Transcription
If the color page in DaVinci Resolve feels overwhelming, I'm going to attempt to make it your favorite tool.
Hello everyone, Tim here, and today we're going to learn the fundamentals of color correction and grading in DaVinci Resolve. We're going to walk through workflow, what nodes are, and how your tools function, so you can have the confidence to look at an image and know exactly how to take it from point A to point B.
If you'd like to follow along, check the link in the description for the files I'm using here. And with that, let's get started.
And here we are in the color page. Now, I'm using a 4K monitor, so your layout might look a little bit different than mine, but all the tools will generally be in the same place, or just need to be toggled separately. So let's go over the UI here.
I've reset it to default so we can start fresh, but first we have the actual viewer showing our clip in the timeline that we're coloring. Our clips tab here shows us the thumbnails of each clip in our timeline. The timeline tab gives us a basic view of our timeline, so we can scroll through it and find a certain section if we need very easily.
The node graph is where all of our adjustments live, and if you're unfamiliar with nodes, the easiest way to describe them is that a node is a point in a flow chart, meaning a node is receiving an image. It does something to that image, and then it sends that new image out to the next point.
Our gallery is where our stills are housed, and you can think of stills as presets or templates. We'll get into those a little bit later. And then we have our effects tab, and this is where all of your resolve effects and plugins are stored.
Here at the bottom is where our main color tools live, which we will explore in great detail. And then this icon over here is one of your most important monitoring tools, which are called scopes.
And just to clean up this UI a little bit here, let's go ahead and just turn off our gallery, our clips, and our timeline. And we'll just move this window over here a little bit just to give ourselves a little bit of a cleaner interface here.
Let's go ahead and look at our primary tools, which are the primary color wheels. And we see we have lift, gamma, gain, and offset, and these are really the drivers for a majority of what happens to your image. Now, each of them control your image in a slightly different way. Lift focuses mostly on the shadows and less on the highlights. Your gamma focuses mostly on midtones. Your gain focuses mostly on the highlights and the least on the shadows. And your offset moves everything up and down in equal amount.
Now, what's actually happening with these tools, and there's a reason why I'm explaining this part because it'll come up later, but each of these are just basic mathematical operators. And why we need to know that is it helps us understand how our tools are working. So as an example with our offset here, offset is just a basic addition adjustment, meaning it's just adding or subtracting numbers.
Our gain is a multiplier, which is why it starts at 1. So anything multiplied by 1 is the same thing, of course, and that's why when we increase it, you'll notice that the values that are the highest are the ones that are increased the most and the ones that are the lowest increase the least. And that's why gain focuses mostly on highlights.
Our lift is basically the same thing as gain except the inverse. So if we move that, it moves the same exact way as gain, but in the reverse direction, which is why it focuses mostly on shadows. And then our gamma is actually an exponential adjustment, meaning it doesn't ever fully touch the top and it never fully touches the bottom, but it touches everything in between. And we'll show this in a little bit more of a visual representation later.
But then we have some other tools, like our contrast, which enhances the difference between our highlights and shadows, and our pivot adjusts where that center point of the contrast is applied. We'll go ahead and double click to reset those. And then we have our temp and tint adjustments. Now, I wouldn't recommend usually using these, but I'll show you what they do really quick. Temp is meant to adjust your white balance and tint is meant to adjust your green magenta shift.
And then we have our saturation tool here. Increasing saturation will make your colors look more vivid, but this is also an adjustment I wouldn't recommend increasing, and I'll get to why in a little bit as well. There's also color boost, which is similar to saturation, but operates a slightly different way. You can almost think of them as saturation is your gain for colors, and color boost is your gamma for colors.
Now, you'll notice on our lift, gamma, and gain, we have four different channels, as opposed to offset, which just has the red, green, and blue. And that's because lift, gamma, and gain all have a luminance value. So if I just move this luminance one, it's only adjusting that luminance channel, not the red, green, and blue channels. But I can move the red, green, and blue channels separately. And I'll go ahead and reset that.
