Speaker 1: One of my guiding principles as a professional colorist is to always seek greatest gains for least efforts. That means that if I'm grading and I have three different adjustments that I could make next, I always go with the one that nets the biggest move toward my end goal for the image. And the same thing applies when we are studying color grading. The best thing for us to learn next is always the concept or the technique that nets the biggest positive impact on our craft. Now, if you are new to color grading or you've been picking up things here and there on YouTube, I virtually guarantee that your next greatest gain is going to come from today's discussion. This is something that virtually all beginners and even most teachers get wrong. And when we get it right, it is an absolute game changer for our color grading practice. So let's take a look here in Resolve at the biggest color grading mistake on YouTube. So right now, I just have a new Resolve project that I've set up, but I haven't done anything in it. I've done no grading whatsoever. I've just got some images pulled in that I want to work on to demonstrate this biggest mistake that we're talking about today. So let's take a shot like this one, this shot number five that we're looking at. This shot is in a camera log state, which is a state that we will often receive our material in when we're working as colorists. And we need to do something right off the bat with this image, don't we? It's very low contrast, very low saturation. And before we can even begin to think about the more nuanced aspects of the craft of color grading, we just need to get this image looking decent on our display, don't we? I'm going to show you the way that I was taught to deal with this issue when I began my career as a colorist many years ago. I'm going to go for my primaries, which in my case are here at my fingertips on my control surface. But they're also available to us in Resolve here within this primaries tab in the lower left hand corner. And all I'm going to do is go down to these primaries and start to drop my lift. That's my shadow area. Stretch out my highlights. You can see the effect that I'm having not only on the image, but on my waveform. I'm just stretching out this image and somewhat normalizing it. I'm going to go over here to my gamma, which controls things in between shadows and highlights, and try to get a better looking result there. Maybe I'll go to my saturation knob, start to add some color into the image. And you might not love what I did here. And there's certainly more that I would want to do before I would deliver this as a final shot. But that initial step that I just talked about of getting an image somewhat normalized or looking decent on my display has been accomplished if I look at where I was versus where I am now, right? I've got this image somewhat normalized. Now, however far we are into this discussion today or this demonstration, we're 30 seconds in and I've already made the biggest mistake. Has anyone spotted it? Does anyone know what I did wrong? The image looks okay, doesn't it? What could be so wrong about what I've done so early? What were those teachers who were teaching me how to color grade so incorrect about when they said you need to tackle this with your primaries? Well, what I've done wrong is something that is often the culprit when we do things that are not optimal in color grading. And that's not so much that I've done something so terrible than that I've missed an opportunity. I've overlooked a better way of achieving my goal. In this case, the fundamental goal, if we sort of rewind and turn off this adjustment, the goal is to navigate a journey from what my camera saw to what my display can show. And in 2022, those are often not the same thing. More often than not, what our camera saw versus what our display can show are not going to agree. And we need to navigate that journey as colorists. But we want to navigate that journey using the benefit of color science. We don't want to do it by hand and by eye in the way that I just did. Because what I'm describing to you is at its foundational level, a technical challenge, a technical task, not a creative task. So in other words, what we're looking at right now, this image isn't a mistake. Nobody made a mistake. Nobody forgot to put contrast into the image. It's just that the camera saw something different than our display can show. And we need to make that mapping. We need to make that journey. Or to use the term for what I'm talking about, we need to employ color management. And I've intentionally held off on using that term in this discussion today, because so many of us are intimidated by the topic of color management and color science when we start to bring it up. However, there's no reason to be afraid of it. You don't need to understand color science to take good advantage of color science. And you don't need to be an expert in color management to take advantage of color management. So let me show you what I mean. Let's go ahead and turn this adjustment back on, because I'm going to want to make a comparison to this in just a moment. And I'm going to grab a still of this. Let's go ahead and reset. And we are now going to set up some color management, which is going to facilitate that journey from what the camera saw to what the display can show. We're going to go over here to our color management section of our project settings. And for my color science, I'm going to select DaVinci YRGB Color Managed. Now, I'm going to work through these settings fairly quickly, and they can look big and complicated and intimidating at first, but I promise you that they're not. And I can also promise you if you want to go deeper and learn more about this, everything you need to know lives here on the channel. I've got a great series on color management called DaVinci Y Gamut Workflows. We talk about color management in almost every video that I do. So if you have an appetite to really dive deep on this, then the material is out there for you to do so. Today, I just want to give you a flight, an overview of the concepts of color management. So here's what I'm going to do. I've got my color processing mode set to custom. I'm going to set an input color space, which agrees with the format of my source images. In my case, that's ArrayLogC3. In your case, it might be something different, but this should be what your camera saw. Color space is, in fact, how we characterize what the camera saw or what the display can show. In this case, what the camera saw was ArrayLogC3. Next, I'm going to look at my output color space to describe what my display can reproduce. In this case, my calibrated reference monitor is set up to show Rec. 709 Gamma 2.4. So I'm going to leave that setting where it is. And