How do you color grades on curves?
What's goin' on? This is Anil. In this Topic, we're
gonna talk about curves. Unfortunately not the kind
you're thinking about.
Let's go ahead and create a new version. And I'm gonna reset everything. I'm gonna create three nodes. I do all my primaries or in this case, we're
going to be using curves but I do that in my second node. The first node is reserved
for noise reduction. Third depends on what you're image is and what it needs but in this one we're just going to be
creating a window in this one. So, here's the thing.
There are different ways
that you can use curves. You know, you can just start
off doing something like that and then just create like a gentle or whatever kind of look
you're going for again. Always remember, talk to your clients, ask them what they are looking for, and ask for some samples. Samples are a huge, huge help because you can bring them into Resolve, you can pop them in your gallery, and then you can see if
you're getting close.
In this case, I'm just gonna stick with a little bit moody, and test the dynamic range of this camera. I'm gonna show you first just using regular curves and then I'm gonna show
you my preferred method. Okay.
So let's just see. We can bring this down a little bit. Like keep it somewhere around here, then my highlights we can pop
the highlights a little bit and bring the mid-tones. This is looking pretty good.
That's looking pretty good, and I like what it's doing
in this area right here. If you remember in the last episode we were dealing with some noise issues so it seems like with curves it's a little bit more gentle with that. And now I'm liking what's happening with my highlights too so we can leave that there. Then we can add saturation. Crank it, crank it, all the way. Just go all the way
And then look at it. And finally, we're seeing some separation and we're seeing our colors now poppin'. We're seeing our blues, our reds, and now that we're seeing our colors, let's start pulling it back and leave it where we
think it looks the best. In this case, I would say somewhere around here. Also, always remember if
it's going on the web when you export and if you see your ProRes versus h.264 or h.265
There's always going to be
a tiny bit watered down effect where it will just pull
the saturation a little bit and it will low -on it a little bit. It's not going to do it too much, so sometimes I will just
overcompensate right here but also look at my scoping and just make sure everything is good and everything is kosher. So everything is looking fine. I mean, we're under where
we're supposed to be so everything is good. Let's make this bigger.
another version right here. I'm gonna get rid of that. And now I'm gonna show
you my preferred method. And what you need to do here is go click on these three dots and you gotta turn on Editable Splines. Let's look at it in action. So just watch how the toes respond when I'm moving the
shoulder and vice versa. Unlike the default curve,
Here we have everything moving in unison, which gives us better roll-offs on both highs and lows. It's just a much more
efficient assisted process that speeds up your workflow. Okay, so let's just say
this is looking good, let's go back to our saturation. Add that saturation where we want it. Something like that. And now let's look at the curve we created without the Editable Spline. It was looking good until
we did the Editable Splines.
And now you can just see
how gentle the roll-off is and the highlights and in the shadows. Okay, moving on. Now I'm gonna go ahead and
copy my noise reduction and windows from the previous episode to get consistent results when comparing different methods. I'm gonna go ahead and
delete the default version and use the Editable Splines version to compare with the primaries. So now we have primaries on the left and we have curves on the right.
If you ask me personally, I would go with primaries. And that's just my preference 'cause if you look at the highlights, I mean, this just looks so much natural, I don't always prefer using the primaries. 90% of the time I'm just using LUTs as a starting point and
then going from there. But there are shows I work on where I don't get a
list of all the cameras that were used per shot. So then I just get one .bat file,
I have to scene cut it in Resolve, and I have to figure it out. And a lot of the time in that case I am relying on primaries because I cannot just cross my fingers, drop a LUT and just hope that it works. In the next episode, we will grade the same footage using contrast and pivot and at the end of that episode we will do a comparison
seeing the difference between primaries, curves,
and contrast and pivot.
And none of the stuff
I'm doing is scientific, I am building these grades in front of you so you can see my approach, my thought process, see inside my head what I'm
thinking when I'm doing that. Alright, guys, that wraps up today's Topics. Thank you so much for sticking around and watching this Article