Transcription
Are you tired of watching countless tutorials on color grading? Sick of YouTubers trying to sell you complicated power grades or wasted enough money on one-click lots that actually just make your footage look worse?
Well, in this video, I'm going to teach you an extremely simple and effective method that will allow you to color grade anything. You're going to learn the difference between color grading and color correction, how to set your exposure, balance skin tones, correct white balance, and match your shots to ensure consistent grades across your entire project.
So, before we get started, I just want to run you guys through the best project settings for Da Vinci Resolve when you're color grading. So to access your project settings, you're going to go down to the bottom right hand side of the screen and you're going to see this cog icon here. You're going to select that and then you're going to come down to color management. Now we're going to take a look at these settings right here.
The first one is going to be color science and you want to make sure that that is set to Da Vinci YGB. And then for timeline color space, we're going to set this to Da Vinci widegamut intermediate. By default, this will probably be on Rec 709 scene, but you're going to scroll up until you can find Da Vinci widegamut intermediate. Now, I'm going to explain exactly why we use Da Vinci Ygamutam later in this tutorial, but for now, just make sure this is selected to Da Vinci Ygamut/intermediate.
Next, we're going to come down to output color space. If you're editing on Windows, this is fairly straightforward. You've got two main options. The first is Rex 79 Gamma 2.2. This is great if you're delivering for anything online such as YouTube or social media, then I'd probably go with Gamma 2.2. If you're delivering for traditional film or broadcast/TV, then probably REC 79 Gamma 2.4 is a better option.
However, if you are editing on a Mac, this is where it gets a little bit confusing. Now, the reason this gets a little bit confusing on a Mac is because of a gamma shift issue that relates to the Mac display. What that essentially means is you go to color grade your project and then when you export it, the colors look different from what you were actually viewing within Da Vinci Resolve. So, as you can imagine, that's quite a big problem and the best workound for that in my opinion is Rec 709A.
Once you've done that, you're going to go to these three white dots up here and you're going to select set current settings as default preset and then select update. What that's going to do is it's going to make sure that you don't have to touch these settings ever again. And every time you open a new project, this will all be done for you. You can then go ahead and close the project settings.
Now, again, if you are on a Mac, there's one more step we need to do to fix that issue I mentioned earlier, and that is to go into the Da Vinci preferences, go down to system, general, and just make sure that use Mac display color profiles for viewers is selected. This step is also very very important. Do not forget that if you are editing on a Mac and then hit save.
Okay, so let's quickly look over the interface of Da Vinci Resolve. So to the top right hand side here, we've got our node area where we can add our nodes. These nodes are essentially like building blocks. They allow us to stack adjustments from left to right and they allow us to organize our color grade in a very intuitive way. To the left we have our viewer where we can see what we're grading. Beneath that we've got our adjustments where we can make the changes to the image. And to the right we've got our scopes which help us to understand our image better and assist us in making accurate adjustments.
So before we start color grading let's address the elephant in the room which is why does this image look so flat? Now that was because it was shot in log. What is log? It's essentially a picture profile that allows the camera to capture as much dynamic range as possible by recording a flat and washed out image. But then when it comes to color grading that gives us so much more control and how we manipulate the image and what kind of adjustments we can make.
So let's take a look at how we can convert this log footage to a standard picture profile. Now we're going to use a special tool to do this called a color space transform. So what we're going to do here is create one more node by using the shortcut option S on a Mac or al S on Windows. We're going to label the first node by right-clicking and selecting node label or using the shortcut R and we'll type CST in. Then we'll select the second node, rightclick node label and type CST out. We're then going to go into our effects tab and we're going to go ahead and drag this color space transform effect to both the CST in and the CST out.
Now for the CST in, I shot this image on Sony SLOG 3. So I'm going to go ahead and select Sony SGAT 3 Cine for the input color space and for the input gamma I'm going to select Sony SLOG 3. Now depending on what camera you shot your footage on, these settings will change. However, on the screen right now, I'm going to display the input color space and input gamma for the most popular camera manufacturers. So hopefully you can see the correct settings for your camera here.
If you're not shooting on a Sony, I do need to make one thing clear though. If you haven't shot your footage in log and you just shot it in a standard picture profile, you can skip this step completely. It's not relevant to you. So only if you shot your footage in log will this apply. The next step is to change the output color space to Da Vinci wide gamut and the output gamma to Da Vinci intermediate.
Next, go to the CST out node. We're going to select the input color space of Da Vinci wide gamut, the input gamma to Da Vinci intermediate, and then our output color space will be rec 709. And then if you're editing on a Windows, you'll select gamma 2.2 or gamma 2.4. Or if you're on a Mac, you'll select rec 709A.
