How To Color Grade In Davinci Resolve for Beginners (2 Hour Masterclass)

Hello, my name is Ragab, and I'm a colorist and cinematographer from the UK. Welcome to this 1 to 2-hour free color grading tutorial in DaVinci Resolve. My aim is, by the end of this tutorial, that you have a really good understanding of how to color grade in DaVinci Resolve.

We will be utilizing a free tool that we have developed called the DaVinci Resolve Starter Power Grade, which will essentially help you to fast-track your color grading in DaVinci Resolve. This free tool is free to download from our website.

In this tutorial, we will not only be going over how to color grade log footage from start to finish but also how to color grade phone footage, such as videos that you take on your iPhone. This video is not only for those people who are beginning their color grading journey within DaVinci Resolve but also those people who have a good understanding already of DaVinci Resolve but want to take the color grading just that one step further.

I will go over many, many different tools within DaVinci, covering most aspects within the actual color tab, and hopefully, by the end of it, you're going to create some really, really good results. And afterwards, I would love to see some of the work that you create from the things that you've taken away from this tutorial and implemented into your own work. So, I recommend filling up your water bottle, sitting down, getting comfy, and enjoy this lesson.

Hello and welcome to DaVinci Resolve. Here we are in our edit tab. Before we fully begin and go into our color grading, what I would like you to do is go over to your settings at the bottom right here, and you're going to go over to your color management. So, you might start your master settings, go over to your color management, and then you're going to set your timeline color space to DaVinci Wide Gamut Intermediate. I believe this might be set to Rec. 709 scene to begin with, but I recommend just for now, set it to the DaVinci Wide Gamut Intermediate. And for your output color space, if you're working on a Mac, put on Rec. 709-A, because this will basically allow your exported image to look exactly the same as the one that you're going to edit in the color tab. So, I recommend you do this, and we can leave this at Rec. 709-A.

If you're working on a Windows machine, you can turn this to Rec. 709 Gamma 2.2 or 2.4. So, I'm going to cancel this. And to get to the color tab, you're simply going to go over to the bottom here, and you press this, and it's going to take you to the color tab. Now, things may look a little bit complicated when you're first getting into DaVinci, especially if you're moving from something like Premiere or even something like CapCut. This may all look a little bit intimidating, but we're just, I'm going to go through most things today in terms of what you kind of have to know.

So, as I mentioned, I'm going to show you how to basically color grade any type of footage. Here we have some log footage. Uh, so this footage was shot in log, but I also do have this footage here that was shot on my iPhone XR, uh, that I will also go over how to edit and basically going to color grade in almost the exact same way and use the same principles to color grade. And to do this, we have our node structure right here. Now, normally, if I was to do a full, massive tutorial about nodes, I'd go through them one by one. But what I've actually done is, if I go to my gallery, we have our DaVinci Resolve Starter Power Grade, and this is essentially all you need to begin grading.

This node you can download for completely free if you come over to our website on melorstudios.com. If you scroll down, you'll have the DaVinci Resolve Starter Power Grade. If you click this, and then you can basically just download this free. And then essentially, what you'll get is, you'll get a folder like this, and then you'll say DRS Starter Power Grade, a DPX, and a DRX file. You're going to go over to the gallery on the top left right here, and then you're going to go into one of your power grade folders. Usually, you'll probably just have one power grade one folder, and then what you're going to do is simply just going to drag these into here, and it'll import your power grades. I'm just going to delete these for now, as I've already imported the power grade. Uh, and then to close your gallery tab, you just going to press gallery.

If your workspace is looking a little bit clunky and a little bit too many things happening, um, I'll show you what yours probably will look like. So, if I was to come here and press reset UI layout, your feed will probably look like this, which might give you a bit of a headache. So, what I prefer to do is work in a much more clean working space. So, what we're going to do is, if we look at this top tool by here, we can turn things on and off. So, I can turn off my clips, which is this here. I can turn off my timeline, which is this blue blocks, blocks, blocks here. And then I can also turn off my gallery. And if your gallery is looking like this and you can't see the power folders on the left, simply click this folder on the left here, and it'll show your power grades folder. I'm going to turn this off for now by pressing gallery.

And now this is going to give us a lot more space to play with with this clip or this video right here. And then you can basically drag this line from left to right depending on how much space you want, um, for your actual footage. I'm just going to probably put it towards the middle here. And then we have our footage on the left right there. We have our node structure here. If everything's looking huge, um, what you need to do is come over to where it says clip and simply drag this all the way down, and that's going to give you the most amount of space. And if you wanted to move your node structure, simply click, left mouse click, drag, and then you can basically move your node wherever you wish.

And we have a nice starting point here. What you might also find is that you might only have two sections on this bottom panel right here. You might have like your curves and all of this will be bunched up with this, and that'll be the first half, and then your parade and waveforms will just be on the right-hand side. Now, you can only get three sections if you're working on a 4K like resolution monitor. Um, and if you, if you're doing this on a Mac and you do have a 4K resolution, but you're still not managing to get all of this and making everything look really nice and getting a lot of space to work with, come over to your system settings, and then we're just going to go over to displays, and then we're just going to go over to our display. And all I'm going to do is I just press more space. When I press more space, that's going to give me a lot of working space. And then what I recommend you do is, if you've done that, go over to your workspace, press reset UI layout, and then you'll get these three different segments and menus at the bottom.

So, now we can eventually, now we can actually start grading. So, we have our clip here that I shot on my Sony A7 S3, um, on S-Gamut3.cine and S-Log3. So, now we're here, and we've got a good setup. And, and I will go over this as we kind of go along. So, in our CSTN, which is our color space transform, in this is where we input the settings that we used in our effects. I'm going to come over and type in S-Gamut3.cine and S-Log3, and that's what I kind of already got as a preset. And normally, it would probably just be set at that. However, if you're using a different camera, such as you're using Canon Log, so you're going to use Canon Cinema Gamma for your color space and Canon Log 3, and basically whatever you know, if you're using Blackmagic, use the Blackmagic Gen 5 film, whatever it is, um, and input the correct ones right here. But for now, I'm going to keep this at S-Gamut3.cine and S-Log3.

Then what you can do is, I'm simply going to go to my effects, and I'm going to press this, and that'll close down my effects. And then what we can do is look at these nodes right here. So, here we have an exposure balance node, contrast node, and a saturation node. And these are essentially all of our balancing nodes. The yellow nodes here, uh, essentially to help balance our image if our CST wasn't doing a good job to convert the image into a nice-looking image, then we can come into here. So, if we look at our waveform at the bottom right-hand corner right here, essentially, what we want to do with exposure, contrast, and saturation is stretch this waveform as much as we can because this is essentially all of the information within this image.

So, if I simply just increase the brightness of this image like this, you can see how the image moves up as I increase because the image is moving more towards the brighter areas. So, where it says 1023, that is the highlighted area of our image. So, the top bit will be our highlights, the middle part is our midtones, and the bottom part where it's close to zero is our shadows and blacks. Now, if you're not able to see all of this, I recommend you come over to parade. You can also use waveform. That is also this is also a very common, um, graph that a lot of colorists do use, but for now, I prefer working in parade. Then we can come over to these three lines here, this menu setting, and if you're not being, if you're not being able to see your graph easily, you can simply move this vertically, and you'll be able to see a lot more clearly. And the same with the graph bars like this, and just save it to where you'd like. So, for now, this is great, and this is a good starting mode.

And you can use, I do recommend using a mouse when you're color grading, by the way. And you can simply hold the middle mouse button and drag this to centralize it if it's like a bit of a jaw like that. So, that was fine. Essentially, what we want to do is get lots of information from this image from these three nodes, uh, if the CST hasn't done it already. Because the reason we're doing this is because for the next step, these three nodes is where we're going to do color isolation. And you can only really do color isolation if you have a good separation between different parts of the image. If our image was to look like log footage, when I to come, when I try to come over to my main object here, and let's say I want to do a qualification, I'll go over this properly in a second. You can see when I select the skin, almost everything else is selected because the image is so flat and there's no saturation. When I select the skin, it's going to select almost everything in the frame because everything's falling into the same tonal tonality. We actually separate the image out, and then I press the skin, it's going to select the skin a lot better. I'm going to have to refine this afterwards, but I'll showcase to you why this is a lot more important during this.

And the reason we're going to color separate is so we can isolate different parts of the image. So, for my exposure, I'm just going to use my offset and bring this up, and that's basically just going to bring the overall image up like this. And as I'm bringing my offset up, maybe you don't want to do it too much. This is good. And then I'm going to bring my midtones up, which is my gamma. So, lift is your shadows, gamma is your midtones, and gain is your highlights. And offset is just like a global look of your image, the, you know, the overall look of the image. So, I'm just going to bring, bring my lift down like this, and I'm going to bring my gamma upwards like this. You can probably bring my gamma even higher, and I can bring my mid-shadows further down, my gain higher like this. What you don't want to happen is, you don't want your highlights to be clipping. Uh, so you'll know your highlights will clip because if I just do this, you'll see it'll hit the 1023 line and it'll make this really straight line, like a straight line on the graph, basically, um, and that'll be that line here. So, you don't want that to happen. And the same thing with the shadows, you don't want it to clip at the bottom because then your blacks will be clipped. Uh, but this is a good starting image, and I'm not clipping, uh, the image too much. But we've basically gone from here to here, and we've separated in terms of the, um, tones, shadows, midtones, highlights, a lot better.

