Transcription
Jesus Christ. Good evening, Mike.
>> Hey, what's up, chat?
>> I see you are preparing to color grade.
>> Yeah, you know it.
>> Shall we begin?
>> Yeah, let's do it. Okay, so let's apply my power grade and take a look at it.
>> H, the color balance appears inaccurate.
>> Yeah, it's just overexposed. So, let's go to the HDR wheels and open my waveform and the scopes. And let's just bring that exposure down a bit. Now, let's go to my linear balance node and kind of fix that white balance. Let's look at my vector scope for this. Go back to the primaries. Bring the gain a little bit more towards the center. Actually, I'm going to warm it up towards the reds since it was sunset. Let's add some contrast. Next, I'm going to go further into my waveform and kind of play with the lift gamma gain. Bring down my highlights to make that sky pop. See where we're looking.
>> Fascinating.
>> Not too bad.
>> I believe the image is becoming cinematic. I think the viewers would like to know how you did that.
>> Well, yeah, that's the point of this video, but I don't know. I don't feel like boring them with a bunch of talking quite yet. How about we roll one last montage to kind of show what this tutorial and power grid can do.
>> All right, then. I'm generating a new preview now. You should see it on the screen any second.
In this video, I'm going to walk through my complete color grading workflow in Da Vinci Resolve. From project setup to how I handle different types of footage, ranging from log color spaces to 8bit cameras and more. All while revealing my film inspired power grade that I use for my cinematic videos.
That was a very nice rendering, Mike. I think you've improved a great deal. Hey everyone, I hope you're enjoying this tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey. I thought this was a more fun and entertaining way to introduce this tutorial instead of going straight into a screen recording, especially since this is so much different than what I usually share on this channel. But I do think it's important once or twice a year for me to share behind the scenes and the workflow behind the cinematic short street films that I create.
Just a quick disclaimer that we will be using a power grade that I've developed over the last year or so and I am selling this power grade. However, I think this video will be extremely valuable to anyone who's looking to learn more about color grading in Da Vinci, whether you decide to purchase this power grade or not. I have the chapters outlined in this video, so feel free to jump around to see what's relevant to you depending on your skill level. I also have a pin comment down below with a list of the chapters. I'm going to start off pretty beginner friendly and then we'll move a little bit faster and get into a little bit more complex situations down the line.
So, before we move into Da Vinci, let's talk about some display settings. I'm using an Apple Studio display to record this tutorial today and I have a MacBook Pro on my left. Usually, I just use the MacBook Pro to have a clean full screen image of the clip that I'm color grading and then use the larger UI on my Apple Studio display. If you're using a Mac, I highly suggest switching from this Apple default display setting to HDTV video BT79. I already have it switched on my studio display. This is just a more accurate color space for color grading. And this will ensure that your video looks similar across all different devices, monitors, and TVs.
Now, let's open Da Vinci and get into some settings here. Under project settings, color management, I use the color science of Da Vinci YGB, the timeline color space of Da Vinci Ygam Intermediate. This is a very wide color space that allows a lot of flexibility while working with colors and accessing all the color information that your camera recorded. And I use the output color space of Rex 709 scene. And I know there's always a lot of debate about which is the best between these three, but ever since the new Da Vinci update, Rex 709 scene is the way to go. This will make sure that your exports match what you saw in Da Vinci, especially on Mac displays, and it is essentially the same as a Rec 709 2.4.
This one is often overlooked, but I switched this 3D lookup table setting from triilinear to tetrahedral. I'm not a professional colorist and I don't have all the color science memorized in detail to kind of explain why all this stuff works. Tetrahedral is the new industry standard and it produces smoother gradients and more accurate colors when dealing with LUTs.
The last settings adjustment we need to do is come up here to Da Vinci Resolve preferences and go to general. And this is very important for Mac users to check these two boxes. Use Mac display color profiles for viewers and viewers match QuickTime player when using Rex 709 scene. This will just ensure that your exported file when you're done matches the colors and brightness that you saw in Da Vinci because you'll want to rip your hair out. If not, this solves a lot of problems to check and we'll discuss a couple more settings further on that help make sure everything matches when you export your file.
So, now that everything's lined up in Da Vinci, let's finally get into the power grade. I have my Power Grade already uploaded into this album. And if you want to learn how to install this Power Grade, if you do decide to purchase this, it will come with another super long, more detailed video how to install it and do everything node by node in much greater depth than we'll go through on this YouTube video. So, just keep that in mind.
So, these are all the camera profiles that the Power Grade is compatible with. It has a lot of different ones. And to be honest, it should act pretty similar no matter what camera you're using because I have these custom CST versions where you can input your own camera if you don't see yours listed. So, starting at the top, I have a custom power grade for any 8-bit camera because I have it tweaked a little bit different depending on whether you're using an older 8-bit camera or something newer with 10 or 12 bit. I have Apple log for people who like recording log on their phone. Ari, Blackmagic, Canon. Here's a custom one for any camera. DJI DLOG M. This is for your Osmo Pocket 3s or your action cams. Fuji profiles. Lumix. This is compatible with motion picture film. We will be grading some actual 16 millimeter film at the end. Nikon phone HDR video. This is a tricky one we'll discuss later because most phones record in HDR now and they don't show up the same in Da Vinci. Rex 709 is just for standard picture profiles or pretty much any footage you don't know which profile it is. You can just start with a Rex 709. Sony SLOG 2 is pretty niche to me. I like to use this for my Sony RX100 and Sony SLOG 3 which is my main color profile.