Now, straight away, our image is looking much better. This is because it's been converted to rec 709. So, I want to take a quick minute to actually explain to you what exactly Rex 79 is. You probably heard this term a lot online if you've watched any color grading tutorials. But you might be wondering what exactly it is and what is a color space. And you can see in this diagram, it's represented here by this small little triangle here that says Rex 709. Rex 709 is the standard picture profile that most displays display such as your computer, your TV, your phone. Most of these traditional displays display for Rex 709. And the reason most displays are set to Rex 709 is because it's a very universal color space. That being said, it's a smaller color space, so that means that we have to grade within the confines of Rex 709. There are, however, much larger color spaces that will give us much more control and flexibility when grading. A good example of this is the timeline color space that we selected before, which is Da Vinci Ygamut, and you can see that here, represented by this big large triangle. This is the Da Vinci Ygamut color space, and it's much much larger than the Rec 709 color space.
But just hearing me ramble on about these color spaces probably doesn't mean much to you. So, let me actually show you how this works with a real life example. So, here's what would happen if we were to work in Rec 709. So, let's create a node before the color space transform by using the shortcut Ctrl S. And then, we're going to go back to our project settings by selecting the cog icon again. And we're going to change our timeline color space to rec 709 and select save. Now, let's try making an adjustment. So, we're going to go to our HDR wheels and we're going to pull our exposure up like so to about there. Now you'll notice straight away the image is starting to lose information in the highlights and it's breaking very quickly. However, if we was to go back and change our timeline color space to a wider color space like Da Vinci Y gamut, take a look what happens. I select this watching the screen here and I select save and straight away we recover all that information. The image is no longer clipping. So that means when we're using a wider color space like Da Vinci wide gamut, we have so much more room for adjustments, control, and flexibility. So I strongly recommend using Da Vinci wide gamut as your timeline color space.
So, we're going to start with this first image. So, using the keyboard shortcut option s or alt s, let's create four new nodes. And then we can rightclick clean up node graph to keep everything organized. The first one we're going to rename to exposure. To do that, simply use the keyboard shortcut R. And then you can type in exp for exposure. Go to the next node. Again, use a shortcut R. Let's type WB for white balance. Next one, co for contrast. And finally, we're going to write HSV SAT for saturation. And I'm going to explain why we've got HSV written here when we get to this step.
So, we're going to start with exposure. Now, when setting the exposure, the tool I like to use is in the HDR wheels here, and it's global. The reason I use this rather than the regular offset is because this global adjustment acts more like the ISO in your camera. So, if I slide this down, the image gets darker, and if I slide it up, the image gets brighter. So, how do you know how light or dark to make the image? Well, we've got this tool over here which is called the waveform. Now, there are a few settings I like to change when setting this up. The first thing you need to do to get to this screen here is to make sure that waveform is selected. So, if you click this, you may be on prey by default. Just select this and select waveform. Then, I like to go into these settings icons here. And then you're going to make sure that Y is selected. By default, it will probably be RGB. Change that to Y. And then make sure that colorize is not selected. The next thing to quickly change is by going to these three dots here. And then just make sure that display qualify focus is enabled. And also change waveform scale style to percentage. And what that will do is make these numbers here go from zero to 100.
So what do these values actually mean? This is a waveform and all of these white lines are representing luminance or brightness values in the image. Now understanding how to read this may seem very confusing at first, but it's actually not as complicated as it might seem. I just want to very quickly draw your attention to this image over here because it's going to make it easier to explain how this waveform actually works. So if I go down to here and I select the qualifier tool, I can then drag my cursor over the image. And you'll notice by looking at the waveform that we can see the position of the cursor on the waveform directly correlating to the image in the viewer. So you'll see this pole here is obviously a lot darker than the sky. And you can see that represented in the waveform. The waveform is literally a linear reading of the image on the x-axis and on the y-axis it's showing you how bright or dark something is. So again, we're seeing on here it's reading as darker on the waveform. And as we drag that cursor to the sky, you can see it's reading lighter. Now, it's a little bit confusing to get your head around this at first, but as we go through examples in this tutorial, hopefully it will start to make a lot more sense to you. Here we have another example. Again, if we look at the waveform, we can see the bright clouds are represented here. If we drag our cursor, that's the brightest part. And then we go down to the darkest part of the image, which is the foot down here. And that's also being represented on the waveform. and it directly correlates to the same position on the x-axis as the image. Hopefully, this is all starting to make sense to you now.