And the reason I show you this is because it leads into our Loom mix adjustment here. Loom mix is basically how much influence this adjustment has on the rest of the image. So right now it's at 100, so it's doing its full adjustment. If I reset Loom mix to zero, this will have no effect at all. If you want to make a specific color adjustment without adjusting how bright or dark that part of the image is, usually it's a good idea to turn Loom mix off.
Now, anytime we want to reset all of our parameters at once, let's say we have just like a bunch of things going on here. We want to reset this. You can always select this reset all button, and it'll reset all the parameters in that specific box.
And then next we're going to look at our custom curves, which is under this tab here. And then our custom curves basically has the same type of control that our left-gamma-gamma offset do, but we have more fine-tuned control over how these curves are applied. So if we move this right here and make just a simple S curve, we can see we can make a pretty contrasty image, but we also have control over just every single aspect and make really fine-tuned looks if we wanted to.
And we can also split up our red, green, and blue channels. So let's say we wanted to have less blue in the highlights and less red in the shadows, and then maybe reduce green a little bit in both areas as well. We get a really quick look really fast. And now that might not exactly be what we want, but it's good to know that we have this type of control. So let's go ahead and hit that reset all again and make sure these are linked so that we don't mess anything up later.
Now to fully understand what happens in our image, let's go ahead and take a look at our scopes. So I'm going to hit this expand window to make it easier to see. We have four primary monitoring tools here. There's also a fifth one, but we're not really going to talk about this one today. This has to do with color spaces and color management. So we're just going to avoid that one for now. But we're going to go ahead and switch this to a single view and talk about one at a time.
And the first one we're going to talk about is our waveform. Now waveform is monitoring our exposure in the image from black to white and monitoring the image from left to right. So it's viewing the exposure at any given point in the image from left to right and showing us exactly how bright those specific pixels are using red, green and blue. So for example, if we pushed our gain all the way up, you'll see that the exposure moves up because our image is getting brighter. And if we just push this really far up, you'll see that as we flatline here at the top with this line, that's where all of these solid white points are. And that means there is no texture, no detail there. All is just solid white. Let's go ahead and reset that.
The same can be said if we bring lift all the way down and we start seeing those bottom parts hit and we flatline on the bottom. That means those points are solid black. And we can see exactly what point we're actually hovering over if we go over to this three dot menu right here and select display qualifier focus. Now, if we have our qualifier button selected on this tab, we can hover over this and you'll see that the waveform shows us exactly what pixel we're showing and how much red, green and blue is on that specific part. Let's go ahead and reset our lift here.
And then the next thing we're going to look at is the vector scope. Now, what the vector scope does is it shows us how much saturation is at any given point of the image and what color it's shifting towards. So on our vector scope, we have red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta. So if I increase saturation right here, you'll see that as the picture becomes more vivid, the colors spread out more because we're making them more saturated. And if I bring saturation all the way down to zero, you'll see that we just have this dot in the center because there is no color in the image. So everything is just flat gray. So vector scope doesn't really monitor exposure as much as it does monitoring how vivid a specific color is.
Now, a couple other points of reference for this vector scope that are nice to have is if we click on this settings tab, we can also show two times zoom, which will magnify the signal so it's easier to see. And then we also have this skin tone indicator. And this is functioning as a guideline, not a rule, but a guideline of where skin tones normally land. So if I hover over his skin tone, I can see, okay, it looks like we're pretty close to being dead on where the skin tone should be at. So I'm going to go ahead and turn that off for now and keep this viewer as is. And that's essentially how our primary two scopes work.
If we look at our other tools here, right here, I'm just going to go ahead and change this back to parade. A parade is basically the same thing as a waveform. It just splits the red, green and blue channels into three separate spots instead of overlaying them on top of each other. But they're showing you the exact same information. And then a histogram just shows you how prominent any pixel color is at any given point from black to white. We can go ahead and hit this X to bring this back down here. And I'm just going to keep this on the waveform for now.
