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Unknown
Welcome to professional color grading techniques and look development
into Vinci resolve. I'm Kevin McCall of The main concepts discussed in
this course are advanced contrast management printer light balancing
techniques and look development. The focus is primarily on higher end
color grading, color theory and teaching techniques that took
professional colors, years of experience to master.

00:00:40:06 - 00:01:01:14
Unknown
You will learn how to shape curves and work with brightness printing
compression techniques, working with separate streams to pipe keys, deep
saturated colors, gamma stretching channel mixing edge softening
techniques how to add grit and texture and so much more.

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Unknown
You will also learn the color theory you need to help you create unique
and modern looks.

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Unknown
Welcome to professional color grading techniques and look developments
inside of Da Vinci resolve. I'm Kevin McCall of The Focus. And this
course is primarily on higher and color grading, color theory and
teaching techniques that took professional colorists years of experience
to master. The main three concepts discussed in this course are advanced
contrast management balancing techniques and look development.

00:01:39:02 - 00:02:06:11
Unknown
Now, keep in mind that these concepts are closely interconnected and it
is essential to master them, to master the craft of color grading. You'll
also learn the color theory you need to help you create unique and modern
looks. If you want to follow along the footage and projects used in this
course are available for download. In this lesson, I want to get into the
nuts and bolts of our color grading course by talking about the infamous
S-curve.

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Unknown
The S-curve is the key component in a log workflow and can be created
automatically and manually. Let's dive into the basics. We take a look at
the waveform monitor and you take a look at our curves window. They're
both represented by straight lines. We have incremental steps starting at
complete black at zero and basically going all the way through straight
up in a perfectly linear fashion, from complete black to complete white,
to give us a straight line.

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Unknown
Whatever we do is going to be directly represented on our waveform
monitor. All right. So I'm just going to reset that. I'm going to pull up
like such. I'm going to pull down like such at the bottom, like that to
make our blacks look more black and our whites look more white. What I
also have the ability to do is to come in and add editable lines.

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Unknown
I can now finesse this however I want to finesse it. And what I've
basically done now is drawn a basic S-curve. What we can now do to see it
represented on a clip, to see exactly the impact that an S-curve has on
actual footage. We can simply copy the correction and paste it into the
clip we're working on, and you'll already notice how much better our shot
looks by adding a contrast to it.

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Unknown
Well, because our image is very flat, we're basically stretching the
image out. All right. We're just going to reset. I'm going to come back
to our gradient. I'm going to reset it there as well, because let's talk
about the next way that we can add an S-curve to our footage, and that's
using contrast and pivot located right down here in the lower left hand
corner of the interface.

00:03:49:15 - 00:04:10:09
Unknown
All I'm going to do is grab the contrast value and dragging it out. And
as you can see, we're now creating an S-curve, much like we had done
before. Now where Pivot comes into play place, that is what is going to
impact exact clip where the straight line portion of our curve is going
to fall on our scopes.

00:04:10:10 - 00:04:25:22
Unknown
You'll notice if I take the pivot, drag it one way, it's going to move it
one way, it's going to bring it back to the other way. Now, again, let's
take a look at what this is going to look like in a practical example.
Again, command or control. And see, let's just go back to our first shot
here.

00:04:25:23 - 00:04:45:21
Unknown
All I'm going to do again, much like I had done before, is paste that on
boom. Take a look at now how much better the shot looks. Simply using the
contrast and pivot. Keep in mind that any time we can grab the pivot and
we can adjust where that straight line of the curve is falling. With a
simple drag of the mouse.

00:04:45:23 - 00:05:15:12
Unknown
Now, last but certainly not least, let's add a technical lot to our
footage. Once again, we're simply going to come back here. I'm going to
hide the clips now. So how does the LUT work? Very simply, I'm going to
navigate right down here to our node. I'm going to right click, come down
to LUTS, I'm going to come to 3D LUT and we're going to choose the lut
that we're going to be coming back to throughout our course because we
are working with log footage that was shot on an RV camera and that's our
RV.

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Unknown
Alexa log C to rec 709 technical lookup table. Now as soon as I apply it,
boom. You see, there is our S-curve already to go. Let me take that. A
simple paste, command or control and V take a look at now how our shot
looks with the proper contrast added to it. Why would we use a lot now?

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Unknown
It can be a little bit difficult to shape that curve manual, especially
if you're a beginner, as you saw in the first example, and you saw how
things got progressively better from when I drew it to when I used
contrast to when we work with the LUT. Now, what's also important to keep
in mind is that the LUT contains a saturation matrix to basically give
you the proper saturation in the image.

00:05:56:28 - 00:06:17:14
Unknown
All right. The saturation matrix is based on a bit more complex math, so
you can expect a more sophisticated saturation than what you would get by
simply raising the global saturation yourself. So the LUT is going to be
a good starting point to work with. Most of the times right out of the
box or really right out of the click.

00:06:17:16 - 00:06:54:21
Unknown
Now there's some other reasons to work with lots of what we're going to
talk about that later on. Let's remove this LUT from this shot. We're
going to come back to our gradient. I'm just going to remove it from
there as well and let's right click on our node. I'm going to come down
to LUTS, but this time, instead of the technical lut, I'm going to choose
a creative lut and the creative lut that I am going to choose is going to
be a film look and I'm going to choose the rec 709 Kodak 2383 D 65 lut
now everything might seem like it's the same as it was before.

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Unknown
I'm just going to add a parallel node here. The reason being is I want to
be able to turn the node on and off. Let's just turn that node off. I'm
now going to apply the same lut that we had applied originally, which is
our RV. Alexa log c to rec 709 Now we're also going to label this so we
can keep track of it.

00:07:12:24 - 00:07:32:03
Unknown
I'll simply call it RV. Now the first thing that I want to point out
that's exceptionally important here is you'll notice that our curve here
starts at perfect. Black ends up perfect white. However, our film look
doesn't do that. It may end almost a perfect white, but if you take a
look down here, it doesn't end up perfect.
00:07:32:03 - 00:07:52:12
Unknown
Black. However, there's something more important going on here that we
don't readily see If we don't have our scopes set up correctly. What I'm
going to do is just turn the scope settings back on. And instead of
looking at the Y scope, which is strictly looking at luminance, I'm going
to look at the RG B scope. Take a look at what has now just happened with
our scope.

00:07:52:15 - 00:08:15:23
Unknown
Taking a look at the film look, lut you'll notice that our three channels
are not exactly aligned together, which is what is going to be creating
this different look. All right. Now I'm just going to leave the scope
exactly the way that it is. I'm going to turn this node off and turn our
technical lut on. And you'll notice I haven't changed any of the
settings.

00:08:15:23 - 00:08:42:01
Unknown
We're still dealing with the RG B scopes. I can turn off those channels.
You'll notice nothing changes. Remember, all of our channels are aligned
so everything is going to fall into place. Not the same. When we take a
look at our film. Look, you'll notice that if I turn the channels on and
off, we can exactly see what channels the red channel, what channels the
Green Channel, and what channel is the blue channel.

00:08:42:05 - 00:09:07:07
Unknown
Now with that being said, I want to mention that in this course we're
going to do all of our exposure and balancing corrections prior to the
different LUTS that we are going to be adding. So we'll have our LUT on
one note and we'll always have another note before for our balancing and
exposure before that note and the results of our corrections are going to
rely completely on the relationship between the individual color curves.

00:09:07:15 - 00:09:32:20
Unknown
But don't worry about that. It might sound a little bit technical, but
we'll dive deeper into it later in this course. In this lesson, I'd like
to talk about the impact of your decisions based on whether you're doing
adjustments before or after. A lot. Now we're going to need a couple more
nodes here for us to do some work, so I'm just going to use some keyboard
shortcuts to call them up.

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Unknown
I need one node that's going to happen before this one shift and as is
the shortcut on the keyboard on both Mac and Windows. And I'm going to
need a node after this one. So that would be option S or alt. And as for
my Windows friends, and we now have three nodes of which the middle node
is where we're going to add our look up table.

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Unknown
I'm just going to come back to our favorite lookup table for now, which
is the RC log C to Rex 709 Lot to give us a very nice curve that we have
going on here. Remember when we talked originally about creating those S-
curve, we talked about what's actually happening is that we have a little
bit more happening in the dark part of the image, a little bit more
happening in the brightest part of the image as seen by the fact that our
curve stays up high a bit longer and gets down to be dark a little bit
quicker.

00:10:22:21 - 00:10:42:27
Unknown
All right. Now let's talk about I'm going to call this sort of the common
workflow when doing something like what I've done right here, which is
you have your image, it's in log color space, you throw the lookup table
on and you're ready to now get in and make some changes or some
corrections. We're just going to assume for argument's sake that this
node isn't here right now.

00:10:42:29 - 00:11:00:21
Unknown
So we've applied the LUT, we're going to come to the next node after that
and we're going to start making adjustments. So what I'm going to do is
just grab our brightness value from offset and I'm going to start
dragging it north. Now you're going to notice that as I do this, what's
happening here is that our white levels are being clipped now.

00:11:00:21 - 00:11:26:01
Unknown
It's a little bit hard to tell exactly what's happening on the gradient
here, but essentially, once an image is clipped, the information that's
in the clipped part of the image is now completely useless to us. It's
gone. We're not going to be able to see it anymore. All right. So by
getting in, applying the lookup table and then on the node after that,
getting into making brightness adjustments, assuming we're taking that
brightness level up, we're going to lose a lot of information very
quickly.

00:11:26:01 - 00:11:44:08
Unknown
Now, taking a look at the blacks of the darkest parts of our image, we
can do the same thing here. If I drag my brightness down, you'll see the
blacks are now being clipped as well. Any information that's located
roughly in about here is going to be completely gone. All right. Now,
let's take a look at the flip side of this.

00:11:44:08 - 00:11:59:02
Unknown
What we're going to do now is we're just going to assume that this node
isn't here because I haven't done anything to it. It's just gonna be like
a piece of glass. We're going to be looking through it. I'm going to come
before the lookup table and I'm going to make the exact same adjustment
to grab the brightness levels and I'm going to start bringing them north.
00:11:59:02 - 00:12:23:08
Unknown
Now take a look at what's happening here to our image. We actually don't
have any clipping happening until I drag that value way up. Now the
reason is because the image is going to expand and compress based on the
shape of the curve. And the same can be said if I drag down. We don't
have a lot of clipping happening until I really start dragging that right
through.

00:12:23:11 - 00:12:42:11
Unknown
Now you might be thinking, Well, it's a little bit hard to see exactly
what's going on because, you know, we're adding it to one and turning
that off and jumping over and adding it to the other one. And I
understand that could be a little bit difficult to see. So what I've done
is taken a snapshot of our scopes that we can take a look at exactly
what's happening before and after the LUT.

00:12:42:11 - 00:13:02:12
Unknown
So I'm just going to hide out of resolve. And what I have here is for
snapshots and we're going to take a look at the high before and after
first. So what this represents is high before the lot and high after the
LUT. And when I say high, what I've done is I've taken the brightness
values and I've put them at 30 for the high and 20 for the low.

00:13:02:12 - 00:13:20:02
Unknown
So basically five points up from where we are, five points down from
where we are. So what I want to do is show you what's happening after the
LUT first, remember we talked about clipping that image and I haven't
brought the brightness levels up very much here. I can take a look at
what's happened to the white levels of our image.