Now, these numbers here on the left hand side, 0 to 100, they basically specify levels of brightness from complete black to complete white. Any information of the image that goes above 100 is considered clipping and it's lost information. So, if I was to drag this exposure slider here and I keep dragging it up, you'll see that as we get closer to 100, pure white and we're losing information. Alternatively, if I reset that and I start dragging it down, the waveform starts bunching towards zero and our image starts to get darker until we get to pure black. And this is known as crushing the shadows. And again, we're losing information. So, when setting your exposure, you want to make sure that the information on the waveform remains between the values of 100 and zero. Where exactly you set it is context dependent. Let me explain. Here we have a nighttime scene that is exposed correctly. However, if you look down into the waveform, you'll notice that all the information is bunched down to zero. So by just looking at this waveform, we might think this image is not exposed properly. But we have to take into consideration that it is a night scene. So that's what I meant by context is important. Alternatively, if we look at this example here, if we look at the waveform, we're seeing this information start to flatten out. And that actually means that the information is also clipping. Doesn't just have to be above 100. If anything's flat like that, it's a sign that that part of the image is clipping. However, in the context of this image, the camera was facing directly into the sun and we've exposed for the trees. So this image would still be considered exposed correctly. We just have to take into account the context and the reasons why the waveform might be clipping.
So let's come back to our image. Let's grab the global control here. And we're just going to pull that exposure down a bit. I'm going to pull it down to about here. And I'm pretty happy with that. I might then come into my primaries and just grab my lift to brighten up those shadows just a little bit. Like that. These primary adjustments over here, lift, gamma, gain, and offset. You can think of these like shadows, midtones, highlights, and exposure. However, they are a little bit different in the way they behave. They're a bit more of a global and softer adjustment. I like to set my exposure over here with the HDR wheels and then fine-tune specific areas like the shadows, mid tones, or highlights by using the lift, gamma, and gain. So, you can play around with these controls to find something that you like. Now, you'll notice here with the waveform, our exposure is looking pretty good. Nothing's clipping, and nothing's getting crushed in the shadows.
So, let's move on to the next step, which is the white balance. So, there are two main ways to set your white balance. either by using skin tones or by finding neutral areas in the shot such as black, gray, or white. Obviously, there's no skin tones visible in the shot. So, we're going to set our white balance by using this black here on the hoodie. So, I'm just going to zoom in real quick by scrolling on my mouse and then I'm going to go to my waveform and I'm going to change a few settings so that we can use this to actually set the correct white balance. So, the first thing you're going to do is select the settings icon here. You're going to change it to RGB and then you're going to select colorize. And now you'll notice that we've got some color information over here in the waveform. Now I'm making sure that this qualifier icon is selected. I'm going to drag my cursor over to the hood and I'm going to take a look at what's going on. If you look very closely at the waveform, it appears that there's too much blue and not enough green in the image. So I'm going to make those adjustments accordingly. I'm going to start by taking away some blue. I'm going to expand the image again and just drag this blue down just a tiny amount. Then I'm going to bring my mouse back to the hood little bit more blue. Go back again. And so far that's looking pretty good. We can always go back and readjust that after correcting the contrast and saturation. So, just quickly, that's before, after, before, after. It's very subtle. Before, after. You'll see that difference more when we add some more saturation. But, let's first move on to the contrast.
To adjust the contrast, you're going to use this contrast slider here. Again, we're still in the primaries color wheels section over here. Come down to the contrast and start to drag that to the right, just like so, till you find a spot where you're happy with the contrast. Now, a really cool thing you could do here is actually grab the pivot and that will open up the contrast and change what parts of the image are affected. Essentially adding more contrast in the highlights or shadows. So, I like to just pull that to the left a bit to open up my contrast adjustment. Like so. Before, after, maybe even a little bit less pivot. Before, after. That's looking pretty good so far.
Now, next we're going to add some saturation. So, you remember earlier we named this HSV SAT. So, what exactly is HSV saturation? Now, before I show you what that is, I want to first show you how regular saturation works. If I just come down to the saturation slider here and I just start pulling it up, very quickly it starts to become overpowered and doesn't look very aesthetically pleasing. This image probably isn't the best example because it's not that saturated, but it's more obvious when you're working with skin tones and bright colors. Now, a better way to add saturation is by using HSV saturation. So, if I just reset that by clicking this icon here, and then I right click on this node, I go down to color space and I select HSV. Then I click again, come down to channels, untick channel one, come again channels, untick channel three. And now if I adjust my gamma or gain, I'm able to add a much more softer and cinematic looking saturation. Now what exactly is happening here? When I drag this gamma, I'm mainly adding saturation to the less saturated areas. So the areas that are already quite saturated, they're not receiving as much saturation, but the areas that are less saturated is getting a boost, which is giving you a more balanced and cinematic saturation look. So, real quickly, I'll just show you before. That's with regular saturation, and that's with HSV saturation. It's a more of a softer, cinematic, and a less overpowered look to it. And that is essentially the entire color correction process. It's that simple.
