Advanced Color Correction & Grading in Davinci Resolve

1. Intro: Hi, everyone. I'm Carson and over the last five years, I've been working as a colorist and DP in the film industry. I've shot and graded music videos, weddings, commercials, and short films, a little bit of everything. And in this course, I want to share with you my advanced color correction and color grading workflow so that you can expertly tackle literally any project that comes your way. Now like I said, this is a more advanced course. So if you need a basic intro to venture resolve and an overview of the program and tools in it, then go ahead and check out my other course, Color Correction and Color Grading for Content Creators. And then you'll be prepared to take this course. 2. Class Project: All right, so let's begin by talking about what all of this leads up to in the very end, the class project. Now what you're going to be doing is you're going to be downloading a folder called project Clips. In this folder you will find three video clips. And you'll want to start by color correcting and shot matching each of those clips. And then you'll want to create a color grade that is consistent across those clips according to the following direction from the client. We want a color grade that is warm and cinematic, has soft contrasts, no clipped highlights, or overly crushed shadows. We also want the final project to be in 709 color space as it would be distributed online. Now once you've color corrected shot match and graded each of the clips according to the information given by the client. Then I want you to go ahead and grab a screenshot of each of your clips with your node structure and each node clearly labeled. Then go ahead and upload those screenshots and give us a description of how you went about color correcting, shot matching, and grading each of the clips. Any struggles you faced and how you overcame them. This is valuable so that we can each learn from each other and build on each other's skill sets. Now that you know what the class project is, let's go ahead and get started with the first lesson. 3. Node Structure & Workflow: Everyone, welcome to the course, and in this first lesson we'll be specifically talking about node structure and workflow. These techniques will save you a lot of time and headache later down the road when you're working on more advanced projects. So even though some of this may not seem super applicable to really short small scale projects, this is super helpful when you're working with multicam projects and things that require a bit more work for color correction. So let's go ahead and jump into the computer and we'll take a look at node structure and workflow. First, we're going to take a look at order of operations. Now in previous courses, what I've done is I've usually put my color space transform at the very beginning. And then I've added a few nodes on top of that one and then maybe one before it so that I can have any exposure adjustments right here in the first node. Then I adjust my color space transform, Then I start doing color correction in a couple of nodes and then grading on after that. While this general order of operations is good and works for most projects, there are a few projects that require something a bit more complex, and let's go ahead and talk about that first, we're going to go ahead and simplify. We're going to take out this node right here, and then we're going to add one at the end. Now we're also going to go to our effects and we're going to drag another color space transform at the end of our pipeline. We have one at the beginning and we have one at the end. What this allows us to do is take our footage from any log format, convert it into a working color space, and then convert it from that working color space into our final delivery color space. For example, this was shot in cannon log right here. What we can do is we've got our cannon settings right here. And then instead of outputting to rec seven oh nine as our distribution, we could go ahead and come to Vinci wide gamut. And then we could set our output gamma to either something like Vinci intermediate or son film log. And then coming to our output color space transform, we can set our input settings for Vinci wide gamut with son film log. And then our output settings to our distribution setting, so either gamma 2.4 or re seven oh nine which is what I'll choose in this case. So what we've done here is we've created what's called an input device transform and an output device transform. This gives us greater flexibility with the nodes in between these two color space transforms. This also makes it easier if we're working with footage from multiple different cameras. So that we could set our camera settings here and then we would just need to adjust these settings as needed. And then our output transform right here, we could either keep this as Rec 79 or we could go ahead and export to a different format, like Rec 2020 or some other color format that our client requests. Whereas before, if we wanted to change our output settings for a different format, like from Rex seven oh nine to HLG or P 360. It's going to change the look of all these other nodes and we would have to recolor, correct, and regrade the entire project. You can see that having an input device transform and an output device transform does give you more flexibility