- What is up people?
Danny here and today we're gonna be taking a look
at my personal process
for color grading inside DaVinci Resolve.
So grab your Color grading beverage of choice
and let's get into this.
(upbeat music)
So the other day over on my Instagram
where you should definitely be following me.
I posted this photo and a couple of people
with a keen eye noticed that I was using DaVinci Resolve.
This is something that I've been doing
for a couple of months now,
I've been doing all my YouTube videos
from start to finish editing,
color grading, audio, everything,
and I absolutely love it.
Especially the color grading features
because it's so powerful
but a lot of people get intimidated
because they don't understand nodes,
they don't understand what it looks like,
it's totally different from what they're used to,
in other non-linear editors.
So today what I'm gonna do is go
through my color grading process
and how I've been approaching it
and maybe kind of demystify a little bit about the nodes
cause it's really not as difficult as you think it is.
And it's so powerful
but first a couple of quick disclaimers.
First of all, I am not a professional colorist.
I do this for my YouTube
and for any client work that I get,
but that's about as far as that goes.
Second of all, Resolve is so powerful
there's so much more that you can do
than just what I'm going to show you in this video,
but it should get you started as far as color grading
within the program itself.
And thirdly, all these lights
that I've got going on around me
to film this video,
I wouldn't normally have them on
while I'm color grading.
I would probably have a much darker room
so that I can focus just
on the colors of what's going on in the shot.
Anyway, let's get into this.
Right, so what we've got here is a finished shot of my wife,
we were out for a walk the other day.
She's just blocking the sun from hitting her face
and we've got the finished version
and then we've got a blank slate
so I can show you how I got there.
And just for fun,
I'm not actually gonna reference that other one.
I'm just gonna show you my process,
so we'll see how close I actually get to
the other version as I work through the process.
So as you can probably tell
this is shot in S-Log3.
So the first thing that we're gonna do,
is add a couple of nodes.
So you can either add nodes
by going right click,
add node,
corrector and then you can connect it,
like this.
Or you can just hit option or Alt+S
and it'll automatically connect at all for you.
We're actually gonna hit four of these
and we're gonna start by labeling them.
The first one is going to be weight balance,
the second one is going to be called prelog,
the third one is going to be called log
and the fourth one is going to be called postlog.
And I'm gonna explain all of that in a second.
Now these are what are called serial nodes,
so what happens is that one feeds into the next one,
feeds into the next one feeds into the next one.
So when you're starting with,
let's say this first one
if I make it all blue,
you can see that it affects all of them.
And then when I go into the prelog node,
when I click on that one and I started adjusting it,
I'm starting from the place
that left off from that first node.
So it's very much like layers
would be in any other non-linear editor
but it just looks a bit different.
So we're starting here
and then we're moving into that one
and to this one and to that one.
So if I start changing this one,
it's only affecting the ones after it
and it's not affecting the white balance one.
We reset all of these.
Funny enough,
the first thing that I do,
is go to the third one.
There are two ways that I approach this.
First of all,
if I shot it specifically to use the Leeming LUT
which is a specific LUT pack
and they have a specific way
that you set up your shot,
then I can go to my Favorite LUTs
which I put it in there
and I can choose Leeming LUT
for S-log3 and that has converted
from S-log3 to Rec 709 in a specific way.
Now what I'm gonna do for this one,
because I didn't specifically shoot it
with the Leeming LUT in mind,
I'm actually gonna go to open effects,
I'm gonna choose Color Space Transform
and drag it on there.
And what this is gonna do is essentially transform it
from that S-log3 into Rec 709.
So it should make it look more like a normal image.
So we're gonna go Input Color Space.
We're gonna go down and choose S-Gamut3.Cine
and you can see how it changed the color
ever so slightly on that.
And then we're gonna go to Input Gamma,
and I'm gonna go down and choose S-Log3
and then our Output Color Space currently
the timeline is set to Rec 709,
so it's already doing it,
but just in case let's go down
and choose Rec 709 on both of these.
So if we look at the before,
of course it looks like an S-Log3
and looking at the wave form,
you can tell it's squished into the middle.
If we look at the after on that log node,
it's stretched it out a little bit.
Now we're very bright
and so this is why I have a prelog node
because now I can have some changes going
into that log node.
And just so that it said
that log node, prelog, postlog
those are just names that I made up
that helped me remember what I'm doing.
You can name them whatever you want.
So remembering that all of the nodes are now in order
because these are serial nodes.
We're going to affect the prelog
which is going to change anything going
into that color space transform.
So what we're gonna do is make it darker,
at this point before the log.
So what I'm doing is I'm looking
for anything to the black.
Now you can see her glove here should have
some pretty dark parts on it.
And I'm gonna go to my Lift and pull that down.
You can see down in the wave forms here
that this little chunk here,
that's where her glove is.
And if you really want you can go to here and show Extents.
And then that's showing me a nice line where the bottom is.
There's even one that's dipping a little bit further down,
must be in her jacket here
or something like that.
So we're gonna bring that down
until we're very close to black here.
And then we're just gonna bring the gain up,
just a little bit to make the bright parts brighter.
So we're just stretching it out a little bit further
and then I'm gonna bring my Gamma down.
So basically I'm just trying to get it to kind
of a neutral place where it looks kind of standard
almost like we didn't use a picture profile at all.
Now working backwards one more time,
I'm gonna go back to white balance down here.
