Speaker 1: 80% of color grading in. In this video, I'm gonna show you how things work in DaVinci Resolve, but all the concept and all the things that we're gonna do, you can do the same in other softwares like Final Cut Pro or Premiere Pro as well. First up is Rec.709. Rec.709 is a color space, a color space you can see kind of like language. In this case, Rec.709 would be English, the most common language understood by all displays. These are just examples. Let's say that you shoot in a log profile on your camera. That could be Spanish. Let's say that's Sony Log 3. This Spanish needs to be converted into English or translated for your display to probably see it and properly understand what to show in terms of the colors. If you didn't shoot in a log profile, you don't have to do anything in this step. You can just progress to step two instead. So when you shoot in log, you shoot in a format where your camera captures a lot more information in a flat, desaturated profile. We need to convert it into Rec.709 for your display to properly understand how to show the image. This is the industry standard. Let me show you a simple way of doing that. Converting to Rec.709, we have two options. We can either use a LUT, for example, a LUT that is meant to convert. I can take this LUT that takes it from Canon Log 3 and Cinema Gamut into Rec.709 and Gamut 2.4, and that'll convert it into Rec.709. And this is how you would probably do it in Premiere Pro or Final Cut as well. I can also reset this in DaVinci Resolve and head into the color space transform, add that here, and then put in my parameters by myself, Canon Cinema Gamut, Canon Log 3, Rec.709, and Gamut 2.4. And that does exactly the same. Let's call this one Rec.709. Now we want this to be our last step. So we're gonna pull it over here and then we're gonna head to the next step. The next step in the line is color correction. Here we have contrast, exposure, and color balance. Step two is to create contrast. Contrast in this case is basically the difference between the dark areas and the bright areas. So by creating more contrast, we are pulling the dark areas and the bright areas apart by making dark areas darker and the bright areas brighter. That creates a contrast and a separation between those two that makes it stand out and draws our attention more to the areas that are in between those. Usually that's the skin tones or subject, or just creates a really nice contrast that makes the image more pleasing to look at. To work with contrast, we're gonna add another node. I can right-click here and say Add Node, Add Serial Node Before, and then I get a new node. Now we know we're already gonna use a few more nodes, so I'm just gonna create a few with option S, and that just creates a few more. This one is gonna be our contrast. And to do that, we can take the tone curve that takes us from pure black to pure white up here, and then all the tones in between. So to create some contrast in this image, we can take the dark areas and the shadows and pull them down, and we can take the bright areas and pull them up. Thereby, if we turn this off and then on again, we can see that we've created a lot more contrast and separated the dark areas and the bright areas a lot more. Step three is exposure. Now, you might have shot in a correct exposure already in your camera, but after you've changed the contrast a bit around, or maybe after you convert it into a rectal line, it doesn't look completely right. So most of the time, we have to do a little bit of exposure adjustments. Now, here are some guidelines. This is the waveform. This helps you to see if things are clipping. Clipping means that it's touching the top, meaning there's pure white. There's no detail left in the brightest areas, or it's clipping in the bottom, crushing the blacks. There's no detail left in this area. It's a common mistake to think that you need to stretch out the entire waveform to touch the bottom and touch the top. That's not the case. Think of your image as the real life. If you're looking around the room that you're sitting in now, is there anything that's supposed to be completely black, meaning that you cannot see any detail in it? Most of the time, the answer is no, unless you're looking in a dark room at night. And in that case, it makes sense that you can still see some detail, and therefore nothing has to touch the bottom. The same goes for the other way around, for the bright areas. If you're looking straight into a light bulb, there will be no detail at all. So it makes sense that those are touching the top. But other than that, for the sun or something else, most of the time, we don't want that to be clipping. Now, a lot of this happens in camera before we even go into the color grading, but in the color grading, we wanna adjust these things as well. So first rule of thumb, do not touch the top or the bottom unless it's intentional. And second of all, skin tones usually lie around the 70 area on this waveform. So that means that we want our skin tones or the brightest part of our skin tones to lie around that area to be properly exposed. Now, when we're doing our color correction, it's perfectly fine to aim for that, but it doesn't always have to be that way. That's just kind of like a rule of thumb or guideline that you can follow. So let's see how it works if you wanna adjust the exposure for the clip that we just worked. Now, we just talked about the fact that if we go a little bit further here, we can see the skin tones a little bit better. The brightest part of the skin tones we want in our waveform to lie around 70. If we hover over here at the qualifier in the Vintage Resolve and then use Display Qualifier Focus, we can hover over the skin tones and see on our waveform here where they lie. So if we pull up the waveform a little bit larger, we can see now that our skin tones are lying around the 60 mark right here. So