How do you use DaVinci Resolve to color grade?

How do you use DaVinci Resolve to color grade?

In this Topic I'm going to show you how to preserve the most amount of dynamic range out of your image what we're working with here is um Ursa mini uh 4k or 4.6 k and uh obviously this is shot in the log so we have tons of dynamic range but the problem is that there's a lot of white in this image so her shirt is white these llamas in the back are white and then there's

Snow on the mountain in the back which is also white so the second I create a very strong s-curve or I push my exposure all of a sudden everything is going to blow out so how do we keep that intact uh while um keeping our image pushed okay so that is our assignment what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead create two nodes okay in my second node I'm going to do my color space transform so we already know

The information for our camera so before we even plug that in I want to show you one more thing I'm going to go under my settings and here the way I have my project set up is my color science is just set to default which is Davinci yrgb so I'm not doing anything there my timeline color space is set to DaVinci white gamut and DaVinci intermediate the reason why I do that is that I love how every tool behaves because since resolve 17 all the

Tools and resolve are content-aware okay meaning that you can use your lift gamma gain in any color space and it will behave accordingly before um you have to force it to rec 709 for lift gamma gain to work properly all right if you want to deep dive into what I'm talking about check out my free training or even better get my master class for your output color space I'm going to force it to rec 79 gamma 2.4 you can also leave it to be same as timeline it

Doesn't matter okay so once uh we are set here one more thing that I want to look at um tetrahedral okay so for 3d lookup table interpolation change it from tri-linear to tetrahedral because it's going to render your lut much better and now that we have that set up in my input color space I'm going to go ahead and select design 4.6k uh film gen 3 and then here I'm going to select uh 4.6k film okay

And then here what I'm going to do is I'm going to select rec709 for my color space and in this one, we're going to select cine film log why are we doing that because we're going to apply a film light once again if you want to learn more about that check out the free training or better yet get the master class let's go under film looks and uh I'm going to be going with the kodak 2383 d60 okay which is a film print emulation and

Already this looks very nice what I wanted to show you is I have this lut right here applied onto this clip and the reason being is because this is our rex over 9 okay so this is a lut from Blackmagic uh that does a rec 709 conversion from the log and this is what it's supposed to look like okay and uh this is where we're at so far after applying the uh

Film print emulation so what a rookie would do is this they would create a node after their conversion and their lut and then in here they will do something like that they will take their gain and they'll raise it so look what's happening when I raise my gain to look how everything is getting clipped out okay that information here is getting blown out this is not coming back so somebody

Could say well I like it like this and then I can take my lift and I can pull it down like that and hey qazi I love the contrast that I'm getting here okay that finds what we can do is we can right-click and grab a still so let's just save that still we can also add this as a version and now a proper way to approach this would be what I'm about to do so I'm going to delete this node I'm going to

Go pre node before our CST and once again why that is important I'm not going to get into that in this video you can watch it in my free training or my full master class links are going to be in the description so let's just name these and then these are going to be our adjustments so here what I want to do is this

I do not want to use my gain well one advantage of making adjustments before your CST and your lut is this like look at if I do the same changes I made before I'm not blowing out anything you see because the lut is making sure that everything stays inside the bounds right that the lut has created with the curve so see everything stays in so that is one huge advantage but we're just not

Going to be using left gamma again what I want to show you instead is using our custom curve and let's just jump in and start messing with it okay so we're going to create a bunch of points in our curve okay because I want to have a mad amount of granular control so just look at what I'm doing okay I'm just going to keep adding these points and then I'm going to keep adjusting it

How I like it so I'm going to keep doing something like this bring that in and I think it's looking pretty good but you know what I want to kind of go in and create a really strong contrast, okay so I like that more I'm liking that more and let's see where we sit this is kind of nice I want to go deeper

Okay so I'm going to do something like that and now I'm starting to like um I like what's happening now okay so what do we want to kind of push that out this is looking very very nice okay so I like that now the advantage of this is look at our highlights now everything is intact okay hence