Uh, to begin with, the contrast levels are looking fine. You can simply use your eye to see where the contrast levels are hitting. Uh, but what I do recommend is if your image is looking a little bit muddy like this, when I say muddy, it's like when the skin is looking like dark and blotchy, um, and if you're not using skin, you can see here it's looking a bit blotchy. Um, what I recommend is you can decrease your contrast a bit. But the main thing also to look at is if you are increasing contrast, is to come over to your pivot and shift this downwards. So, bringing this towards zero, and basically, what this will mean is that the, the pivot or the pivot line for the contrast will shift from where it normally is, like almost in the middle, towards the left. So, it'll be hitting less of the midtones and highlights and more of the shadows. And if you shift it to the right, it'll start hitting more of the highlights. Uh, this is a good contrasty-looking image. I'm happy with this. And then the next thing is you can come over to your saturation. For your saturation, what we can do is simply come over to our saturation here and increase our saturation like this. And if your, you don't want to saturate too much. Basically, if your image is very flat, you need to add a bit of saturation in for allow to allow us to add, um, do some better color separation. So, you can add your color separation, you can add your saturation like this way, and just maybe just add a little bit of saturation like this, and that is completely fine for this initial stage. We're good, we're done, and we do have a balanced image, but it'll just be like an enhanced balanced image where there might be a bit more saturation and contrast than you'd like. Um, but essentially, what we're trying to do is trying to create a balanced image where then we can, where then we can do our color isolation. And then after all of that, we can then come into these pink nodes, which are our global nodes, essentially, and that's where we can actually create the final look. So, if we did want a very dark look, that's when we do it there, not here. This is where we do all of our balancing, basically.

So, our main object is selected right here. Whatever your main object is here is our subject, so our talent right here. But if you're, you know, you're shooting, uh, some something in the street and the main object is like a red mailbox or post office box, then you can use that as your main object. So, whatever your main object is, that's going to be your main object. But for now, main object here is our human, is, is our character right here. So, what you want to do is to do color isolation, is you're going to come over to your qualifier here, and then essentially, what you're going to do is, you're going to ensure this qualifier plus button is being selected. Come over to your skin and press the skin. Now, you're going to see nothing's going to happen. Maybe this has shifted, but you're going to say, "Oh, how do I see my selection?" To do that, you're going to look at the shortcut called Shift H. And then you can see your selection. If you cannot do Shift H for some reason, I do recommend you learn it, by the way. Is you can come over to this right here, and it'll, this half-circle thing, um, and it'll show your selection. So, everything that is selected will be in color. Um, so the skin and these wall bits right here, and everything that is grayed out, like his eyes and his jacket, they're the things that are not being selected.

So, now if I was to move this color wheel right here, you can see only those areas that have been highlighted are now being selected. So, that's great. We've got an okay selection, but we can refine this further. So, what we essentially want to do is try and isolate the skin as best as we can. Depending on what type of footage you may have, you might have might be working with 8-bit footage or 10-bit footage or 12-bit footage, etc., or even RAW. What you want to do is try and get the best selections possible. And the lower your bit, so if you're working with 8-bit footage or lower, you're going to really struggle to isolate, um, or get a nice selection, basically. So, what you can do is you can simply go to your qualifier minus button to begin with, if you don't know how this completely works, and you can press minus, and you can see that'll take away bits that you don't want selected. But you can see now you have taken away the skin. So, what I do recommend you do is kind of have a learn and develop a decent understanding of where the image that you're trying to select is lying. So, I know that skin is lying within the reds and the oranges. So, I'm going to bring this Hue selection, so this is selecting the type of color, and I'm going to bring this width down, and you can see already we've selected the skin in a, like, we've isolated skin a lot more than we had before. Now, that's good, and that's a great starting point. If you're finding things are getting a little bit blotchy, you can come over to your softness here and you can soften this up, but we can also go over that on the right-hand side here afterwards.

Then we know our skin is a lot more saturated than the, than these gray, gray areas right here. We don't want those to be selected. So, I can come over to my saturation. I can either bring my low up like this, and you can see that's doing a good job. You can see those grays are now no longer being affected. And then I can simply go to my low soft, which is my low softness, and then increase this, and that'll kind of feather out even more like this. Fine. The luminance is the brightness part of the image, so how bright that particular part of the image. So, if you had a sky that's being selected, we'd know that the skin's not as bright as a sky in that particular image. So, I can bring this down. You can see that light here is no longer being selected. So, that's looking pretty good. And then you can bring the low down or you can bring it up. So, if I wanted some of that hair in or not in, I can bring that up like this. I can do this like that, and that's a decent selection from what we've gone from before. Remember, it does not have to be perfect.

To further finesse your selection, you're going to go over to denoise right here, and that'll basically kind of soften out your masking. And that's the same with this blur radius here. So, there are only two, two things I recommend you kind of need to look at here: it's blur radius and the noise. And you can kind of push these as much as you want. I don't really push them above 20, but if you have to push them above 20, it's completely fine, go for it. So, we've got a decent selection here. Now, if you was very antsy about your selection, there are two different ways that you can go about doing this. The first way is going over to our power windows right here, and that's this is basically allowing us to create another mask. And if I was to come over to the circle, you can see it selected a circular or radial mask around, well, in our frame. Now, if I was to just, you can move the mask by simply dragging the middle to move it, actually, like this, and to make it bigger and smaller, you can drag the points on the edges and make it bigger or smaller. Now, you can see that only the character in the middle is being selected. None of these parts on the left or the right being selected. So, we've got an even, you know, better selection like this, and this is looking good. And you can refine this. This red circle on the outer circle here, this is just feathering, so you don't want it to be super harsh. Um, what you always kind of want to do is just kind of feather it out a little bit, and that kind of takes off the edge on the sides, and that's looking pretty nice.

Say you have a moving image, though. If you're having a still image, this is perfect. Uh, but say you have a moving image, what you might want to do is then come over to this tracking window, which is on the next slide. Press this, and ensuring that this tracking window is selected here, you're simply going to press this back and forth. You're simply going to press this back and forth, and it's going to actually track your subject pretty well. Um, and as you can see, it did a pretty good job here. Now, if you didn't want to use a power window and it's not doing a good job, you can go one step further. Also, there are squares and, um, a gradient one as well. Um, and that's something we can maybe go over later. But essentially, just choose the correct shape that you like, would like. But if that shape is not working, select this pen tool right here, and simply, you can just go over and just draw around your subject. And once you've done that, you can then come over back to your tracking window, ensure you're in the tracking mode, select the back and forth, and then track him, and then you've tracked your subject. That is one way. And now, if I press Shift H, and I was to move this, you can see we've done a really good selection of our subject. So, this is looking pretty good.

The last way that I'll kind of showcase to you is, if I to turn this off, is Magic Mask. I can't remember if this is a paid version of DaVinci Resolve, so this is only in the Studio version. So, if you're not in the free version, you can maybe skip if this doesn't work for you. But if you do have the Studio version, let me show you Magic Mask and how crazy Magic Mask can be. So, there we had to kind of maybe draw it and find it. But here, I'm going to reset this as well, and then I'm going to press reset this as well. And then I'm going to simply ensuring that my qualifier plus is being selected here, and I'm going to press better. I'm going to draw around my subject's skin like this, and then I'm going to press Shift H, and you can see it's done an almost perfect selection of our character. I'm going to press back and forth, and essentially, it's just going to track our subject back and forth. And you can see some things might be selected, but don't worry too much about that because we can essentially go back into our qualifier. So, we've done our selection, but essentially, we've not adjusted anything in our qualifier. So, we can double up on, we can double up on our qualifier here, um, and adjust this once more again, like we did before. So, I can bring the width down like this, so you can see the eyes are no longer now being selected. And I can actually select a skin like this. I can bring those saturation levels maybe up like this, so our eyes and our hair is not being selected. Increase the denoise, increase the blur radius like this, and increase, decrease the highs that way, increase the width like this, and then we have a nice selection of of our subject.

Then what you can do is, skin normally falls into the midtones, and midtones is correlated with gamma. Now, to see if you wanted to get perfect skin tones, and this is more so if you're working with skin, going to go over to your parade and press vectorscope. You're get this, you're going to get this funky graph at the bottom right here. And what you actually want to do is press these three dots, come all the way to the bottom, and press show skin tone indicator. And on this line, that is where your skin kind of lies. And essentially, if I was to move this point on the gamma, you can see that this line that we're moving, where where is essentially our skin, you want this to kind of fall onto the skin. Now, we don't really want to push the skin too much as of yet, because this is simply what we're doing here is trying to do some color isolation. So, when we do go into our global look, we can then come back to our skin and change it if it needs to be changed, and I'll showcase that to you, um, in in a bit. But for now, I'm just going to, we just have this here, and you can see it's now falling onto the skin tones like this, and it's looking good. Maybe now we can actually decrease the saturation of the skin, uh, because it was a bit too bright before. Find a better frame like this, and that's good. We've now isolated our skin.

Now, let me explain what this actually is properly. We've isolated our skin on this bottom node, or on our main object. And what you might see is the fact that our main object is actually at on the bottom layer, and our background, which is, well, our background and our main object is our foreground, essentially. And our background is our background is at the top layer. Now, essentially, how this works, this cool thing here, this is called a layer mixer node. And essentially, what this helps is, it's just really good for color isolation. But everything, anything that's at the bottom layer is actually on the top layer and takes priority over the rest of the layers. So, I'm going to showcase to you now. I'm going to turn off second object, because if this is on, um, it will affect what I can do on the background. No, I'm going to turn node off, turn a node on and off. If you see the number 06, just press this, and it'll turn the node off. If I go to my background node now, and then simply go to my offset and start adding in color, you can see we're actually adding color to all the image, everything minus the skin that we selected. And this is also a good way to see how good your skin selection actually was, or your main object selection, as you can see we've selected a little bit, uh, less of the chin right here, which you can go back in and adjust. But here you can see this now. Say, if I was to turn on, turn on my second object like this, and I was to select our jacket, and if I was go over back over to my qualifier, select my shirt right here, you can see selected the shirt pretty okay. Uh, maybe we bring this down like this, bring the highs up like this, just a very simple, this is more so just a showcase. We've selected our jacket. I haven't done anything to our jacket, but obviously, from our knowledge, we know that our main object takes priority over our second object, but also our second object takes priority over our background. So, if I was to now again go to my background and shift in, I'll add in pink, you can see that now our jacket is not being affected, and our skin is not being affected. If I was to turn off the second object, you can see the jacket is now being affected. If I just turn off the main object, you can see now everything is being affected. So, this is a really easy way of doing color separation. And if you have more different objects in your frame, so maybe you have a third object, you can always come over to where it says main object, press Alt or Option L, and that'll add another node. So, if you know you have three to begin with, um, three different objects, you can always do this, and you'll add it at the bottom. So, your main object can always be this one. So, maybe figure that out beforehand, then you know this is going to be your main object, and go from there. Alternatively, you can move these around like this, but that's just a bit of a hassle. But for now, uh, we only have like two objects that we're going to be utilizing, is maybe the jacket and and the skin. And then I'm going to go over to my background node right here. I'm going to bring this back down like this. Maybe we do want to create somewhat cooler-looking toned image, so maybe I can add a little bit of blues to the background like this. So, what you can also see here is we've done have color separation, but you never want to push your color separation too much because as you saw when I pushed the skin too much, it just like, it just doesn't work, it'll just break up the image and it won't look very good, no matter what type of footage you're utilizing. So, we're going really want to do subtle changes, and we can do slight color separation here because already, if I was turned, select all of these, and I press Command D, you can see we've already done a little bit of color separation with our skin and our background. If I was to not have done my skin separation like that, you can see that the skin would be a lot more blue. But now that I've selected my skin, I can decide where exactly I would like my skin to fall. So, that is color isolation in a nutshell. And now we can continue to move to essentially the fun part, which is the global look and the final look of the image, and that's what we're going to do with these nodes right here.

