color management in DaVinci Resolve 18
The first thing I have to say is that if you don't understand color management then don't worry about it and I want to address that in this episode so I'm going to show you what color management is and by the end of it you should get a basic understanding of how to use resolve cutter management because it's really good so this is not for advanced users so if you know how to use resolve color management you do not want to be watching this video so uh
Let's crack on so basically I've got a project here and I've got several shots in here I've got some redraw footage I've got some black magic raw I've got a bit of cannon and I've got an apple prores quad four clip here so they've all got different camera profiles and you can see that this shot here, for example, is very flat because it's shot in red color space and it's a log and it needs to be
Much more contrasty and better looking now the monitor that we're working with here is a is set to rec709 gamma 2.4 and if you don't understand that is HD regular standard dynamic range tell me when I'm grading for broadcast that's the spec I'm working to so the first thing we need to do is go to our project settings and I'm just going to work in regular DaVinci RGB this is non-color managed to
In contrast, that sort of thing that is now looking much better that is looking like how I expect it to look on my rec 709 display so this is known as display referred color grading okay I'm using my display to get me into the good into a good place now using color management you can do that much more accurately because when the camera was shooting this scene it has a certain profile that can be
Used to get it into rick79 and gamma 2.4 without me guessing where the controls need to go so what I'm going to do is reset that so we're back to our original image ungraded and I'm now going to put us into a color-managed workflow so I'm going to click down here project settings and I'm going to change my color science to be DaVinci RGB color managed so it's the same color science it's just color-managed this
Time there are two other ones here as well you've got ac cc and ac cut aces is a color-managed system but it's a different type of system and that is um unified across a lot of different platforms so you could do aces in base light uh aces on flame for example so it's more of an industry-standard but we're going to look today at DaVinci ray RGB color manager which is its color management system and it works well
So I'm going to switch into Davinci RGB color managed and it then says what do you want to process so we want to process an SDR standard dynamic range we're not doing hdr just yet and the output color space is going to be sdr rec 709 which is correct for this project so so my display is rec709 that's where I want my output to be I'm going to press save and when I do watch what happens to this image
It's automatically now gone into the correct settings for my 709 gamma 2.4 display so the color management has transformed it from red color space into rec709 display space so its scene-referred is red and its display referred is rec 79 gammas 2.4, okay so I'm just going to say rec709 from now on because it's always going to be gamma 2.4 all right now that looks a lot better than what I did manually because there's some science doing that okay now the
The advantage of that is if you're using different camera formats by using color management to get to your first step this is kind of your first step of grading this is just to get the balance into rec 709 allows me to balance different camera formats so a sony, for example, will shoot a very different scene-referred um color if you like than red will and then Blackmagic will so by using color management you are
Automatically using the camera profiles and the camera manufacturers science to get into a good rec 709 starting point so it means your starting point is great all right I hope that makes sense now what you might have noticed is that it just literally jumped into a nice looking image it's now looking great in rec 79 if we look at our waveform here you'll see that we've got nice settings in there and we can now go
Add another node and just start making fine-tune adjustments so we might want to cool this off a little bit we want to put some shapes around it we basically can perform our grade but we've got a great starting point so I'm just going to re I'm going to get rid of that node now how did it get to there well what it's done is it's recognized that this is red so the clip has metadata attached to it and if we go to our camera profile
Here it's set to the project setting so it recognizes this is shot red wide gamma RGB log 3g10 which is one of the red profiles so it automatically knows where to take it from its scene-referred mode into the correct display referred mode and the display referred mode is coming from our settings here okay sdr x79 so that is how it knows what to do now if I look at these next clips these are all already graded
So within one switch we've now graded all of these 10 shots so if we go to black magic, it now recognizes that this is black magic design so it goes from the black magic design scene-referred color space into rec 709 okay it's just transforming it all right we've got a good base grade on all of these okay this one's canon so it recognizes that it's canon cinema gamut and this one is prores now the prores one hasn't had a profile attached to it
I go input color space and I can set this I know this was shot on arry now you do have to know what it was shot on there's no shortcut for that this is your arrow log c and there we go that looks great already so it's now in a much better state than it was but because it's prores I have to tell it okay so if it's raw it's automatic in fact in the raw settings you don't even have input color space all right because it's switched
In here I've now got input color space and I can change it to be Blackmagic design rec709 read whatever it is so this is quite a simple setup because we've only got 10 shots so what if you're working on a long-form program you've got maybe seven 800 shots and you need to assign the correct color space for them well what you can do is take your clips the raw ones are adjusted automatically but you can take
Any other clips that you've got and in the media management you could group them so you might group them by uh resolution for example so you know all your array clips will be the same resolution by clip name would even be a good way of doing it and you can group them all together and then you can globally a change the input cover space like so and then they're all correctly set in the timeline so the next important thing