But now, it's time to get into the fun part, which is actually color grading. So, let's just create some space in our node tree. I've dragged all my nodes to the side. And the first thing I like to do is add a lot. Now, essentially, a lot is like a pre-created look that you can simply add to your footage to achieve a creative look quickly. Don't worry, I'm not about to sell you a lot. I'm going to give you a lot for free. I'm going to link it in the description down below so you can use that to follow along and to achieve the same look on your footage.
Now, to actually apply the lot, first we're going to create a new node that's going to go after the CSD out. Again, option S. Let's rename that one lot. Going to come over to this folder over here, lots. And then if you just click on any folder in here, right click, reveal in Finder, you'll be taken to the folder where the lots are stored. Then all you need to do is find the lot that you downloaded, select it, and simply drag it into the folder like so. I'm not going to drag it again cuz it's already in there. And then you'll be able to find it in your folder. If it's not there, simply right click and select refresh. You're then going to drag this Dexilm L onto your node like so. And then it will apply a look. That's before. That's after. That's before. That's after.
Now, I created the L on the stronger side on purpose so that we have the option to pull it back and make it less intense. To do that, you're going to click this icon here. You're going to find key output, and I like to change this to 0.5 as a good starting point and select. That's before, that's after. Before, after. So, it's a very subtle effect. You might also notice now that there's more saturation, that the white balance looks a little bit too green. So, I might just zoom in real quick and fix that. Going back to my white balance node, selecting the qualifier. Let's just have a look. And it appears that there's a little bit too much blue and green and not enough red. So, we're going to go back in here. Let's just take that green down a little bit. Just a tad. Have a look. Take the blue down. Maybe something like that. That's before. That's after. Before. After. Nice and subtle. That looks pretty good to me.
Now, the next thing I might start to do here is try to start shaping the light to draw attention to the subject. We're going to create a new node and we're going to label this one mask. Now, to add a new mask, you're going to come down to this icon here. And these are called power windows. We're going to select this circle one here and that's going to place a circle on the viewer. We're then going to drag the circle out like so and then drag it down. Then if you look closely, you'll see a thinner circle on the outside. Pull that down as well and that's going to feather and soften our adjustment. If I select this icon up here, it's going to show us what's being selected. Right now, this area inside is being selected. I want to select just the outside of this mask. So, I'm going to select this icon here. And that's going to invert the mask. Now, just the outside of the image is being selected. Let's take off this view. And we're now going to go back to our primaries. And then I'm going to pull down my gamma, which remember is like midtones. Pull that down. And I'm going to start to make the edge of the image a bit darker. Now, if I show you this in full screen and we go before and after, what that's doing is it's just framing the subject a little bit better. It's naturally drawing your eyes to the subject. Again, before, after, before, after.
Now, let's say I wanted to add another power window. What's the best way to do that? Well, we're actually going to use a new kind of node to do that, and that's called a parallel node. So, if I go ahead and drag this node out like so, and I right click, add parallel, it's going to create a node below that one. Let's first just clean this up by right-clicking, clean up node graph. And now we can see it a bit nicer. So, yeah, what is this parallel node about? Well, essentially what we're going to do here is we're going to take the same clean image feed from here and we're going to split it into two directions. This node gets a little bit complicated, but in essence, it essentially allows you to take the output of this node, which is all these nodes combined, and then add multiple adjustments that take the same output rather than having to build upon each other. So each node is building upon the previous one. What that means is any adjustment that's made here, this next node will take that as the starting ground for the adjustment that it's going to make. So in the case of adding these power windows, I don't want to add my next adjustment on top of this window we've just created. I want to add it to the same clean feed we got from the end of our color correction nodes. Is that making sense? So, we're essentially stacking nodes that are taking the same clean output and they're all having a separate effect and then being mixed together equally and then output to the next node. Rather than adding a bunch of masks on top of each other and having them fight over taking away exposure and adding it and taking it away, we're simply just separating them so they can each have an individual effect and then be mixed equally and then outputed. Don't worry if that didn't make too much sense. You don't really need to know how it works as long as you know that when you're adding your masks and your secondary adjustments, it's best to add these using a parallel node.
So, let's say I wanted to now brighten up the subject a bit more. Let's go to the power window. Let's add another circle. Drag it down. Place it here. Feather it. And I might just add a little bit of highlights to that. Like so. Both these power windows are both taking a clean image from here. They're not fighting with each other. And then they're being mixed equally before being outputed to the rest of the nodes. And here we are. This is our final color graded image. If we go before, after, before, after. Pretty simple, right? Apart from these parallel nodes, they do get a bit complicated. The rest of it is pretty straightforward. Honestly, the majority of this look was created with these correction nodes and the lot at the end.