Okay, so now that we've balanced out our clip and we've done our color isolation, we can now actually start creating the look. Now, we can go on to creating many, many different types of looks, um, which I will showcase to you probably just within this one clip, how we can go about creating a few different looks. For the first one, we'll try and maybe create a teal and orange, which is a very common type of look. And essentially, we're going to use these pink nodes here to do this. Now, I will explain the nodes first this time, and then we can move forward with actually color grading the footage.

So, we have our global node here, and basically, what with the global node, what we're going to do is create your final look. And you can simply do this with curves and your primaries, um, and your Hue saturation luminance adjustments, and can go from there. Now, now we also have these global nodes right here, and this is laid out in a different fashion, something like these nodes right here. These nodes are laid out in a serial fashion. So, when you make a new node, if you, if you ever want to make a new node, you're going to press Alt or Option S, and that will create a new node like this, and that'll add a node. And that's essen, that, and that is essentially a serial node. A serial node is essentially this node here is going to be working from everything from this node here, and then this node here, this saturation node will be working from this node right here. And the good thing about this is you can work this, you can work in a serial fashion, it's quite good, um, but the only problem is with serial nodes is that as you go across, you're losing information. So, what when I'm working with, so when I'm working with the global node here, and these are also global nodes, essentially, what this does, which is a parallel mixer node, it essentially, whereas this is a layer mixer node where one layer takes priority over the other, all of these nodes are working from this one global node. If this was, if these were to be working in a serial fashion, then we'd just be losing information as we go across. But all of these nodes, we're working from this one global node, hence we never really lose that information, and it makes the global adjustment and the final look to just be that much easier.

So, here we can kind of create our general overall look for our global look. And then what I've done here for this node that you'll be utilizing is, I have these three nodes at the bottom here, which is to do with masking. So, I've just put a few gradient masks, and I'll go through that. So, if you want to darken the bottom half of the image or darken the upper half of the image, you can do that, or brighten up the character who might be in the center of the image, you can do that with these. And I've just labeled these Power Window One, Power Window Two, Power Window Three. And if you forgot what power windows are, power windows are essentially, if you look at this circle here, it's these things that we created that masked, um, an area of our image. Then we have adjustment one, adjustment two, adjustment three. Now, I only have six here, but sometimes you may watch tutorials and people have like 10, and that is still completely fine. It depends on how many different things you want to implement within the adjustments. We can maybe look at color slicing, um, which is basically allows you to play with the density and the saturation in a very nice way as well, as we can look at our HSL, Hue Saturation Luminance, and maybe add an effect or something like that. And that's what we can do over here in the final look. This is then carried on as a serial node because essentially, what these two looks are, is we've created our overall look here, but sometimes you like to, it is good to add another node in serial fashion and work from the previous global node to kind of really fine-tune and tweak something because you can only get a specific look after you've done your final look. Then there's only so much you can do. But then if you're working with that lost information in a way, then it allows you to create a much different type of look. I, I'll go for it. Um, I'm not explaining it the most, the best, and the fast track is maybe you just want to just that fine little, maybe, um, white balance shift or add a little bit of contrast and go from there, as well as here, we can also add stuff like film grain and other effects if we so wished to do so.

So, let's go over to our global node. In our global node, what I often usually start off with is our curves. So, I'm going to make one node, two node, three node, well, points, three points, and I always start off with three points on my curves. And if you can't find any curves, remember it's this icon here. Within your curves, you're going to have multiple different types of curves right here, and these basically target different things. Here, this normal curve, we're going to be targeting our shadows, midtones, and highlights. So, our shadows fall down here. If I move this like this, um, our highlights fall, well, our midtones fall here within the middle of the graph, and then our highlights fall towards the top. With these nodes, this is Hue versus Hue. So, say we do have this yellow, I can select this with my qualifier. I'll extend this a little bit, and you can see we can adjust the Hue of that color here. Now, we've done our color isolation here, but say you just wanted to do a general quick change in color, you can always use HSL and Hue versus Hue graphs to adjust that. So, if you want it to be a bit more orange, you can shift it there. I'm just going to leave that for now.

So, you have Hue versus Hue, basically, you're selecting a particular color and you're changing that color. This one is Hue Saturation, so you're selecting a particular color like this, and you're increasing or decreasing its saturation value. So, you're either making it more saturated or less saturated. I adjust this. This one is Hue versus Luminance, so the brightness of your colors. Luminance versus Saturation, so the saturation of either a bright area or a dark area. Saturation versus Saturation, so if an area is really saturated, you can select the most saturated areas, which is on the right-hand side of this graph, and you can basically bring that down if you so wish. If I was bring, make a point there and just bring this down, that's not doing anything. Maybe I make a point here. It's weird because a lot of the image isn't falling into the most saturated areas. Um, so a lot of the image is actually falling here. So, you can see like the yellows here, which is probably the most saturated part of the image. To get rid of a point, by the way, you're just going to right-click and get rid of a point. So, if I was to bring this down, you can see that yellow's in the bottom left, which is the most saturated, you know, come that down and that down. So, that's cool. And then you have Saturation Luminance, which is the brightness of a particular part of your luminance. So, if I was to bring this up, you know, you're going to bring, leave that down, so only the most saturated areas are going to be brightened up like so. So, that is curves explained in a very quick nutshell. But the main curve we're going to play with is this, is this tone curve right here. And what I'm going to do first is I'm going to add a bit of contrast in the shadow. So, I'm going to bring this point down here, and just a little bit of that. And I'm going to bring my midtones, and I'm bringing it ever so slightly up, and I'm bring my highlights down. You can do a lot of this with your eye.

Alternatively, what you can do is, if you're not sure about where to keep your image, you can always bring in a reference image and go from there. To bring in a reference image, what you're going to do is go to your gallery, and say I have this clip, this still right here. To bring in a still, you just going to press right-click, press import, grab an image from your library on your computer, and then you're going to bring it in. And then when you, so essentially, what you're going to do is going to select an image, and you're going to select this icon right here, and then you can essentially adjust this, and you can see where is this image kind of falling into. Make this smaller compared to my image. And there are different types of, you know, ways of looking at it, and you might prefer one over the other. And as well, when you're doing this, you can kind of look at the parade at the bottom right. Whatever you can see, literally is copying what this image is doing right here. So, this image on the right-hand side will only be what's happening on this right-hand side here, and our image is on the left-hand side. So, if you ever wanted to copy an image and you wasn't sure, um, where their tones fell, you can kind of see and kind of mimic it. So, in this image, you can see there's a lot more yellows. So, then maybe you decide, actually, I don't have enough yellows in my video, um, I'll add it here. I'm not going to go into depth with this because I could spend a whole tutorial going over how to exactly copy reference images, but this is just so if you're unsure about where to take your grade, my advice is just look at loads of different inspirations, whether that's on social media, if you see any inspiration that you like, or from movies, just go look at some stills, and then you get a better idea of what tones you kind of like or where you want to kind of take your image. So, I'll bring that back, and we can continue to edit from here.

What then I'm going to do is going to come back into my curves right here, and maybe I can bring this a little bit higher. So, midtone skins always fall into midtones, well, most of the time. So, you can see as I'm increasing this, the skin is also brightening up. So, I can maybe make a fourth point to kind of fine-tune my adjustment. I don't want the highlights to be affected as such, but maybe I just want that midtone just to be slightly raised, ever so slightly. And you can see by pressing your node, and then I can press Command D, just to turn off that one particular node before and then after, and it just brought out the darker side of the midtones ever so slightly, and our skin is looking a lot nicer and a lot cleaner, and this is looking pretty good.

What I then might want to do is start dabbling and adding a little bit of color. Now, what I'm going to do is maybe come over to my gain and start adding some blues into our image. And I can do this. This is looking a bit funky. This might not be looking the best. Now, what I think is the image is a little too bright. I actually want my image to be a lot darker, personally. I prefer much darker imagery compared to something bright. So, what I'm actually going to do is come over to my gain and simply, you'll see the slider here, this black slider, I'm just going to bring this down. It's going to darken out the image like this. You see we've added this blue. Maybe we don't as much blue like this, and we can bring this down like so. Maybe everything is a little too saturated. I can bring down the saturation as well like this. And then maybe I can add some oranges to our highlights just to pull in something for the skin like this. And we create this almost bluey-greeny type of look.

