How do you color balance in Davinci Resolve?

How do you color balance in Davinci Resolve?

So in this Topic, we're taking a clip from sony a7r that is shot incorrectly so the white balance is completely off it is also highly compressed if I punch in and show you you can see these little blocks like little chunks this gets to tell you how compressed this footage is so the odds are against us we're taking this clip that is that has a look baked in

That is highly compressed and uh has an incorrect white balance and we're gonna have to fix all of that and make it look good okay so first things first usually what you've seen me do is just jump into my offsets and then I correct you know my white balance and then go from there well that's not what's happening here because if you look at my vectorscope we are balanced in the bottom

Like in our blacks and you can even see it right here in our blacks and somewhat mid-tones we're looking okay it is our highlights that are completely off and we can even see it in our colorized waveform right here you see all this blue uh action that's happening up here so we have to take all the blue out of our image that tint get our skin tones back get all the

Colors are put into their slots where they belong and then make the image pop okay so the first thing that I'm going to do instead of using my offset we're going to start with our gain okay so what do we have to balance this out so if I were to just jump in there and start doing this like I'm looking at my parade

I'm not even looking at my image right now and just park it somewhere around here before and after we made a huge difference I mean like I was just my eyes were locked in here I was just balancing it out like up top now the next step is I want to take my gain and I want to raise it quite a bit so I'm going to take it somewhere around

Here and if I do before and after we made a big difference right I mean just look at all the blue and like look at the skin tones the next step is I'm gonna go under my gamma I'm gonna pull it down right now I'm just focusing on her face I wanna bring her skin to a point where it has some color and it looks good

So even something like that doesn't look bad at all at this point you have to improvise a little bit like what do you want in your image like how do you want it to feel cooler and if that's the case then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go in and pull up my blues just a tiny bit because let's not forget that we are um in the snow right and then I'm going to take my red what do I want to do i

Want to bring up the red I kind of like bringing up the red because I like what it does to her skin tones so if I part this here this is before and after just look at how good her skin looks how good the snow looks in the back now we're getting somewhere okay so the next step is let's create a new node the next step is going to be we got to pull out all this blue embedded blue in the image okay and the cleanest way to

Do that would be to use your hue versus saturation and you see all the blue is stuck right here so there are a couple of ways to do it you can just click right here and create points right on the graph here or I can just hover over onto my screen and just click somewhere around here and it will create the points for me and at this point, I can just go I'm using my panel right now I can just

Go in there and start pulling this down and just kind of eyeball it where do I want it right I'm eyeballing it so like I don't want to overdo it but I still want to pull out those colors right so I'm just like looking at it and I'm going to me this is looking pretty believable what happens if I grab this point and kind of stretch it out not too far right and what happens if i

Grab it here and stretch it out okay so if I do this and look at it you see like how much how clean our asphalt looks like our road looks so much cleaner than before right like even right here and it's also helping us create color contrast this is before this is after right like we're getting all that dinge out of there like all that color cast that was embedded into our rec 709

Negative if you will know what I'm going to do is create one more node and what we want to do here is I think the highly saturated parts of the image are just too distracting like this red is just popping out unnaturally it just makes it look very much like digital instead of like let's just say a film-like look that we want to create so the cleanest way to remove that

The effect would be un under your curves hsl curve sat versus set and all I want to do is just grab it from here actually grab it from this side my most saturated areas and then I want to start pulling it down so I'm going to go too far and then I'm going to bring it up and then leave it somewhere around here why did I take out this much saturation uh the

The concept is simple because we don't have a lot of color in our image okay so when I pull the saturation out and just keep my reds where they are one it makes it look like the film it just makes it look very clean and two the red still pops because there's not a lot of color in the image right so the red pops automatically we don't have to overdo it so this is where I would be parking it and at this point

You can do a few things you can go back here take your gain and raise it a little bit more and see if you want to go in that direction I feel like I can get away with being somewhere around here yes it's kind of pushed maybe bring it down just a little bit yes it's kind of pushed but I like what it does to my image okay so if I take all of this right now and

Kill it this is where we started this is where we ended up and now if we were to break it down this was our balance node then we took out the blue without overdoing it right I mean we can still go in there and try to like work it a little bit more maybe let's go a little bit further and see what happens like so if I go far like this or like something like that I mean I guess I can go um

A bit further than where I was before like even something like this I don't mind it right um but you have to decide like don't overdo it where it becomes a stylized look then like just cleaning up and color-correcting your image because the look comes later first you have to correct your image then you go back and create a look and then finally we just brought the red down quite a bit right I'm still pretty happy with where this

Red sits you can go back in there and decide like if you want to bring it up a little bit and kind of split the difference I'm going to go back and then I'm gonna start pulling it up and I kind of want to leave it just somewhere around here I think it looks really good and then finally what we can do is go here hit shift s create a note prior

Drop on some grain and then because we have a lot of artifacting I want to kind of go heavy on the grain to like really cover up remember like we have all of these like little blocks so the grain is going to cover it up and you can see it right like it's already covering it up but then we can kind of go heavy on the grains like I'll take the strength and I'll bring it up a little bit I'll take the

Size and I'll bring it up a little bit and if I do before and after you see how we're just kind of covering it up mess around with the texture and just see what happens and now let's pull back before and after before and after and I feel like it just gives it a lot of weight and makes it look pretty cool because I mean even in this area right like it just makes it look like the film it does help so here's our hero frame

Right once again from where we started to where we ended up I mean this is a pretty huge difference right every color belongs as look at her skin tone look at her hair look at the snow look at our blacks right look at our shadows everything is clean and the best thing about what I just did and showed you here is that this is easily applicable to an entire

In the scene where everything was shot with an incorrect white balance you can just apply this and then go from there and make micro-adjustments if you have to so hopefully this was helpful if you do want to jump in and learn uh some things like you know why did I use my grain here instead of like being the last node or what is the proper notary structure to get the right