Beginner Colorist Makes | DaVinci Resolve17 Tutorial

I'm gonna be playing two different parts in this tutorial the second one is going to be an expert's take on this particular short so, first things first, as a beginner people don't really know what camera footage

they're working with, okay cause, I mean, I can click right here and look at it,

and it only says apple pro res four two two

it could be from any camera, and then transcoded into pro res so we don't know

This is mistake number

1. you have to figure out somebody knows' down the pipeline when it comes to production, what camera was used to create this.

so I dug up the information, and figured out that this is shot on a Black Magic Pocket 4k camera in the log, obviously

But, an amateur wouldn't know that so what's the first thing that they do If they don't know that information,

they can't properly convert this image to rec. 709 or anything,

so they're just gonna jump in, and this is the first step that they're gonna take.

They're gonna do a minor primary change, they're gonna start off with their lift,

and then go up with their gain, something like that.

And this is not something that I'm making up on my own,

I, m telling you, I have seen way too many times,

amateurs doing this in my master class,

when I'm giving them feedback. And just in general, this is just something,

You will know, if you are a beginner, you have done this in the past.

So, this is where we are right now, and that's what a beginner would do,

and then they would jump right into their qualifiers.

So they're gonna start doing something like this,

they're gonna go, pick the sky, and then they're gonna come out of there, and they're gonna crank it

they're gonna give it saturation, okay, so the sky is looking nice.

And then they're gonna take their gain, and maybe give it some different colors, so maybe something like that, okay it's looking really nice.

Then they would go and create a new node, and then this time they would grab her skin, and then obviously they won't, they will have limited experience with keying, so they won't be cleaning it up

because they wouldn't know how to do that.

And then they'll do that again, where they're gonna crank saturation, and then just take their gamma and move it where they think the skin looks good.

I'm telling you like this is not something that I'm exaggerating. I've seen that time and again.

And then they will just go ahead and they'll grab this bag. And they'll key it because they just go,

this tool is so powerful, not do this, because it gives you the flexibility to just, pick whatever you want, however you want.

So then they'll do something like that, again, they'll give it saturation, and they'll ya know just accentuate that color a little bit even more.

So something like that, it's looking nine and juicy.

And they'll create another node, and then here, they'll just grab the asphalt, the road, and they'll go, okay let's just pick up just the road. It's okay if we pick up her dress too, cause I mean again, I don't think they're gonna be so particular to like, key something out like that.

but let me just take it a step further, and then they'll go let's bring this down a little bit and just give it a little more shape.

Not too much because the key is breaking, right?

So they'll park it somewhere around here.

They'll create another node, and they'll ya know, grab her dress.

And then go okay, so now we have her dress selected, let's just give it some saturation, again, so it looks nice and blue, give it the right color of denim, something like that, and this is looking amazing right?

So there you go, this is where they sit.

Again, it's not made up, it's something that I've seen time and again.

And they're gonna be like okay, this looks perfect like we graded it, this is great.

Now, the problem with that is, not only it's a terrible way to grate, this is gonna be impossible to copy/ paste from shot to shot.

And now, let, s start looking at the mistakes we're making.

So, let's start off with the sky first.

So if I go turn this on and off, do you like these edges?

How nasty they are?

And if I go back and forth, you're gonna see, that posterization is there, that Posterizing effect is not going anywhere okay?

So now let's go and check out the ski.

So here's the skin, and if do before and after, not to mention look at what's happening with the lips.

Okay? So if I do before and after I play it through.

Look at how unnatural and weird it looks, like what's happening in the shadow areas.

Like in the dark areas, like on the edges of her hair. Okay?

And then once again, let's go back to this sky node, and look what's happening here, look at these edges.

This wasn't there before. let me go all the way back.

This is before, and then this is after, what we're creating, okay? So that's there.

Now let's check out what we did with the bag.

And, first look, it looks kinda clean.

Ya know? we did a good job, but then we start to see these imperfections.

Like, look at what's happening in the hand right here.

Look at what's happening in the hair, and once again, it's adding this weird, just a pop of color, but everything is done in the worst way possible.

And then, let's look at the asphalt.

SO very nice, we added a lot of contrast, but at the cost of this.

And this only gets worse when you do a playback.

And again, trust me I promise you, I'm not making this up, some of you have even done it, and you know it.

This is just, and then, what happened is that people have this experience grading, and then go grading is not for me, I'm gonna go back to the Lut. Okay?

I'm gonna go back to my old ways and just use Lutz, and ya know, I'll be happy again.

Look what's happening, okay? And then, you see these edges right here?

They weren't there before. I'm gonna go all the way back.

You see, I'm gonna get close so you can really see it, but like just look at the edges of her pants,

this is after, this is before. So this, Wasn't there.

That random Artifacting wasn't there either okay?

So, the reason why big Hollywood colorists and commercial colorists and everybody will tell you

to use qualifiers sparingly is for this reason.

Cause you punch in eight hundred percent on every frame and make sure that you got everything, okay? So that's just not going to happen.

This is not how it works when you're grading.

You have to grade a lot of shorts is not a lot of time.

So, this is what we're looking at, this is where we sit, everything looks beautiful, right?

So this is an amateur's way of handling this shot.

Now I'm going to create a new version, I'm gonna get rid of all of this.

And then we're gonna start over again.

So let's just say, Let's assume we didn't get the information for the camera.

This is how I would approach this.

First of all, I would have some sort of method to my madness.

So here, I would call this temp tint.

This is my first node, I'm gonna leave it as is for now.

My second node is going to be called contrast.

This is basically gonna be my exposure.

The third one its gonna be called primary, some people call it CDL. That's gonna be my third node.

Here, I'm gonna have HSL, now, mind you, I'm gonna try to keep this as simple as possible, I'm not building my regular node tree, that's not what we're going for. Okay?