And now what we can do is then come over to our main object. If we so wish, and if our skin is a bit off, what we can do is adjust our skin to be fall where we want it to fall. So, say I want the skin to be more orangey or red like this, I can make it fall here. And remember, we said we was going to adjust this and make sure the cheek is being affected. So, I'm going to press Shift H, and what I will do is simply bring this down ever so slightly, and those softness, soften it out a little bit, so it's not as harsh. So, now we have this kind of cool look. Maybe if you didn't like that, we can reset this. Obviously, the skin is going to be quite hot because we've adjusted it in our main object right here. Say I wanted to add, make it still a blue-looking image like this, that's looking nice. And then maybe on my main object, I want to now adjust the skin. If I didn't adjust the skin and I did that, you can see how the skin is going to look. But now, since we've isolated the skin, I can come over to my gamma and shift the skin to where I think kind of looks nice. If you're unsure where you kind of want the skin to look, I can come over to my parade, go over to my wave, not my waveform, sorry, we can go over to our vectorscope, and we can adjust our skin tone, which is in the gamma right here, and just make sure it's falling onto the line. If it's like over

Here you know your skin's completely off. Of course, if you're trying to do a stylistic look where you want your skin to be purple or something, then that's completely fine. But if you're trying to get some kind of realistic skin, you can move this like so. That's looking nice. That's like a decent starter for our global look right here.

So then, what I can do is then maybe go to my power window right here. And essentially, what we've added is a gradient gradient power window here. And it's drag to the bottom. And you see selection. Press Shift H and see it selected the bottom half. So say I wanted that area to be a little bit darker, I can do this. And you can essentially bring this this up or down. Say for this image, I didn't actually want the bottom half to be darker or brighter. I thought it was perfect. I can simply drag this to the right side, 'cause I think this side is maybe a little bit too bright. I can shift this arrow like so. And you can see a before, what you can see a before and an after on how essentially been able to control that particular part of an image. And I think that's like a lot better.

Same with the power window too. If you're finding, if you're finding this original position isn't exactly where you want it, it's there basically for you to move. The beautiful thing about power grade compared to something like L is everything is completely adjustable. Um, and having this not structure is going to allow you to then select this. I'm going to move this to this side. I know this side is a little too bright for me. So I'm going to bring this this way this time. Press Shift Take to see your selection. And then I'm going to bring my gain down like this. 'Cause it's usually the brightest area is like this. So you can see if I was to turn these two nodes off, so before and then after, and I just brought that down. That's also what it's done is it's brought more attention to our character right here. I mean, that's looking, it's looking all right. It's looking good. We're going to fine-tune this furthermore, um, probably in a final look. But for now, I've just added the colors that I want to be added. Um, and we're balancing out, we're not balancing out the image, we're just controlling different parts of the image as we across.

If we go to power window one here, this is a circular power window. And you can invert this. So say you wanted a vignette, for example, you can come over to move myself off here, come over to this icon right here, which is your keying tool, I guess. And when it says key output, you're going to press this and that'll invert it. So you can see where it says where it is white, that is your selection. So if I was to invert this now, I can see that sides are being selected now. So now if I was to darken the image, just use my offset here, you can see that we've created a vignette here, darkening our image like this.

But say you wanted to do the opposite. Say we want to, um, brighten up our character within the middle. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to simply maybe go over to my lift, which is my shadows. Say I wanted the shadows just to be lifted every so slightly. You can see I've lifted him ever so slightly. So we've gone from before to an after. And you can see we're seeing a lot more of our character here. And the shadows aren't taking over his face as much. And again, it's just a little bit more control over your imagery.

Now we have adjustment one, adjustment two, adjustment three. In adjustment, I'll start in adjustment one. Adjustment one, one thing I love doing is color slicing. And color slicing is crazy. So if you ever heard of something called HSV saturation, this is basically what HSV saturation does. 'Cause the problem with normal saturation is when I'm increasing my saturation like this, this saturation slider does not only affect your saturation, but it's also affecting the luminous values of your saturation. And it also does affect your contrast levels as well. So sometimes that saturation slider isn't the best. Um, 'cause sometimes all you want to do is increase the saturation, not the luminance of your that particular color.

So what you're going to do is come over to saturation within your color slicer. So make sure you do have divin resol of 19 or high, um, to be able to use this. And I'm going to increase this. And it's only going to essentially affect my saturation. And hopefully you'll see is the fact that it adds saturation in a much nicer way. Maybe if I use this iPhone image that will go over soon. If I increase this, you can see it's only affecting your saturation levels and not your luminance levels like this saturation will be. You can see the the image just gets brighter as I increase my saturation there. But the image doesn't really get any brighter there. It's just that the saturation is just more intense.

So we go back to our other image right here. Find a nice hero image. The other thing I completely failed to tell you is when you're grading, what I recommend is if you're looking at a frame, find a nice hero frame. A hero frame is basically a particular frame within your video that's that would be a nice point to kind of start color grading from. Um, and this is a nice frame here to kind of color grade from. And that's what I recommend you do. So say if I started off here, the image is a little bit blown out. It might not be the best hero frame to start from. But this one kind of encapsulates everything and we can kind of go from there.

In our global look here, maybe the blues are a little bit too strong. So what I can do is maybe shift it ever so slightly here. I'm going bring my gamma down as well. And again, here, this is where it comes down to your creative flare about where you kind of want to take the image. So we've gone from a before to an after and it's looking pretty nice. Um, and then what we can do. So we've looked at color density. I can increase my the density here. But what I can also do is if I look at the skin and I was to reset this, is that it's going to fill in the skin quite nice. So if I was look at the, the reds aren't doing too much. But has to increase the skin, you can see the skin just fills in ever so slightly. It's quite nice. And you can increase saturation of that or decrease saturation of that here as well. So I'll just fill that in ever so slightly like that.

The next things you can do is maybe in our adjustment two, we can look at our color warper here. So what you can do is you have these, well, this six-sided shape hexagon. And essentially, if you was to use your qualifier, so when you select this, a qualifier will appear. And I to select this here, you'll see it'll make a point. It'll tell you that this color is lying here on this graph. Let's call it a graph. And if I was to move this color, it's going to shift the hue. So shifting it up towards the red. So this yellow is going to turn more towards reds. And if I shift this more down, this yellow is going to turn more towards the greens. And essentially, this is how it kind of works. And if I was to bring this down, it's going to desaturate that particular particular color. And if I was to increase this, it's going to increase the saturation of that particular color.

So I'll reset this. And if you're finding sometimes six sides are not enough, you wanted to have a bit more refinement, you can go up to eight and you have a little bit more control over your image. To be fair, we don't have too many colors in here. But maybe we just simply want to affect this orange right here. So I can select this here. And it said it's selecting it there. So I can maybe shift this more towards the oranges like this. Maybe shift everything a little bit more towards the orange. You can see we are affecting our skin ever so slightly. But we've gone from a before and then after. And that's have affected this ever so slightly. You can also utilize this hue versus hue curve again right here. And you can shift this up and down. You can kind of see which one you do prefer. Um, with this one, obviously, you can only affect hue. Then you have to go into the hue versus sat to affect that. This one, you can see the selection is very rough. So if finding the selection is a little rough, you're going to increase this radius like this. And you're going to go from that. So here, maybe I just want a little bit more orange like this. That's looking nice. We've gone from a before to an after. And that orange is looking a little bit better. So this is getting somewhere, I guess.

And then what we can do is you can go to final adjustment within adjustment three. There are a few other things that you can choose to do if you so wish. You can look at some effects. Um, if you have some skin or somebody's face, you can simply type in face refinement. And we can drag this upon adjustment three. And then I'm going to essentially press detect frames faces within the frame. And it'll detect a face. And essentially, what this is is a tool to kind of play around with facial features. Let's say when you press this, you're going to press this back and forth button. And you're going press show overlay because it looks really cool. And it's going to essentially track your character right here or your subject who is human, who is a person. And you can press turn off show overlay. And we can do something cool here. So say you want to refine the face even more, you can start adding things here. Say you're working in fashion or editorial stuff and you need the skin to look really smooth, you can bring this up like this. And you can see how we've just controlled the smoothness of our skin like this. And I usually like bringing the scaling down as it's not, it doesn't make it, you don't get rid of all the information within the skin. And it's not looking super plasticky. And the more you decrease this, the more kind of refined it'll look. So if you want to add like natural, I don't even know, I don't know anything about makeup, I guess concealer, I guess or foundation, I'm not sure. You can bring this up. And that kind of smoothing out your skin a little bit.

Alternatively, what I do like to do for male subjects is bring it downwards. And it actually adds a nice bit of sharpness, but makes them look a little bit more rugged and gives them a little bit more character in my opinion. So I'll just leave that there. Here you have skin grading. You can add more contrast to the face if you so wish. And I think that actually looks kind of cool. It gives, brings a bit more edge to the character. I know we've worked so hard to kind of raise the shadows in the face, but, you know, as you go along, you can adjust as you wish. So maybe I want to add a bit more contrast to the face like this. Midtones, if you're want to bring it down or higher, you can do. I'm going to leave this color boost. If the skin is looking a little too desaturated, saturated, you can adjust this here. And then you have all these other things. Shine removal is a good one. If you're finding someone's face is a little bit shiny, you have a bright, like like I do, um, shining on your subject, you can use this and kind of gets rid of the shine.

So already we have a before and an after. And you can see we kind of how we're shaping the face within this particular image. I'm going to go turn off skin grading. So you can turn these sliders on and off by pressing the arrow. And I'm going to go down to the one main thing that I'm going to look at is eyes. And in eyes, it's very cool. So if you go to the brightening here, and I to brighten this, you can see that mostly just the general eye shape, not anything outside of the eye, um, gets brightened up. But if you overdo this, obviously, it's going to look incredibly fake. But if you do this ever so slightly, what I always recommend is small adjustments. Many small adjustments in the end will create a huge, like change, basically. And you don't always have to post the image super hard as well.

Then we have eye light. So this is like just this general area around the person. And essentially, I can increase this. And then I'll brighten this up like this. And then eye bag removal. I kind of like the eye bags on this character. Um, if you want to get rid of it, you can see how incredibly powerful DaVinci is at getting rid of those eye bags. So maybe I'll get rid of it ever so slightly like this. So we have a before and an after. And you can watch it like this. And see if if there's any, sometimes you might not do the best job at detecting the face. So if you have like a face like this, it's very easy for it to detect. Um, but if it's a, you know, if the person's a bit further away or there's a lot of movement, it may struggle ever so slightly. But this is looking quite nice.

