Transcription
If your grades look bad, it's not because you don't have taste. It's mostly because you're putting things in the wrong order. Most people when they first start grading, they want to make things look cinematic. And that is a huge mistake. There's a step that you're missing that can make your grades 90% better. And that's what I'm going to be showing you in this video.
Now, as always, here's the timeline. We're going to be going through what most do. Then we're going to see what pros do. We're gonna check out some blind spots and at the end I'm going to give you my honest take and some tastem advice. Let's get into it.
For those that don't know me, my name is Kazzy. I've worked with brands like Adidas, Amazon Prime, Universal Studios, and I make no straightforward color grading tutorials so you can work with your dream clients.
All right, so here we are inside Resolve. We have these three clips shot on Sony Slog 3. So I'm going to try to get in the mind of a beginner and uh try not to exaggerate, try to stay authentic and the best way I think I can accomplish that is by going back when I was a beginner uh the kind of things that I was doing. So I would see an image like this, right? So this is the footage that I'm working on. Let's just say it's a documentary. And I would see this and I would be like, man, this can look really cool cuz this is shot pretty well. So, I would just go, "Oh, I know this free L inside Resolve that I can use to get started, and it's a film L, and it can make things look really good." Usually, I just like drop it on. Look at this. Like, usually I just bring it in, and it just makes things look so good. So, I'm going to use the neutral version of it. There is a D55, which is warmer. D60, which is neutral, and then we have D65, that's more on the cooler side. So, we're just going to use D60, neutral version. Okay? And I would drop it on and I'll be like, man, like look at this. What? This looks so good. But it's too harsh. Right.
So now I'm going to give myself a benefit of the doubt that I know how to do proper um CST and bringing this L in the right way. So I'm going to create and again a beginner would not be doing that. So I'm just going to make that clear. Okay. But let's just say that this person knows color space transform. He's he has seen a video or two. So then you're going to go right here and you're going to select Slog 3. You're going to select Slog 3 right here. And then you're going to do Rex 709 here. And you're going to do Simeon gamma. Again, I'm giving this beginner a ridiculous amount of like benefit of the doubt. Okay. So that he knows all of these things apparently. So now what happens is we come here and we go, okay, this is too caked on. This is too much. I can't do that. So, I'm going to go under my opacity right here, and I'm going to go under key output, and I'm going to pull that back. And I'm going to be like, okay, this is much better. Okay, this is looking much better. And now, let's just create a new node, and let's control our contrast in this one. So, we're gonna go. This looks good. The colors are looking good. I'm liking that. I mean, so far, I'm going to create another node. And I want to adjust my saturation. What do I want to do? Do I want to add a little bit more saturation? Cuz it does bring everything come to life. So, this is looking pretty good. I mean, this is where we started to This is where we are. So, this is not bad at all. Uh, what else do I want to do? I mean, this is looking pretty good. So, I'm just going to go and copy paste it on these shots. So, I'm going to middle click and I'm going to middle click. So, how are we looking right now? We go from here to here. Now, this just looks kind of bright in the middle. So, I'm going to create a new node. I'm going to create a window. I'm going to put it somewhere around here. And I'm just going to go in my gamma and I'm going to pull it down a little bit. And then I'm just going to feather it out. Right. So, it is actually very nice. We can even track it. Again, I'm giving our beginner all the benefit of the doubt. Okay.
So now we go to this shot and we look at it and we go I don't know like it just needs a little bit more contrast. So let's go here. Let's give it a little bit more contrast. I think it's getting a little too saturated. So I'm going to go and I'm going to pull that back a little bit. And then I'm just not liking how the hands are just so bright. So I'm going to take my gain. I'm going to bring it down. And then I'm going to go in my contrast and I'm going to just crank it a little bit more. Something like that. Now I have to adjust my contrast here. So let's just give it a little bit more contrast. I think the this area is getting a little too bright again. So I'm going to pull that down. Now it's getting too saturated. So I'm going to pull that down. You see what's happening? You see exactly what's happening from shot to shot. And I'm not lying to you. I mean, if you feel me right here, please drop a comment. I'm not making this up. I swear to God, this is what I used to do. So, this is just what it is, right? Like, now this is too saturated. So, I'm going to pull that back. And then I want to pull it up a little bit. I want to go in my gain and like lift it up a little bit. And where are we? I want to go back and I want to pull the saturation a little bit. Is the contrast too much? Let's check out the contrast. I think the gain is too much now. So, I'm going to pull the gain down. This is not a joke. This is exactly what's going on. You know, the the ticking time bomb that can go off at any time and we're not even paying attention to it. We did not label any of our nodes. We are building random nodes that we have no idea what we're doing in it. We have a window right here. We have a gain right here. We have a gain right here. Right. So, I mean, no matter how hard I try now, I still kind of like stay organized. Like you're seeing like I'm trying to like really mess it up and have like 18 nodes or something. But then again, I don't want to exaggerate. I want to give you the real picture. This is the real picture. But as it grows, just think about it. This is just three shots cuz I don't want this tutorial to be like 8 hours long, right? So the this is just three shots. Now, if you have 10 shots or 20 shots, what's going to happen? Right? because then you will be creating more nodes. So then in some shots you have eight nodes, some shots you have like 12 nodes. So what can we do instead? Is there a better way to do all of this? Yes, there is. And that's exactly what we're going to see right now.