Is to know the order of operations you need to understand how the color management works and where it's processed in the order because we're not working with nodes anymore the column the color space transform is just happening this is by some miracle converting from red color space into rec709 color space all right and that is happening under the hood in the color management but where does it happen does
It happens before the edit page before the fusion page after the color page where does it all happen well several things are happening first thing that's processed is the raw okay so if it's a raw clip this is taken into account first okay all these settings your iso settings everything here is analyzed and processed first then the next mode of operation is what's called the idt it's the input device transform okay
Then your color grade happens and everything in the edit page everything you do with edit effects fusion color page effects is all then processed and the final stage of it is what's called the odt it's the output device transform which in this case is rec709 gamma 2.4 now the beauty of this is all the processing is being done in a large color space it's being done in our huge big red color space here or black magic
Raw color space canon color space are log c color space these are all massive color spaces and you can see those on this graph you've probably seen this before but there's DaVinci wide gamut, for example, it's much much larger than rec 709 okay so where can we adjust our idt and out and if you don't understand this but don't worry too much because the beauty of DaVinci resolve color management for beginners is you can go processing mode standard
Dynamic range output color space rec709 and it deals with everything for you so if we just read this sdl gradient environment best used when the majority of the source material is sdr suitable for SDR and hdr deliverables all right so you can switch your output color space into hdr very easily the advantage of that is you don't have to regrade everything you just transform into a different output color
Space so the reason we're not seeing many options here is that automatic color management is on all right so I'm just going to switch this off okay and we now if we go down here you see we've got lots of different options now so we start getting into hdr world p3 cinema mode and all this sort of stuff so effectively Davinci resolve is doing the hard work for us in this episode I'm not going to take this much beyond that but what I want you to
Understand is that it's not a node-based operation it's happening the color processing the color science is being done before you make any adjustments to the color page and then this display output is being set after we've done all the work so we're always working in the largest cutter space possible which is the best-case scenario you want to be working in the largest space you can now you might have seen me doing color
What's called color space transform on a node and I'm just going to show you what that is doing okay so what I'm going to do is come out of color management so I'm going to take my color management off I'm going to go back to DaVinci yrgb and this effectively switches our color management off so all I'm doing now is say my timeline color space is going to be rec 79 gammas 2.4 and press save all the images go flat again because
We're not color managing them and I've now got to manually put them in the correct color space however what I can do is I've normally had a bigger node tree than this but let's just put four nodes down for example all right I'm gonna take out of my effects I'm gonna take this thing called color space transform and what this lets me do is the same as what we've just been doing in the color management but
On a node-based level so I'm controlling where it is in the pipeline so I'm going to take this effect here this is red footage all right so my input color space is red so I'm going to scroll down here it's red wide gamut RGB the disadvantage of this is you do need to know what it is okay because the raw is now not being automatically applied
The raw metadata the input gamma is log 3 g10 okay and my output color space says use timeline which is currently set to rec709 gamma 2.4 it's quite good practice to just switch this anyway just so you really know what you're doing uh gamma 2.4 and you see the tone mapping here is set to DaVinci now it's a good idea to leave
It's at that because what it's doing is saying I'm going to use DaVinci's wide gamut that's this huge color space here and I'm going to neatly map everything down to my just my output device transform my output gamma my output color space which is rec 79 gamma 2.4 so everything nothing sort of clips hard and by doing this that is the same as doing the color management I'll show you what I'm going to do is grab this as a still
Okay so it's there I'm going to delete that note so we've got absolutely nothing going on I'm going to go straight back into DaVinci RGB color managed so I'm going for color processing SDR output color space sdr rec 709 press save it automatically does the work for me and if I now wipe this clip you'll see
There's the clip underneath it if I click on this one you'll see that there's no difference at all and just to check let's just check the waveform there's no difference at all so that's the same so if I know go back to my regular DaVinci RGB so effectively I'm color managing and apply that node there you go there it is there I'm effectively color managing but at a node-based level and
This is better than me doing this sort of stuff in here and just guessing where the contrast needs to be and where the midpoint needs to be the mid-grade point all that sort of stuff so I'm going to reset that again now you'll also notice I've got nodes sitting underneath that and that's because I want to grade underneath this node okay on my fixed notary I have a couple of nodes after that in case I just want to
Do anything after but certainly, when you're beginning you should have that at the end so if you're just starting with the color management I would recommend that you probably don't go this route the color space transform route I would go I'm just going to reset that I would go for regular DaVinci RGB color-managed to set my output to 709 if that's what your output color space is save that and then you've got yourself a great starting