And then you have all these other ones. So if you want to adjust the lips, teeth, blush, forehead, cheeks, chin, you can go in actually specifically change those. I've never actually played with side lighting, but I mean, that's kind of cool. But we're going to leave that for now. But you can see that is simply face refinement. And from this global look, we've gone from before. So that's the image that we kind of had before our global look. And this is the image that we have after. So before and after. If I'm in the way, I'll move. I'll make myself smaller. So we have no, so we have, so again, I'm just dragging to see to see a complete before and after. You can press Shift D and Shift D. And that'll see that'll give you a before and an after like this. To see the nodes before and after, you're going to select the node you want, drag them all, and you can press Command or Control D. And that'll say before and then after. So before and then after. And you'll see how much of a difference we've made. We haven't done too much. Um, and you might not be a fan of the colors, but we can simply, you can go back and adjust those as you wish. But you can see the difference it's making. Just like small step, small step, small step, small step. And again, it's all to do with your creativity within this global look and where you kind of want to take the image.

Now we can then move on to our final look here. Say now I've got the, I've got the look from the global. I've got the tonality. I like that's the kind of thing with the global look. I like getting the tonality right. I like getting the tones of the image correct. And then in the final, I can then really push the image up or down. So I can make one point here really. And then I can bring the image super far down if I so wished like this. So we've gone from before and then after. I'm just darkening the image. I prefer. Again, I do prefer darker imagery. You can kind of play with this ever so slightly. So before and an after. And then you can essentially maybe I want to desaturate the image even further more like this. I think that's looking pretty nice. Before and after. Overall, I'm quite happy with the look that we have created.

If you're want to then in your fine tune node, you can always add in a little bit more color cast if you so wish. So say I wanted to finally add a bit more green to the image. And going simply go to my offset. Shift a bit of green like this. From before and after. And just slightly added a bit of tint to the image. And you can add any other color you want. But for now, I'm going to leave that as it is. And what I might do with this final node, and I've wrote fine tune, can be anything. What I might do is add some film grain.

Now, if you have done something already to your fine tune node, you can create another serial node after this. So you can drag, right click, left click and drag these two nodes down. I'm going to press Alt or Option S to create a new serial node. That'll create a new serial node here. Alternatively, you can right click on node type, go down to add node, and press serial node. And then you can add nodes this way. But for now, we're going to go to this node here. And we can add film grain.

Now, you cannot utilize the film grain that's already in DaVinci Resolve because you need the studio version of DaVinci Resolve. You need to pay. You need to be using the paid version. However, what we have done is created free film grain that you're able to download. So I'll show you that first. So if you come over to our website, you'll find that I will link this in the description, by the way. You'll find that we have free film grain, completely free to download. And essentially, it gives you film grain without having to use the paid version of DaVinci. And there's a tutorial down here on exactly how to install it.

Once you have installed the film grain, all you're going to do is you're going to go back to your edit tab, like I've done here. And you're going to go over to one of the film grains that you kind of like here. Here we got 35 mil, uh, maybe the Kodak one. And I'm just put my input output. So for input, I can press I. Output, I can press O. And then you can either drag this whole node, but it's also bringing in the sound of it as well. Don't know why we added sound. But there's, you can see this video icon here. It's just going to drag this. And that's only going to drag the video icon. And then you're going to bring this on top of your clip. And you're going to see, oh, you've added film grain. But you can't, can't see anything. It's just a gray screen, gray fuzzy screen. That's why you have to come down into your inspector, which is in the top right here. Come down. And you'll go over to composite mode. If composite mode is not open, just make sure you press composite. And it'll take you here. Then you come down to, I believe it is overlay. And press Command F. Now you're going to see you've added film grain to your image. And that's how you do it with the free version. To simply use, go to our website and use that. Again, I'll leave it in the description.

To do it within DaVinci, if you do have the studio version, I'll go over this as well. So what you're going to do is go to effects. You can press the right mouse click, um, to move your node tree across like this. And then this node, I'll call it film grain. If you're wondering how I labeled my node, I pressed the F2 key. But you probably won't have that set as of yet. 'Cause what you actually have to do is go over to DaVinci Resolve on the top left hand corner, keyboard customization, just type in film, uh, sorry, label nodes. And you'll see nodes here. And you'll say label selection node. And you press this. Just press the key you want. I usually use F2. Um, so and you can use whatever you want. And then we'll press close. And that's how you basically label nodes. Film grain. Go over to your effects now. And I'm going to search film grain. And you're going to see this film grain right here. Drag this on top. And it's automatically going to add a level of film grain that you can see within the image on the left here. I usually like to use 60 millimeter archival print. Alternatively, I do enjoy my 35 mil. I just find 60 mil is just a bit more harsh. Um, in which I prefer my grain just to be a little bit more rough, I guess. And 16 millimeter does allow me to do that. And already you can see that we've added this nice grain. And the beautiful thing about grain, and the reason why you may add grain, is it adds texture to the image. And it adds a little bit of interest to the image. You can keep the image clean if you so wish. This looks really, really clean. And then, but you can also add grain. And it kind of just adds some nice texture. And personally, I prefer a little bit of grain always in my imagery.

You can then, the great thing about using the studio version of DaVinci Resolve is the fact that you can change all the parameters in DaVinci. So here I can adjust the softness. So if my grain is a little too soft, I can bring this down. And it's a lot more coarse, I guess, more rough. But it's kind of fine as it was. Maybe just drop it down ever so slightly. But what I can also do is increase the grain strength. You can see increase, decrease. And just find a point that you really like. The problem with film grain only is the fact that in DaVinci Resolve, when you use film grain, it'll take up a lot of CPU, um, or GPU, uh, what's the word, computing time. So when you play things back, it may play back a little bit slowly. If you're having problems with your playback, what you can do is first, we are working, I am working in a 4K timeline. So I can reduce this to a 1080p timeline. So you can come down here and go to 1920 by 1080. Alternatively, what you can do is go over to your playback on the top here. And then time, simply go over to timeline playback speed. And maybe turn to half or quarter. However, when you do this, your grain quality is going to change. So when you're actually adjusting your grain, then essentially leave it on full. But then when you're maybe editing, like back in your edit, edit tab, cutting up and doing all your timeline stuff, you can put it on, um, quarter playback or something.

Alternatively, when you're doing your timeline, you can press Shift D. And it'll remove all the, it'll remove all the grades. Well, it hides all the grades. You'll see it on this corner here. You'll be able to hide and show the grades. And it'll allow you to work a little bit faster. The other thing you can do is if you do want to see your color grading and you want to see in full quality and it plays back fine in full quality, but not when you apply film grain, simply just keep your film grain off for now. And then when you go to export finally, that's when you can turn on your film grain node. And that, that's right here. So film grain is looking nice. I can increase the grain size if I wish, make it bigger or bigger, make it smaller. I'll find a better frame here. And you can see just even the skin alone, it's going from before and after. And it's just added a nice level of texture to the image.

Now say if your grain isn't affecting your shadows too much, you don't, you're not wanting it in the shadows as much as you'd want it in the highlights, you want it more in the highlights and the shadows or the midtones. So you have these advanced controls here. And if I was to decrease my shadows here, you can see over here that the grain is no longer attacking the shadows. Nor now is attacking really the midtones. I can increase it on the midtones. And you can see the shadows are still not really affecting, well, the grain is not affecting the shadows, my apologies. So this is the beautiful thing about having film grain within using DaVinci Resolve. But don't worry too much, 'cause the film grain that we on our store is also so pretty good. Um, and we've had a lot of good feedback. So if you don't want to use this, just use ours. And also it'll perform a lot better on your computer in terms of your playback speed.

So I'm going to turn off effects. And that is essentially for now, my final look for this particular image. And I'm pretty happy with it. You can do different grades. And what I will do quickly is utilize a node tree instead of explaining it all. I'll go through a few different clips and create a few different types of looks. And you can see how you can utilize this node tree structure to essentially create any type of grade you want. It all depends on your creative flare and what type of grade you actually wanting to create.

So now that we have completed this, the final thing you can do is come over to your sharpening here. I've already added a little bit of sharpening for you within this, uh, final node 21 here, well, be node 20 on yours. And to adjust your sharpening, if you're finding sharpening is too harsh or is not harsh enough, you can come over to this tool right here, which is the blur tool. You're going to go over to your radius. And simply going to drag this down to increase your sharpness. So if it's below 0.50, it's going to increase sharpness. And if you bring it up, you're going to blur out your image. So what I'm actually going to do is bring this down to 48, as it was before. And that's where I kind of do. I leave it between 48 and 46, depending on how sharp I want my image.

The other thing is, and something that people rarely ever go over and touch, is something called scaling. Now, I love scaling 'cause essentially what scaling does is if you ever used Lightroom and you've used the detail slider, the sharpening slider, there's like a, a mount at the bottom which tells you which part of the image the sharpening is going to start affecting. And this is scaling is almost a mimic of that in a way. Basically, when I increase my scaling, it's going to target more of the smaller pixels in a way. And if I increase my scaling, it's going to target the bigger pixels or the more sharp areas almost. So if I was to increase my scaling here, so if I put this at zero, this is zero scaling like this, or just a little bit, scale 0.5. And if I put all the way to one, you can see the level of detail that we get back is silly. It's unbelievable. So I do like to increase this. And especially for like social media compression, etcetera, this just looks, it just helps to kind of keep your images quite sharp. But like before and then after, it's going to be very hard for you to tell. But for me, there's like a noticeable difference. And the eyes just pop out that much more. And in my opinion, it looks great. And the grain looks a little bit better as well. I do like to add my sharpening after my grain, just 'cause it adds a little bit of extra texture to your image. Um, but yeah, I am incredibly happy with this grade. I think it looks pretty good.