Now, before we get started on the next image, I want to give you something to help you make this process easier. Now, obviously, creating each one of these nodes was quite timeconuming. So, the best way to speed up that process is by using a power grade. So, here we are on the next clip. Now, to speed up that entire process, you want to go to your gallery, and you're going to select power grades. A power grade is essentially like a no tree template that you can simply drag and drop. So, for example, this image here was shot on a Sony camera. So, I'm going to add this Sony power grade. I'm going to rightclick, apply grade, and here we go. We have all our nodes laid out for us. They've all been named. And that color space transform node with all those complicated settings has already been done for us. Everything is completely done, ready to go. You can start grading straight away. So, this power grade I've made for you guys for free. I've added it to the same folder in that lot that I talked about earlier. So, go ahead and download that in the description. And then when you're ready, come to your gallery, select power grades. You're going to right click anywhere here. You're going to select import. And then find this folder here where it says power grades. And then I've added four different options for you. So, if you're shooting on a Sony, Lumix, DJI, or Canon, you can select which one matches your camera. For me, it's Sony. Select that and simply import. I've already imported it, so I won't select import, but that's how you do it if you want to add it yourself. And then once you've got the power grade, you simply right click, apply grade, like so.
So, let's get into grading this image here. So, I'm just going to go ahead and change my waveform back to how I like it for judging exposure by clicking on these settings. Change it back to Y and untick colorize. Okay, so right now the exposure looks okay. We've got a little bit of clipping here. Obviously, that's where the sun's hitting the window, but I think it could be just a little bit darker. I do want to keep in mind though, there are a few dark spots here in the shadow. So, I won't go too much. I'm going to select my exposure node. I'm going to go back to the HDR wheels. I'm just going to drag that down just a little bit. Like so. Now, I might also go back into my primaries and lift up the shadows a little bit. Just a tiny bit. And maybe like so. Let's take the gain or the highlights down a little bit as well. And what you can actually do here is if you go down to this highlight slider here, you can get more of a targeted adjustment that will just affect the very brightest part. So, if I drag this down, we'll just take those highlights down a bit as well. It's looking pretty good so far. Let's see. Before, after. Before, after. I might just bring those highlights back a little bit. I think I overdid it a little bit. Before, after. Okay, I like that. It's a bit more of a softer image. We can add that contrast in later.
Now, we're going to go to our white balance. We'll change our waveform back. Going to RGB colorize. And let's zoom in on the car. Going back to our qualifier icon here. Let's have a look. Looks pretty good. I think it's a little bit too blue. Let's zoom out again. And we'll just pull down some blue out of the image. See how that looks. Looking pretty good. Go back, pull a bit more blue, and take some green out as well. It's hard to find a perfectly white part of the car. So, you just got to play around to find something that looks pretty good. And that's looking pretty good to be honest on the waveform. I'm pretty happy with that. Let's see. Before, after. Before. After. We've just gone ahead and corrected some of that unnecessary blue and made it a bit more balanced. So, I'm happy with that. Let's move on to the contrast again. Let's grab that contrast slider. Pull it up. There we go. And we'll just go ahead and change the pivot till we find a position where it looks good. Happy with that. And now we'll go to our HSV sat. This has already been set up for us. So we don't have to worry about changing any of those settings before. Just simply come in here and let's start dragging our gamma. Adding a bit more in like that. So when you drag the gamma, you're going to target more of the less saturated areas. When you grab the gain, it'll be more of a global adjustment. So we can just work those two together. So we find somewhere that we like. Looking pretty good. It's before. After. Now if we disable all these nodes here. Before. After. So, that's just some simple color correction. Let's go ahead and add our lot. Clicking this last node here, go to lots, find the lot you downloaded earlier, and simply right click, apply lot to current node. And now, the lot is a little bit strong at first. So, we'll go back into this icon here, and we'll change that key output to minus 5. Before, after, nice and subtle, maybe even less. A really important thing, guys, when it comes to color grading is less is always more. There's nothing worse than seeing a look where it's obvious someone has slapped on a lot or gone overboard with a certain color. If you want your footage to look expensive and tasteful, I'd always recommend urge on the side of less. Less is more.