There's a little color picker
and I'm gonna choose something that's white.
So the snow happens to be quite handy
for this as long as it's not blown out.
There we go so I made
a slight color adjustment.
So these first three are basically just getting us
from this, our S-Log3 image
to kind of a neutral looking image.
Now we're gonna use our postlog,
and this is where we're gonna do kind of our
more creative grades.
So I'm gonna decide,
do I want more saturation?
Do I want more contrast?
Those kinds of things.
And the place that I like to start with this,
is in my curves,
so I'm gonna add just a slight curve,
pull it down in the shadows
and just push it back,
in kind of my mid-tones and highlights.
So just a slight contrast curve here
and that's looking pretty good.
I might just add some saturation,
just a little bit of color going
for something nice and vibrant and bright here.
And then if we wanted to get even
more creative in this specific node,
we could start to add some color contrast.
So for example, I could go
into my Lift and I could push
this down into kind of a more bluey telly thing
and then I could push my Gamma up into
more of a red orange kind of thing.
And so now we've added a little bit of color contrast.
Now alternatively, what you could do
if you didn't want to mix
those together in the same node,
you could actually reset those
and do another node color contrast,
or something like that
and then do that same thing.
(gentle music)
And now we can see before
and after that change,
there's a contrast.
So you can do stuff all in the same node,
if you really want to,
or you can split it out
into as many nodes as you want.
In the original version of this,
I didn't split that out.
I just have one postlog thing.
And actually in my contrast,
I'm gonna warm it up a little bit.
So I pushed it a little bit warmer
and I've added some contrast in that node
and we've got one more that's color contrast.
But we're actually gonna scrap that one for now
because there's another way that I prefer
to do my color contrast.
Okay, so I'm gonna rechange this to call it postlog.
So now we've got,
(gentle music)
kind of our creative color grade on that.
Now it looks pretty good we can call it done
there if we really wanted to,
but we're gonna take it another step further
with a different way to do color contrast.
I'm gonna make a new node
and I'm going to take my offset,
which is the entire image.
And I'm gonna pump a little bit
of kind of teal into it.
And then I'm gonna lower the Gamma
which is gonna make it a little bit darker.
If you wanna know about Lift, Gamma and Gain,
I have a whole nother video about that,
so you can check that out
and then I'm gonna right click on this.
I'm gonna click, add node and choose layer.
Now what this has done, as you can see
it took away what was happening in that node.
It's feeding from the postlog node into both of these
and then back into something called a Layer mixer.
Now the one on the bottom is overriding anything
that happens on the top.
So what we're gonna do with this bottom one,
is just make a selection with the qualifier.
Make sure we're selected on this tool here
and then select her skin.
And if we hit shift H,
we can see better what we're selecting
and then just make a selection.
I'm gonna hit Denoise a little bit
and blur radius to soften it out.
You can hit shift H again
or choose the highlight option which is here.
And now you can see this top node of our layers,
is only affecting everything except for the skin.
Now it's doing a really extreme job,
so that you can see the difference.
But what we're gonna do now is highlight
that node again go into our key.
And we're gonna pull that down.
This is basically like opacity,
so I can pull that down.
Let's say to 30%.
Now it's just a slight difference,
then we can rename this.
Call that noscan,
we'll call this scan.
So then together,
we add a little bit of that color contrast.
Just a different way that you can do it,
and personally I like to do it this way.
After the layer mixer,
I'm gonna add another node.
This one, I'm gonna go to my blur and sharpen properties.
We're gonna just sharpen the image,
just a little bit.
To find that when I shoot S-Log3
with the detail all the way down like it is,
it's just a little softer that I'd like it.
So we'll do a little bit of sharpening add one last node.
And sometimes I like to add a vignette not all the time
but if I really wanna draw your eye in
and right now there's a lot
of bright stuff around the edges.
So we're just gonna draw the eye in to the center.
So the way that we're gonna do that,
is we're gonna go to our curves.
We're gonna drop this down in the middle.
Actually, I might even do it.
Like so.
And then we're gonna add a window.
We're gonna just choose a circular window.
We're gonna invert it,
soften it out.
(gentle music)
And maybe something like that.
I see the vignette,
just kind of draws your attention in towards her face.
And so that's pretty much my whole chain of nodes
that I like to use with a couple of alterations,
depending on which way you wanna do it.
So again, if we go back to the start,
we start off by adding our log conversion
to Rec 709 and we do prelogs.
So we're going to change the levels going
into that color space transform.
And we do our weight balance,
and we do our postlog
which is basically our grade,
the heart of it anyway.
Next we have our color contrast,
adds a little bit of a pop
where your subject comes off,
especially the skin tones,
and then we've got a little bit of sharpening,
and a little bit of a vignette
which I forgot to label,
there we go.
So going from the point of Rec 709
to our finish product,
I think we got a pretty solid grade there.
Let's see how close it was to the original.
So the original was a lot darker,
a little more stylized maybe
But they both look pretty good.
So that's my color grading process.
90% of the time that's kind of the layout
that I use for my nodes.
Hopefully that cleared up a little bit
about how the nodes work.
They're really not as scary as people think they are.
And if you do have any questions about this process
or you wanna hear more about it,
make sure to leave a comment down below
and on your way down there hit that like button
and subscribe
and hit the bell notification.
So you don't miss out on future tutorials and reviews.
Thank you so much for watching
and thanks so much for those
who suggested me doing this video.
And I'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)