Final thing then for this one, since we're here and we're happy with your grade, you finally completed your grade. Yippee! You're going to go over to your deliver tab. So we've come into our deliver tab right here. And in the deliver tab, this is where we essentially export our image. And this is how you can export your image from DaVinci onto your computer or your hard drive that you can utilize however you wish. So on the left hand side here, if you're not seeing this on the left hand side, make sure your render settings is being selected. Then I'm just going to go down one by one. You have all these presets here, but we're not going to really look into. You're just going to leave out custom export for now. Or you can leave at h.264 master and you can adjust it accordingly. But for now, I'm going to leave at custom export. File name, we can call this tutorial clip one, whatever you want to call it, just call it this. Location, select place within your computer where you'd like to export your video to. Then we come down to the fun parts. It's not really that fun, it's just exporting. So going to go over to, I've just put single clip. Individual clips is basically if you have a timeline with loads of individual clips, you can essentially send in set, you can actually select the whole timeline, but it'll just export the individual clips. And that's really good sometimes if you're exporting social media clips for clients, etcetera. But for just a single clip, um, it's going to export just one one clip.

So here we have our clip. And I can zoom into your our clip right here. And this is the clip we want to export. So what I'm going to do is I'm simply going to press the letter I for my input point here. And then the letter O for my output point right here. And then this is basically telling DaVinci where I want the export to start and finish. So it's only going to export this clip right here. If I wanted both of these clips to be exported, this clip and the next clip, I can press I here. And then now both of these clips are going to be exported. But for now, I just want this clip to be exported. So we've done our input output points, that's great. For the format, I often leave MP4. Um, many other people will leave it in QuickTime, which is MOV. Um, but I prefer MP4 mostly because a lot of my clients, most of my clients and clients that work, they can use an open an MP4 file. Same with h.264 file, which will also go over compared to a MOV file. So I'm going to leave this at MP4. And then codec, I'm going to leave at h.264. There is also h.265. And the simple difference between h.265 and h.264 is that h.265 is a much more compressed video. Uh, which means that actually the file size between h.265 and h.264 means that the file size for h.265 is much smaller than a h.264. The only problem with a h.265 file is the fact that some computers will struggle to play them. Some computers do not have compatibility for h.265. So often if you send a h.265 and a QuickTime or MOV video to a client that's maybe working on a Windows old laptop, they might be like, oh, I can't open this video. And just to save you the trouble, you just leave at h.264 or an MP4. And what I use anyways all the time is h.264 MP4. So h.264, I'm saying this so many times, is a much less compressed, uh, video. So it's a lot nicer for your computer to play back. But it means that the file size is often much bigger. So I'm going to leave it h.264 MP4. I'm going to press use hardware acceleration if available. If you're using a Windows, um, computer or desktop, you'll probably also have like utilizing your GPU. So there'll be a setting and you can press down the down setting. And it'll say like Nvidia, um, which I have on my D laptop. And you can select that. And essentially, when you select these, um, menus, then essentially, well, these options, sorry, it'll speed up the process of exporting. So if you have notoriously a slow computer, try and utilize these to export.

The other thing is when you're exporting, if you do have a very slow laptop, um, that's prone to overheating and using the DaVinci Resolve, ensure you're exporting in a very cool place. The cooler you, your laptop is, the faster it will export and the less likely that you're going to have issues exporting your image. Well, your video. I had a friend who was like, every time they exported, they got like a white square, um, within their image. But essentially, what was happening was the fact that the, the laptop that they were using, they were using a MacBook as well, it was overheating so much that the computer kept missing out render frames. And then she got like white blocks in random places within her export. And then what I told her to do was to go out into the snow where she was, it was snowing, and export outside. And when she did that, it did it in probably like 40% less time. And the render was completely fine. So from now on, when she needs to export, she's going to go outside and put a massive fan on her laptop and export that way. So if you have troubles exporting, um, please do that here.

Timeline resolution is set, well, resolution is set to timeline resolution, which is 4K. If you want to adjust this, so maybe I actually want to export in 1080p, it can come down to 1920 by 1080. And you can do this here. If you have a specific ratio or resolution that you'd like to export in, come up, type in custom, and then you can change these to however you wish. And that's there if you're wanting to switch and exporting a vertical resolution, you can do that here. But what I recommend is if you do have a vertical clip, then come over to your master settings here and work in a vertical resolution. So if you do have portrait clips, use vertical resolution, whether it's in 1080p or 4K, doesn't matter. And when you press save, it'll change the orientation of your video instead of being square here, it'll be a rectangle. Well, I mean, this is a rectangle, but a portrait, uh, rectangle frame. Frame rate, I'm keeping timeline frame rate, which is 24 FPS for me. Um, but you can decide however you wish. If you're working in a 60 FPS timeline, you can leave that as that. But often when you bring in your clips and you've chosen what timeline frame rate you will, uh, wanted to use, it'll just stay to that. Basically, everything else is completely fine. I always leave my quality automatic. I often get the question, what quality or what bit rate do you use? And you always hear, what bit rate do you use? And I'm just like, I just use automatic. And I always get pretty good results. So leave it automatic. I do recommend this. You can experiment and play with the bit rate here where it says KBS, so kilobytes per second. This is essentially what bit rate you're going to do. And the higher the bit rate, the like, the higher quality almost that's like kind of what it means. And if you're using a 4K timeline, so I'm going to use timeline resolution here, you probably want to use a higher bit rate. I can't remember the exact numbers for bit rates, um, for this, 'cause I don't really utilize them. Um, but the higher the resolution you want to export, the higher the bit rate. But I'm just going to leave it on automatic, perfectly fine results always. Encoding profile, auto. In mode, auto. Everything else, I don't touch. You can try and just have a look at these settings that I have here. Otherwise, I do not change these at all. So this is my advanced settings.

The other thing is, if you do have subtitles, ensure that you come over to subtitle, go to format, and type in, not type in, press burn into video. When you press burn into video, then it will export your subtitles. 'Cause to add a subtitle, essentially, I mean, this is a color grade tutorial, but to add a subtitle, you'll come over to subtitles here. Or you go to effects, uh, titles, scroll down all the way, maybe not to the bottom of mine. Let's type in subtitle. Drag this here. And you'll have a subtitle. I've fed this. Then you have a subtitle. And to export this particular subtitle, you need to have it, press go to format and press burn into video. If you don't do this, your subtitle won't export. And then you'll be like, why isn't my subtitles export? And then you have to re-export by doing this. I always forget this. I wish, um, the subtitle setting was always just burn into video. 'Cause obviously, if I'm adding a subtitle in the DaVinci Resolve here, obviously I'm going to want it to export. So for now, I'm just going to leave this as off, as I do not want the subtitle to be, uh, exported. Then I'm going to go to back over to my deliver tab. And that essentially is everything.

Then to actually export, the most important thing is I'm going to press add to render queue. And I have to do my in and out points again. I'm going to press add to render queue. And essentially, what it will do is it'll add a job here in the render queue. And then when you're happy and when you're ready, you need press render. And you'll see that it'll do like a progression bar thing. And it'll give you percentage of progression. And then it'll export. And then you can essentially go over to where did I save it? Reels here. And then we have our exported clip. And that is, I guess, quick DaVinci Resolve, um, color grading in a nutshell. Obviously, I didn't teach you color grading. Color grading, I've taught you how to color grade utilizing this node tree. And if you're just wanting to get started in create grades really quick, you can utilize this. And through this, you'll actually learn a lot about node tree structure. And hopefully, I've explained it today, um, on how to utilize this node structure. And once you get used to it, you can add more takeaway, etcetera, etcetera.

So we're happy with this clip. And what I'm going to do next is simply go over iPhone footage or footage that's shown in Rec. 709. Simply because not everyone's going to be shooting in log. And a lot of people do shoot on their phones. And you'll be surprised at how much you can push color on iPhone footage, particularly, well, phone footage in general. So we'll go over that next. And then finally, what I'll do is we'll go over a few different clips and videos, but getting different grades. Like this grade was quite specific, bit of a desaturated, um, blue and orangey type of look. Almost was like, it's not bleach bypass, but it's, it's, it's very desaturated type of image. But if you want to create a different type of image, I'll show you how to do that. So I'll see you in a second.

So now we are looking at some iPhone footage. So if you're utilizing footage that's not been shot in log, that's been shot in Rec. 709, which is essentially, if you're shooting on a phone like this, like a normal phone, not, not the iPhone 15 or 16 Pro in Apple Log, just normal phone footage, then the image that you're going to see, if I go to here, the image that you're normally going to see, hello, that is called Rec. 709. And when you watch the news and stuff, Rec. 709 is like the, the normal broadcast looking image. And that is what this look is right here. So I'm going to quickly show you how to use that same node tree structure, the one that you can download for free in the description, um, what to do and how to use it. So I'm going to try and find the thing again. So in the gallery, right click, apply grade. And it's going to apply our node tree. Now you can see it's looking very bad, um, but that's because we need to adjust our CST in. So I'm hoping you watched the initial video, but if you didn't, I'll go over things very quickly. What I recommend you do is just watch this CST bit for iPhone. And then go back and watch the full video for the other one, as I explain things properly. Overall, 'cause the whole concept is still the same. The only thing that's really different is CST and the quality of an iPhone is much different to something like, uh, a Sony cinema camera.

So I'm going to go to my CST in. And this is where you input your settings. If you're using iPhone, you're going to do Rec. 709. And then for your input color space, Rec. 709. For input gamma, Rec. 709. And here you're going to get an image. So here, essentially, we've gone from a before and after. But essentially, we've done nothing. We've actually not done anything, 'cause we are still in Rec. 709. We've converted to Rec. 709, but from here now we can actually start grading, because now we have our node tree structure that we can start grading.