Okay, so next we're going to add some masks. So let's go over to our parallel nodes. Go back to the power window icon here. Let's grab a circle one and we'll create that vignette effect like before. Dragging it up maybe like so. I might even just rotate that to have it surround the car like so. Drag it out. And then we'll invert it. Go back to our primaries and pull that gamma down. Before. After. Now, looking at this image, this bright part of the road is a little bit distracting. So, I might go ahead and make that a bit darker. Grab another power window. This time, we'll use the gradient. And I'll just pull that like so. And then I might make the car a little bit brighter. So, I'm going to add another power window. Make it nice and small. Rotate it. Feather it out a bit. And just add a little bit of brightness again just to make it really pop. And then I might actually, this glare is a little bit strong. I might try and tame that a bit with another power window. Add it on. And I'll try and just pull that down with the highlight slider. Just feather that right out like so. It's before, after, before, after. So, if we go ahead and disable all these power windows. That's before, after, before, after. So, we're essentially shaping light to direct focus to the subject, which is this car. And that's pretty much it. That's how I would grade this shot. If we look at it before, after. Before, after. Looks pretty good.
Okay. So, for this image, again, going to go up into our gallery, apply the power grade, and then we're going to start with the exposure. Okay. Okay, so with this image, there are quite a lot of bright lights and dark shadows. And we can see on our waveform that the lights are clipping and some of the shadows are crushing. That's totally okay. Remember, this is context dependent. It's a nighttime scene. These lights are very bright. That makes sense. Where we do want to focus our attention is the subject itself. She's a little bit dark. So, I'm going to try and add a bit more brightness into the image. Let's select the exposure node. Go to the HDR. I'm just going to very gradually drag up this exposure. Generally when you are color grading you want to avoid raising the exposure as best you can. Ideally whoever shot the image would have exposed it correctly or slightly overexposed it because when we do raise the exposure in post we start to introduce more noise and the image starts to break down. But sometimes you have to do it like we do in this image here. So I'm going to just drag that up like so. That's looking pretty good. And what I'm actually going to do to counteract some of these clipping areas here is I'm going to go back into my primaries and I'm going to go ahead and pull down the highlights a little bit like so. So, if I just show you before, after. Before, after. Essentially, we've brought up those darker parts and we've managed to maintain the brightness in the highlights and not cause them to completely blow out. You can even go ahead and just drag that gain down a little bit. Like so. Before, after. Before, after. That looks pretty good. It's a pretty good starting point.
Now, let's move on to the white balance. Now, because this is the image where we've got some skin tones, our best option here is to actually use the skin as an anchor for our white balance adjustment. So, let's just zoom in to the hand like so. and we're going to use a special tool called a vectorscope. So, if you go into your scopes, click the waveform dropown and select vectorscope. Okay, before we use the vectorscope, we just need to change a few quick settings. Go into the settings icon and make sure that show two time zoom is selected and show skin tone indicator. What the skin tone indicator does is it essentially gives us this line here, which tells us where we should set the white balance. We want our skin tones to sit on this line here. Now, the way we know that is by selecting the qualifier over here and then dragging the cursor onto the skin. and you'll see a little circle down there. And we want that to sit directly in the center of that line. Now, to make it a little bit easier, I'm just going to add some saturation real quick. So, we've got more color information. And I'll go back to the white balance. And I'll just drag this cursor over. And as you can see, it appears to a little bit too far over to the purple and blue. So, I'm just going to pull that back a little bit. This image is a little bit difficult to do because it's so dark and there's so much external light on the skin. But I think I've managed to do a good job of correcting those skin tones. If I show you before, after. Before, after. We've just taken away that purple and added some more natural color to the skin. Before, after.
I'm going to go to the contrast node, change my vectorscope back to the waveform. And let's add in some contrast. Like so. Not too much because it's already quite contrasty. And just open up pivot up a little bit. Like so. Before, after. Before, after. Then let's go ahead and grab a lot. Same one as before. Right click, apply lot. And I might just turn that L down again. Go into here. Have it like so. 0.5. Before, after. Just a very subtle adjustment. Now, let's go in with our power windows to really start to shape up this scene. The first thing I want to do is brighten up her even more. And I'm going to do that by grabbing a circular power window. And just move it over her. Feather it a little bit by pulling this out a little bit wider. Feather it some more. And let's just very slightly add some gain. Just lift it up a little bit like so. It's before, after. Before, after. Then we might go ahead and just darken the surroundings a little bit. Grab another power window, pull it out like so. Invert it and just darken those corners. So if we look at everything so far, it's before, after. Before, after. So we're just really popping her out and making her the subject. Before, after, before, after. What I might do now is try and pull down some of these highlights even more. I'm going to create another power window. Select the subject and then I'm going to invert it and I'm going to go to the gain and just pull that down a little bit like so. I'll feather it again. Pull it in like so. Before, after. Before, after. That's looking pretty good so far. So, if we go ahead and see the final image. This is our grade. So, that's before, after, before, after.
Now, one thing to note as well is this is obviously a video clip, so it's going to be moving. But you can actually track these masks to your subject. So if you go to this icon here, which is the tracking icon, and you simply select this, it'll track the mask forward and backwards like so. And then when you play it back, the mask will stay attached to your subject. So that's a handy little tip to know.
