- Hey, everyone, welcome back to another video.
In this one, we're gonna have some fun
because we are going to look at the basics of color grading
within DaVinci Resolve.
Now if you're just starting to color grade,
and you are feeling overwhelmed
with the amount of information that's hitting you
when it comes to nodes and effects
and all the adjustments possible,
lots of color space transforms, what is all of that?
What's a working color space and input color space?
You don't need to worry about all of that
when you're first starting.
All you need to worry about is one simple adjustment
called offset
which will get your color grades 95% of the way there.
So today we're gonna look at how this is possible,
but the principle behind this
is to simply let DaVinci Resolve,
which is an incredible full-featured color grading program,
do the heavy lifting for us,
a simple linear adjustment called offset
to adjust the exposure or luminance of the image
as well as the white balance or the color shift.
Some people call these printer light adjustments.
You can do an amazing amount.
So let's jump into DaVinci Resolve and check it out.
I'm working with eight clips today,
and they have been downloaded from Artgrid.
And you can see the Wind Collective
have shot this beautiful set of images of Alpacas Shepherds.
What you're seeing here on the screen
is simply what I presume is a Rec.709 conversion
maybe with some kind of LUT applied.
But when the raw footage is downloaded
and brought into DaVinci Resolve,
you can see it here displayed as log
or what we call Film Gen 5 from the Blackmagic cameras.
So the main thing you need to know
to make sure that DaVinci can do the heavy lifting for us
is what was the color space that the camera shot in?
So whatever footage you're working with,
it's a really good idea to pay attention
to what color space you shot it in,
because we need to tell DaVinci Resolve
what color space it was shot in
in order for it to do the heavy lifting for us.
So what we can do is bring up the color management settings
within DaVinci Resolve,
and I'm going to change the color science
over to color managed,
uncheck automatic color manage,
and head down to custom for my input color space.
In this case, I'm going to choose Blackmagic Film Gen 5.
The timeline working color space
is going to be DaVinci wide gamut.
And then my timeline working luminance,
I'm actually gonna hit custom
and just boost it to 10,000 nets.
And my output color space is going to be Rec.709,
gamma 2.4.
If you're confused with these settings,
I have a video here
which explains the difference between import working
and output color spaces.
But essentially, when you go and hit save,
you can see here if we right click
and update all the thumbnails,
that all of these shots are now converted into Rec.709
which is a nice viewable color space
for me to view these shots.
I can go ahead and click the split screen
and choose selected clips here
to view all of my shots side by side.
So now as a colorist and as we start color grading,
we obviously need to balance these shots out
to make them look like they're all part of the same world.
I want all of the shots
to look like they're part of the same sequence
as if they were shot consecutively.
So obviously, we've got to fix the color shift up here
which was purple.
And then we wanna match it to this hero shot
down in the bottom right,
which is nice and rich and vibrant and warm.
So as mentioned,
we are going to focus on one single adjustment today,
which is simply offset.
Offset is the fourth wheel down in my primary color wheels.
Whether you choose log wheels,
primary bars, or your color wheels,
offset will always be the adjustment on the right.
Now there are two controls.
The slider down the bottom
will adjust the luminance or the exposure,
and then the color will here will adjust the color shift.
Now in my node tree,
I'm going to label this offset exposure,
and I'm also gonna create a second node
which will be offset white balance.
It's two nodes, but it's the same tool
that will achieve the white balance and the exposure.
Once you have your node tree set up,
which is simple two nodes,
I'm going to select all the clips,
right click and apply grade,
and that is going to apply that node tree across the board
so that I have two nodes on every single clip.
This is my hero clip,
so I want to establish this clip first.
So I'm just going to lift the exposure slightly here.
And now I have my hero image
that I'm going to shot match everything else to.
What we can do is continue to use the selected split screen,
and I'm going to choose the clip
that I want to adjust
and command click my hero image.
So now you can see
that I have the clip that I'm going to adjust
and then my hero image on the right.
So first things first, let's just focus on exposure
and get the balance of these two images
to be somewhat in the same world.
When I want to move between clips,
I'm gonna hold shift and Alt,
and this will cycle through my clips.
And I'm simply just adjusting the exposure
of every single one of these clips to match my hero clip.
Great, now that I've adjusted my exposure,
I'm going to go ahead and focus on the next node over here,
which is white balance.
And I'm gonna do exactly the same thing.
I'm gonna select my clip that I want to adjust
and select the hero image with my offset white balance node.
And I'm gonna focus here on the color wheels.
So we're gonna move this away from purple
and just tidy up the white balance.
When you're first starting,
don't stress too much about making it perfect,
do a rough adjustment and then move on,
'cause we can always come back and tweak it later.
Next clip, we're gonna warm this up,
take a bit of that purple hue out,
and then move on quickly.
Again, warm this one up.
So now we have a rough white balance
and a rough exposure that we've added to all of the clips
to try and match to our hero image.
And I'm actually gonna go back to the start
and tweak the exposure,
because what you'll often find is
as you adjust the white balance,
it affects your perception of the exposure.
So I'm just gonna go ahead again, choose my offset exposure,
and use this controller down here
to adjust the exposure of my overall scene.
Okay, so we have it really quickly,
we've adjusted the exposure and the white balance
of every single shot.
And what we can do now is see these all side by side.
This is before any of those adjustments,
and with exposure and white balance,
you can see this is after.
So before and after.
Now it's obviously not perfect, but as you can see,
this has done 95% of the heavy lifting.
To recap, what we have done
is we've taken Blackmagic film Gen 5 footage
and essentially converted it into Rec.709,
adjusted the exposure and white balance
to shot match these clips together
so they look like they're part of the same world.
And we've done this all within a few minutes of work
because we're allowing DaVinci Resolve
to do all of the heavy lifting for us
with the offset tool and also the color managed workspace.
So hope that's helped alleviate some confusion
when it comes to color grading.
What you essentially want to do
is just adjust the exposure and adjust the white balance
in a really clean, linear way,
which the offset tool does really well.
And then once you've balanced your shots,
you can actually start to do some creative grading on top.
Once you have a base correction where all of your footage
looks like it's part of the same world,
it's really simple to head over,
for example, to the timeline page,
and apply something like a LUT
or a set of creative adjustments
to move your image into the creative space that you want.
For example,
Colin Kelly has a film Emulation LUT called the 2383.
I've just dragged it here into the timeline,
and you can see what it's done here.
This is before, and this is after.
So it's one LUT
that is affecting every single clip within my timeline.
Because I've got a good base correction,
all of these clips look like they're part of the same world
once I apply the creative look.
This is before any of my color correction whatsoever,
and this is after the exposure and white balance adjustment
along with the creative look.
So before and after,
before and after.
(ambient music)
There you go, friends, I hope that has helped you.
If you are new to color grading,
remember, if you're just starting out,
don't stress about all of the complicated tools
and the convoluted node trees
that you see out there on the internet.
Simply just worry
about working in a DaVinci color managed workspace.
And then from there,
just spend time worrying about offset white balance
and offset exposure.
The offset is a powerful tool
to balance all of your shots out,
and once you have that sorted,
you can then obviously go and get complicated
on top of that.
But this will be a great foundational start for you
to get used to interacting with footage
within the color page of DaVinci Resolve.
If this video has been helpful,
please consider subscribing to this channel.
And if you haven't already checked out this video,
which goes into more detail about import,
working in output color spaces within DaVinci Resolve.
And that explains a little bit more
about this whole color managed workflow
which we touched on in this video.
For now, peace out, guys. (ambient music)