeah we'll just bring it so that it's in the darker parts of the image and then we're just going to drag this part down right at the end here in the darkest parts and then maybe just bring that curve and you can see it definitely makes a difference to our waveform so if i hit control d and then to disable it and then re-enable it it's totally making a difference but let's look at let's say the red on his shirt so it's fairly red here and then a lot of that goes away as we desaturate it because it's a darker part of the image now all we're looking to do is get our blacks to be black we don't want that blue color cast in there but as a byproduct with this method we're seeing that we're losing color information and we're losing some of that red and maybe there's a better way to go about it well there is a better way so we're just going to reset this node and what we want to do is we want to just adjust the color of the lowest parts of the image to counteract this blue now if you're looking in your primary wheels you may look at your lift and think well yeah that controls the darker parts of the image so let me show you something we're going to go into the edit page go into generators grayscale we're then going to drag that onto our timeline and so that we can adjust it in the color page we're going to right click click new compound clip and don't even bother naming it it's fine so now we're back in the color page and we have on our waveform here this image that goes from dark to white so if we make an adjustment on the lift it should adjust the darkest part of the image right well check this out i'm gonna adjust it up and you see that everything's moving up now it does have a bias towards the darkest part of the image but it can adjust everything with the pivot point apparently being right at the top there so it kind of moves like a lever now if we adjust the gamma you can see that it also adjusts everything and same with the gain we can bring everything up and down with the pivot point really looking like it's at the end there just as a lever now conversely if we go into our log controls check this out we're going to make adjustments to the shadow which is actually controlling the darkest part of your image because its pivot point is here and we can adjust that pivot point with changing our low range so let me increase that and you can see it's going to climb up and if we decrease the low range you can see it goes down now this is one of the benefits of working in the log controls when you want to control a very specific tonal range of your image and just to show you it does work the same with your mid tone and your highlight and you can control your high range as well but that's neither here nor there so let's go back to our image i'm just going to get rid of the clip so we have more area to work with and look at here so now what we want to do is we want to make this adjustment in our shadows so what i'm going to do is i'm going to introduce the opposite color that we're seeing in the darkest part of the image to help neutralize it so i'm not even looking at my screen when i'm making this adjustments i'm just going to be looking at my waveform so we're going to go over i'm going to start to bring that red in to the image and we just want it so that everything basically lines up at the bottom here and that way we know that all the values are the same and we can check it actually if we use our white balance tool you can go over top of it and look at something that is supposed to be dark and see that the rgb values are fairly similar whereas if we disable the node and use this white balance tool we can see that there's quite a difference in these rgb values so that's just a good kind of trick to use so we're going to re-enable the node and now we can adjust our low range so we just want it to be the darkest part so we can bring that down a little bit and boom that works way better so if we turn this note off you can see we have this blue color cast definitely in there but if we turn it back on you can see we've addressed that and we also haven't lost the red on our arm so just to show you comparison with the method we used at the beginning i'm going to hit ctrl y on my keyboard to add a new version if we right click we can see we now have two different versions i'm then going to reset this node grade go into our luma versus saturation and bring down the darker part of our image so we've now lost the saturation in the darkest part of our image and if i hit ctrl b on my keyboard we can swap between the two different versions so check this out so this is with our shadows and this is with our luma versus saturation i'm just going to get rid of the clips to give us more real estate to work with so we can see with our saturation that we've lost a decent amount of red on his shirt whereas with the shadows method we're able to retain that information now if we go back to the luma versus saturation one could argue that we could just decrease this until we're only dealing with just the darkest part so that we are losing less of that red so we can then press ctrl b on our keyboard to compare but as you can see it's still not quite the same and i do feel that you have finer control when using your shadows and you're also not losing color information so anyway folks i hope that helped you make some sense of balancing out your blacks and the darkest parts of your image and also just learn a little bit about the log controls and how they do differ from the primary wheels and how you have more tonal control over different parts of your image if you want to use the log controls and how you can adjust that using your high and low ranges so anyway if you like this video be sure to hit that button and get subscribed for lots more videos like this and anyway yeah have yourself a good one okay bye [Music] you

Channel: Nathan Carter

Views: 32,289

Keywords: davinci resolve 16, resolve 16, davinci resolve, color grading davinci resolve, davinci resolve 16 tutorial, davinci resolve effects, how to use davinci resolve, Davinci resolve color grading, davinci resolve color correction, davinci resolve 16 color grading, nathan carter, Resolve black balance, davinci resolve shadow

Id: sQvATFSIFU0

Length: 10min 20sec (620 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 22 2020