then for my timeline color space, I'm going to select DaVinci Wide Gamut Intermediate. Why? Because it's a big, convenient working space that I can map any source into. I can even map more than one source into it. And again, that's something that I go deeper into in other videos. But for now, trust me, DaVinci Wide Gamut Intermediate is a great timeline color space to select here, regardless of what you've selected here or down here. And these other settings, I'm going to leave all at their defaults right now. I could go in and tailor and tune these. And again, in other videos, I will show you how I like to tailor and tune these to get the optimal result. But right now, I just want to get some broad, basic color management set up so that we can evaluate the difference between color managing and what we were doing a moment ago. So let's pay attention to this log state image when I hit my Save button here. Look at that. We've got a normalized image. We've got exactly what I was trying to do by hand a moment ago, but it's happened automatically. And it's significant to point out that a moment ago, when I made that adjustment that maybe took me 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, this adjustment happened instantaneously once I set those parameters up. And furthermore, it is affecting every single shot in my timeline, not just the shot that I'm on, as opposed to this hand adjustment that I did before. That's something that I have to redo by hand, by eye on every shot. Now, in a timeline with nine shots in it, that might not sound like such a big deal. But if you operate as I do in the context of professional color grading, and you might be working on anything from a commercial with 30 shots to a feature film with 2,500 shots, as that shot count starts to increase, you are looking for ways to cut down on your time and on your labor and to get an equivalent or superior result by putting less time into the process. That's one of the reasons why color management is such a significant gain to your workflow when you start to incorporate it. So this has been rippled across all of my shots as opposed to just one of my shots. Let's also take a look at the difference here. Let's wipe to what we had before. I've just got a better reproduction here. My shadows are holding better. I've got more color happening in this image, or at least more color separation, more pleasing color. I've got a more sensible baseline that I didn't even have to work as hard for. And again, because I know that I'm supported by good color science, I am closer to what the camera actually saw when it was capturing this image. I'm getting more of the cinematographer's creative intent, the filmmaker's creative intent by color managing than by being a hero and doing things by hand and by eye. So this is the alternative to that biggest mistake that I see on YouTube. It's the mistake that I made for many years in the early part of my career, which is to be the hero and to step in and think that I need to take every image from its original state out to its display state by hand with no support and with no foundation. And what I find interesting is when you are grading by hand in that sort of first method that I showed you, one of the reasons why we can overlook the compromise that we are making is because we have no frame of reference. Until I show you this, what I'm looking at here doesn't necessarily seem like a problem. But once you see this and you go, oh, it's actually that's where the exposure was meant to go there. And I'm still getting a healthy level of contrast and separation with a more moody exposure. It's only then that you go, oh, OK, not only is that better looking, that's more aligned with the creative intent and definitely the direction I'd like to take this image. Without that frame of reference, it's really hard to know what's good and what's bad. That leads me to one of my favorite quotes that I think about all the time from a colorist friend of mine. Everything looks good until you see something better. So you want to have a foundation in place that you can set up quickly, automatically across all your shots. And then your grading can happen from this point. So right here with this color management, I have not actually even begun to grade. I haven't done anything on this individual shot yet. But now that I've got my color management set up, I have a new foundation that I can build on top of, as opposed to having to do things from zero. So color management is a non-negotiable if you're looking at building up a really world class, efficient color grading practice that consistently produces great results. You've got to be color managing. And anyone who tells you different is really not guiding you in the proper direction. Now a couple of things I want to briefly talk about that are going to accompany your shift from working in what we could call a display referred paradigm, where you are literally referring to your display for all of your grading decisions into this color managed or scene referred paradigm that we're using now. A couple of things that are going to change when you do that. First of all, what I've just done, setting up that color management in my project settings, that has to happen at the beginning. You can't do that halfway through the process. So there's a bit more table setting that has to take place. And if you fail to do that or if you do it wrong, really the only option at that point is to go back, reset your work, and get it right and start anew. So you've got to get it right from the outset. And that means that if you're used to diving right in and starting to adjust knobs and make creative manipulations, you're going to have to be a little bit patient because you have to set the table correctly at the outset. The second thing that you're going to notice the moment you move into a color managed environment is all of your controls are going to feel different. Now, a great example here is I turn my offset. You can actually see I'm getting a really nice sort of exposure-like response from this wheel. Very different from what I would have gotten if I had just turned this knob prior to setting up my color management. But it is a big difference. Even if it is ultimately superior, it's a big change that your eyes and your hands are going to have to get used to. So expect that and welcome it and know that when you get to the other side, you're going to have a much more useful set of tools than they were when you were working with them in the more display-referred model. That's number two. Last one. I saved the best for last, maybe the worst for last, depending on how you look at it. We've got to talk about LUTs. If you are used to using LUTs in your workflow, the bad news is that more than likely the LUTs that you are accustomed