This first clip was shot using Sony SLOG 3. So you can either rightclick and go apply grade or you can just drag this over. So just to show you that right out of the gate with just one click and no adjustments, the power grade's looking pretty good. This is the log file straight to this just as your starting point, which looks beautiful in my opinion. Just to be fully transparent that this clip was properly exposed in camera and did have a pretty accurate white balance. But if you are exposing your shots well and you have like a ballpark good white balance, your clips should come out pretty good with just one click. Here's one more example from Tokyo. Log one click. Let's do one more. Another New York scene shot in S Log 3. Log to that in one click.
So let's go back to the first clip and look at the node tree. And I just wanted to say that this power grade is film inspired. And what I mean by that is that the core look is coming from this 2383 classic Kodak film print emulation. And I do have film traits like grain, bloom, hellation. This is meant to look filmic, but it's also not trying to strictly emulate anything specific. Like this is not exactly what 16 mm looks like or 35mm or Kodak 250D. This is just a look I've created over the last year or so that kind of takes the best of both worlds between digital and film and cinema and color texture and things that I like and put it all into one package.
A lot of people when they first start Da Vinci are intimidated by these big node trees. And I swear they're not as complex as they look. When you come from Adobe Lightroom or you're looking at a photo editing app and you see like 30 sliders with exposure, contrast, and all of those, this is essentially the same thing, but instead you work left to right and each node represents an individual adjustment towards the color. For instance, we have exposure, white balance, contrast. It's all very similar. And once you get the hang of it, you'll be flying through this.
Before we go node for node, I just want to explain that these two nodes you never really have to touch. These are essentially turning your log footage from your camera profile into this Da Vinci Ygamut space that I talked about having the most flexibility for color grading. So this transfers it into that space and this transfers it back out to a normal viewing color space. So this between this sandwich all of these nodes are and plus this filmic node are what's giving the image its look and this is the main bulk of the color grading happens here. You won't have to touch these and I already set these depending on which camera you choose. And let's say your camera is not available in these thumbnails. You can just apply this one and go to CST in and apply whichever camera you're using here.
So very quickly I'm going to show you each node of this power grade just to tell you what it all contains and then we're going to go through node by node with different examples and show you what they do. At the very front of the node tree I have D noiseis which is noise reduction obviously. Next, we have a fix node, which is what I like to use to clean up dust spots or something that I can erase before I start color grading the rest of the image. We already talked about this color space transform. You don't need to touch this. Next, we have exposure, which we will be using the HDR wheel, so it's almost like making exposure adjustments in camera. Same with linear white balance. I have this set to a linear color space. So, when you play with the white balance, it's almost like you're adjusting it in camera, which is a lifesaver. Next is a contrast node, and I will teach you three quick ways to dial in your contrast with this node. Next is HDR fix, where you can make adjustments to that contrast if it crushed your blacks too much or something similar. You need to do something that you couldn't really do in contrast. Color adjustment is to add a little bit of color to kind of start creating a bit of a look because white balance is more just to make corrections or get your image to a nice balanced start. Saturation. This node is using something called HSV saturation, which is a more filmic dense saturation. I'll go into this more later. Individual color. This is pretty much like an HSL panel where you can individually manipulate different hues, saturations, and brightness. Next, we have a look node, which comes off because this alone, this 2383 film print emulation is a look in itself. And if you toggle it on and off, you can see it provides pretty heavy contrast and split toning. And this film print emulation is a classic look. So you don't necessarily need to create your own looks. But if you are trying to do some more custom color grading, I've created this whole compound node full of other things you can adjust your look to. Just quickly wanted to say that this film print emulation also has this opacity set to 7. You can always adjust this more or less to your taste. And also, if you open this compound node, which you can rightclick and go show compound node or just double click if you're trying to grade faster, you can set this to either a warmer or cooler color balance, but I prefer to just have neutral and set all the balance myself.
So, moving into the look node. Just going to turn it on for now. I have the first one being a film look creator. This just uses Da Vinci's built-in film look creator to further create a film look. And I'm sorry to the free Da Vinci Resolve users. I do not believe this will work if you're using the free version. And I designed this whole power grade mainly for the studio version. Next, I have a split toning compound node. You can toggle it on and off to see an effect, but you can also open it. And I have two different ways to do split toning, and they're both customizable, and I'll get more into that later. Also, in the lip node, we have a few utility adjustments here, such as a film curve, which makes your video have a slight film fade and smooth highlight rolloff. a density node that makes your colors more dense, a sky enhancement tool, and lastly, we have a custom node, which you can use your own look building skills you've learned along the way, or perhaps use LUTs or your third party plugins.
Next, we have windows, which is for masking or power windows or radial filters and stuff like that. Blur is just to take off the digital edge, just create some softness. Vignette is self-explanatory. Hellation, I have three different levels of hellation and also a custom node that I'll get into. Bloom just adds a little bit of diffusion and bloom around the highlights. Grain also three levels of grain to choose from and a custom node. I will get into filmic is a bit of subtractive saturation just mainly to keep myself in check because I like to go heavy on saturation and this kind of just makes sure your colors stay within a filmic look. CST we talked about is just administrative to get this out and do a normal color space. This is the film print emulation node. Final adjustment node is where I like to just do any final last color tweaks or perhaps check my black balance to make sure it's a true black and not shifted to be a bit blue or too red or something like that. And sharpen seems counterintuitive to the blur node, but this just kind of sharpens after everything's in place. And it's mainly just to retain the grain and hopefully the grain survives the YouTube compression. This sharpening helps a little bit with that.