on larger projects. But for most things that I do where things are just being shot on one camera with a specific set of settings throughout the entire video. This is usually the format that I go for in terms of a workflow. All right, now let's go ahead and look at multiple levels at which you can make adjustments to your clips. Now in the other courses, we've been specifically looking at adjusting each of the clips in the individual clip level that we would adjust this clip. Then we would move on to this one, maybe copy the settings over, and then we would repeat the process. But say you have two clips where you want to apply the same color grade. Well, there's a couple ways we can do this if you're switching from premiere. The simplest way to do this is to go back into your editing timeline and then create what's called an adjustment clip. Right here, we're just going to go into our effects, drag our adjustment clip on top of our footage. Then everything underneath this adjustment clip will have the exact same settings applied to it. Then we'll come back into our color page. And then we select our adjustment clip right here. Then I can select one of my lets that I've made for my footage and then I can choose which one I want to place on there. Something like this looks pretty good. Maybe I'll just the contrast a little bit. Bring up some of those shadows, bring down those highlights a little bit, and bring down that gamma, something like that. Now, everything that's under this adjustment clip will have the exact same settings applied to it. This is probably the simplest way to adjust multiple clips at once. Just use the adjustment clip to adjust everything underneath it. But say you had several clips spread throughout your project that you wanted to use the same settings for. In this case, we're going to go ahead and delete our adjustment clip. Come back to our color page. Let's say we want to have this clip, this clip have the exact same settings, but we don't want to just cut an adjustment clip and put it on top of each of these. What we can do is we can add these two clips to a group. We're going to go ahead and hold command or control on our keyboard. Select both of the clips, right click, and add them to a group. You can click Add Into Current Group or Add into a new group. In this case, let's create a new group. We'll call this one Group One. Now you can see there's a little green chain that adds these both to a group. You'll notice if we adjust the settings on one clip, it's not necessarily reflected on the other clip. Why is this? This is because we're using the clip mode. If we go ahead and come back to this clip that we're adjusting, reset this first, we'll go ahead and adjust some contrasts on this clip to work on it individually so that we can get it prepared to be adjusted as a group. Then maybe also adjust some contrasts on this one. Pull those shadows down just a little bit. Then we want to adjust both of these together. First, we've made a couple of individual adjustments on these clips. Now we want to adjust them as a group instead of being in the clip mode. We'll come up here to where it says clip right click on the down arrow and then select Group Post Clip. Now this is basically adding a layer on top of all the clips in the same group that you can adjust at once. So we'll just come into our color wheels and then let's say we want to just drag this all the way to the left to make it just crazy warm. You'll see in both clips, this is being adjusted at the same level. Anything in this group will be adjusted all the same at the group post clip level. You can also do this in the group pre clip level if you would like. The reason why you would have these three levels is because if you wanted to make your color space transform on the group pre clip to adjust all your color space transform settings. And then you could go in and color correct each clip individually and then color grade them on the group post clip. This gives you a lot more options in terms of being able to organize your workflow, especially if you're working with multiple different cameras. You can assign the different clips shot on different cameras to different groups that you can then adjust so that you have a more continuous workflow throughout your project. Now, there's one other option in here, it's called the timeline option. If we click on this, then it basically puts all of the clips in the timeline into one group that you can adjust altogether. But you'll notice that there's no node in here. In this case, we're going to go ahead and create a node. Click add node, corrector node, or really any node that you're looking for. Make sure that you adjust the input and output to their proper boxes. And then from here, you can go ahead and adjust any setting you want. And it'll apply to every single clip in the timeline. Looking at other clips, you can see we also have this blue purple cast to every single clip. Because it's adjusting literally everything in the timeline. The reason why I would use this level is if I wanted to apply a certain effect to all the clips at once. Whether it's film grain sharpening or really anything that I want on each clip in the timeline. So those are the different levels that you can apply effects at using this dropdown arrow up here. Then you can also just remember to create different groups for different clips shot on different cameras. And you can go ahead and color grade those groups individually. 