Master Study in DaVinci Resolve Printer Lights

Fantastic article and tutorial; excellent!

On 1/13/2019 at 7:46 AM, Luca Di Gioacchino said:

Can the RBG Mixer be considered an alternative to using PPL?  It, too, offers precision.

No, in Resolve the RGB Mixer has a completely different function. I tend to use Offset very early in the grade (usually followed with a Custom Curve), to get a broad overall adjustment, and once I get the image in what I call "quasi-Rec709 space," then I can start making more precise balances. I tend to use Pots (individual RGB controls) in the Primaries to start the adjustment, but you can make a good argument for other methods. I sometimes work with film-based projects where there is no Raw data per se (that is, no Raw adjustments), so sometimes I'll use either the RGB Pots or sometimes the RGB Mixer to fix color temperature problems. In particular, it's helpful if you have an underexposed Blue channel, and you can "steal" some information from R&G to give the Blue a cleaner signal to work with. This will help minimize noise in cases where the Blue channel is underexposed. 

There are a lot of different ways to work, and the beauty of Resolve (or Baselight or Mistika or any top-flight system) is you can choose one of a half-dozen different methods. As long as it works, the end justifies the means. I do tend to start with a very well-balanced picture first and then degrade it later on if we need to go to (say) an extreme blue look or a bleach-bypass look. I'm not a fan of starting with an image that leans off to one side early on in the signal chain, because the danger is that later on, you can wind up with distortion and noise because you're overdriving the signal (or worse, destructively crushing the signal and then being unable to normalize it in subsequent nodes or layers.

Amazing article I have been following " The way of the printer lights" since I read Walter and Marc talk about this

It would be great to know how PLights  are used to create different looks, not only balancing. In parallel nodes maybe? Qualifiers for highlights, and shadows? 

Reading this after going through the whole Professional Color Grading Techniques tutorial by Kevin P. McAuliffe just makes more sense now.
 

Thank you for sharing this guys!!!

Great article!

I will probably catch a lot of flack on this, but printer lights originated in an era when 99.5% of all color correction happened in-front of the camera; prior to filming.  What you can alter and skew is very, very limited to now standard color grading tools.

If you have really uneven or mismatched looks on a job, you would probably be advised to make a balancing grade pass BEFORE you try to use printer lights and keep your printer lights node toward the very end of the node tree.

Very interesting and detailed. 

On 2/3/2021 at 1:14 PM, Frank Wylie said:

I will probably catch a lot of flack on this, but printer lights originated in an era when 99.5% of all color correction happened in-front of the camera; prior to filming.  What you can alter and skew is very, very limited to now standard color grading tools. If you have really uneven or mismatched looks on a job, you would probably be advised to make a balancing grade pass BEFORE you try to use printer lights and keep your printer lights node toward the very end of the node tree.

I see your point, but I don't agree. Think of Printer Lights as a way of adjusting LGG Shadows and Gain simultaneously. It has its uses, and you don't have to necessarily do it at the end of the chain. I agree it's more useful with Log images, but I honestly use it on a lot of stuff. In particular, when I have an operator who changes the lens exposure in the middle of the shot (which is pretty much a logarithmic change), I find a keyframed Offset usually will fix it, or at least minimize it so it's not too noticeable. So there's a lot of "it depends" to this.

I'm very much a "if it works, it works" kinda guy: there's a lot of different ways to approach things, and often there are no absolutes beyond making the client happy and not winding up with a picture that looks stressed-out or distorted.

This is a very naive question – apologies in advance... But what would be the correct way to apply this method to color correcting flat/log film scans, in terms of colour management in Resolve? What would you select as input and output gammas?