First of all, I'm just going to save these frames so we just have them. Real quick, before we get to the next part, I made a checklist for the steps we're going through here. You can download it. Links in the description. Let's keep going.
All right. So, now we're moving on to the pro version. And what would a pro do? The first thing the pro would do is pick a hero frame. And what do I mean by that? We have to build everything around our subject. That is number one. Okay. Our subject is our dude. So, I'm going to find a shot where we can see him the most. It's this shot. That's our hero. Beginner didn't do that. He was reacting. Okay. We are being proactive. That's the first difference between a pro versus an amateur.
So now that we did that, the way we're going to handle it compared to a beginner which started with the look, we're going to flip the script. So the first thing that we're going to do is to normalize the shot. What does that mean? That means I'm going to create six nodes. My entire grade should not be more than six nodes for what I'm trying to accomplish. The first node I'm going to drop color space transform. I know my footage was SLO 3. So I'm going to select that and I'm going to work in Da Vinci wide gamut as my working color space so I can have the most amount of range to take full advantage of this 14 15 stops of dynamic range image. Okay. And I'm going to go here. I'm going to drop color space transform again. I'm going to select Da Vinci wide gamut here. And I'm going to select rec 709 and gamma 2.4. And soon as we do that, that already looks so freaking good. That is our proper rec 709 conversion. Footage has been normalized. I can just go select these three clips, middle click on this one, and that is already applied. Okay. And obviously, let's not be like amateurs. So, we're going to call it IDT. We're going to call this ODT. Output device transform. Input device transform. Let's go do it again. Nice and tidy. Okay.
Now, what's the next step? The next step is to balance our shot. Meaning, is the exposure correct? Is the contrast looking good? Is the overall color temperature of the shot looking good? And for that, we can just go in our HDR offset, which works and behaves very much like if we would have made these changes in camera. Okay. So, I can just go here and now I can go in my offset and start raising this up and bringing it down and kind of seeing like what do we feel like? I think they did a pretty good job where they had it. So, I mean this is like literally 08 like it barely does anything but let's just say like this is looking good. Another thing is like we look at our vectors scope and see like hey can we do something with this footage like can we like is it balance or can we do something with that and I personally feel like it was a little too green overall pulling it back we're getting like cuz again what is the goal the goal is our subject and most of our subject is covered besides his hands right here so then I'm paying attention to that and obviously It's he's in the forest and it just feels like it's cold there. So this white balance feels way better. Now we can just like select these work like a pro. So what we can do since we have a fixed node tree nothing is moving meaning every change that we make in each node is going to be the same type of change. So then when we have want to reflect that change across the board three shots five trillion shots doesn't matter we go under color we go under ripple node changes to selected clips okay and as soon as we do that bam if I come here that change is applied if I come here that change is applied okay it's perfect so now we are balancing our shot now for balancing We have to do it on individual shot level. We can't just copy paste a balance from one shot because now if I go from here to here, it's a little different. Okay. So, what am I seeing here? I'm going to go we should bring it down just a little bit. And then I think we just need to pull back on the uh balance that we did here. So, this is looking closer. Okay, this is looking closer. So again, this is still my feel balancing. I'm not pulling out my my charts yet. Okay. So this is still like just kind of blazing through it. So now I park right here and I go, well, this definitely feels like it can come up a little bit. And as soon we bring as soon as we bring it up, it fixes a lot of our issues. So now when we go from here to here, it is looking a lot better. Now it's crunchy. It's crunchy compared to this. Like look at the contrast on this one. Look at the contrast on this one. Like breathing. And this is like just kind of little it's it's a little crunchy. Okay. So that's the thing that we want to fix. Second, but you can do your contrast here. That's totally fine. You can and we should. So we did our color temperature, we did our exposure. The third third thing that we want to do here, some people do their saturation and contrast in a different node, which we can we can do that like just for this tutorial sake. What I usually leave my second node for is called adjustment. Meaning like if the client comes back and he has some or she has some suggestions about like, hey man, the overall image can come up a little bit or maybe we can make it warmer a little bit or something. I would do it in this node. But for you guys, like just to make it like simplified a little bit more, we can basically do our contrast and saturation changes right here. So we will we'll consider them our adjustments. Okay. And the first thing that we want to do since we're working in Da Vinci wide gamut, we want to make sure that this is set to uh what it should be. So which is going to be 336. That's going to lock in our 18% gray. So then when we make changes on our contrast level, nothing like the exposure doesn't