Lastly, and I did this intentionally, every single power grade starts on this HDR exposure node. And I left certain ones toggled off because if you are unsure of where to start or you just want to go faster, I left on what I feel like are the essential nodes to create a quick look. And the ones that are turned off are kind of optional and situational. So, I hope that helps people who are new to Da Vinci kind of know where to go. Also, I have each power grade start on the HDR exposure node because I believe this is the best place to start each clip you're color grading. So, the first thing you should check upon putting the power grade on is your exposure. And I put HDR here and here because I want to remind you, you only have to use this HDR color wheels panel. And the only thing we need to touch is global, which is your global exposure. So, you can do this by eye, but it's good to monitor everything on the scopes because eventually your eyes are going to be playing tricks on you. So, what I like to use to keep an eye on my exposure is the waveform. And it comes colorized like this, but I take it off because I'm not using it to check the color. And also, I put these reference levels of 40 and 940 to kind of provide safe zones to make sure my blacks aren't getting too crushed or my whites aren't getting too bright. So 1023 is white, zero is black. And you can see that my reference levels are at 40 and 940. That way I know if my blacks dip below that line, they have a risk of becoming crushed when viewed on different monitors or TVs, and I don't want that. So as you can see, this image is properly balanced. We don't really need to do much. So let's move into another clip. This one also is a bit tougher to read. We can see that nothing's really touching the bottom at zero and nothing's really going over the 1023. So technically this image wasn't overexposed or underexposed. It's just that the bright street lights are really hot and then the darks are really dark and that's fine. So we're going to clean this more up in the contrast. But for now the exposure is fine. So, as I move forward with these clips, you might not have noticed it when I showed you earlier, thinking this is an okay image, but sometimes the exposure is a real game changer when you apply this power grade. So, let's look at this one. This one, even though it falls in the range, I feel like these highlights can definitely be brought down just by looking at the image. So, I'm going to start it at the global exposure, and I am just going to bring this down a little bit. And I like to keep my highlights around 896 or 768. So I'm just going to put it there. Actually looks a little dark. Maybe I'll do half a stop. Minus.5. One half stop. So just with half a stop, that's how much better the image looks. Next, let's go to this one. And you can see this exposure is too high, too. You have a lot of the image sitting up here in 896 768, which is where I like my brightest parts of my image. So let's take this, bring it down. maybe minus.6 from that to that in one node.
So after you fix the exposure, your next step is to check your white balance. I like to use the vector scope to do this. So the vector scope has four quadrants. This is cyan blue, magenta, red, yellow, and green. So this is essentially like temp. And this is essentially like tint. You have the cool quadrant, warm, magenta, and green. You want the majority of your image to sit right in the middle. And you can see that the auto white balance on my Sony did this pretty well. The vectors scope comes like this, but I like to turn on show 2x zoom and show skin tone indicator, which helps you see a lot better. And also, you can kind of keep your reds along this line to make sure your skin tones are accurate. Let's move into the Japan clip and look at the vectors scope. Obviously, you can see this is really warm, and I kind of like the sci-fi Bladeunner look that I remember this scene looking like. So, I'm gonna come to the linear white balance. And the only thing we need to control here is the gain. If you look, this gain is going to drag your white balance all over the place. So, it's too hot. So, I'm just going to take the ball and drag it to the cool side. And you can make it more green or more magenta. The center is balanced. So the goal of the white balance and the goal of the exposure is not to start creating moody cool looks here. It's just to correct your image if it was wrong. So only thing you need to touch in HDR exposure is the global. The only thing you need to touch in linear white balance is this gain in the color wheels. So with one adjustment, we went from there to there. Moving on to the next one. I'll check the white balance. This one looks pretty warm, but this was also golden hour. You can tell by the light on the building. So, if I were to put it something like that, that just doesn't look as good for me. I'm actually going to leave this white balance where it was. This shot, the white balance looks a little bit cool. So, I'm going to come to linear white balance, go to gain. I am going to just drag it a little bit more towards red because this is a shot from Wildwood, New Jersey on a hot summer day, and I want it to look more like that. So, that just adds a bit warmth into the image.
So, let's start one more clip from scratch. I'm going to apply grade. And as these clips go down the line, they get more and more incorrect. Just to show you that the power grade is not always going to come looking super pretty, but after just a couple small adjustments, it'll be back to looking good. So, first things first, I'm going to turn my waveform back on, and I'm going to look at my HDR exposure. Go to HDR, and I'm just going to bring this up maybe there. Next, I'm going to go to linear white balance, go to my vector scope, and I'm going to bring this gain from being super warm to somewhere more balanced. Maybe there. So, with two nodes, we went from that awful looking image to this.
So, coming back to this clip, the next node is contrast. I have just a contrast boost. When you click it on and off, it comes on because I don't think this amount of contrast is going to ruin any shot. So, with this was done just with this contrast knob. And I have the pivot set to this special number that keeps a perfect balance for Da Vinci Ygamut. So, anything you do with this contrast dial will be natural and shouldn't mess with the exposure. I'm going to reset this. That's the first way to do contrast is just this simple dial. Nice and easy. Gives you a great contrast. I like to use the lift gamma game, which is essentially shadows, midtones, and highlights. And I'm using a Da Vinci mini panel. So, it's just kind of fun to spin these wheels. So, a way to do this is to lower the lift, which I'm doing right here. You could just, if you don't have a mini panel, which I'm assuming most people don't, you just can use your mouse to go here. But the mini panel is really fun. So, I can bring this crush it down to my 40 point. And then I can compensate by raising the gain, put my black somewhere nice, my white somewhere nice, and then adjust the midtones to what I think either down or up depending on what I like. So that's another way to dial in some contrast. And the third way to add contrast is to come to the custom curves. And if you're a photographer, you probably recognize this. This is where you can add your points and make an S-curve. But in video, I suggest coming here and toggling this editable splines on. And then what happens here when you touch a point, it creates these splines. And now you can use these to do a more natural looking contrast curve. I don't use this one all too often, but I know some people really thrive at this. So not the best at making this contrast curve very fast, but maybe something like that.
