Transcription
Welcome back to the video. In today's video, I'm going to break down seven tips or tricks in Da Vinci Resolve that I wish I had known sooner. Some of these tricks are really useful. So, let's hop right in.
All right, so in no particular order, first up, we're going to talk about a new tool that I think is in Da Vinci 20 and above, and it's called the color warper. Now, to make this happen real smoothly, I'm just going to add a serial node here. Option S on Mac. And on the serial node, I'm just going to adjust everything. This is my standard Odyssey power grade. I'm not going to go too into detail about this, but if you're interested in this, it'll be linked down below.
On a separate note here, if you just go ahead and click color warper or chroma warp, you're going to notice this really cool 3D matrix. And basically what it allows you to do is selectively adjust colors with your little eyropper tool here. So, if I want to just go ahead and select pieces skin here, I just click. And then, if you'll notice on the actual 3D matrix of the color space here, you'll notice where I'm selecting and what's changing. But basically all I'm doing is I'm selecting the skin color here and changing its hue. So I can make it more orange. I can make it more magenta, more blue, green, etc. There's a lot of different things you can do. Basically, it's the color slice tool on steroids. It's really useful. The way that you can use this is to selectively adjust colors real simply on your actual screen here. So if I just want to select the green of his beanie here, I just click and drag. And you can you can make it more green. I can make it blue. I can make it yellow, orange. There's a lot of different things you can do with this. It's really useful in certain scenarios. Specifically, if you want to touch on skin or let's say that your shadows here for whatever reason have a little bit of blue or magenta, I could real quickly just as I'm hovering over my image here, if you notice in the actual 3D matrix, it changes depending on where I'm about to select. And if I go over here, you notice it's just in this blue area. I can click and then I can drag. I can either reduce saturation or change the hue. I make it more green. I could bring it closer. The more central you make it, basically it takes out less of the blue in this certain scenario. So, if I command Z and then I just click and drag and bring that more central. Let's say I want to make his green beanie a little bit more pronounced. So, I'll just click and drag and make the green beanie pronounced. And then you can quickly see before and after really subtle changes. You can go really major. You can click and drag and change the the skin color real easily. It's just a really simplified version of the color slice tool here. Basically, it's a really powerful tool and it's really easy and it's something that I wish I had known about a lot earlier because sometimes you have your highlights a certain hue, your shadows, or just your skin color is not quite right. Just having this 3D matrix here and allowing you to quickly click, drag, and intuitively change the hues makes a whole lot of difference.
Next up is something called the film look creator. You might be familiar with the film creator and how it can emulate film, but it's actually a lot more useful and a lot deeper than that. You can go ahead when you click and drag the film creator onto a separate serial node here. You'll notice that it automatically applies this kind of ugly filmic grade. Um, you can quickly change that by going up to clean slate. Basically, not default no effects, but clean slate. By doing clean slate, it allows you to build your overall look from scratch. And there's a couple different things that I love to do in Film Creator. I think it just looks better than the built-in, you know, curves and etc, etc. in other places. If I just open up my curves here, if you go into contrast, Filmic Creator does a great job of adding contrast in a way that's really pleasing. It doesn't quite destroy your image and make the the blacks too overbearing or the highlights too crazy. What you can go ahead and do is as you add contrast, if you want to bring back your highlights, you can quickly bring those back to a more manageable level and kind of create that nice fall-off in the highlights of your image. And additionally, I like to couple all of this with perhaps a little bit of fade in the blacks. You can really overdo this sometimes, but just adding a little bit of fade allows you to get a really nice kind of pleasing fall-off. Show you before and after of your image. Sometimes when you add film CL, you want to bring back some richness, some HSV. And you can actually do this within this node by going to richness and kind of just bumping that up just a little bit, not too much to bring that back. You can even add a little bleach bypass to to get creative with your looks. You can go to subtractive saturation and and it's kind of the inverse of density. But again, if you just bump this up a little bit. Now, if you go before and after, there's a bit of a filmic grade that you can build all within this one tool. Another thing is great is you can do split toning. Split toning can get as crazy or as as subtle as you'd like. Sometimes like to add kind of a mid hue angle and just a slight amount of split toning. I think it's a great way to add a little bit of richness in your highlights and a little bit of coolness in your actual shadows. Again, this is before and after. And on top of everything here that you have in addition to the film creator, you've got vignette, halation, bloom, grade, gate, film gate. There's a lot of different things that you can add to it. One thing I like to do to get a little bit of bloom, but not too bloomy, is I like to add halation. And I actually like to subtract all of the saturation. So, just showing you before and after. Sometimes it's a little bit too much. So I just bring this down. I bring down the amount a little bit, the radius just a little bit. And I like to get it to a point where it's just kind of affecting the edges, the contrasty parts of your image. So if you just adjust this a little bit here, sometimes I find that with this halation, it just adds a nice bloom that doesn't soften the overall image, but just kind of really appears in the major contrasty points of your image. And so that's kind of a key. I use it in almost all my talking heads. I use it all the time in in client work, professional work, and and personal work. But here's a little cheat code is utilizing halation and just bringing down the saturation rather than using bloom. Another great one here is their built-in grain. And the grain, the 35 mil grain looks really pleasing. If I just turn off everything here, before and after, you can kind of tell it adds it adds a really nice kind of filmic look that you can build from scratch without having to to download anything. It's all built within Da Vinci and it's a really powerful tool.
