Masterclass in Color Grading with Derek Hansen

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Derek Hansen is one of the most successful colorists in Los Angeles, with experience from high-end commercial work at MPC, The Mill and Arsenal Creative. In this masterclass you are invited into his color suite to watch how he creates great looking images and discuss workflow, techniques, creativity and strategies that will help you become a better colorist.

The course is about the art and craft of color grading and is not designed to teach the operations of a specific software.

The footage used in this course is available for download.

About the instructor

Derek Hansen is a world-renowned colorist with background from MPC, The Mill and Arsenal Creative. He has crafted images for many top directors such as Gia Coppola, Young Replicant, Luke Monahan and Brian Buckley, and graded music videos for artists such as Miley Cyrus, St. Vincent, J. Cole and Mehan Trainor to name a few.

Who is this course designed for?

  • Colorists
     

COURSE OVERVIEW

 

LESSON 01: COLOR SETUP AND ANALYZING THE SCENE

Derek is setting up the color workflow and analyzing the scene.

LESSON 02: PRIMARY BALANCE

Starting with the primary balance and discussing the importance of it.

LESSON 03: ORGANIZATION AND RIPPLING 

Discussing layer organization and grade rippling.

LESSON 04: BALANCING 

Balancing and discussing all the decisions to be made when it comes to brightness and exposure. Dealing with challenges such as thin images and sharp highlights.

LESSON 05: REFERENCES

Analyzing the references from the client and preparing for the look creation.

LESSON 06: CURVE MANAGEMENT

In this lesson Derek recreates some of the characteristics of Kodak Eastman, and use techniques to compress the midtones and control the highlights.

LESSON 07: DEEP SATURATION

Continuing the work of recreating the Kodak Eastman look, compressing the image with hue curves and creating deep rich saturated colors.

LESSON 08: HUE SHIFTING

Pushing and hue-shifting the individual colors to bring the colors into harmony and create a stronger look.

LESSON 09: RED TONES

Finessing the look by bringing in the red film tones.

LESSON 10: SECONDARY WORK

Finishing it all up with some shadow, highlight and skin keys to create a better match.

 

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Thank you gentlemen. 

Derek do you find yourself in the position sometimes where you are asked to come up with a look(s) without any references and if so what is what is your game plan for such a situation

Also any "begining baselight" courses for those of us that have the student edition would be most desirable.

Edited by Dimitrios Papagiannis
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1 hour ago, Dimitrios Papagiannis said:

Thank you gentlemen. 

Derek do you find yourself in the position sometimes where you are asked to come up with a look(s) without any references and if so what is what is your game plan for such a situation

Also any "begining baselight" courses for those of us that have the student edition would be most desirable.

I think he mentioned some things he does under base grade and some in look depending situation.

I work now in a siular way a bit and it really depends now and then as some things are good to do under and some after.
I would say play around variations and see how you like it most. 

My experiences are from Scratch and Resolve now but hope to utilize this class information in Sudent soon.

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This is probably the coolest colorist course I have seen, it felt like I was sitting on a chair next to him in the color suite! Well done Lowepost, you deliver unbetable content over and over again.

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Once we arrived at 'secondaries' I was curious to see if we'd get a short 'fixes' to remove the mic dip into frame  with the man eating chips agains the window...   😊

I agree with others about the value of being able to listen to established pros with some weight to their name.

But I feel a course like this could go quite a bit deeper in showing practical approaches to solving what is talked about—while still keeping it software agnostic. I'm on Resolve but don't mind Baselight being used. There were some cutaway shots to scopes, but it felt more like B-roll to me, than actually showing a "method to the madness".

I also think Lowepost should move to a more professional video delivering system. For online courses 'Teachable' is great. As in really great. I'm forced to use Chrome browser instead of Safari and there is no auto play of content.

There, I'm off my box. Just trying to provide constructive feedback—I really enjoy the courses.

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Hi Andree,

in my experience a lot of the bigger facilities running Baselight try to keep their colourist colouring, which is what I think Derek is focusing on in this tutorial. The fixing & finishing would probably be passed on to the GFX department. If you want the in and outs of object removal, look at the Paint Fixing in Resolve Fusion course by Lee Lanier.

I'm a freelance editor/colourist and unlike big facilities I have to do as much as I can in Resolve, editing, colouring & fixing shots. So I've found all the Fusion ccources very helpful, worth a look at.

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