So coming to our Japan clip. Sometimes I feel like you don't always need to use the contrast. Like this clip does look nice kind of softer. I also like to adjust the highlights in the contrast clip. So I can kind of work at these lights a little bit. Let's bring that down. You can see the highlights coming down a little bit. And maybe I'll just use this to lift the lift a little bit. So that could be an ending point for this contrast. Nice clean look. Moving on to this one. contrast on and off. I think that's good enough. And I don't really need to do much more.
Okay. So, for this example, I'm going to reset this contrast back to default. And I want to show you what this adjuster node is for. So, let's say we want to bring this contrast down. I'm going to create a contrast really quick here. It's a pretty heavy contrast. Let's say you like it that way. But the blacks are just a little bit too crushed for me. So that's what this is for. You can come to HDR fix and make any adjustments postcontrast. So come to your HDR wheels, which is what that HDR fix means, and you can just nudge these shadows, maybe half a quarter of a stop. And just like that, you can bring back a little bit of that information in the shadows. Moving on to this clip. I think I'm actually going to go no contrast here because this is a darker scene and I kind of like it looking a little cleaner. So I don't need to touch this one.
Color adjustment. This is kind of getting into a little bit of look building. So this white balance node was to just kind of correct it. And now you can kind of decide if you want to nudge any other colors into it. So I'm going to go to my vector scope. This is where I like to see where I'm putting my colors. You can also look at this to see your color balance, the parade to kind of see where your red, greens, and blues lie. But I've kind of got in the habit to do vector scope. So for this node, you can use any of your color wheels to kind of nudge a color into somewhere. I found the most success using the gamma. So if I were to kind of customize this, you can see here, you can kind of take the look in specific directions, like if you wanted a little bit of magenta, let's say something like that. Just make it a look a little bit more stylized.
So next is the saturation node. And you can see with this on and off, it's a very subtle filmic saturation. Since I have the color space set to HSV and the only channel being affected is saturation, it's just putting density into the saturation without affecting the brightness at all. So, it's a very filmic look because when you look at motion picture film, the colors are very dense. The only thing you need to touch with this node is the gain or the gamma. And nothing else will work. You don't want to touch saturation. It's not going to behave properly. Only the gain or the gamma. The gain increases the colors of already the most prominent colors, the colors that already have the most saturation. And the gamma will start to lift the colors that are less saturated. So, let's go to different example. Saturation here, you can see there's not a ton of color to work with. Only the blues are getting a little nudge. If we increase this a bit, I only like to go to around 1.25, but just for example, you can see only the blues are kind of getting that density. But if we went to the gamma and we went here, now it's starting to bring up all the other colors that were previously left out. You can kind of do a mix of these. Gamma is less filmic, but sometimes you just need to. Like for this example, maybe I would just bring it up a couple just to bring the image more to life. For this example, you can see saturation doesn't do a ton. The red sign, which is a very vibrant color, is getting more saturated. And the blues, this one, you can see it just adds a different kind of saturation. It just feels dense and filmic. Finally, saturation here and see what that node is doing.
Next is the individual color node, and this is to adjust individual hues. So in order to use this node, you can use the color slice. And this opens all the different hues. And here you will find the saturation. If you watch the Caribbean sign, saturation of red, this is the value or density pretty much. And this is the hue. This is a good tool. I like to use it to more take color out than put color in. If you get in the habit of pumping colors into your image with this, it has a higher chance to break and they just don't behave very well. There's a better tool for this that's absolutely free that I have preloaded here. I'm just going to delete it for now. It's available on GitHub and I have a link for it in the description. You open the link and this is what it looks like. It's called Tetra Interp DCTL. And the first time I was on this site, I couldn't really figure out how to download it. But if you go to code and go to download zip, that's where you download it. You download it on your system and you come to the effects tab and go to DCTL. Drag that on there. Then go all the way to tetra interp HSV. And remember we set this setting in the beginning to tetrahedral. This is the tetra interp. It uses that same math. This is where all those settings come in handy. So now this is a lot better tool. If you can look at the way it's handling these reds or the blues, this is just such a better tool and absolutely free and absolutely worth the 5 minutes to kind of be able to manually adjust these colors. And I still use this to sometimes subtract some red from skin tones or something, but if I have color adjustments, I'm mainly coming to this thing right away. So for this example, I'm just going to increase the red saturation and maybe make that sign pop a little bit. And I kind of liked it when I decreased the color in the sky. So you don't always have to touch this, but just a couple quick adjustments and you're getting a much different image. So again, we could come here to individual color and I could increase this blue saturation, bring this down. Now you're making the sky more dense just from that. Okay, let's get back to the bridge shot.