if we take the offset and just try and pull that up until we get those skin tones to lie around the 70 mark instead, now they're properly exposed. Now our footage look a little bit more washed out again. So we could go back to our contrast and try and add a little bit more, or we could do something like pulling down the lift that's sort of equal to pulling down the shadows and pull up the gain to stretch those out a little bit more and do that until we feel like we have a good contrast. And at the same time, we have our skin tones lying in the correct place. I feel like this is a pretty good spot. We went from this to this. It looks a little bit better. The next step on the list and the final step in our color correction of this simple workflow is color balance. Now this means that sometimes when you shoot, the white balance might be off or there might be some colors in the image that are influencing the sense of our camera to not properly capture the colors the way they're supposed to. Often that looks a little bit too green, a little bit too magenta. It can also look too warm or too cool. To fix that, there's a few different methods that we can work with, either the temperature and tint slider, that's the most common used, or we use something like the offset in the Vintage Resolve, where we can drag around the different parameters, the red, green, and blue channels to compensate for that mistake or that error we had in our camera when we captured the footage. Now again, with the color correction, our aim is to get the footage to look as close as possible to what it did in real life, what we saw with our eyes when we actually captured the footage in the first place. Let me show you how we can balance this clip that we've been working with already. Now we wanna use our balance. And for our balance, we wanna make sure that we are on the vectorscope, which shows us the red, magenta, blue, cyan, green, and yellow colors out here. And then we have a blob of color here that shows us where our colors lie. Again, we can use the qualifier here to see that these green tones are lying somewhere around the green and the yellow area. The skin tones are lying up here around the red area, but we do have what's called skin tone line indicator here. We can turn that on by switching on dials here and then turning on the skin tone indicator. You have a similar thing in Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro. And what we can do from here is that we can take the tint. For example, when we hover over here now, you see the skin tones are lying more towards the magenta tone than the green tones when we are comparing it to this line. So we could just add a bit more green by pulling the tint to the left. And by that, changing up the temperature or the tint a lot more. And you can see it already looks a lot better. Another thing that we can do inside of the mixed result is that we can use the offset where we have the red, the green, and the blue channels. So if I add a bit more green, we're sort of doing the same as we did before, but here we have one more dial compared to the temperature that's just blue and orange, where we can just, if we move it up a little bit towards the red, now we're moving the blob up and then moving it a little bit away from the blue, which is over here towards the yellow. Now we're getting a lot more control of what we're doing. And now we might actually end up seeing that we have a little bit too much green. We went from this to this that looks a lot more natural than this magenta hue and tone that we had before to this one that looks a lot more natural, maybe a little bit on the green side, but we can tweak that later on as well. I'm pretty satisfied with how this looks. Now that we're done with our color creation and hopefully have an image that looks as close as possible to what it looked like in real life, we can progress to the most objective area of color grading, which is the actual color grading, where we put a look on or we change the colors to fit the emotions, the vibe, the mood, or the overall feel of the story that we're trying to tell with the video. The first step in this for me is to create or develop a look. Now the most popular looks in Hollywood are teal and orange, desaturated or muted tones, and this very high contrast with crushed dark look. The teal and orange are seen in something like Mad Max, Fury Road. The muted or desaturated tones are seen in something like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And the last one is seen in something like The Dark Knight. So these are popular styles and looks that you can try to implement into your videos if you want to create a specific style or mood or vibe in your video. To do this, we can usually use the color wheels to enhance or implement color that wasn't already there into the scene itself. Now, some of this also sometimes happens in camera when it's shot. For example, Hollywood will implement the lighting and as much as they can in camera, so it's easier to color grade afterwards. But we can also do it in post if we want to. So using the color wheels, if you are in Premiere Pro or Final Cut, you'd usually have the shadows, mid-tones, and highlights, which are the areas that you can then implement this color into. For example, in the teal and orange, you can put teal into the shadows and orange into the highlights and see and work with how you can develop that look. If you're working in DaVinci Resolve, you also have the lift, gamma, and gain that are in some ways similar to shadow, mid-tone, and highlights, but are different in the way that they work with things. But you also have the other tools in DaVinci Resolve as well. So let's jump into DaVinci Resolve where I'm gonna use the lift, gamma, and gain to just apply a little bit of color and look into the footage that we already worked with. To develop our look, if you are in Premiere Pro