4. Color Space Conversion: Now in this lesson, we'll be specifically talking about color space conversion. You may have also heard of color space transform and input lets or conversion lots. These are basically very similar things, not exactly the same, and I'll point out some of the differences as we go along. But in this lesson, I want to show you guys how the Color Space Transform Tool, Ind Vinci resolve works, how input or conversion lets work. And I'll show you guys the tools and techniques that I use to create color space conversion presets that work with any camera and color science. If you guys are ready, let's get started. All right, so when we talk about converting color space, the biggest idea here is we want to take this log footage or whatever format footage this is and turn it into something that's actually used for display and for output. So currently we have log footage right here and then some of these other clips we can tell are definitely more contrasty and have more of a wreck 709 color profile used. But in this particular clip we know that this one is shot in log and this was actually shot in cannon log. What we're going to do is look at how color space transforms work and how you can create your own. Now first let's go ahead and drop a color space transform onto our first node here. Then in this area right here, we've got our input color space, input gamma, output color space, and output gamma. These are the basic settings that we want to pay the most attention to for input color space. Since we shot this in Cannon, Cinema Gamma at Cannon log. Then we're going to choose Can Cinema Gamut. Then for input Gamma, this is the luminance and contrast setting that we used in the camera which was Canon log. So we're going to select Cannon log. Next, we're going to look at output color space to determine where this is going to be displayed. For most projects that I work on, they're displayed online for video ads and Youtube videos, things like that. So our output color space is going to be rex seven oh nine. We're going to go ahead and come down to rex seven oh nine. Then for output gamma, there's a couple of things we can do here. We can set this to the most common setting which is gamma 2.4 Or there's another setting called Rex, seven oh nine A. If we turn this off and back on and you can see we have more natural contrast in colors and exposure. Everything is looking a lot better than the more flat, desaturated look of cannon log. Now if you don't like the way the color space transform and Di Vinci resolve behaves. You can also go to your cameras manufacturer website and then download conversion lets from the developer. Let's go ahead and apply some of those for this clip. Let's go ahead and add a new node and then disable our first node. Then we are back to cannon log. And then I've already loaded in some lets directly from cannon. I'm going to select the three D let folder 33 point grid let, and then back into this folder here for these first two lets. These are specifically for cannon log. I'm going to go ahead and drag these onto our second node here to see how they look. I'm liking the second let right here just because it gives us more natural, pleasing skin tones and some nice vibrant blues. But if we drag our first cannon let onto here, we can see we get a little bit more desaturated colors that give us a little bit more leeway in color grading. And I might like the look of this one as well if some of the colors in the shot are already saturated. So you can go about this using a let from your manufacturer. That will just be a conversion preset that you can apply to your footage in just about any video editing program. Or you can use Davinci resolves built in color space transform. But what if neither of these options are available? Say the log profile for your camera is not supported in resolve or you just don't know what log profile is used. Well, you can go ahead and play around with your color space transform and see if there's a log profile and a gamma that works specifically with your camera. And see if you can find something that looks right. But this can be iffy and doesn't always work. In this case, if you're not sure what settings were used, you can go ahead and experiment. Or you can develop your own color space conversion preset. Now, I did shoot this clip in a log profile, but it was not cannon log. Let's go ahead and try guessing the log profile that was used. We can go ahead and look at our input color space. Since we know that this looks natural. I'm just going to go ahead and set this to rex seven oh nine. Then for input gamma, let's try something like sine on film log. Okay, now this is really crushing our shadows and blowing out those highlights. But let's hold on for just 1 second. Let's go ahead and set our output settings to rex seven oh nine and we can try rec 79 A and gamma 2.4 and see which one looks better. Okay, now let's try gamma 2.4 Yeah, this is still not quite looking right. What we can do is we can either play around with these settings more or do it ourselves. In this case, I want to do it manually. So we're going to go ahead and reset all grades and nodes. And with this particular log profile, it's not the most flat profile I've ever used. But it does lift our shadows quite