Next up is a tool that I didn't know existed and perhaps people do know, but sometimes when you want to copy over grades from other projects, you have to export a lot or export Powerrade and then bring that in, reimpport it. It's all just kind of an a hassle. And if you actually go to your project manager and let's say I want to copy a grade from a separate project, all you need to do is rightclick and go down to dynamic project switching and make sure this is toggled on. And then you go ahead and double click your project. You'll see that it opens up, but now there's a little pull down arrow next to the actual title. And if you click this, you can intuitively open between two projects at once instead of having to flip through the project manager every single time to open up a different project. And this this blew my mind when I first found out about it and I think it's not published enough. I might just be really stupid, but I didn't know this existed. And then now if I want to copy a specific note for another project, I just command C, copy it, and then go back to my other project and put it wherever I need to put it. I mean, realistically, not not the white balance, but you get what I mean. You can copy over nodes. You can copy over. It's just really easy to move between two projects with this dynamic project switching.
All right, next up is an update in Da Vinci Resolve. I think 20 and up, and it's been in Da Vinci forever, but it's called Magic Mask, but now it's called AI Magic Mask. And I like the new AI magic mask better. I feel like it does a much better job of noticing subjects. And before you had to like click and draw little squiggy lines. Now you just click a couple dots. Let's put a couple dots on my subject here. And if I press shift H now, it shows me what I'm actually selecting. And you'll notice that obviously the more dots you add, the more accurate this is. But the new magic mask is is a lot better. It's really good. And where you would use something like this is let's shift H again back. Let me just add a couple more points. Make sure that my magic mask is fire. And then I'm going to go ahead once I've got my magic mask selected. I'm going to go ahead and track back and forth so it tracks across the whole project. And you'll notice it's ob obviously it's not perfect, but the more points you add, the better it'll become. And now you've got a tracked mask that you can now work with. Masks are really nice because you can go ahead and add elements behind your subject or do different things. In color grading, it allows you to selectively, you know, pick out different things or subjects in this case and add different things just to the subject layer or just to the background layer. So now I've got my subject selected. If I press invert, now I've got the background selected. Let me go down to clean black and just feather the radius a little bit so it's not too harsh. And now press shift H again just to deselect everything. Now if I go to my HDR global and I want to lower the background overall exposure, I just click and drag. And now without affecting my actual subject here, you can tell that I've lowered the background exposure. And that's really useful if you want to create kind of like that split toning or or even just like add a little bit more depth to your image. Instead of decreasing exposure, you can obviously change kind of the the hue, the the white balance in the background here. Make it obviously this a little too pronounced, but you can do a lot of different things just to the background layer. It's super useful. Alternatively, if you wanted to, you know, just affect the the actual person here. Alternative, if you just want it to affect your mask here, you can just selectively, you know, let me just reset this area. You can bring up his exposure, bring down his exposure. There's a bunch of different things. It's really useful to have this magic mask available. And I think the AI magic mask 2 specifically is a lot better. It's a lot more intuitive than previous magic masks.
Next up is depth maps. And depth maps are really useful. They're very similar to what they actually do for your image and how they're useful. I'm just going to add this depth map to this first node here. And I'm going to map the alpha over here to my second node. I'll do my adjustments on this this specific node right here. It basically creates masks based on depth. You can adjust this manually. near limit, far limit, gamma. But once you've got this actually selected, let me just click off death math preview. You can then go ahead and do things to again the background, the foreground. You can affect elements selectively, very similar to the magic mask. But the way that this is useful and intuitive is let's say I want to add a let's do radial blur. Let's go ahead and add a radial blur. I can then go ahead and add a radial blur. Let me invert this just to the background. It'll only affect basically everything behind this main foreground image. And it'll I mean it'll it'll do it on a kind of varying threshold level, but it's really nice to use separately from the actual magic mask because especially when you have like pronounced images or subjects in the foreground and background, it's really pleasing to to do it this way. Here I've just added a little radial blur that you can basically play around with just the background selectively or I could even again go into exposure and crank this down. And as you can tell the the subject in the foreground isn't affected as much as a background. It's more of a gradial gradual difference rather than a harsh mask. And so it's a little bit more useful than the magic mask in certain situations, but handy tool nonetheless.