After individual color, we have the look node. Let's turn that on. Film look Creator just has a couple presets built into these two menus where you can go to cinematic or these kind of different looks they have pre-built. They're very subtle, but they do slightly shift the look. You can also go into the split tone. I have kind of a custom one built, which is way too strong for this image. There is this split tone option. You can toggle it on and off to see what I have it already set at. Or you can open it, which is how you see where I built it. And in order to adjust these, you would just go to the color wheels and put some warmth into your gain here and cool into your lift, which is shadows. And you can play with the mid tones if you want. Only problem with this method, although it's the easiest, is that your highlights will spill into your mid tes and your shadows also. It's kind of just influencing the whole image. So, this is why there's this custom curves split tone one. And but this one is just really advanced. I'm not even going to get super into it on YouTube, but if you come in under the hood, this is the professional way to split tone. I have these points locked off so you're not influencing your midtones. And if you check this, it is matched perfectly to the middle gray of Da Vinci wide gamut, which means that it's not going to be affecting the neutral points when you're playing with your colors in the highlights or the shadows. I'll get more into that in the paid tutorial if you buy the power grade.
Next, I have kind of just utility nodes that are a lot simpler. This is the film curve. Just adds a little bit of film fade and rolls off the highlights. Density is just a color density boost. Sky pop comes in handy once in a while. Sometimes it's hard to get the sky to pop out. So, you can toggle this on and off. I saw this in Film Vision Pro and had to figure out how to do it because I really loved it. It is coming on quite strong in this one. And I have it set to one. But if you come to the key output here, I can turn this maybe down to 0.5 or maybe 04. And now we can try to see if that helps. Just adds warmth into the sunset. Again, lastly, I have a custom node to kind of use any other techniques that you've learned and don't want to use any of these. Or let's say you bought Dehancer 2 years ago and just want to get your money's worth. You can open this and make sure you set it to Da Vinci wide gamut and disable all tools. Put the output a lot less. And then you can come up here, enable your film stocks, and now you can just go through all your presets in your third party plugins. And let's say you want to use Kodak Vision 3500T. Even though it's very subtle shift, you can just use whatever you want to create your own custom look. And this power grade is super customizable. You can also, if you wanted to just delete this whole look node and put in dehancer there, or you can customize this to your liking as you go.
The next series of nodes are the power windows for radial gradients or power window adjustments. So let's say you went crazy with the saturation over here. And now I feel like their skin is too orange. So I'm going to build a window with a circle. And I'm just going to going to feather it. Put it ballpark around their skin. Try not to get too much of the sky. Now you can come in here and maybe let's go to that color slice tool and bring the skin down. Now you can see that's so minor. Let's just bring it a little exaggerated. Now you can see you just did adjustment right around there. And these windows right next to it automatically create the opposite. So this isn't the best example for it, but now you can control everything that you didn't touch in that power window. And a better example of this would be this image where I have this cool scene kind of a split screen with this guy. It was tricky to expose for because I had to expose for the TV screen. So you'll see it looks fine as a log image, but as soon as we apply my power grade really falls apart. Let's check the exposure. It's tricky because it's like too bright on the right side, too dark on the left side, but it kind of looks exposed correctly. So, what do you do? I think it'd be easier to kind of fix in the contrast, but let's try a power window. So, I'm going to open the power window. Let's put a gradient. Put this over here. You can click this button up here to see where the gradient is affecting. Let's bring it way more precise since it is a hard line there. Okay. So, now we can turn this on and you can see this node's creating split here. You can edit this side here, this side here. So now we can adjust this. I'm going to use my mini panel. If you don't see the mouse moving, I'm lifting the lift. And we can come over here, bring down the gain, and you can watch these charts. Bring down the gain. I'm also going to lift the midtones so I can see the ad, and kind of keep playing with this to find somewhere I'm happy with. Go back to this side. Bring the gain down. Bring the mid tones up. And then crush the blacks a little bit. And just like that, with that node, we've got it to be an acceptable image. Now, I could go and do the rest of my corrections. Like this white balance is way too warm for me. I like that kind of sci-fi look. Take the gain, bring it a bit cooler, and you can do more of a global contrast. I can look at the waveform. And now you have even more of a different image.
So let's start on a brand new clip before we get into the film textures just to keep things kind of fresh and kind of get repetitive about how we're grading so it kind of gets in your heads on how easy this is. So I'm going to come here, start with HDR exposure and the waveform HDR color wheels. Let's bring this down to my levels that I like. one adjustment, we went from log to the power grade. And then finally with the exposure adjustment, already looking way more cinematic. Let's come to the white balance. Go to the vector scope. Go to the gain. Bring this just a hair cooler. Before, after contrast, I'm just going to keep it simple. Put some here. So, we're like three nodes in. Looking really good. Let's just see what the saturation is doing. You can see the density coming into the neon sign and the yellow shirt and all the prominent colors. Individual color. I don't need to change it. Let's go see what the look can do. Film look creator. Once you put it on and off, you can see it does add bit of a filmic look and they're crushing those colors even more. If we wanted to do that ourselves, we could just do the density. I will actually do the density. Turn the film curve on and the split tone. Let's just go nuts with these effects. Okay, so here's the look node. We did a lot. And it might look a bit weird cuz you've seen the before and after, but I think that still looks like a pretty cool image just quickly doing all that stuff without even really thinking about it, just playing around.
So next, the power windows. One quick trick I'll show you that in in other examples is that if you do build a power window and let's say you want just this guy's face and for the sake of this tutorial, let's say you just want to smooth it out. Let's go to midtone detail. Reduce it quite a bit. So now I'm just making his skin softer. But you're like Mike, he's moving like what am I going to do? Here's the frame back back on his face. You can just come right next door from the window to track and hit this forward and backward. It's going to track his face. Now your effect follows his face. So simple and Da Vinci is so smart with it. So just wanted to quickly show you that.