a bit off that black point, and our highlights do retain some more information. So what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and close out of our effects. And we're going to start by working on our white point and our black point. Because these two aspects, the white point and black point, are super crucial when you're manually converting log footage, you want to make sure that your black point is set properly. So if we look at our curves right here, our custom curves, we can go ahead and take our y curve and drag it just until it barely hits this wall of color right here, because right over here is no information. But then this is when we start getting all our color information in. And a lot of this should be in those deep shadows. And so we're going to bring our black point up here properly. And then for our white point, we can go ahead and try dragging it to the left. But in this case, because we already have highlights just touching our white point, I wouldn't drag this any further to the left because I don't want to increase our white point. In this case, I would start working on contrast. Most log profiles store a lot of information in the shadows. In this case, I'm going to go ahead and add our editable splines to our curve. And this will give us a couple of handles that we can use to really move this curve around with a lot more fine tuned control. So I'm just going to go ahead and drag this down into the shadows and start pulling up some information somewhere right around there. Then I'm going to go ahead and bring our white point down, just until we recover some of that information that was up there. And then we'll go ahead and click on our black point, make sure it's set properly. And then we can play around with the handle here a little bit and see if there's any information that we want to pull back up into those mid tones right here. We're actually looking pretty good. Let's go ahead and turn this off and back on. We've definitely adjusted our black point and we've adjusted our highlights in mid tones. We've pulled some of that information out of the shadows, as most of that information is stored in the shadows in a lot of log profiles. But now we want to play around with the saturation a little bit. We're going to come over into our primaries wheels and then we are going to adjust our saturation. We'll go ahead and just gently bring this up a little bit. We'll bring it up a little too far and then we'll just dial it on back somewhere right around 55 to 60. Looks pretty good. Somewhere right around there. And then we'll go ahead and drag or Playhead through the clip to see how it looks right here. Maybe a little bit more saturation, something like that. Maybe bring those shadows back down a little bit more. This is the challenge that you run into when working with log footage and you don't know what settings you're supposed to use is you really have to play throughout the clip and then just adjust the colors around to make sure that your contrast exposure and colors look decent. So let's go ahead and resize this back here. Come back to the beginning of our clip, and I'm very happy with our levels and our colors. And we can also apply this to this clip which was shot using the same settings. So we're going to go ahead and right click on this clip and select Apply Grade. This will copy the same grade over to this clip and boom, now we have our log footage converted much more naturally to this more wreck seven oh nine style image. Then we can go ahead and come back to our primaries wheels and come to our offset to bring down our exposure if we feel like that's needed. But I think the color space conversion that we developed on this shot right here works fairly well on the other shots using these settings. If you want to save your adjustments as your own color space conversion let, then you can come down to your media right click on the clip, hover over, generate let, and then select 33 point, be let. From here you'll be able to apply this same preset and a lot of different video editors so that you can properly convert your footage every single time. Now that you're more familiar with automatic and manual ways to convert your color space, let's jump into the next lesson. 5. Noise Artifacts Banding: All right, so now let's talk about tools and techniques that you can reduce noise artifacting and banding in your videos. So let's go ahead and fix these issues. All right. So when we talk about noise artifacts and banding, there is a limit to what we can recover. However, in this video, I'm going to give you all the tools you'll need to recover most issues that you'll find in your projects. First, we're going to go ahead and look at banding, since this one is relatively easy to cover, if we come into our curves here on this image, I'm just going to go ahead and create a really, really aggressive curve, just to show you what we're working with If we create this super aggressive curve, something like that. Let me, that's a little too aggressive. All right? Something like that. You can see we've got this banding going on in the sky now, you don't have to make a curve this aggressive to start seeing this issue. Because in a lot of flat gradients, this can come up just a much more mild version of this. But just to show you, you've got these different bands and it looks like almost like a cartoonified