So now that we understand our scopes and some of our basic tools, I'm going to add something onto here and I'm just going to reset that. Right here, because there was a point unable. But I'm going to go ahead to this gallery and you won't have this specific tool because it's one I specifically catered for this. But I'm just going to add this grayscale ramp here. And as I hover over it, you'll see that I have the waveform showing me exactly which point I'm hovering over. And so now we can look at our lift, gamma gain offset or curves. If I start moving this around, you'll see that it's mimicking exactly what I'm doing here, because this is showing us exactly how our tools are functioning. So if I move gain, you can see that this is the exact type of operation it's doing. If I move offset, you'll see it moves everything up and down evenly. Our gamma moves everything but black and white. And this removes mostly the shadows and moves everything but white. Reset that. And then we can see exactly how our contrast is applied. So it provides this little S curve here. And then you can see as we move our pivot, it's adjusting that center point of where that contrast is applied. And also if I move contrast backwards, you'll notice that it doesn't do an S curve. It will actually reduce contrast linearly. Just wanted to point that out.
And now that we see that, I'm going to go ahead and add this still here. Again, you don't have access to this. I customized this one. I have a special DCTL tool that's a studio only feature. But again, you don't need this. This is just for visual representation.
Now I mentioned that moving temp, tint, saturation, and color boost aren't necessarily recommended. Now I can show you somewhat why here. I'm going to just make a new node here. I just press Alt S to do so. And if I move my temp, you'll notice that as we move, you'll see the lines over here kind of shift in an interesting direction where the ones that are at the top are the brightest are the ones that are moving the most and ones down here at least. And that's because temp and tint are actually similar to gain adjustments where they're both multipliers. And the reason this doesn't really work is because it's not really how light behaves. So it's a very unnatural looking adjustment. So let's go ahead and remove this. And you're not going to see this on the line, but the saturation functions the same way. Back when I said that saturation and color boost like the gain and gamma saturation is also a multiplier. We can better see this on the vectorscope. You'll see that the values that are the most vivid are the ones that are being adjusted and moved the most. And then if I move color boost, you'll see that the ones that are at the top still move, but you'll see a lot of the ones at the lower end also move a lot. So let's go ahead and reset that there.
Now, if temp and tint aren't great adjustments, is there a better way to do it? Well, yes, there is. There's a concept known as working in linear. There's also different chromatic adaptation effects, but we're not going to really get into effects today. We're just keeping it simple, but linear involves some color management stuff. If you would like to learn more about working in linear, please leave a comment and I can do a detailed video later. For now, we're just going to use our offset and that's going to suffice for today. But instead of running our temp and tint all around, we can actually just move our offset wheel around and get a little bit of a more clean movement of our white balance and green magenta shift. And we can be more precise with it as well. We can also do the same thing with exposure with offset as offset is actually the original exposure tool. So we can move this up and down and we can get a difference in exposure. But again, working in linear is the more optimal way to do it. Again, I can do a video on that if you'd like.
So when it comes to saturation and color boost, what's the alternative there? Well, we can go over to the color slice tool and now color slice is going to look overwhelming, but we're going to focus on these two adjustments right here. So we have another saturation adjustment here and then one down here. Well, what's the difference? So if I go back to the waveform, this is actually going to be easier to see. If I increase saturation over here, you'll notice that the red, green and blue channels just kind of separate and try to make colors more vivid by spreading apart from each other. This is what's known as additive saturation. But if I go to the saturation over here and I'm going to bring sat balance to negative one just to make this easier to see. If I increase saturation in color slice, you'll notice that none of our red, green and blue values are increasing. They're all decreasing. This is what's known as subtractive saturation. Now, just to understand this in a more simplistic way, when I say subtractive, I mean that whenever a color gets more saturated, it gets darker. And that's basically how film or print works. So increasing saturation in something like color slice gives us a more filmic type of saturation adjustment. So I'm going to go ahead and reset that there.