Finally, moving into the film textures. Taking forever explaining the power grade and then we'll kind of more quickly grade clips after this. So blur just does what it says. Takes some of that detail out. If you look at these signs, this is without it. Just takes some of that digital edge off. Makes it more filmic and soft, more natural. Vignette, also self-explanatory. I like a good vignette lately. You can adjust this more or less to your taste. Here's another vignette. You can come to the vignette in the film look creator and just crank it if you want.
So hellation is a compound node. You can right click and go show compound node or just double click. Comes with three different settings. If you click this view isolated regions, it'll show you where the hellation is affecting. So in here you can see where all the hellation is happening. Come back here. So I have it starting on low and low is very subtle. You can barely see it in some of these clips, but it's good in color grading to not go too nuts with everything because then it starts to look fake fast and have a bunch of small little adjustments that build up to a look. So, this is medium. You see around his headphones, it's starting to creep in a bit more. And high. And these will hit differently depending on your lighting situations and stuff. This isn't the best example, but I do have one preloaded here. This is a clip. This is the log file. I kind of just lightly graded it just to get started here. It's a cool shot in the subway. Just want to show you here some more examples of hellation in the ways that you probably are thinking. So I have this set up here. Let's go to the hellation low. Obviously we're looking at these tubes of light. Low. You can start to see that hellation is creeping in. This is probably the most natural or maybe medium. This is the most filmike and believable in my opinion. Maybe not for this scene, but overall for all your footage. Medium. you can start to see those reds creeping in. And then high is obviously that really exaggerated look. And if you really want to go nuts, you can come over here and just go to gamma and tweak that to your liking. Or you could just double up on these. You can kind of mix and match how you want to do. But just for fun, let's go to medium and kind of see that hellation in those lights. And if you want to exaggerate the hellation even more, you can come to bloom and bloom the lights as well. So now you get that really stylized look, but like I said, I feel like you should do it in moderation. Maybe medium tops on this one. Also, I left the custom node in case you want to use your third party systems for hellation. You could put on dehancer. Switch to Da Vinci intermediate. Disable all tools. Now just go to your hellation. And there you go. Now you can play with dehancers hellation in this power grade and kind of mix the best of everything you own.
Okay, coming back to the first clip for grain. Just open the grain. Comes on medium. I think it's a good level of grain. Not too much, not too little. If you are wanting the grittier look, of course, can toggle that on. Can also double up on them to be really grainy. I've been enjoying the low look in contrast. So, there is a low setting. And of course, you can put your grain on using your third party plugins with the custom.
The last node before the CST out is this filmic node, which is just an on andoff node. This is just a little bit of a bleach bypass from the film look creator. You can enhance or decrease it, but this pretty much just keeps me in check with my saturation. This is before. It just looks a little bit more digital and saturated. And then once you hit it, this keeps it more filmic. I like to keep it on and grade around it the whole time. And let's come back to the bridge one last time.
The final adjustment node I like to save just to do last minute black adjustments. So for this one, maybe I do want to bring my blacks closer to the zero. So I'm going to bring my lift down and my gain up a little bit. So with that last note adjustment, you can see I'm making my imbing pop a little bit more. It's a bit more crisp. And finally, I like to keep my blacks a true black, not tinted blue or red or anything. So, in order to check that, I'm going to go to my qualifier and rightclick and go show picker RGB value. And let's check her black shirt. And you can see they're perfectly balanced. 23 23 23. I did not expect that to be honest. If they weren't balanced, let's try this one. 9 134. Let's say you wanted to bring up that red just a hair. You could come to the log wheels and go to three and 11 113. That's pretty balanced. And I don't know if you'll be able to tell the difference here, but there's a slight blue cast in his shirt or something. And that is fixing it.
Okay, now that we've covered the power grade and grade detail very slowly, I want to just kind of show you how quick it can be to use this. So, I opened it up and I'm just going to use my mini panel here to do some of these adjustments. I'm going to bring this global exposure down a little bit. Linear white balance looks good. I'm actually going to take off the contrast saturation. Maybe I'll kick up a little bit. Like so. All right. Don't need to mess with any of that stuff. Vignette bloom look. All right. I mean, I think that could be it.
>> Mike, I've noticed something.
>> What is it? What's up?
>> I have noticed your workflow appears unusually efficient.
>> What you mean like speed? It's because I'm using this Da Vinci Resolve mini panel by Blackmagic Design. They were nice enough to send me this for a few months, and I just promised I'd talk about a little bit. It's truly been a game changer, and it's just so nice because you barely need to touch your mouse.
>> I see.
>> And don't get me wrong, you can do everything with a mouse and keyboard that
you can do on the mini panel in Da Vinci, but this thing just makes the whole process tactile, and you naturally become so much quicker. And more importantly, it's just super precise. These track balls make color adjustments incredibly smooth. You can move the ball to adjust the color and then use the dials to fine-tune it. And the wheels, you can move them at the same time, controlling multiple levels at once. There's dedicated buttons for creating and navigating nodes, dials that also double as buttons to reset the parameters, undo, redo, playback functions, and just so so much more. You can even create power windows seamlessly and track them instantly right from the panel. No more swapping through menus, no more hunting around with your mouse. The mini panel just keeps you in the flow. And I already can't imagine ever color grading again without it.
>> Remarkable. That is quite impressive. Okay, next let's get into some footage that can be viewed as problematic or more difficult to grade like the Osmo Pocket 8bit footage. Let's get into that and then we'll get into motion picture film.