version of the image. What we can do with this is we can come into our effects. Let's create a new node first. If we go ahead and type in banding, then you've got band, drag them onto your next clip. And you can see already it's recovered quite a bit of that and smooth out that gradient. We'll turn that off and back on, and you can see it's really trying to recover that. Now let's go ahead and turn this off. We'll give some nice normal contrasts like we usually would with this footage. Just bring down those shadows a bit, maybe bring up those highlights, something like that. Bring these a little bit further in and then we'll go ahead and increase our saturation. Something like that. Now if we go ahead and make this 100% or even 200% you can see we are getting a little bit of artifacts and noise and banding in the sky. If we turn on the band feature, then you can see it really clears a lot of that up, but there's a problem. It also starts clearing up other areas that we don't want to, other flat, more gradient type of areas like this road here. If we turn this off and back on, you can see there's all this detail in the road before. And then there's a bit of noise in the sky and then to clear up that banding and noise in the sky, it also does the exact same thing to the road. We can go ahead and play with our edge threshold settings in the band feature and with the post refined settings, things like that. But we're going to go ahead and reset all of these. What we can do with this if you don't want to impact other areas of your image, just the sky. Then you can go ahead and mask out this effect by coming to your windows here, your power windows. And then you can use any of these masks in here. In this case, probably want to stick with something like the rectangle mask here. Then we'll just drag this something like that over the sky and then we'll feather this out a little bit and then bring our horizon back down right there. You can see now we're only impacting noise and banding in the sky. This is super easy, super dead simple way to do this. Let's go ahead and copy these effects. Come to our next clip here and then paste them. And then we'll go ahead and bring this down a little bit here. Now you can see the band feature is really working to make a much smoother gradient in the sky. It does soften it out quite a bit, but if you are running into banding issues, then this can be a lifesaver and you can also reduce the global blend if you feel like the effect is too strong. Now, when we talk about noise artifacts, let's come to this other image here. Now, noise artifacts are a bit more of a pesky problem that we see in a lot of different clips. If we come to our curves first, we're going to go ahead and brighten up this clip, something like that. Now if we go ahead and zoom in to like 200% you can see we've got all this blue, green, red noise going on in the image here. We're going to go ahead and create another node. Then we're going to come to our noise reduction tab right here. Now when we talk about noise, there are two main types of noise that we're trying to fix. Luminous noise, chrominoise now, luminance noise is differences in brightness between different pixels. Then chrominance noise is differences in more of this flickering, blue, green, red hue between pixels. We're seeing both in this case, but much more color noise than luminance noise. If we go ahead and unlink these two, and then we increase our luminous noise reduction, we're sacrificing detail. If we go ahead and increase our chrominoise reduction, we're sacrificing color and it becomes a bit more gray and washed out. We've reduced quite a bit of that splotchy colorness, but if we look at it, it just the colors are all washed out and everything. And then again, luminance doesn't work all that great, just makes the image look real muddy. Now you can change the mode to better, or enhanced to get better results, but it doesn't always work in every case. This is why one of my favorite ways to reduce noise is to use temporal noise reduction. Which this estimates differences between frames of video, giving you a much higher quality version of noise reduction. If we come to our frames, the more frames we select, the more CPU intensive the program is going to run. And you're going to need a lot more power to run this. But this is a much higher quality noise reduction algorithm. We're going to go ahead and zoom back out to 100% on this clip, just so we can see what we're working with. Then we're going to set our noise reduction frames to two. We don't want to go too high just because we don't want to bog down our system too much. Then we can do motion estimation type faster. Obviously you want to choose better if you can, but faster is acceptable if you absolutely have to. And if you can get away with it, then for noise reduction or temporal threshold here, we can go ahead and increase these, and you can see we're getting rid of a lot of that noise without really sacrificing too much detail. Turn this off. Back on, we're getting rid of a lot of this noise. If we zoom way back into 200% you can see there's just not that red, green, blue, spottiness. You're not getting these weird looking artifacts and pixels here. We're getting a lot more even colors throughout. Now when you are working with footage from cheaper cameras, there is again a limit to how much you can