Okay, here we are on the next image. I've already gone ahead and added the power grade. And again, we'll start this image with an exposure adjustment. So I'm going to come over to here. Going to go back to the HDR wheel. Going to pull this down like so. Something about there looks good. It's before, after, before, after. By the way, if anyone's curious how I'm doing the before, after and disabling the node, it's just D on the keyboard. Before, after, before, after. I might go ahead and take the shadows up a little bit. It's a little bit dark. Just pull it up a tad, like so. That looks pretty good. We're then going to go to the white balance. And again, we've got some skin tones here. So, we can go and select our vectorscope, zoom in, get the qualifier tool up again, hover over the skin, and as you can see, the skin looks pretty good. But I think you can see just there, it's a little bit too far over to the purple. So just pull that back just a tad the other way. Drag it down like so. That looks pretty good. That's before after. Before after. So just some purple in the skin. And we've just gone ahead and removed that purple. Like so. And that's looking pretty good. We'll then go ahead and add some contrast. Going back to the waveform. Let's drag this along like so. Add some pivot to open that up a bit. That looks pretty good. Before, after. Before, after. And then we'll add in some saturation. Start with the gain for a more global approach. Like so. And then maybe add some of the gamma as well to add some more saturation to the unsaturated areas. Like so. Before. After. Before. After. Looking pretty good. Let's go ahead and add the lot. And it's a little bit too strong. So, we'll pull it back a bit. 2.5. Like so. Before. After. Before. After. Very subtle look. And we'll go and add some vignette with the power windows. Drag that out like so. And we'll go ahead and invert that. Take down the gamma. It's pretty good. Before, after. Before. After. And to be honest, I'm pretty happy with the image how it is. That's before. That's after. Before. After.
So, real quick, I want to actually show you a really useful technique about how you can match the color grades between different images in the same scene. So, for example, if we open up our clips. So, if I press command C to copy this grade and then select this next clip, command V to paste. It looks good. But these clips look different. The white balance is off. The exposure is off. So, I want to quickly show you how you can match the color grades seamlessly between these two images over here. So, what we're going to do is we're going to first grab a still. So, open the gallery, select stills, right click, grab still, and we're going to select this icon up here. What this is going to do is it's going to give us a split screen view of the two images. If we drag this, we can change where the split occurs. But actually, if you look carefully, you'll notice in the waveform, we can actually see the split being represented down here as well. So, if I drag this along, just watch the waveform. You can see where the images are being split. Now, if you take a look at these two images here, we can see that they both actually have the same cement. Now, we can actually use this as an anchor to match the exposure. So, if you look here, we can see that's where the difference is occurring. Obviously, this image here on the left is a little bit brighter. So, let's go ahead and grab our exposure and let's drag that down to get it to match the exposure on the right. Let's pull that down like so. And now, those two images are actually looking pretty similar in terms of the exposure. Let's go back out. Go into regular view again. That's this image. That image already. They look so much more similar with that small change.
Okay. If we now go ahead and check the white balance, we can see that this image here is a little bit more on the green side and this one's a little bit more on the purple/b blue side. I'm just judging that with my eyes. By the way, the scopes are looking pretty similar. But one thing we can see is that the skin tones on this image are being pushed further away from that center line in the vector scope. And these ones are sitting more on that center line perfectly. I do kind of like the greenish warm aesthetic of this image. So, I'm going to try and match the second one to the first. To do that, I'm just going to slightly warm up the skin tones. And I'm going to pull them out like so. So, now if we look between the two images, it's definitely closer. I might just go slightly more. Before, after. These are looking very similar. And I'm pretty damn happy with that. They look pretty similar. Obviously, the sky is a little bit different because one's shooting into the sun, the other's shooting away. But the cement is a similar exposure. The shirts are matching and the skin tones look similar as well. So, that's a great way you can actually match color grades between clips is by using these tools here, which is the split screen, which you can drag across like so. Or you can use this viewer here, which gives you two sidebyside images.
Okay, so we've got one last image to grade. And there are actually quite a lot of good compositional components in this image. We've got some good leading lines. We've got our subject in the rule of thirds. We've also got some stuff in the foreground to add some extra depth. But we're going to go ahead and shape all this to kind of accentuate these natural compositional elements. But first, let's start by doing a quick color correction. Go to our exposure waveform. We'll take that down with the global exposure. Pull it right down like so. And then going to grab the white balance. I'm going
To zoom into the subject's skin. Open up the vectorscope. We're going to enable the qualifier again and just kind of hover that here. Get a reading. Now, that skin is way too far over to the orange and red. So, we're going to pull that back. We want the bottom right hand corner of this circle to kind of sit right here on that center. So, let's go back to the primaries. We'll drag that back like so. Getting there a little bit more. Looking pretty good. Let's just see how that looks. Before, after. That looks great.