So let's not get confused, let's just stay right here.

First of all, I'm gonna go under my contrast, and let me just go back and park it o9on my hero frame.

That's very important, that's another thing a pro would do.

They would always have a hero frame within their shot that represents the entire shot in the best way possible.

So the first thing that I'm gonna do, I'm gonna start off with my contrast.

I'm gonna leave it somewhere around here, I'm gonna take my pivot and I'm gonna open it up a little bit, not too much,

so something like that, and that's enough for the contrast.

And that's where I'm gonna park it, okay? First.

Then I'm gonna go under my primaries, I'm gonna take my lift,

I'm gonna bring it down a little bit, I'm gonna take my gamma, open up the image, I'm gonna take my gain, I'm gonna pull it down a little bit.

I'm gonna take my gamma up, gain down, something like that,

and then lift down, just to keep that contrast going.

Gamma up, gain down, something like that, so let's just leave it here for now.

And now I'm gonna go ahead, take my saturation, crank it all the way, one hundred percent, okay?

My saturation is at a hundred percent.

Don't freak out yet, okay?

This is why we have the HSL node, because I'm gonna show you what we're about to do here.

Okay? So instead of using all these qualifiers and controlling our colors,

We will still be able to do a lot of that but in a much more clinical way.

So I'm gonna go under my hue versus saturation.

And here what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna say, hey, take my yellow and pull it down.

Because it's looking just a bit too digital for me. Okay?

And keep it somewhere around here.

Now, I'm gonna park this here, and now I'm gonna jump back to my node number 1.

Let's do a little bit of temp and tint.

You know, even before we do this, let's just turn this off,

let's go here and do a little bit of temp and tint.

What are we feeling here?

it looks that this is a bit too warm.

The image is a little bit too much on the yellowish-green side. And we can see it in our vector scalp too, it' not very well balanced, if it's well balanced, it should be right in the middle, somewhere, okay?

So what we can do here is that I will go under my temp and tint, and I'm gonna cool it off a little bit.

First, I'm gonna go too far and then I'm gonna come back.

I'm gonna leave it somewhere around here, then I'm gonna take my tint, and I'm gonna add a little bit of magenta.

Okay, I'm gonna go too far I'm gonna pull it back.

And I'm gonna leave it somewhere around here.

I'm gonna take my temp and I'm gonna leave it somewhere around here, okay?

So now if I do before and after, you're seeing the difference.

And all of a sudden, now we're seeing colors that we weren't seeing before.

So before, there was this weird tint.

Now we see that the car is white, you know, her hair is red the sky is blue, there is white in here. Ya know?

There is like this brick color that we see now that we weren't seeing before.

So it was all a weird green tint.

Ya know? So now we're seeing our colors.

Now let's go back into our HSL curves, and now we see that we don't need to pull our yellows down as much,

So I'm gonna go back under my hue versus saturation, I'm gonna pill my yellows up a little bit.

I'm gonna say maybe keep it somewhere around here.

Don't crushes it all the way.

So this is, this just takes the sting off a little bit gives it a little bit of like, "a film feel so we can keep it here.

But now what I can say is that hey, take my cyan hue and start swinging my sky because I wanna have a little bit of teal in my sky.

So now I'm putting a little bit of teal in my sky, and I can take my blue channel and do the same thing.

And just put a little bit more teal in my sky.

And now, if I wanna give it the illusion of like, a better dynamic range, what I can do is I can go under my hue versus luminance and I can go hey pull my cyan down a little bit.

And be careful with that, don't overdo it.

And I can say, grab my blue and pull it down a little bit too.

And now, just look at this area right here, if I do before and after, see?

And you can even see it in my parade, that it feels like we're just creating so much more dynamic range if you will from our image, just by doing this, and it's a very gentle curve, nothing is cracking, nothing is breaking, we don't have to worry about it frame by frame

This is all under control. Okay?
What else can we do here?

So, we can go back into hue versus saturation.

Let's take our cyan and pull it up a little bit, and then let's take our blue and pull it up a little bit.

Okay? So what is that doing?

Like, Look what it's doing, it's bringing out our dress right here, it's bringing out the sky quite a bit, like look at that, how big of a difference it's making. and again, it's very natural, nothing is cracking, nothing is breaking, and I'm taking my time to show you these tools, but once you know to do this way,

you could be lightning fast. Okay?

and weather you're a pro or an amateur or whatever, this is one skill that you should really learn.

You know how much I really love using glow, but let's just say if you're just like, dude, we still gotta bring her out, she's still in the shadow, so that's okay.

This is where ew go in here, and we drop this down to soft light, we pull this, and we go all the way out, and we take our spread and go all the way out, and don't freak out, it's Okay,

this is what we Gotta do.

Now we gotta go under our qualifier, but we're gonna use it the right way.

So I'm Gonna take my luminance, and I'm gonna crank it to about seventeen-ish.

So it's very soft.

And then I'm gonna bring this down to around, to around sixty- ish, something like that, okay?

So, look at what's happening, look at what we did.

We, just check this out, we don't have to create power windows, we didn't have to do any of that.

We just left the sky where it is,

because if I show you what's really happening, like in terms of what we're grabbing, and what we're not grabbing.

So, we pretty much said, hey, leave everything else as-is, just grab the areas that are a little bit, ya know, in the lower mids and live 'em up.

and now there are the steps that Literally take your average-looking project and make it look very high-end, and it doesn't cost you anything, I mean, it's part of Davinci resolve's package and again, the way I'm showing you these techniques, it's not really hard to use, but if you learn these and apply them in the way I'm showing you, I mean just look at the kind of image that you've created from where we started to where we ended up. So, this is basically it.

Beginner Colorist Makes | DaVinci Resolve17 Tutorial