or Final Cut, you'll probably see shadow, mid-tone, and highlights. In DaVinci Resolve, we're gonna work with the lift, gamma, and gain as just mentioned, but they work sort of similar. We're not gonna go in depth what these are today. But in this case, we're gonna try and create a more teal and orange look. I'm gonna use my vector scope again just to pull this up and make sure that I'm on the look node in this case. And I'm just gonna see if I can pull some teal in here in this area in between the cyan and the blue and add a little bit more to the skin tones here that are orange. So by doing this, I can take my lift here and I can try and pull that towards the area that I want it to be pulled because you can see that the wheel here depicts the same as the vector scope does up here. So by pulling this down towards the cyan, we're getting something that looks a lot more cyan overall. Now I can take my gain and I can pull it the opposite way, something like this. And what I wanna make sure is that the skin tones stay sort of the same. So if I turn this off and on again, I can see this blob moving a little bit. So if I move this and make sure that it's staying sort of the same area, this part up here, that's the skin tone. Now we can see that the skin tone is not changing that much, but now we have a nice contrast between the teal shadows here and the brighter orange in the highlights here. So if we turn this down again, now we are with this image so far. Now that we've got the basic look set down, we can work with curves to dial it in even further. The curves are usually used as hue versus hue, hue versus saturation, and hue versus luminance. These are the three parameters that we wanna work with. Hue versus hue controls the different colors and you can tweak the colors, say that you want the red tones to be more orange or the green tones to be more teal. That's something you can do in hue versus hue. In hue versus saturation, you can take specific hues, say in green, and desaturate them if you want that more desaturated, tropical green kind of feel and look. And lastly, we have the hue versus luminance, which lets you control the overall brightness of a specific color. Personally, I mostly use hue versus hue and hue versus saturation and try to do everything else around luminance with other tools, but that's completely up to you. Let's jump in and see how we can tweak the colors just a little bit using the curves. To use the curves, we're gonna head into the curves down here and we're gonna have the hue versus hue and the hue versus saturation. Now we're gonna make a few tweaks here. So I'm gonna pull up the vector scope again so we can see what we're doing in terms of this. And we're gonna look at the image at the same time. First up, we're gonna try and draw on the skin tones here to get a nice selection of that. And I can already see that they're lying a little bit too far to the left. They are getting selected probably because we added some teal in here. So I'm gonna draw it over a little bit because we actually know exactly where the skin tones are lying. They're lying somewhere here between the red and the yellow, but a little bit more towards the red than the yellow. So this selection is pretty good. We have almost all the way to the red and not as close to the yellow here. And then dragging this side up, you can see if you turn it off and turn it on, we're narrowing in the scope here. Now this is a personal preference for me, but this is just to make sure that the skin tones are actually lying on the line here. And it's not making a massive difference if you're looking at it from a broader perspective, but it does just dilate it a little bit. Now, another thing I wanna do is I wanna try and see if our cyan colors here can be a little bit more opposite of our skin tones. So I'm gonna take a point here somewhere and around the teal. I'm gonna try and tweak them around so they get just about opposite of the skin tone line here. Gonna drag this up a little bit. I'm gonna try and pull this further down. Now we can see that we're creating more of a direct contrast between the two. So we're getting a more blue, cyan, magenta kind of feel in the background that stands out a lot better and contrasty towards the skin tones that we have here. So here everything blends a little bit more together. Here we have more contrast, but it might have become a little bit too blue now. So we might wanna loosen up a little bit on our selections here, just to make sure that we're not overdoing it too much. And then I wanna make my greens a little bit more to the yellow side as well to make sure that that looks nice too. And we might wanna turn this up a little bit too. And by doing that, we're getting softer, more yellow greens than the greens that we had before. And everything is standing out a little bit more in the background in terms of that blue, cyan tone. So this is a way that you can tweak the hue versus hue. And then if you wanted to come in here and say, we wanna protect the skin tones, those are lying in here, we're gonna lock those off. And then we wanna desaturate everything that's not the skin tones just a little bit so we don't have as much as we did before. We see now all the colors are exploding a little bit. And now with all our adjustments, it's just looking a little bit more desaturated. And maybe that was a tad too much. So we can always just pull it back up a little bit and then see where a nice middle ground is. I think this looks pretty good for this tutorial. So we're just gonna stay with that. Last in the list is masking. Masking is the final step that we wanna get to. Step number seven in this case, which allows us to select specific areas of the footage, the clip, the image, whatever you wanna call it, and tweak that specific area to our liking. Now, often you will see a mask as a circular or rectangular mask, and you kind of crop out