Okay, we'll add some contrast again. Opening up the waveform just so we can see what's going on here. Drag the contrast slider up like so. Open up the pivot a bit. That looks pretty good. And then we'll add in some saturation. We'll start with the gamma so we can start to saturate less saturated areas first. Pull it up like so. And add some of the gain, too. That's before, after. Before, after. Maybe a little bit too much in the gamma. Take that off. Before, after. Before, after. Looks pretty good.
Now, let's go ahead and add the lot. And we'll just tone that down a bit as well. Five. Before, after. Before, after. So, what that's doing is just adding some coolness and blues to the shadows and a little bit more contrast, too. Okay.
So, let's start by shaping this image with the light. The first thing I want to do is darken this foreground area here to draw some attention to our subject. So, we're going to grab the power window, the gradient, and we'll just drag that like so, directly on that naturally made line by the light from the window. If you can create these power windows to complement the natural light already in the frame, they look so much more realistic. So, always try and complement the natural compositional or light in the scene. I'll then grab the gamma, drag that down like so. That looks pretty good. That before. After already you can see she's just starting to pop out so much more.
I'm going to go ahead and add another power window to just kind of darken this area too. It's a bit distracting. So I'll grab another gradient. Pull that out like so. And I'll go ahead and drag that down like that. And I might even just go ahead and pull those highlights down as well. Like that. Before after. Before after. So we're just really drawing attention to our subject. And I might go ahead and create a global vignette as well. So add a power window. Drag it out like so. Feather it. And I'll invert that, too. And then I'll pull down the gamma. That's before. After. Before. After. So, if we disable all these masks. That's before. After. Before. After. You can see so much more attention is being brought to our subject. It just looks way better.
Now, I still think our subject's skin tones are just a little bit too warm. I'm going to go ahead and check that with the vectorscope again. Go over to our white balance qualifier tool. And they're still just a little bit too warm, especially on the arm. Just going to pull that back even more. And it's totally okay for you to go back and change these color correction adjustments just to get the image right because as you start to add more LUTS and all kinds of stuff out here, sometimes these foundational elements can start to drift. Let's see. Before, after. Before, after. I like that.
And we'll do one last final image. Starting with the exposure. Take that right down. We've got loads of room at the bottom of the waveform. So, we can pull that down all the way somewhere like there. Looks pretty good. Go to the white balance. This image here. We do have skin tones, but they're not the best gauge just because there's a lot of redness in there and the light is kind of changing it. So, I might actually try and base the white balance off the white on the shirt. So, I'm going to go back into the waveform, change it to RGB, colorize, and let's see what's going on here. Looks like there's a little bit too much blue in the image. Go to the primaries, take some blue down, and then looks a little bit too green. Just take that away. Before, after. Before, after. That looks pretty good to be fair. I'm happy with that.
Then we'll go into the contrast. As you can see, this is so quick. Once you learn how to color grade and you learn these steps, you can just fly through this. Add some contrast. Add some pivot. Now, looking at this, some of these lights are still quite bright for my liking. So, I might go back to the exposure. I'm just going to take the highlights down a little bit, like so. And that looks lovely. Before, after.
Now, let's add some saturation. And I might go for the gamma to saturate those darker areas. Like so. Give us a nice rich saturation. That looks pretty good. Before, after. Before, after. Maybe even more. Great.
Now, let's add the lot. And that looks awesome. Again, we'll just turn that down just a tad. Maybe like before, after. Before, after. Little bit more. Before, after. Before, after. That looks pretty good.
I'm going to go ahead and add a vignette. Drag that out. Invert it. And take the gamma down. That looks pretty good. Bring it in a bit more. Really feather it. Before, after. Before, after. That really frames the image nicely. And I might also go ahead and add a gradient power window. Go here. Drag that down like so. And just go ahead and make that a bit darker down here, too. And really feather that out. Like so. That looks really nice. Before, after. Before, after. And honestly, that's pretty much it. This image looks great. Super impactful. That's without the grade. That's with the grade. Without. With. So, that is pretty much it.
Hopefully, you guys now have a solid understanding of color correction and color grading within DaVinci Resolve. If you do still have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments down below. And if you want to keep improving your color grading, I have a free weekly newsletter where I email you color grading tips and tricks. You can sign up to that in the description down below as well. I'd also recommend that you check out this video here if you want to learn more about the other things you can do in DaVinci Resolve other than just color grading. It's a complete beginner's guide to mastering the software. So hopefully you found this video useful and I will see you next.