00:13:20:02 - 00:13:44:01
Unknown
Lots of clipping. Now I want you to take a look at what happens when we
take the exact same brightness level change and we apply it before the
lot. Take a look at the difference. We practically have no clipping now
in the whites or in the brightest part of our image. There it is again.
That's after the LUT and that's before the lut.

00:13:44:03 - 00:14:02:27
Unknown
And you see the change in the curve as well. The curve here much smoother
than what we have here. All right. Now let's take a look at the flip
side. When we're going to get in and bring the brightness values down
again, let's take a look at what's happening after the light and you'll
see that is an absolute ton of clipping we have going on here.

00:14:03:00 - 00:14:28:29
Unknown
Take a look. Now, what happens when we add the exact same value change
before the LUT you'll see the curve is much different. We still do have a
little bit of clipping here, but not even as close to as much as we had
when working with this. After the let's in this lesson, I want to talk
about print contrast, because a curve alone is not enough to get full
control over our contrast.

00:14:29:02 - 00:14:50:04
Unknown
Now option or alternate s, let's add our curve to our gradient here.
There we go. Very nice. I'm just going to select that first node and
let's talk a little bit about curves, because curves are programed with a
set of luminance versus distance ratio. So we're going to need to disturb
that a little bit to get ourselves to new places.

00:14:50:06 - 00:15:12:27
Unknown
Now, a popular way to manipulate contrast is to compress both the shadows
of the blacks and the highlights or the whites so that basically we're
gathering that black information together in more or less a straight
line. Then we're going to do the exact same thing for the whites so that
it doesn't spread them all over the place. Now, this is often referred to
as a printed look.

00:15:13:00 - 00:15:32:00
Unknown
So let's get in and let's set this up with that first note selected. I'm
going to navigate right down here to our dropdown and we're going to add
our default anchors. Now I need to remove a couple of them like such, and
let's straighten this out. We don't want to have a straight line right
there. We still want to have just an ever so slight bit of a curve.

00:15:32:02 - 00:15:52:16
Unknown
Let's just bring this one down a little bit and do the exact same thing
with the light levels. There we go. So by doing this, what we've done is
we've mapped the values of this image into a much smaller total range
than we had before. But we can expand on that later. All right. Same
curve, much smaller tonal range.

00:15:52:16 - 00:16:10:24
Unknown
All right. Next thing we want to do, I want to save this look. So let's
grab a still of it. Once the still is grabbed, let's make sure it's
there. Very nice. Let's come to the shot We're going to apply this to.
We're simply going to right click. We're going to apply that. Great. Very
nice. Let's just spread this out just a little bit here.

00:16:10:26 - 00:16:35:02
Unknown
Perfect. All right. Now, as you can see, the shadows in the highlights
are gathered together, which creates a very nice and soft transition
between the total range. Now, with the log shadow control, we can bring
the shadows down if we want to, which is basically bringing down the
gathered shadows, because remember, we just gathered them together by
compressing that curve so now we can get in and bring down the gathered
shadows.

00:16:35:04 - 00:16:52:19
Unknown
So let's add another node. We're just going to make a slight adjustment
here. It's going to start dragging itself. They will take it down to
about 0.5. It's also worth mentioning that the log controls are designed
to be used on log footage only, so don't expect the same results when
applying them on linear footage. A very slight adjustment here.

00:16:52:19 - 00:17:12:13
Unknown
Very nice. We're not pulling the blacks all the way down to zero on our
scopes as we want to keep texture in the blacks and concentrate the
contrast on the mid tones. You can use lift instead of the log shadow
control, but shadow will give you more precise control as the pivot can
be set to only affect the range of the blacks you want.

00:17:12:16 - 00:17:33:22
Unknown
In this case, we only want to pull down the absolute lowest values.
Another precise way would be to pull a Luma key and pull the values down.
But in this case, the log shadow control works really well and what I'm
now going to do is add a node before this here, let's go add node, let's
add a serial before.

00:17:33:24 - 00:17:56:17
Unknown
Let's just give ourselves a little bit of space here. Very nice. And now
that we have the nice rich contrast, we're going to add a little bit of
color correction prior to the curve that will fall in nicely into the new
total range that we've established. All the color corrections we do from
now on are being watched through the total range that we have created.

00:17:56:20 - 00:18:23:24
Unknown
The colors will find their place based on this. So it's exceptionally
important that we understand this order of operations. You can go back
and fine tune the contrast later, but you need to remember that contrast
affects colors greatly. So keep that in mind. Okay, let's move on to the
next lesson and learn more about compression techniques as it will be
important to master to get full control over the contrast and to create
unique looks.

00:18:23:26 - 00:18:46:03
Unknown
In this lesson, I want to show you a technique to deal with high dynamics
on dark images. Now, this image obviously not as dark as it's going to be
because, you know, as always, we're going to right click. We're going to
come down to our LUTS, we're going to apply our log C direct seven or
nine LUT. And what we're also going to do on this note is we're just
going to make an exposure adjustment.
00:18:46:03 - 00:19:12:27
Unknown
I think I've two punches all the way down to about somewhere around 8.5.
I think that's pretty good right about there. All right. Now, if I zoom
in here, you're going to notice that we actually have some hard edges
happening between our highlights and our midterms that we're going to
want to get in and fix. Now, a soft clip is not going to be able to do
the roll off on the highlights that we want because they're way too low,
as you can see over here on the scopes.

00:19:12:29 - 00:19:34:12
Unknown
So we need to find a different way to limit the extreme registers of our
highlights. So let's compress the highlights with a Luma curve. Now this
is more commonly referred to as controlled clipping. So what we're going
to do, select this first node. Now the important thing here is if I only
want to adjust the brightness values, so I'm going to unlink all the
channels.

00:19:34:12 - 00:19:55:28
Unknown
We're only going to be dealing with the luminance value. And what I'm
also going to do here is I'm just going to add the default anchor and
then I'm just going to remove a couple of them and we're simply going to
pull this value down to somewhere about there, I think. And then what
we're also going to do is I'm going to turn on the editable spines and
what's going to make this a little bit of a smoother curve.

00:19:55:28 - 00:20:20:04
Unknown
Now, it's not readily apparent intellectually disabled this and enable
it. You can see now a lot more smooth between the highlights and the
midtown's. Basically, it's gathered highlights and it's a nice roll off
from the highlights to the Midtown's. It gives a much more cinematic feel
to the image and is one of the most important techniques to master to
control the look of the image.

00:20:20:06 - 00:20:38:10
Unknown
You can use this technique to control the whole image or inside of
garbage masks to control part of the image. Flattening highlights can
give a painterly feeling, and it is a very important element in look
creation. Now what we need to do is just add a little bit of shine back
to this light. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to reset.

00:20:38:10 - 00:20:58:14
Unknown
Let's just zoom to fit. I'm going to add another node here option or alt.
And as I'm going to want to make sure that I am in my log controls, let's
set our high range value here to be point five. And then what I'm going
to do is grab the highlights. I'm going to drag them way up here
somewhere around.

00:20:58:16 - 00:21:18:29
Unknown
I think 0.4 might be a little bit too high. Let's just turn this on and
off here. Yeah, let's sort of put that down at around half that. Let's
just go sort of around to 2.2 maybe. I think that's much better. All
right. You can see we just added a little bit of shine back to that light
as we talked about in the previous lesson.

00:21:18:29 - 00:21:37:09
Unknown
We can also do a Luma key to isolate the range we want, but it's good
practice to avoid clean when we don't need to do it. The law controls are
precise and work perfectly. In this case. Now we're going to get in and
create a new Luma curve to better control the blacks and mid tones of the
image.

00:21:37:12 - 00:21:55:15
Unknown
Let's just space out our node option or alt. And as now, what's important
to keep in mind is that I could have done the same thing with log
shadows, but we're going to use this technique here. So I'm going to
select this node and we're going to give our image a little bit of a
gamma stretch here. So again, much like I had done before, I'm simply
going to come down.

00:21:55:15 - 00:22:21:12
Unknown
I'm going to turn off editable lines for right now. I'm just going to
come down. We're going to add the default anchors, grab the bottom one.
I'm going to drag it over to about here. Now, you'll notice over here on
the scopes, I'm just going to zoom in on the just so you can see exactly
what's happening. That's as I grab this bottom most point of the curve,
you can see that I'm actually stretching those blocks right down to make
sure that they are as dark as they can be.

00:22:21:12 - 00:22:44:03
Unknown
And what I also have the ability to do is just to grab one of these other
points, just bring things north just a little bit here. These small,
precise adjustments mean everything to the image. Work the curve until
you get to the sweet spot. In this lesson, I want to talk a little bit
about printer lights. Give you a little bit of a primer on them, what
they are and how you're going to use them inside of resolve.

00:22:44:04 - 00:23:08:27
Unknown
Now, before I get rolling, I think it's important to talk a little bit
about where they came from. So basically where Printer Light came from
was back in the days of photochemical color timing. Now that means in the
film process. So basically what had happened back then was that filtered
light red, green or blue was shown through the film to change the balance
of color in any particular shot.

00:23:09:00 - 00:23:29:10
Unknown
All right. Now they were measured in points. There was a 50 point range
with a starting place of 25 for each channel. Printer points are still
extremely popular and common corrections for setting the primary balance,
but also for creating looks. One of the reasons for its popularity is
that printer points alter the entire tonal range in the image.

00:23:29:12 - 00:23:49:02
Unknown
This way we stay true to the way the original image was shot, and the
result can be very clean and very cinematic. This is a completely
different deal than working with the separate tone controls such as the
Lift Gamma and Gain. So in this lesson, I want to show you exactly what
you're looking at when it comes to dealing with printer lights.

00:23:49:05 - 00:24:11:27
Unknown
And then in the next lesson, we're going to quickly color correct a shot
using them. All right. So let's get rolling. All right. Now, before we go
on, I want to be very clear that printer lights is exactly the same thing
as offsets now, offsets being red, green, blue and brightness, which is
what resolver refers to the old printer lights as.

00:24:11:27 - 00:24:33:24
Unknown
So obviously red, green, blue and brightness right here. All right. So
let's start out by talking about luminance. Now we have my good friend,
the gradient here. Now you're going to notice I do not have a curve on
here. I don't have a look up table. I didn't create my own curve. We just
have a straight line that represents the tonal range of our shot.

00:24:33:27 - 00:24:54:12
Unknown
Now, here's where working with offsets inside of resolve is important, as
opposed to working with our Lift Gamma and Gain. What I'm going to do is
I'm going to get in, I'm going to grab the brightness will, I'm going to
drag it to the right. Now you're going to notice what happens in my scope
is that the highlights midterms and shadows are impacted equally.

00:24:54:15 - 00:25:30:23
Unknown
Okay by this change. Whether I'm adding brightness or taking it away, the
tonal range of my shot remains the same. Okay, let's just reset that to
put it back the way that it was. Now let me show you what happens when we
get in and we impact the lift Gamma and gain. You'll see that what
happens is as we start making these changes, which is a common workflow
for most people when they get started working and resolve is we've
complete broken the tonal range of our image, which is not what we want
to do.

00:25:30:23 - 00:26:02:27
Unknown
Well, we're getting started correcting this shot. Let's reset this. All
right. Let's talk about color now with the offsets. I'm going to grab the
red or we're going to separate red. We're going to separate green. Just a
little bit here and blue. And you'll see again, we have the tonal range
maintained. And even if we get in and adjust the brightness again, you'll
see everything stays in relationship keeping that tonal range exactly the
way that we need it.