reduce the noise without destroying the footage. One easy way that you can hide a lot of the artifacts and noise that comes from these cheaper cameras is to add film grain. If we go ahead and type in grain, drag that onto a new node here, then we can really hide a lot of these issues because the grain will make it harder to tell the differences between these clusters of pixels, making it a lot more pleasing on the eyes. Now let's tackle one more issue, soft footage. If we go ahead and zoom into 100% on this clip, you can see there's just not very much detail here. Let's go into even 200% it's just really blurry almost. Even though this is intact, sharp focus in camera, everything was set right, it's still soft because of the old camera that was used to film it. It is filming in ten AP, but this is a T three I. It's fairly soft. If we go ahead and we come to our sharpening and blur tab here, we can try to sharpen it. And oftentimes I'll just rely on this tab a good bit and I'll bring this down to like maybe 0.44 If we come back out to 100% or even 75% you can see that we are getting a bit sharper of an image, but sometimes this doesn't work and it just makes it look over sharpened. Again, if you want to create the illusion of additional detail, you can add film grain on a new node and that will greatly enhance the overall aesthetic of the video. And then you can even go further and play with some of the other sharpening features in Vinci resolve. If we type in sharp, then we've got our normal sharpened tool right here. We've got sharpened edges which prioritizes sharpening specific edges within the image. So if you check this box that says display edges, it'll show you the areas that it's trying to sharpen. The reason why this is important is because it's trying to prioritize sharpening stronger edges rather than sharpening every single pixel and actually accentuating the noise, This will just sharpen the larger structures in the image. We'll go ahead and take off this effect. Then there's also soften and sharpen. Now by default, this one's going to really soften your image up quite a bit, but this gives you greater control over whether you want to sharpen the small textures, the medium textures, or the large textures. You can go ahead and play around with this, but sometimes I like to sharpen the medium textures more, maybe a little bit of the large textures, but not so much the small one, since that's typically where a lot of noise is found there you have it some ways to fix noise and banding artifacts as well as how to work with softer footage. 6. Clean Keys & Masks: All right, so now in this lesson we'll be specifically talking about how you can pull clean keys and masks from your eight bit footage. Most videographers will tell you that while you can make masks on any kind of footage, you can't pull clean keys from eight bit footage. They say that you need to be shooting in ten bit in order to get any sort of a clean selection. But this is actually not true. There is a way you can pull clean keys from eight bit footage and the way you can select specific tonal ranges to make your color adjustments. And on top of that, we can refine the selection using masks. So let's jump into the computer and check it out. All right, so if you've been researching color grading for very long, you'll know that a lot of people say that you just can't get clean keys on eight bit footage. Today we're going to go ahead and debunk that myth. The reason why it's not entirely true is because you actually can get clean keys most people when they're pulling keys on pit footage like this. First let's just go into our keying area right here or qualifiers, if we go ahead and just select your skin, something like that. And then we'll press Shift H on our keyboard just to highlight it. You'll notice that we get this pixel a mess in some areas right here. One issue that we run into with pit footage, that gradation just isn't very smooth, it's very harsh, and it's roll off into other colors. You just have this really messy looking image. Why does eight bit footage do this, but ten footage or 422 footage doesn't do this as easily? This is because we're selecting hue saturation and luminants. Now this can work with a couple of setting adjustments, but there is a way to do this that's a lot more reliable. First, we're going to try to make this work here. Let's go ahead and reset it, and then we'll go ahead and select your skin again. Something just like that. Okay, we're getting somewhere. Just select more of her skin until we feel like we have enough of it selected. And something like that looks pretty good, but we still get this blotchy effect. What we can do is we can come down to our blur radius and we can just really punch this thing up and really blur out those edges so that we don't get that nasty gradation. And now it's a lot smoother this way you can actually pull clean keys from eight bit footage. If we go ahead and drag our playhead through the video, we can see that there's still some flickering going on though. Even if we've blurted out quite a bit, there's still some flickering going on. And we still get blurred edge right here into other areas that maybe we don't really want being affected. How do we fix this? Well, if we reset everything in here and we turn off our heat and saturation qualifiers and we just focus on luminants, then we can