a portion of the clip that you then adjust. You can also use something like the qualifier that allows you to select specific hues, meaning specific colors or specific ranges of brightness that you then wanna select and tweak to your liking. This video, we're simply just gonna add a little bit of contrast to our subject in the middle and then lower the exposure overall around her just to make sure it looks a little bit better. And she stands out in the middle a little bit more. So let's see how that works. And we're gonna do two masks. So we're gonna do a focus mask. And in this case, I'm just gonna do both manually. And we're gonna do an outside mask. What we're gonna do here in our focus mask is we wanna find our window tool, whatever software you're using. In DaVinci Resolve, it's a power window. I'm gonna draw it around our subject here in the middle, maybe a little bit smaller. And then I wanna make sure that the softening is pretty large. Click, click, Shift-H in DaVinci Resolve. You can see all the gray is what I haven't selected. And all the green here is what all the color in here is what I have selected. Now I can go into my tone curve again and just add a tiny bit of contrast in the middle here. Something like that. That just makes her stand out even more in the middle. Now, if I turn it on and off, it's pretty obvious that it's here. But because we've softened it out, it blends pretty well. Now, if we were to try and make a similar mask out here, we're gonna drag one out, maybe make it a little bit bigger this time because we wanna select everything that's around her. And we wanna make something like 50% again. But this time, we're gonna invert the mask by clicking here. And now you can see the gray in the middle means that we don't have her selected. And then we can go into our curves here again and just drag down a little bit on the shadows here. This creates much darker area around her, making her stand out a lot more, but also blending our original mask quite a bit more. So with these two masks, we've just gone from this to this. That looks a lot better already as well. Now that we have all seven steps in place, let's just quickly go over it one more time. So Rec. 709 is the conversion from a log profile or a different profile than Rec. 709, the standard profile, into Rec. 709. This is so that most displays that we will export to can see properly what we graded and what we created inside the software. We want this step to be the first thing that happens so we can see it in Rec. 709 as well. But if possible, we want the software to do this as the last step. In DaVinci Resolve, that means making it as the last node. And then when we grade before that, everything that we do is essentially in log, but it's live being translated into Rec. 709, and thereby we can take advantage of all the other information that we have. If you're working in Premiere Pro or Final Cut, a way to do that could be to add an adjustment layer on top of your clip, add the Rec. 709 conversion there with a LUT or with the Color Space Transform in DaVinci Resolve, and then grade on the clip underneath. That's a way that you can go about it. Then we want to do our color correction steps. It's crucial that we get the foundation right before we start tweaking the colors and making it stylistic. So that's the contrast, exposure, and balance. The reason why I'm going backwards when I'm doing it like you just saw is because then we don't have to go back and forth as much. If I first do the contrast and then adjust the exposure before that in the node tree, I'm essentially still having all the range of the brightness and the information available, and then it's being translated into the contrast and so on to the next node. And then the color balance, you can place that where you want in the color correction. I like to have it as first step because then I'm moving backwards. And then when we get to the color grading, we move forward. So with the color balance as well out of the way, tweak things so they look as they're supposed to, we can head on with our look, where we create something like the teal and orange style, or we go into something like the muted and desaturated, or something completely different if that's what you want. Here we can apply colors into, for example, the shadows and highlights to separate them and also create color contrast in this case. You can tweak that even further with the curves by dialing in the hues and the saturation to get the colors just how you want them. And then finally, we can jump into the masking where we selectively can choose where we want to make adjustments, for example, by adding a little bit more contrast to our subject and just overall lowering the exposure outside to really pull in the focus and our attention to the subject in our video. So this is pretty much 90% of the basics of color grading. If you're nailing this, you can get a really, really good image. Now, there are other tools for more advanced techniques and other things that you can do, and that's the last 20%. But if you make sure that you nail these tools with other software you're using, I ensure you, you can get really good grades when you've locked down a good workflow and when you've started to really understand how these things work. I have a lot of other tutorials on this, and I just released a free guide on what we've just covered today. So if you want to read through it and have that available, you can find the link down below and you can download that for yourself. I also have a lot pack for easier grading, and I have a course if you want to dive even further into how to color grade, creating your own LUTs, and really dial in looks and styles. So with that said, that's what I have for you today. Hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned something. Leave a comment down below if you did, and I'll just see you in the next video. Take care.