Professional Color Grading Techniques in DaVinci Resolve

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This course provides colorists with an in-depth overview of professional color grading techniques and look creation in DaVinci Resolve.

The main concepts discussed in the course are advanced contrast management, balancing techniques and look development. The focus is primarily on higher end color grading, color theory and teaching techniques that took professional colorists years of experience to master.

The course is presented by Kevin P. McAuliffe but is created together with professional colorists that have contributed with insight about their work methods. Kevin uses DaVinci Resolve, but it is taught with the goal of showing techniques that can be used in any color corrector.

The footage used in this course is available for download so that you can easily follow along. In addition, we have included power grades so that you can deeply study the node structures and color grading techniques demonstrated in the course, and a free sample of 35mm film grain from our friends over at Cinegrain.

 

COURSE OVERVIEW

 

LESSON 01: S-CURVE MANIPULATION

The curve is the key component of contrast creation, and in the first lesson we look at the basics of the curve and curve shaping.

LESSON 02: CORRECTIONS IN LOG SPACE AND GAMMA SPACE

We continue to explore how brightness affects the curve in log- and gamma space, and how to manipulate the curve in a log workflow.

LESSON 03: COMPRESSION TECHNIQUES

In this lesson we look at how to disturb the luma vs. distance ratio of the curve with compression techniques to challenge the contrast and create a printed look. This technique is often used as a base to create a painterly feeling with limited dynamic range.

LESSON 04: LOW LUMA COMPRESSION TECHNIQUES 

We dive deeper into compression techniques and how to compress low luminance levels, add speculars and  details with gamma stretching and the log controls.

LESSON 05: PRINTER LIGHTS FUNDAMENTALS

Now that we have a better understanding of contrast management, we look at the fundamentals of printer lights that we will use to balance and create looks later in the course.

LESSON 06: PRINTER LIGHTS WORKFLOW

In this lesson we look at using printer lights in a log workflow and watching the results through our curves.

LESSON 07: BALANCING TECHNIQUES

Now it's time to analyze and match shots with the help of what we have learned about printer lights. We also take a closer look into using the RGB-parade and the vectorscope. We will also discuss some thesis questions related to balancing in general.

LESSON 08: BOUNCING TO CREATE LOOKS

We are ready to create our first desaturated and moody look by bouncing in colors though a defined node structure.

LESSON 09: UNDERSTANDING COLOR HARMONY

Colorists need to understand what makes an image look pleasant to the eye and in this lesson we discuss the important of color harmony. We are building on the look from the previous lesson to create color separation and tweek the colors into an analogous color scheme.

LESSON 10: COLOR CHANNEL MIXING TO CREATE UNIQUE LOOKS

In this lesson we look at how to create a modern and cold look with the help of channel mixing and opacity control.

LESSON 11: GRIT AND TEXTURE

We will go though techniques to bouncing luma controls agains each other to bring out texture, create silver tints to add rawness, clip the blacks and advanced sharpen techniques to bring out grit.

LESSON 12: NODE COLOR MIXING

Node color mixing is a very important skill to master for every colorist, and by combining colors and strengths we will get access to unlimited color combinations that can be used in look development. We will see how our color combinations blends onto the tonal range we have established.

LESSON 13: PIPING A KEY DOWNSTREAM

In this lesson we work with separate streams and color transforms to pipe super clean keys.

LESSON 14: LOCAL EDGE SOFTENING

This lesson is about isolating the local edges in the images and working with them to create a softer image without loosing the overall sharpness.

LESSON 15: CREATING VOLUME IN THE WHITES

We will look at another important compression method for creating volume in the highlights and reduce the sharp thin feeling of digital images. 

LESSON 16: EVENING OUT SKIN TONES

Going through a very popular technique to even out skin tones and take care of imperfections.

LESSON 17: SOFT SATURATED LOOKS

In this lesson we will dial in a soft contrast and create color contrast with varying hue strenghts.

LESSON 18: FILM EMULATIONS AND GRAIN TECHNIQUES

In our final lesson we will create a new look with a Film Emulation LUT, the log controls and add texture with a 35mm fine grain sample (that you will get for free sponsored by Cinegrain). We will look at different techniques to enhance the structure of the grain.

 

 

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3 hours ago, Justinian Buckley said:

Re an ACES Workflow is this how the node tree should look, with reference to Lesson 3.

First node Printer lights / Contrast flatten/ LoG Shadows / The last node being a Gamut Mapping OFX (REC 709 / Tone Map simple / Saturation compression)

1762203831_Lesson3.thumb.png.191e04c6b0f86b3dab2893d1f26c9694.png

 

 

 

 

 

How does your last node look like in the gamut map?

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1 hour ago, MichaelTiemann said:

Lesson 16 glosses over the fact that you turned the woman's blonde hair to ginger.

It can be hard to see small differences in compressed files, so most of the corrections in all the lessons are overdone a bit to the make the result more noticeable for the viewer. That's something we mention several times in the course and we do encourage the viewers to be much more careful with the values than we are when judging the final result on the grading monitor. With this technique you should be able to even out the differences and get a great looking result without affecting the hair. Even on very complex shots with a lot of neighbouring tones.

Also note that in this example we demonstrate how to play the two hues against each other to affect imbalance in the entire shot, but you can isolate the effect to affect only the skin tones  if you create more separation between skin and hair in the balance node and pick more specific hue ranges.

You can even apply the techniques inside of a key to isolate it even further, but in most cases you will be perfectly fine by playing the curves against each other. It will give a much cleaner result, and if you discover that some hues are affected negatively you can counter balance the shot after the hue shift with the offset. 

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He didn't explained exactly how RGB Mixer works. Ok, I can replicate what he did, but what actually happens if I pus the green in the red channel, or others? 

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12 hours ago, DRAGUSIN PAUL said:

He didn't explained exactly how RGB Mixer works. Ok, I can replicate what he did, but what actually happens if I pus the green in the red channel, or others? 

Yea, that would be interesting to know.

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Lesson 15 at 1:05 - the entirety of the 0-100 luminance range is actually mapped between the values of 50 and 75 in the luminance qualifier, so you incorrectly identify where the highlights/midtones/shadows fall here.

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