get a more reliable key that doesn't flicker nearly as much. If any, we can go ahead and drag our low up real quick just to get rid of some of the low end and the shadows. Something like that. And then we could pull down our high if necessary. But because some of our skin tones lie in those highlights, then we might not want to exclude some of those higher ranges. But you'll see even if we don't blur anything out, we still don't get that flickery effect. This is because eight bit 420 footage has the same amount of luminance data as eight bit 422 footage because those first numbers, the fours, specifically represent luminant data. Now we can go ahead and turn on our saturation qualifier and start adjusting that if we feel like we need to. We can bring up our saturation qualifier a little bit. Maybe bring down our highs with 842 footage, we can actually pull just as clean of a key as 8422 footage if we're using our luminant and saturation qualifiers and not using our hue qualifier, whether you want to use all three and then blur out your radius a little bit so that you get a more clean key on your skin or whether you just want to stick with the luminous or saturation qualifiers. That'll give you a much more clean key than if you include the hue qualifier. Then my favorite way to make selections on footage is just to use masks. If we just come over to our power windows, then we can just draw a mask around her and then just select her and exclude the background. Or we can include the background and exclude her. If we just want to adjust the background, things like that. The mask that I use the most is the circle mask right here. Usually what I would do if I just want to adjust her skin tones on her face, which are the ones that are probably going to be the most visible is I would just drag this on top of her face, something like that. Blur out the selection just a little bit, make it a bit smaller. And then I would just press command or control on my keyboard to track that mask throughout the shot. Press shift H on my keyboard to remove our highlight. And then just see that that mask follows her face throughout. For me, this gives me the cleanest selection. If I wanted to darken some shadows on her face, brighten those highlights and just create contrast or something in a specific area. This is what gives me the most control over that, rather than pulling keys in my qualifier selection panel. But both of those techniques work and you can also combine them in tandem to make specific selections within your mask. For example, let's go ahead and turn off this curve right here, and we've created a mask on her face. Let's go ahead and press shift H on our keyboard again then if we wanted to select just our highlights on her face. If we come into our qualifiers, we'll select those highlights right here. Something like that. Turn off our hue and saturation. And then we'll just drag this on up. Now we're selecting just the highlights. And then we'll feather this out a little bit right here with our low soft, something like that. Then we can go ahead and come back into our primaries wheels and make some adjustments to maybe the saturation. Maybe we could pull down some of those colors to bring back some of those highlights. Something like that. Press shift H, and you can see that we've adjusted a specific range within this mask that we've selected. We've just brought down some of those highlights. Those are ways that you can use these tools independently or combine them for specific effects so that you can really fine tune your footage and make very specific selections and adjustments. 7. The Color Warper: All right, so now let's talk about the color warper tool in divinciate resolve. This color warper tool is similar to HSL curves, but has major advantages that those features just don't have. It consolidates multiple tools into an easy to use format with a lot of advantages including Luma and chroma modes. And learning how to use the color warper can speed up your color correction and color grading workflow immensely. So let's go ahead and check it out. All right, so now let's look at the color warper tool. So right now we're in our primaries, and if you remember on this clip earlier, we created our own color space conversion. So what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and create another node. And then we'll start looking at the color warper on the color page. Over here at the color wiper. Right now we're working in hue and saturation mode. There are other modes for the color wiper. But first we'll look at hue and saturation. Then you'll see that we have these little spokes on this wheel. You'll notice that if we just start playing around with these points, we can start changing the hue and we can also increase or decrease saturation of that specific hue. Now you may be asking, well, what's the difference between this and the hue versus hue curves? Well, there's actually a pretty big difference. If we come to the hue versus hue curves right here, and we select a specific hue, and then bring all the others back down to the normal point. Then you'll notice we just adjust all of the hue in that one range, right? Then if we go to our hue versus saturation curves, then we can adjust all of the saturation, even the more saturated parts and less saturated parts still get saturated altogether within that hue that we selected. But