The title of this video preserves our dynamic range we're pushing the f out of this image nothing is blowing out okay look at that so I can even push it like this and everything looks good so at this point, I see way too much yellow and everything is sitting in these two quadrants I don't like that so I'm going to go under my printer lights I'm going to make sure

That my printer light hotkeys are turned on and then all I'm going to do is subtract one or two red and then I'm going to subtract some yellow so I'm going to keep subtracting some yellow and maybe I can add one red that's okay and maybe I can add one yellow so let's just keep some of the yellow in there it's it doesn't look too bad um I'm fine

With it and now that I'm looking at it I feel like I can push the contrast a little bit more so like the contrast adjustments that we can make like I said would be something like this right so we can keep pushing the contrast and create a very very strong s-curve and let's see what we want to do here I like when it dips like that I want to create another point here maybe I want to create another point here

Don't be afraid of just getting very very granular okay that's what I'm doing right now so look at this what we just created and look at how we're maximizing our dynamic range so right now we're working in SDR but even if I were to convert it to hdr we would have an image that's nicely pushed okay once again I kind of want to like

Take this and push it down and I want to keep working on that I want to keep taking these points and kind of just pull them down like that because I like it I just feel like it enhances the dynamic range between the darkest to the brightest areas right I just want to make sure that my hero doesn't look too dark so I'm going to

Bring that up a little bit but I don't mind the one side being dark and the other one just like popping like that guys look at it okay we didn't add any saturation we didn't do any other adjustments okay and somebody can say well you just spent like five-six minutes creating this curve well the beautiful thing about this is that this is my look DNA this is done

I am set so once I lock this in this could be applied on a group level and then that is going to be my look and then everything underneath I can go in and make offset level adjustments to bring up the clip and down in exposure, uh to match it you know one shot to the next but this is the heavy-duty this is the heavy lifting that we did so now if I were to go to what the amateur has created here compared to

What we just created I mean just look at the difference and don't you think we did not sacrifice anything like our dynamic range is intact it's right up there yet we kept everything um right on the cusp as it belongs right like look at this even after blowing out the highlights and blowing out and crushing uh the blacks the image does not have the color density it does not have the depth that we have here

Right and then here what we can do is we can do half printer light and I can still do um subtract half yellow and I like what I'm seeing now even better okay so this is where we're at I still think that we can push our like right here I think we can go up a little bit and keep working that

Not too much but even something like this it's uh it's pushed it is pushed but I think I like what it does to my image and um look at it right uh what happens if we do half cyan if we just add half cyan um I think I don't mind it I think this even looks kind of cool what if we do have magenta

Um I don't know it doesn't look bad I even like that um I like that and we can look at our vector scope right like how everything is just like really nice well balanced uh yet it has a very very strong look right without making it look cheap so if I go here right a beginner's grade there are technical things that are

Wrong here right like things are clipping so that's one and two just look at how thin the image is like looking at the skin tones right compared to this um and since so let's do this I'm gonna go here um I'm gonna do the reference and then what we can do is we can go here um right and get rid of this and kind of look at the two images so let's hide this

And look at that so  you know now if we want to bring up the image we can add another um node and lift our mids but that's not very important because where the skin is sitting is where the skin is supposed to be okay because if I come out and like this and if I hover over to make sure that my qualifier is turned on and then

I want to pull up my scopes right here and guys just focus on this scope right here and I'm going to hover over her skin okay so with her complexion her skin should be sitting where it is right now it should not be any higher okay it should be between 384 to 512. and look at it that's exactly where it is all right and here

This is just not correct but once again when we go to our split-screen just look at the two images how much detail we have in the sky the separation that we have looked at even the brightest areas are not blown out the same thing right here they're not blown out and uh look at the colors look at the color density all of that okay the way it was done so hopefully you guys