00:26:02:28 - 00:26:27:26
Unknown
Now, again, let's reset this and let's just impact the lift gamma and
gain. Once we get in here, you'll see that it immediately just throws
everything else completely out of whack. That said, we will use lift
gamma and gain to adjust color later in this course, but for balancing
it's best practice to alter the entire tonal range. And it's the
preferred method used in many of the top post facilities in the world.

00:26:27:28 - 00:26:53:05
Unknown
Now, what's important to keep in mind is that you can get all kinds of
color combinations with just offsets. The combination of red, green and
blue and the opposite's cyan, magenta and yellow in varying degrees of
intensities can create a variety of different colors. Believe it or not,
I say in the good old days, all the tools that the color timers had
available to them was printer lights, red, green, blue and exposure.

00:26:53:07 - 00:27:24:00
Unknown
No lift, no gamma, no gain. And thousands of blockbusters were color
timed this way. So you can see what an essential tool offsets and printer
lights are inside of resolve. Let's dive deeper into this topic in the
next lesson. Let's talk a little bit about workflows. I've picked a
random shot here. Doesn't really matter which shot that I use, and the
first I'm going to need to do is to add another node after the first node
that we have selected.

00:27:24:00 - 00:27:38:24
Unknown
Now to do that option and s on the Mac Alt, and that's for all my Windows
friends out there. And what we're going to do is add some contrast to
this shot. But what we want to figure out is where exactly we'd like to
tear this image apart and to start pulling the brights away and to start
pulling the blacks away.

00:27:38:27 - 00:28:00:08
Unknown
So, for example, I think somewhere around the 300 mark is where we're
going to go, which is going to cut it right across this line here. This
line here is pretty much not going to move that much at all. I'm just
going to adjust the contrast not to match probably to about there. We can
even adjust the overall lightness a little bit here just to bring our
values up.

00:28:00:08 - 00:28:20:10
Unknown
And that is looking pretty good as a starting point. If we're not happy
with the entire balance of this shot, I might need to do a uniform
adjustment to the red, green and blue channel or a combination of these,
but maintain the tonal range on this particular shot. There is no reason
why the color should be off and out of the shadows.

00:28:20:10 - 00:28:52:07
Unknown
Midterms or highlights. 99% of the time. It's often the entire tonal
range of the shot and a printer light adjustment is all that's needed.
The only correct way to do these adjustments is prior to the lookup table
or curve that we have applied, which is really the way offset tools are
designed to work. Now the reason is because the offset controls are
designed to act like a traditional exposure control as the image is going
to expand and compress based on the shape of the curve.

00:28:52:09 - 00:29:15:16
Unknown
That means when we look at the corrections through an curve, we'll see
more changes in the straight line portion of the curve. Basically in the
middle rather than in the ends, which is the head or the toe of the
curve. Now, creatively, it means that we can push our color quite hard
into the image without affecting the blacks, the highlights as much as
the Midtown's.

00:29:15:18 - 00:29:36:12
Unknown
Okay, let's look at the adjustment we just did. You'll see we've made a
very minor adjustment. However, if I come back to the actual node and I
turn it off and I turn it on, you can see that it's actually made quite a
staggering difference. And all this with the knowledge that we didn't
break the relationship between the total ranges and kept it all natural.

00:29:36:14 - 00:29:59:10
Unknown
Now with that being said, using the offset wheel can be I'm not going to
say tricky, it can just be a little bit cumbersome and we really want to
have precise control over them. Well, this is where our printer light
hotkeys come into play. I'm just going to reset it, navigate up to the
color dropdown. I'm going to come down to our printer light hot keys and
make sure they are turned on.

00:29:59:10 - 00:30:20:26
Unknown
Now, we can be as precise as we want to. A quarter of a point adjustment
to these printer lights. Half a printer light would be a value of 0.5 a
quarter printer light would be a value of .25. This is a way that you're
going to be able to get in and make corrections faster than you ever have
before.

00:30:20:28 - 00:30:42:27
Unknown
The previous lesson I did really focus on the red, green and blue printer
lights. However, if you come down to the shortcuts, you'll see that we
have the master, which is obviously all the red, green and blue being
adjusted at one time. We can then get in and worry about the red, green,
blue, cyan, magenta and yellow all separately of each other.

00:30:43:05 - 00:31:14:26
Unknown
So keep that in mind. Let's try this out. I'm going to switch to the
parade scope. Now. You'll see that in this case right here, I'm just
going to look more so at the highlights of the shot. You'll see that our
blue is a little bit on the low side. Now you might be thinking, well,
Kev, we can, you know, pull away from, you know, red and green to add to
the blue or what we can do is simply just add a little bit of blue to
this shot again by utilizing our printer light hotkeys.

00:31:14:26 - 00:31:34:08
Unknown
Now, for me, the way that they're mapped out, which is how they're mapped
out, standard inside of resolve is with the numeric pad. Now keep in mind
that for the full point changes now if you could get in and map your
keyboard to have all the printer light shortcuts, as you know, one is
command, one is option, one is shift.

00:31:34:08 - 00:31:53:18
Unknown
However you want to have this laid out. Okay, let's see how we can do a
simple adjustment with the printer light hotkeys. I'm going to use the
nine on the numeric pad and as I hit nine, you'll notice over here that
not only has my scope adjusted, but over here you'll see that the blue
value has jumped 26.

00:31:53:18 - 00:32:11:21
Unknown
And what I'm going to do is just add a couple more in there and you'll
see that as I'm doing this, blue is being added. Now, I don't want to add
too much blue, so let's just bring that down to 26. I'm just going to
bring the red and green down just a little bit to about there. I think
that's looking pretty good like that.

00:32:11:23 - 00:32:41:11
Unknown
Now, keep in mind that I could adjust the master level now to bring
everything up if I wanted to, but take a look at the before, which looks
like that very, very green and the after which has a little bit of blue,
added All the whites look a lot better now than they did before. And for
me, this shot has now been color corrected and is the new baseline for us
to start with in this lesson, I want to talk about shot balancing and
matching shots.

00:32:41:13 - 00:32:57:27
Unknown
Now, obviously, that's going to be very important in this situation where
we have an office scene where we have our two talent talking to each
other and we're going to need to make sure that the shots look seamless
when cutting back and forth. So that's going to require us to do a little
bit of matching. Now before we get rolling, I am going to come up.
00:32:57:27 - 00:33:13:28
Unknown
You'll notice that I have these two clips flagged. I'm going to come down
and only view the flagged clips just so it's a little bit easier when
we're switching back and forth. And as we know from previous lessons,
first thing we're always going to do is we're going to add that curve to
our shots. We're going to add a second note.

00:33:13:28 - 00:33:43:00
Unknown
I'm going to right click, I'm going to come down to LUTS. We're going to
add that Ari Alexa log C to rec 709 Do the exact same thing on our next
shot option or alt and SX and there we go. Now remember we apply the
electric light on these shots because that's the lut the deal he watched
his light through on set using the same LUT is the only guarantee that we
have that we'll see the image the same way that they did when they were
shooting.

00:33:43:02 - 00:34:07:11
Unknown
That said, there's nothing wrong with shaping your own curve or starting
with a film emulation lookup table, but it's generally a good idea to
know where we're coming from. And often the DOP wants to see that as a
starting point. Now let's take a look at these two shots to see exactly
what's going on here. Now we sort of have this overall yellow look that's
happening in between the two shots.

00:34:07:11 - 00:34:27:26
Unknown
Now the yellows actually impact in the shots in a slightly different way.
If you take a look at this shot here, overall, this shot is a little bit
brighter. The other shot, however, you'll see that we got a lot of yellow
happening in his shirt, a lot of yellow happening over here on the board
and even a lot of yellow happening in the door, which is not quite what
we would want.

00:34:27:28 - 00:34:50:05
Unknown
Now, taking a look at our other shot, you'll notice it's a little bit
darker, however, take a look at the paper in behind him. That's looking
pretty. Whites were already on the right track with this shot. It's just
a little bit on the dark side. All right. So how are we going to get in
and balance these shots so that they're going to match each other?

00:34:50:07 - 00:35:07:25
Unknown
Before we start out, I want to point out the balancing means, adjusting
the color so that the image looks more natural or not necessarily correct
on a scope. If the yellow color cast that we see in this shot works for
us, there's no rule that says we have to neutralize the white balance. It
might be gels or decisions made on set.

00:35:07:27 - 00:35:30:17
Unknown
Sometimes we also deliberately ignore the balance for artistic reasons.
Think about that blue hour in the morning or evening. It's supposed to be
blue and it's perfectly natural, just as a sunset shot needs to stay nice
and warm. So keep that in mind. Well, the first thing that we're going to
do is I'm going to navigate over here to my waveform drop down and I'm
going to switch this over to parade.

00:35:30:19 - 00:35:54:10
Unknown
Now, parade is a very visual way to see exactly what's going on with the
red, green and blue channel. And as you can see, we're a little bit blue
deficient. Here are blue channels, a little bit lighter than the other
two channels. Now, I think this is a good place to start. And just talk
about a concept that I think is important for you to understand when
getting in and deciding, well, do I want to pull back on red and green or
do I want to add more blue?

00:35:54:12 - 00:36:16:26
Unknown
You need to think about what the consequences are of those two different
actions because they are very different in the sense of how your shot's
going to look. If we get in and add more blue to this shot, we increase
the blue channel, we're going to increase the overall brightness of the
image. If we bring down the green and red channels, we're going to darken
the overall image.

00:36:16:28 - 00:36:36:10
Unknown
So this is what you're going to need to consider when you're going to
decide what you actually want to get in and adjust. Maybe you want to
bring green and red down ever so slightly, bring blue up a little bit
more just to keep everything as far as the brightness goes, more or less
where it is. What I'm going to do for the purposes of this shot is, I'm
just going to add a little bit more blue.

00:36:36:12 - 00:36:55:27
Unknown
Now. You'll see that we already are on our primary bars. We can do this
one of a couple of ways. We can just grab the value and just start
dragging however much we want. I'm just going to release actually already
reset itself to 25 because what I want to make sure of here is that I
have my printer light hotkeys turned on, going to make sure that I have
node one selected.

00:36:55:29 - 00:37:22:23
Unknown
Now keep in mind I only have the full point value of the printer light
hotkeys turned on if I wanted more precision I would get it and have the
half point and quarter point ones assigned to my keyboard as well. I'm
just going to increase the blue value ever so slightly. Not too much. And
I think if I go three points, while you know what three points is
actually not too bad, and you'll notice that we've helped balance this
image out a lot more than it was before.
00:37:22:24 - 00:37:46:09
Unknown
That's what it was before. This is what it is now. You'll see. It just
helps give it a little bit less of a yellow feeling, too. It makes
everything look a little bit more, quote unquote, normal. Now, something
else that I want to show you with this shot, I'm actually just going to
reset this node. And what we're going to do is switch back here to the
primary wheels, and I'm going to switch my scope here over to my vector
scope.

00:37:46:09 - 00:38:08:14
Unknown
Vector scope is a tool that I think is always sadly underutilized by a
lot of colors when they're starting out, because right away we can see
that something is going on with the image because as you can see, the
image color is skewed a little bit over towards the warm side. And what
I'd like to do is just pull it back and to pull it back to compensate,
all we're going to do is grab our crosshairs here.

00:38:08:14 - 00:38:32:11
Unknown
And as I start to grab it and pull back, you'll see it move right away in
the vector scope. And what you're also going to notice is that the values
are changing red, green and blue. I'm going to try to keep it somewhere
around what I had it at before. You'll notice it as I'm dragging. I want
to keep it somewhere roughly close to what we had it at before, which I
think is probably about here and now.