And then what is density? Well, density in the same way that subtractive saturation makes things darker, density will look at what the most saturated colors are and reduce their brightness or luminance. So if I increase density here, you'll see that the most saturated colors are the things that are getting affected the most. So go ahead and reset that there too. And we'll just reset this whole thing.
And then we have our different individual color vectors where we can adjust the specific colors individually. So we have our red, yellow, green, sand, blue, magenta. And then we also have this skin vector, which unfortunately makes it a little bit of an issue sometimes if you're trying to adjust your reds and yellows because skin isn't actually one of our six color vectors over here. So you just have to be careful as you're adjusting this and not push it too far because obviously you can get some significant breakage or weird artifacting. So just something to be aware of there. But with our different individual color vectors, we can adjust our density and our saturation per color channels. So this can be nice if we're trying to dial in a specific look or adjust certain colors. Go ahead and reset that again.
So now that we understand that tool, let's look at power windows. Power windows you can think of as masks. I'm also going to reset this offset here so that it doesn't look weird as soon as I apply it. But I'm just going to go ahead and apply this circle power window. And I'm going to hover my mouse over the window and scroll out to zoom out and make a more fine tune adjustment. But let's say I put this power window over our subject here and just make it really large. And then this pink circle right here where I'm adjusting is our feathering. So this is the softness of the power window. So if I do this and then go ahead and move my offset here, you'll notice that the adjustment is happening inside this power window here. So if I turn off this power window right here and look at this before and after, again, I'll get to how to do this before. But you'll see that we're only seeing that adjustment where that power windows applied. So that's a really good way to localize certain adjustments. Power windows are also trackable too. If you want to track it with a moving subject, you can use this tracker window tab.
So those are really all the key tools that can get you started with a vast majority of your grades. I'm going to go ahead and switch this back to the curves window. And let's just reset everything to default by right clicking on our node graph and selecting reset all grades and nodes. And that'll give us a clean slate to work with here.
So speaking of nodes, let's talk about how our nodes work and what they do. Now, pretty much any given node inside of our node graph is what's called a serial node. And those are just standard nodes that you have in your graph. And to add a new node, you can just press alt or option S and that'll add a new node in front of the one you just had selected. If you wanted to add a node before the one you had selected, you could press shift S and that'll add one before.
So whenever you're building out a node graph, usually you want to have your biggest broadest adjustments early on. So that's when you do your exposure, your white balance or color balance, and your overall contrast, and anything that has the most broadest effect to your node tree. And then later on, you can apply secondary adjustments that don't have as much of an effect, but you want to do those later on so that those don't ruin the original intents of the image.
You can also label your nodes as well. If you right click on a node, we can select node label. And I can just type in exposure. And in this one, we'll just call this balance for color balance. And for this one, we'll call it contrast. And in this way, we make sure that our image is exposed correctly first. So we make that adjustment first. Then we go to our balance and then we can make sure we have the proper white balance for the image. Then in our third one, we can adjust our contrast and give it the specific type of look that we're going for here. And contrast can be a number of different things. You can just use your contrast and pivot. You could use a combination of lift, gamma, gain, or you could even do a custom curves contrast. Whatever works, there's no right or wrong answer for any of those. But this way, you can go back to each individual one and let's say, "Well, maybe that contrast made it a little bit too dark. Let's go ahead back to our exposure and just bring that up a bit." And that way, we don't ruin the intention of any of our other adjustments.
And then to enable and disable a node either for preview or just to see what it looks like without it, you can just select that node and press Ctrl or Command D. And that'll disable a node to see exactly what kind of thing it's doing to that adjustment. You can also highlight multiple and still press Command or Ctrl D. And it'll enable, disable any of those nodes you have selected. Or you can press Alt or Option D. And that'll enable or disable all the nodes in this node graph to see the full before and after.
