How do you use color in DaVinci Resolve 17? 2022

How do you use color in DaVinci Resolve 17? 2022

One of the most common things that you will always hear from your clients is going to be hey take this footage and make it pop there are so many different ways to approach that and there are many different techniques that I've shown you on this channel how to do that this is going to be one of the most practical and simplest ways to get there footage that I'm using here is rec 709 I don't even know which camera is shot on

This is one of the things that you guys have asked me to cover before so I'm gonna be showing you that and we recently did a survey majority of you regardless of the skill set or struggling with shot matching skin tones balancing and working with 8-bit footage so I created a one-hour long free training that covers all of that plus we'll wrap up the training with an extensive q a and you'll also get a link to download the practice footage power

Grades and some of my personal luts so check out the free training link is up top and in the description below and please do me a favor pause this video for a second smash that like button subscribe to the channel for more awesomeness make sure you're following me on Instagram let's roll the intro alright so this is going to be a pretty straightforward tutorial three simple tricks to make your footage pop so the note 3 is going to be super simple

Just going to leave it as is because I want to leave a little element of surprise for you guys so in our custom cars, first of all, let's just look at the scopes what do we see we see tons of green right here okay so it's overpowering and we see that in our image as well and we see it in our parade right how the green is channel overall is just lifted and then the blues are down here the reds are down here and that's what's creating like

Overall this green cast is all right so the first step to creating the pop in your image comes from custom curves, okay and what you need to do is click on these three dots and make sure that this is checked editable splines and once that is set all you have to do is this I'm going to go click on this guy right here on this site then I'm going to grab this point I'm going to bring it in a little bit

And I'm going to start raising it up okay so I'm going to keep it somewhere around here and the beautiful thing about this is that nothing is clipping like look at what's happening to my image like yes we're bringing up our exposure by brightening up the image but nothing is getting clipped okay then I'm gonna click right here I'm gonna grab this point bring it in a little bit and then start pulling it

Down okay and now I'm just like looking at my screen and I'm seeing what feels good where we don't make a sacrifice of like what's happening with our character the suit and everything in between so we just want to add the right amount of pop this is doing it for me I don't want to overdo it okay so if I go back and forward this is looking good if we have to make

Any adjustments we can do that later but for now, this is looking pretty good so that's the first step to making your image pop I mean look at how far we've come okay the second is going to be our primaries so remember we talked about how much green is in our image so let's take that out so I'm going to start off with my offset my primary so look at this section right here I'm just going to start subtracting my green

Okay and I'm gonna do I'm gonna go overboard and then I'm gonna come back and um I'm gonna leave it somewhere around here and this is looking much better to me okay so if I do before and after and you can even see it here and here that we're making huge huge progress okay overall like all of a sudden the shirt is white uh before there's a crazy

Green tint to it right everything just belongs like look at the white buildings in the back okay everything is coming through I am actually very happy with that and even when we go right here and look at our vectorscope let me just look at it now what we can do one more check is to hover over the skin and see where it is so if I go right here on the skin look it's right in the center where it's supposed to be where the skin indicator

Is that gets to tell me that we've done a really good job because this is before and look at where the skin was and then this is after okay we can still clearly see that on the top end it's still a bit more green biased so at this point what I'm gonna do um is a couple of things, okay I can subtract some yellow and then what I can do is I can try to add red into my image

And now if I do before and after I feel like it's more believable okay I'm not gonna spend more time on that this was just to give you an example of like once the colors are separated the blue from the white and the green all of a sudden like look at how much separation we have than this is just like one wash like a green tint here the hair pops outright the lamp pops out like the shirt suit leaves everything belongs okay now the third

The step is going to be a point of interest, in this case, it's our guy and especially his face what is he looking at it's the expression on his face but because the entire image is so bright and the only part that's dark here is the actual point of interest so what we have to do is we sort of having to reverse it we have to make this our focal point and everything else should just like kind of fall off how am I going to do that

Instead of using a circular window around him like an oval, I would suggest using a custom shape and the reason being is that so look at this right we have some light coming through from here, and from here it's only this area that's kind of dark so I want it to be very organic like the change that I'm going to make I don't want it to be a geometric shape so that's what's going on okay so I'm going to create a shape like this you're going

To see what I'm talking about so I'm just literally going to create a shape like this I'm going to go under my gain and I'm going to lift it up too much first and I'm going to kind of bring it back I'm going to keep it somewhere around here now I'm going to go under my window again and I'm going to soften it out okay so I'm going to go back in there I'm going to soften it out a little bit

Something like this and now if I do before and after look at the difference that we made at this point all we have to do is just go under tracking and click on this guy and it's going to track forward and trackback this is a new feature in resolve 17.4 okay so everything is tracked and everything is looking good even if I do this and we go back and forth like look at the difference that we made

I mean just look at this all right so I'm going to go back to our hero frame this is before this is after massive massive difference now in this node I'm gonna go in and create an oval something like that around here so I'm gonna do something like this and then I'm gonna feather it out okay we're gonna go to around 24 25-ish I'm gonna invert it

And now again we're gonna go under our primaries I'm gonna take my gain and I'm gonna bring it down and I obviously go too far first and then pull it up and that's all I want to do I don't want to go too crazy so this to me is pretty good okay so I can just leave it I don't need to track this so if I go before and after

Like look at how my eyes go straight to his face if I take these two and turn them on and off look at the difference we're making before after there's a purpose now obviously I'm explaining as I'm doing this so it's taking time but when you're going to be doing it on your own is going to be a lot faster okay so these are the three simple tricks they are applicable on anything and everything it could be

A food commercial could be a car commercial it could be a movie and you can apply these simple rules to make your image pop and now if you look at it and you know however you feel right like if you just think okay it's now it's too red now it's too green whatever it is that you want to do you can go and do it from this point but to me, this looks pretty good I can go back in my custom curves and kind of go okay do I want to do anything to it like at

now I can go here and pull it up like that if I want to and then just make the entire image pop even a little bit more and honestly I kind of like that so having a structure like this is beautiful because you can always just go back and forth between

These but you know exactly what you're doing and at this point what I see is that we can still make some adjustments in our white balance what am I talking about so you see my blues right here compared to my greens and my reds right so my blues are down here now I'm not going to do offset I'm going to individually make changes so I'm going to go under my gain I'm just going to take

My blue channel and I'm going to start lifting it up until we have a pretty close to a pure white so if I do before on that and then after you can see the difference that we're making and we're really like making the white okay like pure white like and you see it you get to see it everywhere it might be just a bit much so I'm going to pull it down just a tiny bit

So something like this but I feels like it still makes a huge difference uh to where we were and this to me looks super clean okay like if you look at his shirt how clean this looks like this is before this is after I look at it something with like skin tones I mean just look at that hair it's almost green so like what it looks

Like now and then outside right before and after and the same thing with like if we just look at the windowpane to green unrealistic the right type of gray that it should be okay so to me this looks pretty good what we should do now is I'm gonna kill all of this and we're gonna start with

Our first change which was our custom curves to make our image pop then we went in balanced our image and then after balancing our image we put some emphasis on his face made a huge difference and then brought everything else around him down and guys these are the three simple tricks that you can use to pop anything that you're working on let's check out the final look in full screen

So I wasn't lying when I said it's going to be one of the simplest and easiest tutorials on this channel but you saw the effect like the transformation is pretty significant color grading doesn't need to be rocket science it doesn't always need to be extremely complicated you can simplify it and strip it down to what we did here and still get amazing results now if you want to dive even deeper and learn more about the proper notary structure and

How that can help you on big projects then do not forget to watch my free training link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBmiEBIl8Ew