Moving on, something that could be useful in certain scenarios, specifically you want to add a little bit of cinematic feeling to your image and you have like harsh light, is if you go ahead and add a serial node here. Let's go ahead and add cinematic haze. And cinematic haze is really interesting because it uses a I think AI pretty sure it uses AI to know like where the haze could be coming from and where the sun rays could be coming from. Obviously, this looks terrible right now. Let me go ahead and tweak this. You can see the depth map preview to just make sure if everything is aligning properly. But what you need to do now is just adjust the limits of the far and near. And you, as you can tell, it'll only affect certain areas. It's almost like the haze is actually in the scene. And sometimes it's it's a little bit over pronounced. So, let me just lower this a little bit. You can just play around with the the tools to adjust different parameters. And the more that you fine-tune this, you can really get get creative with your looks. Sometimes it's a little bit over pronounced. I like to just add it sometimes a little subtly. You know, sometimes it's a little bit too much. Yeah, you can add a bit of haze in post, which is always really useful. Alternatively, I think what's even cooler are these light rays. And you can actually add light rays uh from specific angles. So, as you can see here, the sun's coming from this angle. So, I'm going to add at the same angle, sort of this, not quite 45° angle, but it's a it's almost like a 45°ree angle. And you can soften it, you can harshen it. As you can see here, it's it's really prominent these rays. Let me just soften it a little bit. You can increase the brightness, bring down the brightness, and then obviously bring up or down the saturation. But overall, before and after, it's really cool to have this ability to add cinematic haze. In some situations, it looks a lot better than others. Realistically, it's great just to add it subtly into your image. I think you can be really more pronounced if you've got like a window behind you. I think that's where it's really useful if you can clearly see the source of light. In this case, it's it's nice. It's it it adds a little bit of of cinematic quality to your image. And it's it's good to use in moderation, I would say. So, just having that in your arsenal could be nice. It could be really nice.
And finally, as a little trick, if you want to get a bit of a filmic shadow or a little bit of lifted shadows, you don't want your shadows to be crushed, a little tip I like to do is I like to play in the curves. And specifically what I like to do is like to add a few different points. And for filmic curves, what you need to do is click your bottom left here and bring this up. Obviously, you don't want to bring it up too much, but you just bring it up just a tad. And if you still want to keep a little bit of contrast or even bring the overall blacks down a little bit more, you can bring this down a bit more. There's a fine line between crushing your image and making it look a little bit more filmic. But even right here, if you go before and after, you can get a nice kind of fall-off in the blacks. This is a little bit too pronounced. But if you get really subtle with it, it's quite nice to to keep keep a bit of filmic feeling to your shadows so they're not just like crushed, very digital black shadows. They're a little bit more more, I guess, filmic and and and not as crushed. And then for highlights, I like to take the top right and kind of bring them down just a little bit so your highlights aren't aren't blown out all the time. One of the great things about shooting on film is the dynamic range. And if you want to mimic this, you can play around with the curves, specifically custom curves in a specific section. You can play with the custom curves in a separate serial node. And again, just bringing up usually people talk about like S curves, but if you actually take the bottom left and pop this up a little bit, it's a it's a neat trick to to play around and just see what a pleasant pleasant black overall in your image is. this. And if you add a little bit of grain overall, it's a great way to make it feel a little bit more filmic and it's a really easy way to add on a sort of noncrushed black look to any L, any power grade. And it's another good trick to have.
So yeah, those were seven tips or tricks for Da Vinci Resolve that I've been using recently. I just want to share with you guys. If you have any questions on anything, leave them down in the comments below. I'll try to get to them. If I can't personally, I'm sure someone else in the community would love to help you out. If you enjoy my color grading or my sound design or any other presets or assets, please check out my shop. It'll link down below. I've got my power grades, LUTs, sound effects, all that jazz. It's a huge help to the channel and I really appreciate it. If you made it to the end of the video, please leave the word oat milk. I I need a latte right now. It's been a long day. I appreciate you guys staying to the very end and I'll see you guys in the next one.