Now, there are different types of nodes that you can add. So if I just add a new node in front of our contrast node, we can right-click and then go to Add Node. And you'll see we have a few other ones. We have parallel, layer, and outside. So let's start with parallel. And what parallel does is it makes a branch to put one node on top and one node on bottom. You can make additional branches if you want to if you add inputs. But we'll just keep it to two for now, just so you can make it simple.
Now, why a parallel node is useful is let's say you wanted to make certain adjustments, but you wanted them both to not interact with each other. And you wanted them to base off of the same original image. Well, that's what a parallel node does. So whatever this contrast node is sending out, both of these nodes are still operating on that original image that contrast is giving it to them without knowing what the other two are doing. And then when you get to this part where it merges them back together, it just blends the average of the both. So we could do stuff like let's say we wanted to give an interesting density type of look, but we didn't want our saturation adjustments to interact with each other. So what we could do is we can actually reduce saturation in our primaries here, to something like that. And then we could go to this other node here and then increase saturation in our color slice tool. And then we can highlight these both to see what kind of adjustment that makes. And maybe we like it or maybe we don't, but sometimes that can give us a little bit fine tune of an adjustment, as opposed to if I just select this node here and press E to remove it from the node graph and then click and drag and put it in front. Now that has a very different response as it would if I had them in parallel. So you can see how those two react differently. I'm going to go ahead and put this back to where it was.
Now there's also the layer mixer, which has the same format as a parallel node. So if we add layer, it will basically do the same thing, except this is a layer instead of a parallel. You can also right click on the parallel and morph it to a layer mixer. So now it is one. And layer mixer basically just uses composite modes. So if you're familiar with composite modes, you can have a lot of fun with playing with these. And basically how these work is the bottom one takes priority over the top. We won't go into all the specifics because this can get really complex really quickly, but you now know that it's there. So I'm just going to switch this back to parallel.
And individual nodes have composite modes built into them. So you don't necessarily need to use a layer mixer if you're not doing two different adjustments mixed together. And then real quick, before we get to the outside node, I'm just going to go ahead and label these. Sat reduce, red is not reduce. Sat reduce and then sat increase. And then I'm just going to go ahead and highlight all of these, move them over a little bit. You can also change the size of your nodes. If you click and drag this, you can increase or decrease the size of them. I usually like to have them small to give me a little bit more space to work with.
But let's look at our last node here is called the outside node. I'm just going to add a new node in front of it. And let's go ahead and just create a power window here. So let's add a power window, do similar thing that we did earlier with increasing and putting it just on our subject here. And I'm going to go ahead and just add some offset here. Or maybe actually I'm going to increase gain on this one. So let's do that. And now let's right click on this and then add node, add outside. And what outside does is it connects the mask part, which is the blue connection, and it automatically inverts it. So anything that we do in this node is on the opposite end of this power window. So if I go into here and let's say we reduce our gamma or something, you'll see that all the adjustments are applying outside of this power window. So now we can look at before and after this. And we really make our subject pop a little bit more by just adding almost like a natural vignette or natural darkening and changing the lighting. So an outside node can be very, very powerful if utilized properly. And then we're just going to go ahead and turn this off here. And then just a fun little shortcut right here. If you select your window in here and press shift control X or shift command X, it'll automatically set it to fit to window.
Now let's take a look at our before and after. It doesn't look too bad. I think we did an okay job with this. It definitely gives it a little more pop and looks a little bit better. Let's say we wanted to save this grade and use it in a different place. We can go ahead and pull up our gallery and make sure our stills are highlighted here. And we can just right click on our window and select grab still. And that's going to save this node graph into this here as a still, which also can be considered a preset.