get um shifted. And if you want to learn more about that, we're going to have like a contrast video in the description below. Now, if I come here, I want to actually open it up a little bit. I don't want to close it. I want to open it up a little bit. Something like that. So now, if I go from this shot to this shot, it started to look way better. And now I want to go back uh here and I want to just like pull this down a little bit cuz Okay, so this is looking way better. This is looking way better. Okay. So now you see what we're doing like we made our primary balance change right here and we did our let's just call this adjustments right here. And also I think the saturation is a bit much on this shot. So we can just pull the saturation down a little bit. And then that's going to help us match this even better. Okay. This one can we can drop the saturation just a touch on this too. Actually, you know what? Maybe not. So, let's just do this. Um, it's fine for now. Okay.
So, now we normalized our shot. We did the balance. We made our little adjustments. Okay. Corrections, if you will, and now it's all looking way better. Contrast is looking good. Balance is looking good. Skin tones are where they're supposed to be. Now, there's one step that we want to do before we get into our actual look, and that is when it comes to saturation. Saturation, don't look at it as like a global thing. Look at it as like a control thing. Let's just say if I'm like, man, I want to put a little bit more emphasis like in the browns than in so much like into the green. Like I want to control that because if I just go here and just, you know, just go like this, like what did I do to my browns, right? Because clearly if I do this, this is way more dominant than this most of the time, right? Like the green is just like going crazy. So if I want to control the green a little bit before I start doing my actual look development, one thing that I can do is I can just come in here color slice and I can control it. So I can come in my green saturation and I can just start like controlling it from here. So I can just go this is not bad. And what you guys need to realize is that once we apply a look, the look will bring in so much juice. So we don't want to make the when we're prepping our shot super juicy because it's going to get that from the look. So that is like a super super important thing to just remember. So then we probably want to do something like this. We want to go in our yellows because yellows will contain a lot of that foliage that we're seeing. So now we're here and when we go here, this to this is now matching way better. We want to do a similar thing here. So we're going to just pull it back a little bit. We're going to go under our yellow and pull it back a little bit. And now when we go from these like they're all matching way better now. Okay. So selective color. All right. at this stage.
Now, what I'm going to do is like, you know, you can uh because the tutorial, the entire idea about the tutorial is these steps, not necessarily so much of like how we're going to build a look, like an actual building of the look. So, you can use like your weapon of choice. What I'm going to be doing is I'm going to use uh my tool rapid grade to just quickly kind of drop a few looks and make a point of just like how easy it is to get a good look once you have your foundation done right. So again, we should just go and do balance and we should go here and we should do uh adjustment and then this is for our secondary whatever we want to do with it. So right now we're not using it. And then this is our look. Okay. And then we can just like drop that here. And then just do a ripple select. So that should bring that here. And then uh we want to name these two. So one of the things that I should have done um is I should have dropped six nodes and then label them label all of them. But I didn't want to spoil the surprise because I'm building each one with you and kind of showing you what I'm doing. So, I didn't want to do that, which is why that didn't happen. Otherwise, like it would have just genuinely ruined the surprise to like what we're doing. First thing that we can do right now, let's just say if we're still making sure that the balance is 100% locked in, we can go under our charts. Now, there's a bunch of like different utilities that you can use. I'm going to use like the chart utility in in my tool. It's built in, which makes it really freaking insane. So, we're going to do false color. We're going to just like ripple select so it can just turn on the false color on all of these shots. Uh so this is just like update thumbnail right here. Okay, this is everything. Okay, now you look at the hand alone and that's going to tell us where the exposure needs to be. Makes it black and white. You see like how there's like yellow like there's like highlights that are in yellow and then green whereas here it's all green which means can we lift it up a little bit? You you get what I'm saying? So now if we can just come in here and lift it up a little bit. Not too much. Then we go here. Where we at? You see like how clippy like how much yellow is here compared to here. And then there is a little bit of yellow here. So now you're getting to see like how different it is. And maybe we can bring it back just a little bit. Okay. And now let's just go here and uncheck charts on all three and let's see if this did anything. So you see like how charts can really come in handy. I'm telling you right now and I think it helped. I I really really think it helped overall like tied it in. And the best part about it is that it makes it very black and white. I mean, we're not making anything up. Th This is the point where we're becoming very objective with the changes that we're making.