00:38:32:11 - 00:38:51:18
Unknown
You'll notice if I come in and I hit the D key to turn that node on and
off, you'll see we have a noticeable difference. Now, the only catch here
is that you'll notice that as I was bringing the blue channel up and
bringing down the red and green channels, it actually made the overall
image darker than what I had it at before.

00:38:51:20 - 00:39:12:14
Unknown
So now you can start to see how the impact and how you choose the
technique you're going to use to adjust The color is immediately going to
have an impact on the brightness of the image. All right. I'm actually
just going to reset this node. I think I'm just going to punch in the
printer, light right back to there.

00:39:12:15 - 00:39:29:19
Unknown
We'll just increase the overall brightness of the image. I think that's
good. Even 29 might be pushing it a little bit, but I think that's good
for this shot. All right. Let's switch back to our other shot now and
let's quickly correct this one. Now, keep in mind, the technique is not
going to work any differently now than what we had done before.

00:39:29:21 - 00:39:45:18
Unknown
If we're going to be using our offset, I'm simply going to come in.
You'll see we're not exactly centered up here. I'd really like more of
the bulk of the color to be right there in the middle. So let's do this
now, obviously, by doing this, the problem that we're running into is
you'll see the red green values are coming down, even though blue is
coming up.

00:39:45:18 - 00:40:19:23
Unknown
So we're actually making the image darker. And in this case, I don't want
to do that because the image was already dark to begin with. So let's
reset by simply double clicking. Let's switch on over to our primary
bars. Let's use our printer light hotkeys here. I'm just going to
increase the blue values a little bit here. And what I'm also going to do
is actually just increase the overall red and green as well, just to make
this look a little bit on the brighter side, I'm just going to switch
back here to our parade and you'll see this is already looking much
better than it did before.

00:40:19:25 - 00:40:38:14
Unknown
Now the big question is, how does it compare with our other shot? And
you'll see these two shots are now pretty darn close to each other. As
far as matching goes, brightness and color. So I think this is pretty
good and a pretty good place to leave off these two shots because they're
balanced pretty darn close to each other.

00:40:38:16 - 00:40:59:15
Unknown
All right. One thing that I want to mention before moving on to the next
lesson is that balancing doesn't have to mean forcing blacks to be
completely black and whites to be completely white. That's one of the
biggest mistakes inexperienced colorists make in the real world. Blacks
aren't always completely black, and we can certainly say the same thing
about the highlights.

00:40:59:18 - 00:41:22:12
Unknown
It's about finding a neutral starting point, good separation and that
center of attention, often the skin tones that look good in this lesson.
Let's talk about looks now. We've done a lot of technical discussion up
to this point, so I thought we'd have a little bit of fun in the next few
lessons, create some different looks for you to use in your productions.

00:41:22:15 - 00:41:49:26
Unknown
Now what I'm going to do is add a couple of extra nodes here. As we know,
with the last node in the chain that will always be for our curve. Let's
add our log C2 rex 709 lookup table. I just want to remind you that even
though it looks like the exposure adjustment is happening after the LUT,
it actually happens prior to the LUT, that means we can be quite
aggressive when working with the exposure without losing the details and
clipping the blacks.
00:41:49:28 - 00:42:13:02
Unknown
This is because the majority of the exposure will affect only the
straight line portion of our s curve and not the blacks and whites.
They'll be rolled off in either direction. The same principle applies to
the color corrections we do here on the first node. When we dial in the
colors, we'll watch it through the curve and it will mostly affect the
mid tones and not affect the black and whites that much.

00:42:13:05 - 00:42:34:18
Unknown
All right. So keep that in mind as well. Now, what I'm going to do just
for right now is I'm just going to reset our offset, our exposure, and
I'm going to get to that at the very end and you'll see why I'm going to
select my second node. And just so we get a little bit more enhancement
in the colors, what I'm going to do is just cut the saturation value down
to about 20.

00:42:34:20 - 00:43:05:06
Unknown
So that's basically cutting it about 60% because we will do our primary
color corrections prior to the D saturation node. The colors will be
filtered through this node the same way as all the corrections will be
filtered through our last node in the chain, down the colors through the
combination of both the D saturation filter and the lookup table will
give us both access to the low saturation colors, the color palette and
most impact the mid tones of the shot.

00:43:05:08 - 00:43:22:08
Unknown
With our first node here selected, we're going to do a little technique
that's referred to as bouncing. Now it's a little bit easier to do if I
had a control surface in front of me, but just because of desk real
estate and obviously the clicking and clanging of actually working with a
surface is a little bit loud of my recording.

00:43:22:08 - 00:43:37:24
Unknown
So that's why I've been using a mouse up until this point. But basically
the way that bouncing works is you're going to come in and you're going
to take your control surface or your mouse for that matter, and you're
basically going to be going off in different directions with either the
lift or the gamma to get the look that you want.

00:43:37:24 - 00:43:57:12
Unknown
So for example, with our lookup table here selected, we know that we're
going to need to affect the yellow and the blue of the lift and the
gamma. Now it's up to you to decide how you want to start going to figure
out the look that you want a gap. And what we're going to do is take our
lift and we're going to send it over towards blue.

00:43:57:17 - 00:44:16:27
Unknown
We're going to take our gamma, we're going to send it over towards
yellow. And the blue and the yellow combination will give us a green
combination. All right. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to come down
here and I'm just going to start basically dragging like this. Okay.
Little bits and little bits. Now you can see why this is a little bit
easier if you're working with a surface here.

00:44:16:27 - 00:44:35:12
Unknown
And what I'm going to do is I'm just going to keep clicking this over
here just a little bit. I'm going to get it over here, roughly about
there. We'll just bounce this over a little bit maybe to about here. And
I think we're almost good where we've got it right about there. I think
that's not too bad.

00:44:35:16 - 00:44:55:27
Unknown
All right. It's looking a little bit green. Not as green as I would like
it to look, but it's pretty close. So the question now is, how do I get
it? Even closer? Well, this is where the exposure comes into play. And
the reason I wanted to throw exposure in here last is because the
exposure is really what's going to determine how much mood we're going to
be adding to this shot.

00:44:55:27 - 00:45:14:14
Unknown
That's sort of the best way that I can put it. And what we're going to do
is we're simply going to come back to that last note in the chain and I'm
going to grab the exposure under the offset, obstacles are dragging it
south. And you'll notice now that we definitely get a different feeling
as we bring this shot darker right to about there.

00:45:14:16 - 00:45:32:28
Unknown
Normally you'd want to dial in the exposure first, as explained earlier
in the course buffer, demonstrating the impact exposure has on the color
will do it the other way. This time. Now, there's something that's
important to keep in mind when you're doing a technique like this. Now,
I've applied this to a I'm going to call this to a close up.

00:45:32:28 - 00:45:53:18
Unknown
I'm going to right click. We're just going to grab a still of this. We
can take a look at it on some other shots. And I'm just going to switch
back to see all the clips. Now I'm going to jump down to the wide shot of
our office because that really is what's going to determine if this look
needs any adjustments, like maybe the exposure needs to be brought up,
maybe in a little bit more green or a little bit yellow needs to be
added.

00:45:53:18 - 00:46:18:22
Unknown
But this is where we can easily tell if this look is working and it
definitely is working and it definitely gives our shot a very different
cold feel than it had when we started. This setup can be used for a
variety of different looks and moods, and it's up to you to dial in the
right amount of each color and find the combinations that fit the story
and your tastes.

00:46:18:25 - 00:46:46:28
Unknown
Keep in mind that adjusting the amount of saturation that you run the
colors through will give you access to a new set of color combinations. I
also encourage you to combine this set up with the print curve from one
of the first contrast management lessons and create some unique looks of
your own. It's not always easy to understand what to do to enhance an
image, but learning a few things about color Harmony certainly helps in
color theory.

00:46:46:28 - 00:47:18:07
Unknown
Color harmony refers to certain pleasing color combinations. For example,
complementary colors, which means colors that are opposite to each other
on the color wheel or analogies colors which are next to each other on
the color wheel by tweaking the colors in your image into harmony, it
helps to create an image that is pleasing to the eye. Okay, let's see
what we can do to enhance this image and bring the colors into a more
harmonic color scheme where I want to start out with as the highlights.

00:47:18:09 - 00:47:39:12
Unknown
What I want to do is just get in and compress a little because they are a
little bit on the sharp side. So we're going to right click on our first
node. I'm going to add a serial node before this one and we're going to
head on over here to our custom curve, and I'm going to make sure that we
have our default anchors selected.

00:47:39:12 - 00:48:02:09
Unknown
I'm going to simply turn the second from the top one off or disable it,
basically remove it all together, grab that topmost point and bring it
south just a little bit. Now, if you'd like this curve to be a little bit
smoother, we can turn on those editable lines and just smooth it out just
a little bit. And if you take a look at our lights up here, I turn the
node on and off.

00:48:02:09 - 00:48:23:03
Unknown
You'll see how we've compressed them just to make them blend in with the
overall image just a little bit better. All right. So let's bring our
skin tones back from the original source. And we're going to do this by
adding a parallel node to our green node. So let's add that right here
and parallel. We're just going to give ourselves a little bit of space
here.

00:48:23:08 - 00:48:43:22
Unknown
Perfect. All right. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, well, why do
we add a parallel node? Well, first we're going to be piping in from our
source. And second, we can mix this with our green tone node to make it
blend better into the environment. So what we are going to do is drop
down to get access to all of our different curves.

00:48:43:24 - 00:49:07:05
Unknown
And I'm going to be heading on over to the hue versus saturation curve.
Now we want to add some red back in. So I'm going to select red and stick
this up somewhere around 1.6. 1.7 will put it roughly about there. Now,
take a look at the before. This is actually the after and then the
before. You'll see again just a little bit more life to our talent.

00:49:07:05 - 00:49:26:21
Unknown
Now, the only catch with doing what I've just is that I now need to do a
little bit of a huge shift to push the hue back towards a little bit more
natural tones. And we're going to do that with another parallel node. So
let's add a parallel node. Once we have the parallel node there, we're
going to head on into the hue versus hue curve.

00:49:26:23 - 00:49:51:20
Unknown
Let's click on that red color. Once again, we're just going to rotate our
hue or bring it north up to somewhere around, I don't know, ten, anywhere
between ten and 15. I think it's pretty good. Nice again, much like we've
done before. Let's disable the node and re-enable it. You'll notice again
a very subtle change. Now let's add a node after our saturate Asian node
again, right click, we're going to come down to add node.

00:49:51:20 - 00:50:13:16
Unknown
We're going to add a serial node right here. And what we want to do now
is we want to isolate certain colors that are jumping out at us to bring
those tones closer together. Now, the two that stand out to me are this
color blue right here and this color red right here over our shoulder. So
let's deal with this color first.

00:50:13:18 - 00:50:36:08
Unknown
Now, with the node selected, the first thing I want to do is isolate that
area. We're going to do it with a power window, simple circle that's a
little bit on the big side. Let's bring it right down here. Let's
position it right about there. We could soften it out just a little bit.
Now, once we've isolated the area, we can come back to our curves because
we are adjusting the saturation of a hue.

00:50:36:10 - 00:50:53:14
Unknown
We want to make sure that we are on hue versus saturation. We're going to
drop that color. You'll see it picks the very specific hue here. And what
I'm going to do is just bring this south maybe to about here. Now, if you
don't notice a huge overall change, what you can do is just widen out the
area here.