to using will not survive the journey into your new and improved color-managed workflow. Why is that? Is it because LUTs just can't work in color management? No. It's because most LUTs, I'll give you an example. Let's go over here to my LUTs folder here in Resolve. My film looks LUTs here inside of Resolve. If I apply this LUT here, I'm even going to turn off this first node for now or reset it rather. And let's try this Old Faithful Rec. 709 Kodak 2383 D65. You've probably tried this LUT out before, maybe gotten some interesting results out of it. Let's see what happens if we apply it now. Well, that looks insane. That looks terrible, right? That's not something I'm ever going to be able to work with. So all these LUTs that you might be accustomed to using are now going to be effectively useless to you in color management. That is because a LUT like this one is set up to not only apply a creative manipulation, but a technical transformation from a film log state, in this case, out to Rec. 709. And because we have color management that is already making that transformation, we effectively have a double transform. That's why the image looks so strange and unreasonable. So that's the biggest shift that comes along with shifting to a color-managed workflow. The LUTs that you are accustomed to using probably will not work. But don't worry, there is good news here. As I said, it's not that LUTs can't work in color management, it's that some LUTs can't work in color management. Many of the most common LUTs can't work in color management. However, let me give you an example of a LUT that does work in color management. Let's just try flipping over to a new shot, just for the heck of it. Here's another shot that's already been normalized from its camera log state, even though I haven't even looked at it yet in our demonstration today. It's already happened automatically under the hood because I set up my overall color management. Now within this, I'm going to go into my CKC folder in my LUTs folder, and then I'm going to go into the PFE subfolder here, and I want to look at my 2383 DWG to DWG V2 LUT and double-click on it. This is a LUT that I created as an adaptation of the Kodak 2383 LUT that ships with Resolve. It's aimed at getting that same emulation of a Kodak 2383 print stock, but it works nicely inside of a color-managed workflow. This LUT is available for free in a link that I will leave in the description for today's video, so you can download it and try it out and see for yourself that LUTs can still be phenomenally useful, and in fact, I use LUTs in almost every color-managed workflow that I tackle. However, we just have to be more selective of the LUTs that we use, and we need to make sure that they are set up to succeed inside of a color-managed workflow. This free Kodak 2383 LUT is a great example of a LUT that will give us the creative character of that Kodak 2383 without also netting us that double transform to Rec. 709 that makes the image look so crazy. Another great example of LUTs that do play nice here inside of my DaVinci Wide Gamut color-managed workflow would be my Elements LUTs, which I created for this workflow as well. In this case, we have a Tone as well as a Palette LUT that we can drop on and mix and match. We can even change the order of them if we want and end up with very different results. Some of them are more subtle than others, some of them are more bold, but it's meant to give you different creative options that you can leverage within your color-managed workflow where you are already getting more sensible, more sound, more balanced images than if you're trusting yourself shot after shot, image after image to bat 1,000 effectively. In this setup, when you're color-managing, you've got that solid foundation underneath you automatically and quickly, and then you can layer in a good look like I have here with my Elements or this Kodak 2383 that I've made available for free. And at that point, you can, by the time you start grading, you haven't even begun grading thus far, by the time you begin grading, you're already so much further ahead than you were before. Your images are already balanced and dialed into a pretty consistent place, and you can that much more quickly start to work on the nuance and the really fun details of color grading that separate okay color grades from really, really excellent color grades. So working color-managed is a non-negotiable for me in my professional practice. If your goal is to be an excellent colorist or even a professional colorist, it should be a non-negotiable for you in your practice as well. And we've really only scratched the surface of color management here today. We're going to go much deeper on it in my next Friday live session that we do on Friday mornings at 10 a.m. Pacific. We call it grade school. We spend an hour talking about whatever subject we've discussed in the video that preceded that session. So this week, we're going to be going deep on color management or its alternative, what we've called display-referred color grading, why one is better than the other, the various benefits that we can get from the other, and how we can tackle our challenges inside of a color management setup as opposed to a more traditional display-referred setup. And I also just want to close by saying that if you've learned things the way that I learned things, by using your primaries, or you have a teacher who you like who teaches with this method, nobody's a bad guy here. Nobody's done anything wrong. It's a very understandable mistake because until you have a frame of reference, until you see that something better, it probably looks pretty decent. And the reality is, until fairly recently, until the last 15 or 20 years, doing everything by hand and by eye was actually a fairly reasonable thing to do before we had this proliferation of different professional and prosumer cameras that shoot in all kinds of different color spaces and have all kinds of different latitude and dynamic range and color volume for us to negotiate. Prior to that point, it really wasn't unreasonable to take a more color correction approach and simply make little adjustments to our image using the tools of color correction. Today, we've got to level up our game. We've got amazing cameras that can shoot amazing images. We've got displays that have different characteristics than those cameras. And we want to navigate that journey with the help of good color science, with the help of good color management. So try these things out. Go download that LUT. Play with these concepts. Play with these techniques. And I hope to see you in our next session of grade school loaded up with questions that we're going to tackle in the full hour that we have dedicated to this topic when we get together. See you then.