So now let's bring our clips up and let's just go to our next camera over here, which doesn't have anything on it. Let's say we wanted to apply that same node graph from what we did on the first one. There's a couple of ways we can do that. If we had it as a still, we can right click this and apply grade. And that applies the same nodes that we just had. Another way we can do that is if we right click on the clip that has the grades on it. We can right click and select apply grade from there. That'll basically do the same thing. But the benefit of using a still is let's say I wanted to make a slightly different adjustment and see what that would look like back and forth. That would be a good time for us to bring up our split screen window. So let's go ahead and just turn off clips just to give us a little more real estate here. I'm going to drag this window over and you'll see this split screen view here. I'm going to select it and you can hit this drop down and then just go to selected still grades. If you were trying to compare with a different clip, you could use selected clips. And this is a great way to preview back and forth. So we'll just go ahead and hit selected still grades. And let's just say we made a different balance adjustment. So let's just say we made this a little bit more green or something. If we go ahead and turn off a gallery here with it still selected, now we can see the before and after. And what's nice is is that on our waveform and our vectorscope, it shows us the difference between the two. So if I'm moving this around, you'll see that one is moving and the other is stationary. So you can see which ones are which. And on our waveform, you'll see that if I'm moving exposure, it's only moving the one on the left instead of the one on the right or whichever one you have selected to make an adjustment with. So this is a good way to directly compare one or the other and see which one you like better. So I think I like the original one that we did better. So I'm going to go ahead and just go back to my gallery and instead of right clicking and selecting apply grade, I can also just middle click and that'll automatically apply it there as well.
So let's go ahead and turn off our split screen mode. And then we notice we have this folder here called power grade. If you right click, you can actually make a power grade album or power grades are for is let's say you have a specific template that you want to be able to use in any project. You can just click and drag a still into the power grade or you can just create a still with power grade selected. And that grade or a still or that node tree will show up in every single project that you open.
Let's go back to our stills here and I'm just going to turn off the gallery for now. Let's bring back up our clips and then let's go to this third camera here and let's go ahead and middle click our clip so we can apply that same tree. Now, if we highlight our clip here, let's bring up that split screen view again and we'll go to selected clips. That's how we can compare one to the other. Now we notice that our original clip that we like doesn't really match this one. So this is why we split up our node tree accordingly so that we can see the before and after now. It's mostly the colors that don't look right. So let's go ahead and switch to our vector scope and you'll see that there definitely is a shift between them so we can go to our balance node and let's just move our offset until we actually align those as basically as close as we can. And with just that simple adjustment, we got a lot closer to matching both cameras with just that one little adjustment. So there's a lot of powerful things you can do inside the color page.
The last thing I'm going to show you, I'm going to deselect this, is something called groups. Now you'll notice that we have these two tabs up here. We have clip and timeline. Let's say because we have all three of these from the basically the same group of a session or same camera, we can actually highlight all of our clips and we can right click on them and select add into a new group. And we'll just call this interview. And now after we've made that group, you'll notice that we have these chain links connecting them and we have two more tabs that show up here. We have group preclip and group post clip. And this essentially means that whatever adjustments we make in these group sections will apply to every single clip inside of that group. Let's say I wanted to make a adjustment here in our curves and let's just say I wanted to make this type of adjustment here. You can see in these clips down here that this adjustment is happening to all of them. And again, this is just for preview, but you can see like just that little adjustment here is being applied to all of them. So this is a good way to imply a specific look if you have something you want to do to every single clip in that group. And then the last note here just on groups is the group preclip happens before your adjustments in the clip section do. And the group post clip happens after your clip adjustments have been applied. So just keep that in mind. The order of operations do matter.
And then lastly, if you go to the timeline tab, timeline is applied to every single clip in your timeline regardless of whether or not they're grouped. This just gets applied to everything, including graphics or including anything that's in your timeline.
And that's the color page in a nutshell. Hopefully this makes it a lot less intimidating and gives you some fun ideas of how to build interesting looks. What should we cover next? Color management, effects, camera matching or fixing difficult shots. I would love to see how I could help lift your skills, gain new workflows or maybe contrast some different ideas. Okay, that was bad. Maybe you should just pivot to the next video.