00:50:53:14 - 00:51:14:12
Unknown
Very nice. And now if you take a look, you'll see that blue color is not
as blue as it was before and blends much more nicely into the overall
shot. Now let's deal with the next one, which is our thermos. I think
that's a thermos over our talent shoulder. Now, again, right click, I'm
going to come down. We're going to add a new parallel node.

00:51:14:12 - 00:51:35:14
Unknown
You'll see parallel nodes are our friend. And let's just give ourselves a
little bit more space here. Perfect. Okay. So what we're going to do now
is, again, select that node. We're going to power a window to begin with.
Let's come over to Power window. Let's choose that circle way too big.
Let's flatten that out just a little bit or feather it out just a little
bit.

00:51:35:14 - 00:51:58:23
Unknown
Let's position over our talent shoulder. And the first thing I want to do
is to create a little bit of a deeper red. Now, to do that, I'm going to
use hue versus luminance. So let's head back to our curves, hue versus
luminance. Once we have it selected, we're going to navigate over. I drop
that color and just bring that value down to about 2.5.

00:51:58:25 - 00:52:25:09
Unknown
What I'm then going to do is switch over here to our hue versus
saturation and we're going to do the exact same thing. I'm just going to
I drop that color, let's bring it somewhere down around point five. I
think. I think that's looking pretty good. Now, again, as we always do,
let's simply with that node selected, turn it off and on and you'll see
it's just a much deeper red that blends much better into the overall
scheme of things.

00:52:25:12 - 00:52:43:09
Unknown
Now we're going to sharpen him up just a little bit, so I'm going to add
a serial node here. Let's make sure we have it selected. We're going to
head back to our power windows again. We're going back to our circle.
You'll see beauty Part about a lot of this is, is that we're not really
changing how we do things.

00:52:43:09 - 00:53:03:14
Unknown
It's just a slight variation on each one. Let's give that a little bit of
a feather. And what we want to do now is we want to head into our Blur
category, but not Blur. Sharpen was going to zoom in on his face just a
little bit here, and I was going to pull that radius down. And you'll
notice that as I do that, it adds a ton of sharpness to his face.
00:53:03:17 - 00:53:24:18
Unknown
I'm just going to go down point one will put it back roughly about there,
and I'm thinking that that is looking very good overall. Now, something
that I do want to mention in these lessons with this example specifically
where we're getting and sharpening up our towns face. I'm going to go a
little bit to the extreme because keep in mind, these tutorials are
compressed.

00:53:24:21 - 00:53:44:19
Unknown
Go on to the web and it's not very noticeable if I don't go a little bit
further. So keep that in mind. Sometimes you're only going to want to use
the absolute slightest amount of sharpen in this case than you would in
the example that I did right here. Now, what we want to do is we want to
save this.

00:53:44:24 - 00:54:06:13
Unknown
We want to take this concept in this grade and we want to apply it to the
next shot. So let's right click we're going to grab a style of this and
I'm going to head on over to my gallery. Let's rename this style or
rename the label. We're going to call this power grade. We'll call this
finished grade with our finished grade, I'm just going to call up my
clips.

00:54:06:13 - 00:54:27:07
Unknown
I'm going to head on to the next shot and we're going to take this and
we're just going to apply the grade. We're going to take exactly what we
just did and just modify it slightly to work with what we have.
Everything works perfectly fine until we get up here to our isolation.
All right. Now, we used one to isolate blue and we used one to isolate
red.

00:54:27:08 - 00:54:51:07
Unknown
Now I want to keep that red isolation. Let's just rename this node red
ISO, and I'm just going to remove that blue iso and this is the sharpen.
So let's just see exactly what was going on here. I was going to turn my
highlights on because I want to see exactly where that power window is
sitting and I'm going to go back to Power Windows Perfect and I'm going
to put it over top of the red right here.

00:54:51:07 - 00:55:11:12
Unknown
So let's stretch this out. Just expand it just a little bit. And that's
going to work right about there to sort of take care of the red. And if I
needed to get in and be more specific with the orange, we could do that
as well. Now, let's take the same concept that we've just used right here
and use it to sharpen up our talent's face.

00:55:11:14 - 00:55:35:13
Unknown
Let's head right on over here. You'll see way too big. But of course what
we can do is rotate that a little bit. We can shrink it right down. It's
going to sit right over top of our town's face. And what we've just done
in a few mouse clicks is taken what we created in the previous shot and
brought the color over to the next shot and with a few minor
modifications because we are in the same location, we can take what we
had and make it what we have.

00:55:35:21 - 00:56:00:04
Unknown
Very simple to create harmony across this entire scene. All right.
Another look's lesson coming your way right now. And in this lesson we're
going to focus primarily on the RG B mixer to create the look that we
want to create. Again, another great tool for creating unique looks
inside of DaVinci Resolve. Now we know what the process is.

00:56:00:04 - 00:56:23:00
Unknown
You don't need me to go into it in great detail. As always, we have our
two lots to start with and what we're going to do is with our first node,
let's head on over to the RG, the mixer. Now inside the RGV mixture,
you'll notice we have the red, green and blue outputs. You'll also notice
at the bottom we can get in and we can make things monochrome from here
if we want.

00:56:23:03 - 00:56:40:28
Unknown
We can also get in and start swapping channels around as well. We're not
actually going to do any of that. What we are going to do to get things
rolling is I'm going to come in and we're just going to set our red blue
value to be somewhere up around one. We'll put it about. They're going to
do the same thing with our green output or up around one.

00:56:41:01 - 00:57:03:07
Unknown
And let's now take our green output. We're going to put that up at around
two all the way up, and we're going to take our red value. And I'm just
going to drag it down to about somewhere about one right there. Now, you
might be thinking, well, Kev, this really doesn't look any different than
what we had before, but we're already on the way to creating this new
look.

00:57:03:07 - 00:57:25:27
Unknown
What do I mean by that? We'll take a look at what's actually happening
here. You'll notice that we do have a very slight color adjustment here
happening more noticeably over here. You'll notice that fin very blue
becomes more of a turquoise color and the background even goes from sort
of a brownish color to a lot more yellow. Now, let's take this look one
step further.

00:57:26:00 - 00:57:42:18
Unknown
I'm going to head on over to our primary wheels, our primary color
wheels, and I'm going to make a hue adjustment. Let's just grab the hue
value of 50 and it's going to drag it right down to about somewhere
around 39 or 49. You might be thinking, Wow, Kev, that looks awful. And
it does or not finished yet.

00:57:42:20 - 00:58:04:04
Unknown
What we're now going to do is we're just going to start pulling some of
this look out of the shot until we get to the point. We're happy with the
look that we have. When you work with creating a look, it can often be a
good idea to start with something very extreme and slowly dial it back.
It will fall nicely into its place on the range of established on your
image.

00:58:04:04 - 00:58:22:21
Unknown
If the separation is good, let me show you what I mean. We're going to
head on over to our key section, and I'm going to come down to the key
output. Now, if I take this key output and I put it at zero, you're going
to notice it essentially pulls everything that we've done off of this
note. It just resets the note back to nothing.

00:58:22:24 - 00:58:48:15
Unknown
When I put this back up at one, we just start dragging this value down
and you'll notice that when we get to somewhere around 60 to 55, this
look is really going to fall in to where we want it right about there.
And that my friends, a fantastic look that looks very different from what
the base looks like with the LUT applied and a simple exposure adjustment
made to it.

00:58:48:15 - 00:59:08:06
Unknown
You'll see. There we go. Versus this two very different fields. This
gives us one of those fields of almost a David Fincher movie. And the
beauty part is, as we know, we can come to our look right click, grab a
still of it. Let's now just come back to my primary color wheels. We're
going to reset everything here back to all clips.

00:59:08:06 - 00:59:22:11
Unknown
Let's just pick a different shot here to take a look at it. It's going to
come back. Doesn't matter which one. Let's pick this one here. All I'm
going to do is hover over the look and take a look. Looks fantastic.
Let's pick one more here. I'm just going to zing all the way back, even
to this shot here.

00:59:22:11 - 00:59:48:23
Unknown
We got a little bit more light in this shot. You'll see again the look
looks fantastic. Gives us the look of almost like a seven or a Zodiac.
And you'll see it was very, very simple to create simply using our RG B
mixer. In this lesson, I want to talk about adding some grit to our shot
and we're going to continue the look that we had at the end of our RG B
mixer.

00:59:48:26 - 01:00:08:09
Unknown
Look lesson to create this new look by adding some grit. Now before we do
that, what I'm going to do here is just switch my scopes here over to my
vector scope. I'm going to add another note and we're just going to
center our color up or fix it a little bit here. Let's head on over to
our primary wheels.

01:00:08:09 - 01:00:24:14
Unknown
Just grab the offset. Let's just center this up just cause I want to have
the color in our talent's face looking a little bit more. We'll say quote
unquote, normal. Now for the look that we're going to be creating. I have
to zoom back just a little bit here, because I need a little bit more
screen real estate for our nodes.

01:00:24:17 - 01:00:50:22
Unknown
Now, the work that we're going to do is going to happen between the node
that we just added and our lookup table. So the first thing we want to do
is add some silver. The beauty part of this technique is that silver will
add rawness to the image and at the same time increase contrast, which
again makes the image appear slightly sharper, which is a key ingredient
in the creation of grit.

01:00:50:24 - 01:01:08:05
Unknown
We're going to play off of the lift and the gain by lowering our
luminance values, the y value on the left, and we're going to increase
the Y value on the gain. Now, the beauty part of this technique is that
we're not actually increasing the saturation to our image. Let me show
you what I mean. Option or alternate.

01:01:08:05 - 01:01:29:29
Unknown
S Let's head to our primary bars now with the lift that I want to bring
it down too much. Let's bring it down to somewhere about -0.05 minus .06.
That's pretty good. What I'm going to do now is take the gain value and
bring it up to somewhere around 0.15. So what about there is pretty good
now it might not look like a substantial changes happen.

01:01:29:29 - 01:01:48:13
Unknown
But take a look here. Look at this. That's the before and that's the
after. Take a look at how much a silver has now been added to this. So I
want to give this node a little bit of a label. We're going to call it
Silver. Make sure I spell that right. Retention. Now playing around with
the ungainly Luma curve can give much of the same result.

01:01:48:13 - 01:02:11:14
Unknown
You can get greater precision, but it can be difficult to control. The
only issue with what I've just done is that we've actually accentuated
some colors that we don't necessarily want to accentuate, sort of
increase the silver we've added to this image. It makes the folders in
the background stand out. Let's head on over to our curves. We know which
curve we're using, hue versus saturation.

01:02:11:16 - 01:02:30:12
Unknown
Let's make sure we add another node option or alternate s. Let's select
that color. Now, keep in mind we have some orange in our talent's face.
Now, if we hadn't have gone in and adjusted and rebalanced everything
out, we probably could have left this the way that it wasn't. Don't worry
too much about what was happening to the color in his face, but that's
okay.

01:02:30:15 - 01:02:46:27
Unknown
I'm not going to be pulling too much orange out anyways. Now what I'm
going to do is just reset this a bit. Let's just grab this. I'm going to
come back over here to Orange. Let's select it. Perfect. You'll see
there. I'm just going to drag it south a little bit. Not too much. You'll
see that orange has just been muted little bit.

01:02:46:27 - 01:03:06:18
Unknown
And it just makes it a little bit easier on the eyes. A little bit of
colors come out of our towns face, but I am okay with that. So let's turn
this node back on command or control in D on the keyboard. I am going to
name this. Let's call this, we're going to give it the node label, orange
reduction.