So, this is with my RX100. It's an old camera shooting 8 bit. I use Slog 2 on it. So, I have a custom power grade just for that. When you open this up, looks pretty bad. This is log. This is with the grade. Actually looks better as log, but we're going to fix that up really fast. So HDR exposure, you can tell most of the image is where my highlights should be. So I'm going to bring that down. The highlights at 768. So one node adjustment, fixing exposure, linear white balance. Let's go back to my color wheels. Vector scope. You can see it's sitting in the cool zone. I'm going to bring it a bit warmer because this is the beach in Florida after all. So two adjustments.
Now, the contrast, I feel like, is where this is really going to come to life. So, let's open the waveform. I'm going to play with my lift gamma gain to get this one. So, I'm going to bring the blacks down to my 40 mark, stretch the gain up to maybe just past 768. And then I'm going to bring my midtones down. And then kind of repeat, bring the gain up, mid tones. Takes a lot of kind of playing around with that. I'm also going to drop my contrast a little bit. And then I'm going to put some contrast in with this dial as well. So before contrast with contrast, it's like night and day. And this is eight log foot or 8 bit footage. So add a vignette bloom. Keep inhalation grain on medium. See what that filmic node is doing. Taking out a lot of color, but I think that's good.
The next clip is an iPhone clip using HDR video. I shot this using just the native camera app, but what I didn't know at the time is that most phones nowadays just automatically record as HDR video. So despite looking good in QuickTime or your camera roll, when you import it into Da Vinci, it looks like this, which just falls flat, super desaturated, and almost looks like a log clip. I was actually a little bit concerned at first, but eventually I did enough research to figure out how to transform this and ended up making a custom power grade just for HDR video.
So, when you apply the HDR video power grade, you might notice that it comes with an extra color fix node. I also put this in all of my 8-bit power grades. And this just basically retrieves some of that color that was lost while importing to Da Vinci and makes it look more normal compared to the other footage you might apply the power grade to. It also has a custom color space transform just to deal with that HDR footage and bring it into that Da Vinci wire gamut.
So, as usual, let's go to the HDR exposure and just lower the exposure a bit to get a better look at this image. So, with one node just fixing that exposure, you can tell that it's already looking a lot closer to what the iPhone video might have meant to capture and what you see in your camera roll, plus the textures and everything of the power grade.
So, for linear white balance, I'm just going to make this image a bit warmer because I can tell already that it is a bit cool for me. So, I'm going to nudge this towards the warm side. So, with the linear white balance, I'm going from here to here. Contrast. I might actually lower a bit back to its original settings. And I'll just use this node to kind of fix my highlights and stuff that's bothering me on that N9 sign. So, I'm going to bring the gain down. Bring those back to like 768. I'm going to lift the lift a little bit. Maybe play with the mid tones. And just bring down the highlights a little bit here. So with the contrast node, I'm just bringing it from here to actually here, which is just kind of a more smooth image to me. And now I could actually come back and move this contrast dial, and I'll probably like it a little bit more. Color adjustment. I might nudge a little bit more warmth into this image because it's the beach. So I'm going to take my gamma and just put a little bit more red in there. So that's before and after. Saturation. The colors look a little bit intense to me, actually. So, I'm going to bring this down to maybe 1.2 instead. So, here's without saturation, with saturation. I'm going to have a little bit of fun with individual colors. I'm going to increase the red saturation and that value. If you look at the ATV, that red is starting to really pop. And blue, I'm going to increase the saturation a bit and bring down the density. And yellow. Let's just see what the density does here. Maybe I will do the same for yellow. So now I have a really custom image with the select colors that I affected. I'm going to skip the look node. Blur is special for iPhone video. I felt like it was extra sharp compared to just general camera footage. If we look at the tree here, you can just see if you turn it off and on how much that blur is making the image look a lot more natural. So, off, on, off, on on just makes it fit in with the rest of your footage so much better. I'll add a vignette here, and I'm not going to touch really the rest. So, that can be it. Coming from this ugly start we had with the HDR footage, problematic footage going into Da Vinci to this in just a couple of minutes.
Next, we have Apple Log. This is using Apple log, the native camera app, just in log setting. This one's severely underexposed. So, just going to bring it into normal exposure. And then boom. I mean, it's the same pipeline with any footage. So, I don't need to go through all the nodes again. It's just as soon as you get these settings in, transform Da Vinci Y gamut, you have all the settings, it's going to look decent. You just can play with this stuff.
The next clip is from a DJI Osmo Pocket 3, which uses DJI DLOG M. Right away, we're getting this. Not a bad starting point. A lot of people get confused because they think since it says DJI DLOG in it, that it means you come here to the color space transform and you go to DJI DLOG, but you can tell the image just kind of goes nuclear if you do that setting. It's closer to a rec 709. And I know they offer an official rec 709 L, but I prefer to just do it this way. And I think it's close enough.