So from what we went through before, what I can do is I'm going to find a nice hero frame. So like this, uh, clip is a little bit gory. So this was some BTS, um, from a documentary we shot in the Faroe Islands. But I'm just going to showcase, find a nice frame like, like this. We'll start at this frame. It's a pretty nice frame. So this is a shot on the iPhone XR, I believe, in 4K 24 FPS. And I'll show you how to adjust this. So you can see the image is pretty well, like, I'm going to say balanced. But what I mean is that there's a lot of saturation, there's a lot of contrast, uh, the image is not flat looking at all. So it's completely fine if there are parts of the image that are too dark and you're losing information, like the blacks were clipping ever so slightly. I can simply go to my lift, which is the shadows, and then bring this up like this. And you can see we're getting information back within the shadows. Even when you shoot on a phone, uh, you'll find, well, you won't find until you come into color grading, there will always be information trapped that hasn't been fully released. So here you saw that I brought up my shadows and actually I brought out some information within the character's jacket on the left. And that's looking a lot better already. So before and after, so we brought out that information. And I'm going to bring the highlights back down ever so slightly. And I'm going bring up my midtones. And then like this, I'm just going to stretch out the image. Like I explained before, we're just trying to want, we just want lots of information to do some color separation. So that's pretty good contrast levels. I am completely happy with. You can add maybe a little bit of contrast like this. Maybe shift the pivot to the left. And then I'm going to go to my saturation. And then I'm going to increase this probably ever so slightly. And that is good for main object. Obviously, our main object is probably going to be the skin of our character right here. And then I'm going to press Shift H to see my selection like this. And you can see it's in, actually not bad selection to be honest. I'm going to soften up my selections and bring my width down. And you can see it's done a pretty good selection here. It's even selected the, I don't mind it being selected, um, the sea to be. It's done a pretty good job even without selecting the net. But I don't mind the net being selected 'cause having this net and the skin in this image fall into the same kind of color might actually look kind of good against all the blues and greens. And then I'm going to go to my denoise and blur this out. And then increase my blur radius. And that'll soften out our selection. And press Shift H. And now you can see if I go to my gamma, which is where skin tones often fall into, I can shift this. And you can already see how much you can kind of shift iPhone footage. Skin is looking good here. Might be on the bit of the red side. So maybe I want to shift the hue more towards the oranges over so slightly. So I'm going to shift this downwards to hit the oranges. That's looking pretty good. And then for my second object, I could then go in and select the skies and the image right here. Ah, the one thing I did forget to go over is white balance. If your white balance is completely off in your image, like here we have a bit more of a cooler white balance, then warmer white balance, like the image is a lot cooler than warmer. You can then come over to do in saturation. And you can adjust the offset or the temperature to a bit more warmth like.

This and maybe I'll shift it ever so slightly, just towards the warmth. That's looking good. And same with the tint, if you need to adjust the tint, if the image is too purple or green, just shift it in the correct direction. Maybe I shift this a bit towards green, like this, for my second object.

Now, this is where iPhone footage will struggle, is the fact that maybe I want to separate the sea and I want to separate the mountains. The mountains, you can see they have greens in them. The sea has blue within it. So let's see how well it does a selection. So it want to select to see. Press Shift H. You can see it's done an okay selection. I can bring my width down, 'cause I know the water mostly will fall into blues, but also the mountains are going to be falling into the blues as well. And you can see it's very difficult for it to select everything. So there's only so much you can do. But we can still increase D-noise and increase the blow radius.

And what, let's go back into this image. And it's done an okay selection. And you can still add a little bit of color. I'm just going to go to my offset and add a bit of blue. So before and an after I have. So like, blue shift. With iPhone footage and this like 8-bit footage, you really don't want to push too much color. 'Cause now, if I push too much blues in, like this, I'll move this here, you can see look how broken up the image is going to look. So I don't want to add too much. I'm just going to add a bit of blue, just so that water has a tinge extra blue. And then in the background, the background layer, which is everything else, maybe I want to add some greens to that here. So within just color separation, we've done a before and an after. Well, before and an after. And we've added just ever so slight amount of color. And you can see. And hopefully, what you are seeing from the utilization of the previous one is that loads of small changes will make a big change for my global look.

Then we can go over to my curves. Make three points, as we discussed before. Bring this down, like here. And then bring this up. So I brought my shadows down there, so slightly. Now we're trying to create, almost trying to create the final look here. So maybe I do want to add a bit of contrast to those shadows and darken up those shadows, like this. And then I can maybe drop the image down. And I'm going to clip my whites. So when, when you bring your whites down, just going to clip it. And that's going to help soften up your highlights. I'm going to bring everything down, really. And if I wanted to put the image darker, I can do that. If I wanted the image brighter, I can do this. This way.

And then what I might want to do is I want to add some blues to the shadows. So I can go over to my lift, which is my shadows, and add some blues to the overall image, just over so slightly. And then in my gamma, maybe I want to add some oranges, 'cause skin falls into the mid-tone. So it'll help with the skin. So like this. And you can see we're creating a little bit of a color shift. Well, a split tone, almost. And you can kind of push your color like this. So we've gone from a before and an after. And you see already how much kind of, I wouldn't say better, but how much of a nicer color grade we've created from the image before to the image afterwards. And this is looking pretty good now. I'm happy with that for now.

Now we can look at our power windows. Go over to our power windows. Maybe I'll bring this upwards. Press Shift H to see your selection. Maybe I actually want to darken this part of the image up, like this. Maybe I want this part of the image to be affected, but only just like the boat. And I can bring this up, like this. Darken up our character side. This is good. And then we have our sky here. I can bring this down, like this. Maybe if you wanted to add a little bit of color to your sky, you can come over to your G. Maybe add ever so slight amount of warmth. To be fair, the pinks look pretty nice. So now we've created on almost sunset is coming. Almost kind of like, um, alternatively, you can simply push in more blues, like this. And don't, if you're going too hard, is you get all grades. Don't always have to be realistic. Uh, if you go on Instagram, I mean, even my Instagram, you'll find that a lot of the grades are not realistic at all. They just look a bit funky. And as long as you like the look, it doesn't matter. If it helps to tell your story, just go for it. And the color grading is all about kind of expression, as it is. It is an art. Um, so that bit of blue does help. Maybe I don't want it to affect her so much. But maybe I do want to add some morph to the image compared to before. And then maybe actually want to darken up that sky. Or you want to brighten up the sky. Maybe actually, let's brighten up the sky this time. As you went for a darker image last time. I can brighten up the sky this time. Maybe instead of this, I can add a little bit of blue to my image. And I can brighten up that. I'm actually creating a bit of a glow here. And it's looking quite nice. We have a before and an after. And it's looking quite nice.

Then we have our Central. Maybe we want to brighten up our character. So I'm just going to increase the lift here. And we've gone from before and after on our character. Then I can go over to my adjustment. Maybe go into color slicing and we add in some saturation. So I can go to my saturation. Increase this. iPhone, you do not want to push too much saturation. The more saturated colors, the more flat your image is. Honestly, that's how you're going to get iPhone footage to kind of look good. Unless using the newer iPhones, then you're completely fine to kind of push color. And maybe I'll also increase my density, like this. And it's going to fill up the image, just ever so slightly, like this. Maybe I'll, skin is now too harsh, too hot, as they say. If it's too saturated, I'm just going to bring the skin down, like this. That's overall, it's looking pretty nice. So we've already gone from a before, so this is straight from your iPhone, to an after. Before to an after. And you can see how much kind of, in my opinion, it does look a lot better. And people always say, ah, you know, you can't really do anything with iPhone footage. I need to buy a camera. But you don't have to buy a camera. Um, I mean, you do eventually, 'cause only so much you can do with an iPhone. And I would never be able to shoot everything on an iPhone. Maybe in 10 years' time, when it goes, was a bit crazy. But for now, you'd be surprised. Until you color grade footage, you can actually delay the process of having to buy a camera because you understand color grading so much. And you can push and pull your image. And people like, no, you did not shoot that on an iPhone. He'd be like, yes, I did. And they'd be like, whoa. Um, so yeah, big F. But no, going back to this, this is looking overall pretty nice.

If I did want to add a glow to the image, like to the sky, an actual glow. And know we did the power window. Come over to my effects. As I just did. Go over to Glow. Drag this onto adjustment. To I'll drag this to the left. Then you can see no glow has been added. And that's because our shine threshold is too low. And shine threshold is basically saying which part of the image do you want to add a glow to. The more you decrease this, the more bright parts of the image will be, um, notified to become glow. That was a really weird way of explaining it. And when you bring it all the way to the left, it'll say, even the darkest areas should a glow should be added to. So here, we really just want maybe the sky, over so slightly, like this. And you can see we have this glow effect, which kind of gives it quite a dreamy effect. If you wanted to increase the spread of the glow, make it more bloomy, you can increase this, like this. And if you didn't want it to be too bloomy, then you can decrease the glow, like this. So you have before and an after, like that. But maybe do want to add a bit of glow. Before and after. And it's looking pretty nice. If you want to add a bit of color to your glow, come over to your color filter. And maybe add, maybe add a bit of a blue glow, like this. And you can adjust the saturation of it here. I don't want to do it too much, just every so slightly, possibly. And you can adjust the strength using the gain, which is more so the brighter parts, so the highlights. And gamma, which is like the mid-tone parts. So you can do a very subtle glow, like this. So you have a before and an after. That's looking pretty good. And overall, we're creating quite a nice image.

For our final look, maybe want to bring the whole image down. So we created curves once within our image. Now we want to actually do it again to bring the image even further down. But working from the information that we have here. And this is where serial, serial nodes work better than a parallel node, is because now you're creating, working from this, you're basically wanting to adjust this final grade. So final look. I'm going to bring the mid-tones down, over so slightly, like this. And just making the image look cool. And I can bring the image down, like that again. I was just flattening out the image, ever so slightly more. And you can add particular color shift to your image. So just more of a green hue. Maybe you want a bit more warmth, like this. You can do this, like that. Bit more of a warmy, almost, I wouldn't say golden. Now, but it's getting, it's, it's getting dark in this image again. Whenever you do this, if you're finding the skin is looking off, we've isolated it already. I can come over to my skin and I can desaturate it. So from, from before to an after. And that's the beautiful thing about color isolation, is the fact that we've already isolated it. So we can come in and adjust it. I'll leave that as it was. Maybe in our final look, we don't want to go for that particular color. So maybe you wanted to, you can go for, uh, what, what do you want to go for? Maybe add a bit of warmth to our shadows, like this. And then we've already created a blue. I'm not, I'm obsessed with, um, blue tones. But say again, just play around with this. Have fun. Gain's probably the one to go for. Yeah. And then you can bring this down, ever so slightly. Mid-tones down. Curves over so slightly down. Can then go back into my power window too. Say you wanted to add some actual color into this particular part of the image, you can do that here. Maybe not too much, ever so slightly. And you can brighten it up even more, or you can darken it up, as you so wish. And then come over to my skin. Now, bring this down to adjust the skin. And the skin is looking fine and dandy. So that's our final look. Fine tune. If you want to add a little bit more contrast in the end, for some reason, you can do that here, or decrease the contrast. Or simply again, you wanted to fine tune from the final look, you just want to bring the image even further down, you can do that here. Overall though, I think we've created quite a nice look. Um, we've gone from a before to an after. Obviously, it's a bit more on the warm side. But I've essentially tried to showcase to you. I'm not going to show you the rest of the video, 'cause it's a little bit gory. But, um, from the look we've created, we've gone from a before, which also does, I mean, doesn't look bad, uh, to an after. And actually, I think this is a little too strong here. Maybe I add, I'll add cont. I'll reset this. And I'll just simply add contrast and shift the pivot to the left. So we're going from before, before, and then after. That's looking nice.