01:03:06:20 - 01:03:24:19
Unknown
Another way to add grit to the image is to create muted blacks. That
means to keep the blacks black, but reduce the nuances of gray that
you're going to find. There. Let's add that other node option or alt and
s on the keyboard and we're going to head back to the main curves window.
We're going to deal with a soft clip down here.

01:03:24:20 - 01:03:40:00
Unknown
Let's set the low value. And to do this, I want to make sure I'm showing
the wave form. We're going to put this up around between 60 and 70. Now,
what's important to keep in mind is you'll notice it more so in the
curves window over here that we see it over here in the wave form,
because we're obviously zoomed back a lot.

01:03:40:00 - 01:03:59:14
Unknown
And you'll notice as I start dragging, nothing seems to be happening
until we hit about 60 or 70, where we can see that color start to get
clipped or those black levels start to get clipped. Let's just set it
somewhere around 70. What I'm now going to do is simply grab that low,
soft. We're just going to soften it up a little bit like that somewhere
around 20.

01:03:59:16 - 01:04:21:09
Unknown
Now, obviously, the more that we adjust the low, the more washed out that
image is going to become. That's why I think somewhere around 70 is
probably pretty good. What we just did might not be readily apparent, but
as with everything we've learned up to this point, it's a combo nation of
techniques that creates the final result or the look that we're going
for.

01:04:21:11 - 01:04:45:09
Unknown
We can see that we have a lot less detail in the shadow and that nuances
are diminished. But in an image with more dark areas, this will be more
apparent. So let's call this node label soft clip. The next step is to
work directly with the sharpness controls option or ALT. And as to add
another node, what we're now going to do is head to the Blur section.

01:04:45:09 - 01:05:03:02
Unknown
I know it sounds kind of funny that we're going to add grit by heading to
Blur, but I'm actually already in the Sharpen dropdown because obviously
by default will be in Blur if we grab the radius and just start blurring
it, that's what's going to happen. Let's undo that. Let's come back to
Blur and let's switch that to B sharpen.

01:05:03:04 - 01:05:24:15
Unknown
Now really, there's three parameters we're going to adjust in here.
Radius It's CORIN Softness and level. Now let's just put the radius is
going to break down just slightly. Let's bring it down to about 0.45.
Let's talk about now. CORIN Softness and level and what the differences
between the two will level is how much edge detail we're going to get in,
sharpen, how much of it's going to be sharpened.

01:05:24:18 - 01:05:44:23
Unknown
CORIN Softness is how much of a feather transition is going to happen
between the sharp and the sharp. So let's set these We're probably going
to set them somewhere about the same let's set them about 45 for each.
Now, the only problem with this is so you don't actually really see
what's happening as far as what is being selected, what's been softened.

01:05:44:25 - 01:06:10:09
Unknown
But we can actually see this by navigating right up here and turning our
highlight on now, you'll notice now exactly what is being sharpened. Look
at the hair detail. Be careful what sharpening can do to specular
highlights as it can lead to clipping or strange artifacts very quickly,
some colorists are isolating out the highlights completely when adding
sharpness.
01:06:10:09 - 01:06:31:00
Unknown
Because of this, it's important to understand that this is not a one size
fits all game. The result of sharpening is of course going to vary from
shot to shot. And now if I switch back, if I turn highlight off and I
come in, let's take a look at the detail in our talent's face here. I'm
going to turn it off and turn it on.

01:06:31:00 - 01:06:58:12
Unknown
It's very slight, so let's just make a little bit more of an adjustment
here by dragging Seth a little bit. There we go. And now let's turn it
off and turn it on. So much grip we get back. Now there's way too much
sharpening here, but we can clearly see that it brings out the texture.
There is an alternate way to do this, and that is to sharpen only the
channel that will result in a bit cleaner sharpening.

01:06:58:15 - 01:07:14:24
Unknown
But let's name this node first. What we're now going to do is we're going
to right click. We're going to add a node, we're going to add a parallel
node just so we can see the difference between the two. Now I'm just
going to turn that node off. I'm going to come back here. I'm going to
add a color space conversion here.

01:07:14:24 - 01:07:36:16
Unknown
We're going to switch to the lab color space. Now, what exactly is the
lab color space? L stands for Luminance, A is the values from green to
red, and B is the values from blue to yellow. So this is what is now
making up the color and the luminance values in our image. So let me show
you how this actually comes into play.

01:07:36:21 - 01:07:57:09
Unknown
I'm going to come back to our color wheels here, and I'm only going to
talk about the offset here. Now in the offset, remember, keep in mind we
talked about RG B now being mapped to L, A and B, L representing not red
anymore, but luminance values. So you'll see if I come in and I grab that
and adjust it, we actually have to make sure we're on the right node
here.

01:07:57:11 - 01:08:18:21
Unknown
But if I grab it and adjust it, take a look at what's happening. Red is
not being adjusted or added to the image. Luminance is Now if I reset
this, let's just double click on it. There we go. If we now get in and
adjust the a value, what this is going to do is it's going to give you
value adjustments from green up to red.

01:08:18:23 - 01:08:53:09
Unknown
And now with the B slider, what this is representing is values from blue
all the way up to yellow. So therefore, if I come back here, let's double
click what I can actually do. Now is again, set this to be about 45, set
this to be about 45, unlink these values and simply adjust the red slider
to add sharpening to luminance only if you want to try to add another
layer of complexity to your sharpening, you can create some depth by
adding a tad of blur to the other two chroma channels.

01:08:53:11 - 01:09:15:08
Unknown
All right, now we have a few more techniques in our arsenal that will
help us to create interesting and unique looks in this lesson. I want to
talk about color mixing Now, before we do that, I want to talk about one
of our other curves. So I'm just going to add our LUT as we always do.
And what I'm also going to do here is call up our vector scope.

01:09:15:08 - 01:09:31:23
Unknown
And let's just give this just a little bit of a quick correction here.
That's looking very nice. All right. And what I'm going to do here is
just add a couple nodes in between the two that we had there. And with
Node three, I'm just going to take the blue colors and just bring them
right over here like such.

01:09:31:25 - 01:09:58:25
Unknown
All right. Perfect. Now, on the node, right after that, we're going to
head into our curves. I want to head to luminance versus saturation. It's
one of the ones that we didn't talk about in our previous lesson, where
we were getting in and talking about what the different curves are going
to give you the ability to do. Now, what it lets you do is it lets you
control the saturation of the highlights, the mid tones or the shadows or
the blacks, whites or grays.

01:09:58:27 - 01:10:18:21
Unknown
So what I'm going do is add a point down into the blacks or the shadows,
and we're just going to bring that value right down to zero. Now, you
might not notice anything. I was going to turn it off and turn it on.
Now, if you look very closely, you actually will. And we're you're going
to notice this is in the darkest parts of the shot here.

01:10:18:23 - 01:10:43:18
Unknown
Here, even a little bit in the hair. Now, the higher up that we bring our
point where we're actually going to have the saturation get cut off,
we'll notice the effect happen more. And what we're basically doing is
we're d saturating those values. So of course, obviously we want to keep
the blacks as black as possible, not have them influenced by this blue
color that we've pushed into the entire image.

01:10:43:21 - 01:11:03:20
Unknown
So this is where luminance versus saturation curve comes into play. Now,
it's going to come into play in our lesson because when we start talking
about the technique I'm going to show you with color mixing, we want to
make sure that it's not impacting the blacks. So let's just remove
everything, just that we have our curve and we have our balance.

01:11:03:27 - 01:11:27:14
Unknown
All right. Now, again, we're going to add another node. I'm just going to
do that exact same technique that we just did. Well, give us a little bit
more space here and then we're just going to bring this right down to
zero. So basically the absolute blacks of our shot are going not have any
saturation added to them at all, and it's going to ramp up a little bit
as we get towards somewhere up towards the mid tones.

01:11:27:18 - 01:11:49:05
Unknown
All right. Now I'm going to add another node and we're going to add a few
parallel nodes in here. We are going to get in and do a little bit of a
color change when it come back to our primary wheels. And I'm just going
to give this an overall offset change over towards red. And by doing
that, what we're also going to do is just isolate part of the image with
Power window a circle.

01:11:49:05 - 01:12:06:28
Unknown
I'm just going to place that right up here. Same thing we're going to do
with the next node, except in this case, we're going to be going to
green. Okay, not too much. There we go. And again, exactly the same
technique that we just did. We're just going to add a circle. I'm going
to place it right up here.

01:12:06:28 - 01:12:25:06
Unknown
And last certainly not least, we're going to push this one over here
towards blue. And again, I'm just going to come to our power windows.
We're just going to add a circle. And what I'm doing when I do this here
is I'm basically overlapping our colors and showing you, obviously, that
the combination of red and blue, for example, makes purple.

01:12:25:06 - 01:12:43:07
Unknown
But more importantly, in this case, the combination of red and green
actually produces yellow in there. So we're going to take this yellow
concept and we're going to take it one step further. Now, the reason that
I want to show you things this way is because I want you to start to
rethink the way that you're doing things.

01:12:43:09 - 01:13:03:12
Unknown
All right? And I'm just going to disable both of these nodes. In a lot of
cases, instead of coming in and splitting the two colors up into red and
green to create yellow, what you may have just done is push the entire
image towards yellow. The only problem with that is that there are
limited ways to influence the yellow this way.

01:13:03:15 - 01:13:30:11
Unknown
Whereas if we turn these two nodes back on and mix red and green
together, we're in a better position to manipulate the yellow because we
can work with the individual colors that make up yellow. We can tweak
each color to create new color combinations and adjust the individual
strengths and brightness levels. By mixing colors together, you will
experience that the colors fall into place with better separation.

01:13:30:13 - 01:13:52:10
Unknown
We're going to head on over to our key section. I want to put this key, I
don't know, somewhere around 0.55. Okay? What we see now is that we have
a very interesting mix of colors that is well distributed throughout the
image, thanks to the base work that we have done. When setting the
contrast and balance, this look would not be possible to create within a
single note.

01:13:52:10 - 01:14:12:09
Unknown
And we are now in much better control of the color elements in the image.
If you want to take the concept of mixing colors to the next level, you
can add a third color into the mix and get access to another set of
colors called tertiary colors. In this lesson, we're going to talk about
piping a downstream key.

01:14:12:09 - 01:14:29:14
Unknown
Now, what's important to keep in mind is that this lesson is all about
best practices. So let's get started. First thing, we're going to add a
couple of notes. I'm just going to separate them just a little bit here.
And as always, with our last note, we're going to come down to our LUT,
to our Ari. There we go.

01:14:29:14 - 01:14:48:19
Unknown
Very nice. Now, what I want to do is to create a look. So let's just
create a black and white look with our second note. What I'm going to do
is simply just navigate down to our saturation, just pull the saturation
out all together. Now, one way that we can do this key is to key from the
source and pass it by the look note.

01:14:48:21 - 01:15:10:16
Unknown
We're going to right click and we're going to navigate down to add a
parallel node. And what we're now going to do is select this note here.
Come on over to our qualifier. I'm simply going to navigate up to the
window. I'm going to click somewhere right around here. Now, you'll
notice that when I select it, nothing really happens.

01:15:10:18 - 01:15:23:27
Unknown
So let's see exactly what's happening. Now, keep in mind with the way
that I have things set up right now, I'm looking at is the output of my
entire node chain. So if I want to see what's going on on a specific
node, I can simply navigate right over here to the highlight parameter
and I turn it on.