So, first thing as usual, I might lower this exposure a little bit. Maybe 04 linear white balance. I'm just going to warm up the image a little bit. Contrast. I might just leave the contrast settings where they are, but I also might bring down the highlights just a little bit. and then see how that affected my waveform. Might just raise the mid tones. So, without contrast, with contrast, just a subtle amount. The saturation looks a little too much here. So, I'm just going to bring this down to 1.2. And I might actually reduce 0.1 in the gamma. So, this is before and this is after. Just a very subtle amount of saturation. Individual color. I find that Osmo Pocket footage and DJI DLOG M seems to have kind of very saturated colors. So, if you look at these cyans and blues look like a little bit too much for me. So, I might come to let's just use the color slice tool in case you didn't want to install the Tetra interp. And I'm just going to bring down the cyan maybe 15% and the blue maybe 10%. And if you look here, we can just see it's bringing those buildings back to be a little bit more lifelike. the look node. Let's see what we can get into here. I think I'll just turn on the film curve and the density. So, let's see what the look node did. Before. After. Another thing I might want to do is that these skin tones of some of these people are looking a little bit warm. So, I might come back to the individual color and I'll just take red and lower that slightly. Maybe skin. So now if you look at this guy's face, bringing it from here to here, just a very subtle shift in the skin tones. I'll add a vignette. Let's add some bloom. Let's check the hellation and see where it's affecting. I think it kind of affects the side of the boat a little bit. I kind of want to show that a little bit more. So let's go here and see before and after. Brain. Let's move to low this time. And let's do a final adjustment node. So I can see that the blacks are a little high. I'm going to come to my color wheels. Go to the lift. Bring this down closer to zero. Bring the gain a little bit higher. Maybe I'll bring the midtones down a tad. So with that final adjustment, go from here to here. Just kind of crunching those colors a little bit. And then I will do a final black check. Let's go to this guy's black shirt here. Turn on my qualifier. And we're at red 8, green 11, blue 15. Move it around a little bit and see. So maybe I'll just bring up that red a little bit. Go to the log wheels shadows. Bring up the red 03. Seems a bit closer. Maybe I'll bring down the blue. One. Okay. So that's good enough. Let's see what we're doing. So we're going from this to this. And it's hard to tell with the blacks, but there might be a little bit of a cast in his shirt. And when turn this on, just makes it more solid black. So there we go. DJI DLOG M from an Osmo Pocket 3. Looks pretty good.
Okay, last couple clips here. This is motion picture film. I just wanted to show you the power grade for working on actual motion picture film. This is 16 mm film from my Bolex Rex 5 right from the lab. And obviously it looks pretty terrible. Also, you can note that the node tree is slightly different. I got rid of the film textures and I'll go over that in a second.
So, bring up the exposure. White balance. Looks pretty cool. Warm that up a bit. And that could I mean that could be done right there. You don't have to do too much for film. You note the natural hellation and stuff. Just to show you a little bit more. I'm going to bump the contrast a little bit. These individual colors. I don't really like those yellows as much. I'm going to just going to make the hue a little warmer. Not going to mess with the look of film. Seems sacriiggious. I changed blur to detail. So, this just sharpens it up a little bit actually because my 16 mm is really soft sometimes. Vignette deset. Sometimes I still need to be kept in check about my saturation even with film. So, this is without it and then with it. I kind of like it just a little bit less saturated. That's about it. So, let's turn on detail. Start to finish. Very quick. I could do a little bit more, but you get the point. Let's just do one final 16 mil clip because they're fun. And this one's really cool. So, bring this over. Per usual, underexposed. You know the drill. Let's bring that up. Love the colors of that. This is a tricky one because the colors look like this, which are amazing, but they're not natural. So you could go more natural to how it might have looked, but this is blue hour and I kind of want it to look a little green and kind of like taxi driverish. So I might just split the difference and kind of do something like that. Contrast. I'm just going to lower the highlights. Bring up the blacks a little bit. Bring that gain down. Bring it out in the mid tones. Pump some here. One thing I did notice is that sky pop actually kind of helps neon too. So it kind of brings some color into that those neon lights. Vignette detail. Maybe not the vignette. So yeah, very quickly don't have to mess with the look of film too much. Really love the way Vision 3500T hits in blue hour with neon. Looks so cool.
Okay, as if this video isn't long enough, I'll show you D noiseis really quick. So, this is a clip from my RX100, which is bad at low light. The grain is off. And if I play this clip, you can see it's very noisy. So, I have this D noiseis section open here with some settings in. And if you click it, does a good start at removing the noise. You don't want to go too nuts with D noiseis. You just kind of want to make it acceptable because once you mix grain and stuff with it, it's harder to see. But this is without it. At 8ish, it starts to look good. You don't want to put too much in, especially with this side. If you turn this, you can easily make this look. I mean, you can barely even see the ripples of the water with this side, but it is effective if you have really noisy images. I do have some sharpness dialed in, especially to kind of keep the image sharp.
Lastly, this is my dustbuster node. So, this is a nice clip I have lightly graded just to show you that I have this big nasty like saliva stain of a sensor. And luckily this was a static shot so I can get rid of this. But I trigger on my fix node. And I would probably use something like object removal. Bring this here. You have to use a circle for this. So put a power window right on top of it. Surround it. Get rid of the feather. Come to object removal. Go to object adaptive blend scene analysis. Boom. Just like that. So now you could peacefully grade your footage without seeing this giant thing the whole time. And another way to do it would be patch replacer, but I'll explain that in the paid tutorial. This obviously works better if you have a static shot in the sky or something like this. It's a little bit trickier when you have a moving image with a dust spot video. A lot of times you're kind of out of luck if that happens.
So, okay. So, finally we got through it all. I hope you learned a lot from it. One thing that sucks about color grading is that you can't smoothly play back your clips on a timeline once they're color graded. You kind of have to bypass right here to kind of edit your film to the music and stuff. So, I save color grading to the last part. So, chat, if you can just render out a little montage of what we just created together so we can see it all in motion, that'd be awesome.
>> Analyzing image data. Loading a new preview now. Heat. Heat. All right, that's it. That's the whole workflow. If you made it this far, you're an absolute legend. Hope you learned a ton. Hope that you use the Power Grade. Appreciate you for making it this far. Chat, this is it. If you can just render the rest of this color grading video, that'd be great. I want to get this upload to YouTube. Render it.
>> I'm sorry, Mike. I'm afraid I can't do that.
>> What? You kidding me? AI man. AI.