So yeah, that's iPhone footage, um, in a nutshell. So you can really, really, you can actually really push iPhone footage. And maybe in the sharpening here, I increase the scaling, ever so slightly. And it'll just make it a bit more crisp. But iPhone footage, you often find it's, it over sharpens itself. So maybe actually, you want to have no sharpening whatsoever. And you get this much more less sharp look. And it actually looks pretty good when you're not sharpening iPhone footage, because iPhone does add sharpening within its footage already. So that is iPhone footage.

Now we're going to look at two more clips. This clip and this clip. Just two different types of situations. And I'm simply going to showcase to you how utilizing the DaVinci Resolve start power grade, um, and how you can, how to essentially show us to you how fast you can kind of grade with this. So I'm going to go over, right click, press apply grade. Turn off my gallery. CST in, in my effects, it's already been applied. 3 SL 3. This will show on my Sony A7 S3. I'm going to come over to my exposure balance. I'm just going to lift the shadows over so slightly. And I'm going to bring my gain down. Now, the reason why I haven't utilized something called HDR wheels as of yet, is simply because I don't think it's available in the free version. And that's why I didn't want to go over it. But if you do have the studio version, utilize HDR wheels instead of using your primary wheels for exposure balance, because you can really control your image. So if I brought my lights down here and bring my shadows up here, I can control your image so much more. Nice. Like, look how much of the clouds I was able to bring out. So before and an after. And already this image is looking so much better. In the contrast, I want to add a little bit of contrast to this image. Actually, spread the tones out, ever so slightly. And that's looking a bit, it's looking nice. Saturation levels are perfectly fine within the main object.

Maybe for this main object, I want to select the grass. Press Shift H. Grass has been selected. It's also selecting the sky, which I don't want. I know my hair and this jumper is a bit dark. So I can bring up the luminous value, like this. And we've got a good selection. There's some yellow bits on the jumper, but it's completely fine. Bring up the D, bring up the blow radius to feather out that selection. And we've got a nice selection for the grass. And now we can change the grass to whatever color we wish. So if you wanted pink grass, you now have pink grass. And if you wanted to get light pink grass, essentially you want to brighten up that grass or desaturate that grass. And now you have light pink. You don't want to push it too much though, as you see it doesn't look too natural. So I'm going to reset this. But all I want to do is maybe create a bit more of a bluey greeny grass. Or you can, yeah, more bluey greeny grass, like this. Maybe I'm just want to lift the mid-tones, both slight. So before and then after. And then I'm going to go to my second object, which probably be my sky, to be honest, this time. Press Shift H. And it selected the sky. Pretty good job. Again, blur radius, increase this. D-noise, increase this. And then I'm press Shift H. Actually going to bring it up over so slightly. Actually, what I'll do is come over to my power window. I don't want my jumper to be selected. But instead of using my qualifier, I'm only wanting to affect the sky. So I can just use a gradient mask. And I can see that jumper has disappeared. And I can bring this down, like this. And now we've got the sky to be selected. And I can now come over to my gain and add in some nice blue. So before and after. Already again, once again, we're making steady progress here. It's looking very nice. The rest of the image, I'm going to leave it. You can increase it, decrease the saturation, whatever you want to do. But I'm just going to leave it for now.

Within my power windows, I'm in my power window 2, which is where the sky is. Again, I can actually come down here this time and say, I can come over to my HDR and I can bring the lights down, just to get a bit more information back into that sky. That's looking overall quite nice. I don't want to push in too much color as a, so we get here. But over my global, what I would like to do is actually, that was my alarm. Go over to my lift and add in some yellows. I like adding yellows to like sunset clips, as it does add a little bit of nostalgia. So we're going from before to an after. And you might not like this, but I kind of like it. The main object is fine. If you're finding the grass color is now not correct, um, or not the color that you wish it to be, come over to here and simply shift this back down more towards the blues. So this is looking overall pretty nice. In my global node, I'm going to make three points. One, two, three. And I will raise my shadows over so slightly. I'll make one more point, actually, just to control those mid-tones and highlights over so slightly. Bring that down. Bring that here. Maybe I don't want too much to be pushed into the shadows there. Actually. And I'll push in a bit of blues into my highlights. Maybe what color I want to push into my mid-tones? Just a bit of this, bit of orange. So before and an after. And that's looking overall, it's looking quite nice. Don't really need to do anything too much with these. Maybe my adjustment one, I can come over to my color slicer. Come up to my saturation. Increase that ever so slightly. Come up to my density, which is what I really want to adjust. I'm bring that in. I mean, the sky is actually a bit too saturated. So I'm bring that saturation on that sky a little bit down. Then I can come over to my final look. Maybe I want, if you wanted a high key look, you can bring this up, like this, a bit brighter. I don't really like that, to be honest. So I'm going to bring the image down, like this. I'm going to create a bit more of a flat looking image. Maybe shift in some warmth. Maybe actually, I don't like the grass to be this green. Maybe I want it to be a bit more yellow. That's fine. That's looking okay. I don't actually like the yellows too much. But actually, don't again, just try an error. See what you kind of like. Final look, you push the image wherever you want to push it. I'm going to bring the highlights down, like this. So we've gone from a before to an after. I mean, that's looking pretty nice.

If you wanted to add output blanking, so cinema for example, come over to your output blanking and you put out 2.39 to 1 and you got the cinema ratio. And if you need to adjust your clip, come over to your sizing input, move your tilt upwards, and you've got this cool aspect ratio. Alternatively, you can come over to your timeline output blanking 1.33 and get this nice cool look. I'll reset this and get this cool almost square crop. And if I wanted to make this more filmic, what I'm going to do is in my film, in my tune node, fine tune node, I'll add a G-blur. Just blur out my image. Put this up like 0.12. And that'll soften out my image. Maybe I should put out 0.14. And then after I've done my blur, I can add some film grain. And again, you can add film grain using our overlay on our website. And maybe I want to do 60mm archival print, like this. And you can see we have this nice filmic look. Now we've gone from a before to an after. And it does look quite filmic. Remember, when you're trying to emulate film, like 16 or 35mm film, it's a lot less sharp than something like digital film. So adding a G-blur always helps. When I say digital film, I mean like normal digital cameras. So when you're adding blur, it helps to soften out the image and kind of replicate that look in a much nicer way. So we've gone from before and after. And I think that looks pretty good.

Then for our other clip right here, I'm going to reset my output blanking. Reset it. Go over to my gallery. Go to this power grade. Press apply grade. And you can see again, this is shot on C-Cam 3C S-Log 3. This was underexposed. You can see heavily over here. So what I'm going to do is go to my exposure balance. Come over to my lift. Stretch out the image. Bring up the gain. Bring up the mid-tones. Get that information back. This is a good example actually for balancing, I guess. And then what I can do is contrast levels. To be fair, the fine. Maybe I bring them down. Actually, I'll leave them up. And then for my saturation, I can actually shift the temperature towards the right, because it is more on the blue side. And you can see essentially on the right hand side here, how when I shifted that temperature, we're balancing out the image so much more nicely. Now these colors are falling into the same place.

Then what I can do is actually, I'm not going to touch menu object, second object, for third object or background, 'cause I don't really need to do any color separation here. What I can do is go to my global. And actually, normally, if I was doing this here, I would leave this as this. But I actually want this to be cooler anyways. So I'm going to bring the temperature down, because I do like the cooler look of this. It's almost, we've almost done our global look already. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to add some greens, like this. And you get almost like a, I don't say Joker look, but much more of a grungy type of look, like this. And essentially, a lot of the time, you don't have to push your grade too incredibly hard to get good results. Sometimes it's literally a shift of the primary wheels, a bit of balancing, and you're on your way. So before and an after. If you didn't want greens, you can create more of a blue look, like this. So before and an after, like this. And it's looking pretty good. Again, you can add your film grain. This time, maybe we'll add film grain via, where is it? Maybe this time we'll add film grain using our film grain from our store, the free film grain. So if you wanted to use it this way, go to overlay. Now we've got film grain on our image. It's very difficult to see, but it is there. It's looking pretty good. And overall, I'm pretty happy with this image. And I didn't really have to take much time color grading this at all. So you don't always have to spend ages color grading. Um, sometimes a few clicks will do the job. So I hope this makes sense. And I've gone through a few variations. I know not all the variations in the world. But I'm hoping with with these videos, that you now have a decent understanding of how to utilize the color page in DaVinci Resolve. How to use the node structure that I've provided to you, that you can use. Remember, just go to a website, you can download it for free and utilize it. And then understanding more about why you need to do certain things or why you don't need to do certain things. And then go from there. That. And the more you study images, the more you like, how do I get this look? You'll then experiment and then you'll learn. And essentially, the more practice you do, the more you'll improve. So best of luck. I know this tutorial was very long, but I do hope it was helpful. So best of luck. And please do let me know if you have any feedback. Send me an email. Drop me a message on Instagram, um, saying if this, if you found this helpful. I would love to know. And maybe we'll make more of these in the future, going more into depth into different things. Of course, please do like and subscribe this video if you did find this helpful. Thank you.