01:15:23:27 - 01:15:57:09
Unknown
You'll notice the qualifiers only adjusting right over here. It's only
choosing right over here a little bit in this nostril, a little bit up
here and his type. Now, what's important to keep in is that resolves here
was originally designed for linear images, but a lot of color is key
directly from log source so that it works well most of the time I'll say,
all right, so what we're going to do here is I'm just going to delete
that all together and we're going to keep this all set up the way that we
have it, because a better practice is to actually key from a different
node stream all together.

01:15:57:11 - 01:16:15:13
Unknown
So to call up another source to create another node stream, we're simply
going to add a source once that sources there, I'm going to right click
and we're going to add a corrector node. And what we're going to do is
just pipe into this corrector node like such. What I now need to do is I
need to convert the color space of this node.

01:16:15:13 - 01:16:35:11
Unknown
Now you might be thinking, okay, Kev, perfect. You can just copy your lut
here and you can paste it here, but we're actually not going to do that.
The reason being is that you'll get a cleaner key using the color space
transform effect rather than a lot cleaner math and a nondestructive
transform. So where do we find this effect?

01:16:35:11 - 01:16:53:04
Unknown
Well, what I'm going to do is navigate right up here to the open effects
tab, and I'm simply going to punch in color and you'll see there's our
color transform effect. I'm going to take it, drag it and drop it down
onto our shot. Now, you will notice that with highlight turned on,
nothing has happened and I've applied that effect to this shot.

01:16:53:06 - 01:17:08:12
Unknown
You'll notice that we have a few parameters we're going to need to get in
and adjust, and you might be thinking that you're going to need to adjust
the input color space in the input gamma. But in this case, I do not. Why
will, if I navigate up the file, I come down to my project settings and I
come into the color management parameter.

01:17:08:12 - 01:17:31:04
Unknown
You'll see that the timelines color space is already set to RC log C. So
if I come back here you'll see that we are using the timeline for the
input color space in the input Gamma Perfect. What we're then going to do
is navigate right down here and this is going to be converted to rec 709
The GAM is going to be gamma 2.4 and I'm just going to set the tone
mapping method to be simple.

01:17:31:04 - 01:17:54:01
Unknown
Now I'm just going to close the open effects window because before we
move on, I want to come in and just do our offset correction here, just
to give us a little bit more of a balanced why better separation equals a
better key. All right. So we're now ready to get in and do that key. Now,
you might be thinking that I'm going to do it on this node, but we're
not.

01:17:54:03 - 01:18:16:10
Unknown
I'm going to add another node to do the key on. Now. Y Well, you'll
remember in previous lessons when we got in and we applied, for example,
the lookup table and we went in to do things like to pull a key, that
key's actually happening before all of the other operations on the node.
So if I was to get in on this node and to do the key, we're actually
right back to where we were before in our previous example.

01:18:16:13 - 01:18:33:03
Unknown
So this is why I want to do the key here on this node. So we already have
everything back together and we can apply the key on top of all of that.
Now what I'm going to do again with the qualifier is I'm going to
navigate right up to roughly the same space. You'll see again, I'm just
going to turn this off and on again.

01:18:33:06 - 01:18:49:24
Unknown
We're going to come to right about here and I'm going to select right
there. And right now you'll see we've already got in a way better key
than we had before a couple little things happening here that I do need
to tweak, like, for example, saturation. We're just going to set the load
to be zero. This area that we're keen is like super thin.

01:18:49:24 - 01:19:15:12
Unknown
So Let's just stretch that right out about there and we can adjust the
center point after the fact. All right, so what do we do now? We're going
to need to patch this information back into the mainstream to make use of
this key. However, we're going to need another node to do this. What I'm
going to do is just add another node and take the key information that we
just utilized or we just created.

01:19:15:14 - 01:19:39:28
Unknown
And I want to send that key information to this node. So let's do this
I'm going to grab this output. Remember, this is the B output
information. This is the mat information because I want to send that that
information to this Node here. We're going to take it and we're just
going to patch it directly in. Now, as soon as I do, you're now going to
immediately see that that key information is going to this.
01:19:39:28 - 01:19:55:08
Unknown
No, no. I'm just going to turn the highlight parameter off. And on this
node, what we're going to do is just make an offset change to about
there. Now, the only problem that we have here is that we've actually
keyed a little bit too much and we can see a little bit too much of that
offset change that we just made.

01:19:55:10 - 01:20:32:02
Unknown
Now, what I can do is simply just go back to the qualifier or adjust that
hue. And as you can see, it's very easy to get a clean key this way super
quick and super simple. In this lesson, we're going to talk about edge
contrast in the image or what is referred to as a cuteness. A cuteness is
the percent of sharpness related to the edge contrast of an image, and by
softening the Luma differences on the edges, we get a slightly softer
looking image without taking away sharpness.

01:20:32:04 - 01:20:52:18
Unknown
You can see that we're set up right at the end of our high dynamics on
dark images lesson with our node structure. And the only difference here
is that I've gotten in and I've added some names or some labels to our
nodes. Now let's go about doing this. We're going to two nodes. The first
know we're going to need is to set up our edge detection.

01:20:52:18 - 01:21:14:09
Unknown
So I'm going to right click, we're going to add a corrector node. I'm
going to take the source output. I'm just going to patch it into that
node. We're going to put that node right about here, and I'm going to
need another node after this node. Now, what's important to keep in mind
is we're going to want to label these nodes that we can keep track of
everything that's going on, much like we've done up until this point.

01:21:14:09 - 01:21:42:15
Unknown
So right here, right click, node label, Edge, the teched in with this
node here, it's going to be Blur. Now, what's important to keep in mind
is that once we have figured the edges, that information is going to be
sent as a mat to the map channel of this node for us to get our edge in.
As you can see, we're starting to get techniques crossing over from
previous lessons into other lessons.

01:21:42:18 - 01:21:58:14
Unknown
All right. We're going to take the RG B output of this channel and we're
going to patch it into the node channel. Now, as of right now, we haven't
applied any effects. We haven't done anything, but we're now ready to get
in and set this up. Now I'm actually going to apply the Blur first and
you're going to see why in just a second.

01:21:58:14 - 01:22:13:09
Unknown
So I'm just going to zoom back here. Let's zoom to fit. All right. I'm
now going to come to my open effects. I'm going to type in Gaussian
because we want Gaussian. I'm going to take the blur and I'm going to
apply it to the entire image. All right. You'll see that if I zoom in,
everything's blurred here.

01:22:13:09 - 01:22:36:06
Unknown
I can turn the node on and off. Okay, Now we want to get in and detect
the edges. So I'm just going to turn this node off right now. Okay. With
this node here, I'm just going to type in edge. There's my edge detect.
We're going to take it, drag it and drop it down onto our node. Now, keep
in mind, what I'm looking at right here is the output of the node chain.

01:22:36:06 - 01:22:54:18
Unknown
However, I need to see what's going on with it because I need to be able
to adjust its parameters. So what I want to do is I want to come over
here and turn the highlight parameter on. I can see all of the edges that
were detected. However, it's actually in RG B edges, which I don't want.
I actually want this to be grayscale.

01:22:54:18 - 01:23:15:27
Unknown
Now you'll that as soon as I do this, what have I just done. I've created
a matt, let's just adjust its threshold because I don't want that much
edge in here even. That's probably fine. I'm going to turn highlight off
and I'm now going to come back to the Blur node. Let me just zoom in on
the lamp here and all I'm now going to do is turn this parameter back on.

01:23:15:27 - 01:23:34:01
Unknown
Now the blur level is way too much. Let's just put it down somewhere
around like 0.18. And even with our edge detection, we can adjust the
threshold to be whatever we want it to be. You'll notice it sharpens up a
little bit here. We're going to put it right back down around there. But
you'll see that if I turn this on and I turn it off, not too much.

01:23:34:01 - 01:23:54:27
Unknown
Let's just turn it back up a little bit here. There we go. You can see
it's about finding the happy medium. And this is a technique that you can
use on any shot where you just want those edges not to be that sharp to
find. You just want to soften them up a little bit, to give it a little
bit of a nicer feel in this lesson.

01:23:54:27 - 01:24:15:12
Unknown
We'll take a look at another way to compress highlights and build volume
to make them feel less than now as we always do. Option or alt and as to
add our second node. And let's add our Ari Alexa log C to rec 709 lookup
table. Now the issue that I have right now is that the highlights feel a
little bit sharp.
01:24:15:12 - 01:24:37:11
Unknown
They don't really blend well into the mid towns, so the first thing I'm
going to do is I'll make an exposure adjustment. We'll put the exposure
down somewhere around 21 to 21 and a half even. That is perfectly fine
right there. Now the next thing we want to do is we compress our gain
just a little bit. Now to do this, because we are talking about the
highlights, we're going to do this inside of a key.

01:24:37:14 - 01:25:02:01
Unknown
So I'm going to select the first node and I'm going to head to my
qualifier and I'm not going to be using the eyedropper and I'm not
actually even going to be using a hue or saturation value because keep in
mind, we want to isolate the highlights. So it's really luminance that
we're adjusting. And because we are talking about the highlights, we're
going to want to put the low values somewhere around, I don't know,
somewhere around 60 Now by doing this, this is isolating the highlights.

01:25:02:01 - 01:25:20:09
Unknown
You can basically see highlights, Midtown's shadows, and obviously the
whole point is we want to have it roll from the highlights to the
midterms. Now, the issue I have now is that if I isolate this node,
you'll see hard falloff, sharp edges. So what we want to do is soften
them up a lot. Let's put this somewhere around.

01:25:20:13 - 01:25:40:11
Unknown
I don't know, let's sort of split the difference of what the low is.
Let's put this somewhere around 30. All right. Okay. Perfect. Let's turn
the highlight off there. And what we now want to do is, like I said
before, we're going to compress with gain inside of the key. And what
this is going to do is give us a more graphic feeling to the image by
simply lowering the highlights, by utilizing the game.

01:25:40:11 - 01:26:02:02
Unknown
And what we're going to do is just grab the gain and put it down
somewhere around, I don't know, 0.9.88 is probably fine even yet. I think
that's pretty good right there. What I'm now going to do is push some
lift into the whites to make them bolder. All I'm going to do is grab the
lift value. Let's bring that up 2.3 right about there and you'll see what
we had before.

01:26:02:02 - 01:26:39:29
Unknown
What we have now is just a lot smoother image. We've got some really nice
softness in there with thick blacks and a very nice roll off. Now the
only catch is I don't want to lose too much detail in those Midtown. So
what we're going to do is hit option or alt and ask to add a node in
between the node we were just working on and our lots node and we're just
going to jump over here to adjust the MDR or the mid tone detail just
going take this volume is going to drag it up somewhere around 50 I think
is probably pretty good.

01:26:40:01 - 01:27:01:00
Unknown
And take a look at what we now have. If I turn that on and turn it off,
look at all the detail that we get back to. Really just take this image
and finish it off in the right direction. In this lesson, I want to talk
about skin correction. Now we know that we start out our lessons as we
always do, but I'm going to do things a little bit differently this time.

01:27:01:02 - 01:27:24:14
Unknown
We're going to add our lookup table inside of the timeline view in the
color module. So let's add a new character node. Now The reason that I'm
doing this is because this is also a common technique that some colors
will use when they're adding the LUT to their in this case timeline. So
let's right click let's navigate down to our RC log, see to rec seven or
nine.