So, now let's get into creating a look. And we have this one-click look system. We create I personally create one tailor made look per week. And most of the time, I'm basically covering the gamut. So, it's like broken up into five different families. And regardless of the type of project you're working on, you will have a look for that. So here, if you're working on commercials or films or inspired by, inspired by basically will be like some of the best darling looks out there and then I get to recreate those looks in here. But uh so like for this one, let's just say if we choose Jurassic World Rebirth, it's going to look really really good. So if I choose this, look, look at this. It just pops so hard. And now that we have this right here, I can go and apply it across the board. And now if we just get to see this. I mean look at this. Look at what happened to our greens. Oh my god. Look at look at the skin tones. Look at the rendering of the skin tones. I mean this is to absolutely die for. I mean whoa. I mean look at this and how absolutely stunning this look is with a single click. And it respects like look at what it did. Like this is why I love the colorized waveform. tells us like exactly what's happening. If you want to do something fun, you can go under like let's just say if you want to like kind of dial it back and go under like film looks and create something a little bit lighter, we can do maybe a creamy cinema. So if I select this like you know this is a little bit more dialed back but still like our uh skin tones and everything should look really really good. So let's ripple select that and now come here like look at the Yeah, look at the hands. Oh my god. To die for. Like look at this. How beautiful the hands look and the greens and the wood, everything. And there's like so much happening under the hood. Uh we have a diffusion that we created from ground up. Genuinely bought the filters, shot the footage, brought it in, and re-engineered everything from there. So the results you're going to get here is just unlike anything else. We have halation in play, grain in play, and all of that. You know, turns our image into something like this. And once again, it's done. But did you see how mature this approach was? When you normalize your image, then you set the balance. Then you go and make adjustments to match your clips and you do a selective saturation just to kind of like really control uh where everything should be sitting before you get into the look development. Look development is the last part. Why? Because if the foundation is strong, look is going to work like this. We're just going to flip through looks whatever we like or if we want to build something from scratch, do that. And then you just apply it on the entire scene and it should work like this. Flipping a switch and you're done.
All right. So now I have both versions here which you can clearly see. So if we go here versus here, you see how much work we had to do to make this work. Like I mean we're creating these windows. We're bringing down the opacity whereas here and like look at the difference and what about this one? How awful this looks compared to what we created here and the colors and how everything just freaking pops.
Now I want to go through a couple of blind spots. If your L has to rescue your grade, your foundation is broken. And the second one is if every shot requires something different like what we were doing here as we were building our grade that just means that you have no plan and you're headed in the wrong direction. And number three, if matching feels impossible, that means you started matching way too late into the process. If your note tree keeps growing and your images start to look worse, that is a dead giveaway that your order of operations is just completely messed up.
Now, let's move on to my takeaway from all of this. Nobody is hiring you to know where the saturation knob is. They're hiring you because you can make decisions on the fly because no two clips are going to be the same. I mean, as a matter of fact, this stuff is actually shot really beautifully. But even then, we had to do so many micro adjustments just to kind of bring it all together. And that intuition will come from having a strong foundation. So as much as I am with you, getting here and actually working with looks and trying out different grades is way more entertaining and exciting than actually doing what we had to do here. But trust me, once you have a good command over getting your images to look stable across the board, it does become a game in its own right. And it's actually very exciting because then you just know that you have acquired a skill that a lot of people do not possess. And that's what makes you irreplaceable.
And on that note, if you guys found this video helpful, do me a favor. Smash the like button, subscribe to the channel, hit the bell icon so you can be notified about our next video. If you have any content suggestions, drop them down below. Do not forget to check out the links in the description. If you want to try out Rapid Grade or any of our other products, everything is in the description. I'll see you guys in the next video. Peace.