01:27:24:14 - 01:27:40:27
Unknown
We're now going to switch back over to our clip view and I'm just going
to add another node. Get us rolling now as we always want to do. We want
to get a little bit of separation before we get in and to do the change
that we're going to do. So I'm going to make that I am in the vector
scope.

01:27:40:27 - 01:28:03:20
Unknown
We're just going to grab our offset. We're just going to bring it over
just a little bit. Now, as we know from following along with this course,
color separation is important and in this case, these imperfections will
be more visible because of better color separation. It can be hard to see
an unbalanced. All right. So let's add a second node to get us rolling
here.

01:28:03:24 - 01:28:34:10
Unknown
Now, very often you're going to see skin with inconsistent color patches
and blobs to skin differences and lighting. Now, if we take a look at our
male talent's skin, you could see a little bit yellowish pinkish pretty
much on all the skin, most visible on the top of his head. This is the
problem with this particular shot, and this is what we're trying to get
in and correct now one way that we can deal with this is to compress the
color vectors together just a little bit.

01:28:34:13 - 01:29:01:10
Unknown
And we're going to push red over to yellow, yellow over to red and that's
going to even out the skin for us. Now, I could do this with a garbage
mask if I wanted to, but it's often better to treat the whole image as
the skin might not be the only place where this issue is occurring. So
what we're going to do to get us rolling with our second node here is
we're going to get in and utilize our hue versus hue curves window.

01:29:01:13 - 01:29:23:05
Unknown
All right. I'm going to navigate right up and I'm going to click right
about there to add the point that we're going to adjust. I'm just going
to push it over a little bit towards yellow here, just a little bit more.
And as we start to drag it south, we're only making a very minor change
here. But as we've talked about in the past, sometimes what we need to do
is to take things to the extreme and then dial it back.

01:29:23:07 - 01:29:47:12
Unknown
Now, the problem that I have here is that because I use the eyedropper,
it's very hard for me to tell exactly what is going to be affected by the
change that we're making. So what I'm going to do is just drag this all
the way south. And as I do this, you're now going to be able to see
exactly what is being impacted so we can now decide if we want to widen
the area so that we affect more of sort of the red, orange and even
yellow or even dial it back.

01:29:47:12 - 01:30:06:00
Unknown
Now, for the purposes of what we're doing, I'm going to leave it where it
was right there. We're just going to do again, a very minor adjustment
here somewhere around, I don't know, -15. Perfect. I'll just leave it
right there. Now, we've come a long way, evening out the color. And what
we now need to do is the exact same thing just with yellow.

01:30:06:00 - 01:30:37:22
Unknown
So what I'm going do is to add a new parallel node. We're going to add
the point where yellow is and just push that north just a little bit here
again to about the same minus or plus 15 plus 16. And that's pretty much
what we're looking for. A very subtle evening of the color on our
talent's head and keep in mind, I took a lot of things to the extreme in
this lesson, but you're going to want to dial it in ever so slightly,
just that the change is noticeable to you after the fact.

01:30:37:24 - 01:30:59:28
Unknown
In this lesson, we're going to talk about soft saturated looks. Now, as
we always do, we're going to create our two nodes. Let's our lookup table
to get us rolling. And with our first node, let's come in and let's just
bring the lift up to about I don't know, we'll bring it up to about point
six. I think we're just going to bring the gamma down to about the same.

01:30:59:28 - 01:31:25:12
Unknown
I think roughly. There we go. Very nice. All right. So in this example,
we're going to go for a soft look and create depth with saturation
instead of rich contrast. What I'm going to do is just my notes over here
just a little bit. We're going to add a node before I'm just going to
park it right over here and let's make a global saturation adjustment.

01:31:25:12 - 01:31:45:25
Unknown
We're just going to bring it up to somewhere around 60 I think is pretty
good. So we have the before and the after. Now, the issue that we have
here is that some colors like red are not deep enough. So let's get in
and let's adjust that. We're just going to add another node here and
we're going to come to our curves.

01:31:45:25 - 01:32:12:26
Unknown
Now, which curve would we use to get in and to adjust the luminance of
the hue? Well, of course that is hue versus luminance. So let's select
hue versus luminance, and we're going to use this to darken the overall
color in the image to create a more pleasing saturation and a deeper,
more defined red. Now, what it's also going to do for us is it's also
going to help us gather values on the back wall and on the face.

01:32:12:28 - 01:32:33:11
Unknown
So I'm just going to click anywhere. It doesn't really matter where I'm
going to click, and we're going to bring this right down to a 1.5 even. I
think that's pretty good right there. Very nice. You'll see that before
the after, you'll see it's really noticeable here and on the wall. One
thing that is worth mentioning about this method is that it can add some
noise if.

01:32:33:11 - 01:33:02:25
Unknown
We push it too hard. The problem with lowering the luminance based on the
hue is that most of the data in the image is luminance. So you kind of
throw away a lot of that information. That said, the hue versus luminance
curve has been improved with the last versions of resolve. There is
another way to get deeper. Read that some color is still use and that is
to change the color space of the node to H as L, and lowering the green
channel of the blue output in the color mixer.

01:33:02:28 - 01:33:24:26
Unknown
Just make sure to uncheck preserve luminance to make it work. That might
be something to experiment with, but in most cases the method we just
went through works really well. Now you've heard me talk about color
separation throughout this course. Now, color separation is important
when working with high saturation. Everything should not just be
saturated. It's about finding balance.

01:33:24:26 - 01:33:48:01
Unknown
And in this example, we get more depth by lowering the saturation levels
in the face while pumping up the colors of the wall. All right. So let's
just add another node here. So once we select hue versus saturation,
we're going to come down, we're going to select red. And with red, we're
going to put red somewhere around .0.75 ish, I think is pretty good.

01:33:48:03 - 01:34:15:09
Unknown
And then we're going to select our lighter blue. And what we're going to
do is just send this up to about 1.5, somewhere in there. Very nice. I
think that's pretty good, right About there. Now, let's take a look at
the before and the after. As you can see, just making it look just that
little bit better. Now, what's important to also in mind is that when we
work with saturated colors, we have a lot of data to create.

01:34:15:09 - 01:34:45:09
Unknown
Interesting hue shifts and shape the colors the way we want to create a
very nice harmony. All right. In this lesson, we will grade a shot using
a film emulation and add some texture to the shot with grain. Now We are
going to be working with this grain clip that comes to us courtesy of
sin, a grain that you can of course download as part of this course so
you can follow along as we are working.

01:34:45:10 - 01:35:02:10
Unknown
All right, command or alt and tab into DaVinci Resolve. We are in the
media pool and I would like to bring in this clip of grain, but I'm going
to bring it in as a matte. I'm going to right click, we're going to add
to the media pool as a matte. There it is right there. I could see the
little matte icon.

01:35:02:12 - 01:35:30:18
Unknown
So this will be all to go when we need it. So let's head back to the
color module and as always to notes to get us rolling. However, we're
going to apply a different lookup table off the bat here. Let's right
click come down to LUTS 3D, LUT we're going to come down to our film
looks and we're going to apply the seven Kodak 2383 D 65 lookup table
with our first note.

01:35:30:18 - 01:36:12:15
Unknown
What we want to do is get in and add saturation for separation when our
corrections are done prior to a film emulation lookup table, the result
will be different than it would be working with a technical lookup table
as the Alexa k1s1. The reason is that a film emulation lookup table will
have some kind of cross colored deformity that we could see in the
waveform when examining it in the first lesson by using film relations or
creative lookup tables in general, you will have to work within its
boundaries of allowed colors, which can force some interesting color
combinations.

01:36:12:18 - 01:36:31:15
Unknown
Now what I want to do is dial in a cold look with our offset will, we're
going to send it over towards blue and then I'm going to add back a bit
of color into the face or into the midtown's using the log midterms. So
another node option or alt and as let's grab the offset, send it over
towards blue, that's looking pretty good.

01:36:31:15 - 01:36:52:25
Unknown
We're going to grab those midterms them all the way over there. If you
feel you need to extend or limit the range of the midterm control, you
can change the low and high range values. Next to the contrast, pivot
controls below the wheels. All right. We're now ready to get in and to
start working with our grains. So how are we going to go about doing
this?

01:36:52:26 - 01:37:10:24
Unknown
What I need to do now is to switch over to timeline mode. Couple of ways
that I can do this. I can navigate up to clip, I can switch to timeline,
or what I can do is just click the little button right here to switch
over to timeline. I am going to need to add a new corrector node that we
will need to patch into.

01:37:10:27 - 01:37:32:15
Unknown
Well, it's important to keep in mind is that there are going to be no
LUMA changes happening when we work this way, which is obviously a huge
advantage for us. So what I'm now going to do right add node, we're going
to add a new layer node. What's important to keep in mind, this input
into the layer node is going to be the foreground.

01:37:32:18 - 01:37:55:02
Unknown
This will be the background. I'm actually going to disconnect the
source's input and we're now ready to add the grain. I'm going to right
click, I'm going come down to add Matt, and we're going to add our 4K
scope grain. Now you're going to notice that what has happened is, is
that the Matt thinks that it is a matt, it's going to function as a matt
does.

01:37:55:02 - 01:38:20:20
Unknown
But what we were doing was just using this to get the grain into resolve.
So what it's doing is it's patching the output of the Matt channel into
the input of this node match in which we actually don't want I just want
the grain. All right. I'm going to disconnect that and we're going to
connect the RG B output of our grain into the RG B input of this node and
you'll see the grain appear immediately.

01:38:20:22 - 01:38:45:07
Unknown
Now what we can do is we can simply click on the layer node. I'm going to
right click and I'm going to come down to its composite mode. You'll
notice that I dragged through. We can see the composite modes doing what
they should be doing and depending on the one that I choose, like one of
them down there, I think it was linear light actually gave me a super
grainy look right there, which I thought was pretty cool, but I just want
a very subtle grain look.

01:38:45:07 - 01:39:13:21
Unknown
So we're going to come down to overlay and once I apply the overlay
transfer mode, you'll see. Now if I come back to this node, specifically
command or control and D on the keyboard to add or remove that grain, and
if I just like to adjust it subtly, I can come down to my key parameter
and adjust the key output gain to either it or add it, depending on how
much I want to have there.

01:39:13:21 - 01:39:35:13
Unknown
Now I am going to get in and just make this grain a little bit more
defined. Now this is optional. You don't have to do it if you don't want
to, but what I'm going to do here is option or alternate to add another
node and head on over to our blur parameters. Course we are a blur. What
I'd like to do is make sure that we are on sharpening, which you can see
we are here.

01:39:35:15 - 01:40:02:26
Unknown
So with sharpen selected, all I'm going to do is just grab that radius,
start adjusted and you'll notice as soon as I pull it south, we can now
see that grain really stand out. And what we can now do is jump back to
our key category and remove it or add it as much as we want. Now, one
thing that you should keep in mind is that some colorist like to add
color to the grain or even apply it to only certain parts of the image.

01:40:02:29 - 01:40:26:03
Unknown
That choice is completely up to you. Another popular thing to do is to
add only to the blue channel to simulate the style of Kodak 500 film
stock. It can be done very easily by using the splitter combiner node and
the built in grain system. Okay, thanks for watching the course. I hope
you enjoyed it and got a lot out of it.

01:40:26:03 - 01:40:38:24
Unknown
Don't forget, as always, if you have questions you have comments or
suggestions to help make our courses and lessons better, head on over and
post them in our forums at low Pollster.com. Slash.