if we reset this and come back to our color warper, then we can actually saturate the less saturated parts, which are closer to the center of the circle, and then desaturate the most saturated parts. Then we can choose how we're going to shift these hues around. This does give us a lot more control over the hue and saturation within our image than your traditional hue versus saturation curves. If we want more control than we get right here, we can go ahead and reset it. Then we can change the number of dots we have here, the number of points, and we can also change the number of spokes. What I prefer to do is change the number of spokes on the wheel. We'll go ahead and select maybe 12. Then this gives us a lot more control over the different colors and different in between total ranges of these different colors. On this wheel, we have a lot of control using this. We can compress our colors by maybe saturating the less saturated areas, and then desaturating those more highly saturated areas. And then we can really compress color that way. Now if you do go too far with this, you can end up with some weird color warping effects, like you see right here, where we've desaturated some of these areas and resaturated some, and it creates this rash looking effect. This is something you have to be aware of when you're adjusting this. You don't want to go too far, as this does give you a lot of control. There's also a lot more ways that you could mess up with this. I prefer to just use the least amount of spokes necessary and the least amount of points necessary to get the job done. Another way you can use this if we set this to a lower number of spokes on this wheel. I like to use eight spokes. And then we'll go ahead and set this to fit again. Then like let's say we want to select this blue in his shirt. If we click in our viewer, you can see that we're adjusting the hue as we drag left and right on our wheel. Then we can also adjust the saturation as we pull the colors further out from the wheel. We can really have a lot of control of this. Just start playing around with the image and just really click point and drag to color grade. This is one of the fastest ways to color grade, if you're just trying to do this quickly, is to just go ahead, click and drag, And then you can create a unique look like the one we have here. Very quick, very easy to use for just a click and drag system. This is the tool for you. Now, there is another way we can use the color warper as well. Let's go ahead and reset this. Then we can come to this little box icon right here. And then this is what's called chroma luma mode. This does look a little bit intimidating, but don't worry. Here we have two grids with our colors. This little white mountain in the center of it represents the color within our image. Down here at the very bottom, we have our black point on both of them. Up here at the top, we have our white point on both of them. Then of course, we have our mid tones in the center, like let's say we wanted to bring our mid tones more towards the warm side of things. We can go ahead and drag that to the left. And then if we want to brighten them, we could go up. Then we can go down to darken the same thing on our other grid here. If we wanted to make them more magenta, we could do that. We could also brighten or darken them. Now, why is this useful? Well, this is useful because if you wanted to operate in a specific color range, you can do that. I'll explain what this means. We're going to go ahead and reset this. Then we can choose the colors that we want to operate on. I'm going to go ahead and take my axis angle and drag this to the left and right. Now I'm primarily focusing on the grid on the right. It doesn't really matter which one you focus on too much, I just prefer to look at the one on the right, since it's the closest to my viewer. Then we've got Tal right here and orange right here. Say I wanted to drag Teal into the shadows, I could. I do want some more options to work with. I'm going to create a more detailed grid by setting this to eight. Then I want to drag my shadows more towards teal. You can see we're really cooling off those shadows. Then maybe I want to take my highlights, not my white point, but my highlights right here. A little bit more towards orange, something like that. Maybe take our skin tones, drag that a little more orange as well. Maybe I want to take those same skin tones and make them a little bit more green. I'm going to go ahead and drag that a little left, not too far. Bring it back. Something right about there. Now, this does require a lot of fine tuning and there's still a lot of work to do. But this is what will get you in the ballpark of the look that you're going for. This is a really easy tool that you can use, so you can shift colors within specific color ranges. The reason why you may want to use this over something like your standard color wheels, whether it's your primaries or your log is because right here you have a lot of colors you can select. But then with your color warper in chromoluma mode, you're specifically selecting two colors. You can shift those tunnel ranges between one of those two colors or one of these two colors. This just gives you some guard rails and some really finite ways you can adjust your image if you already have an idea of what you want in mind. And then you can also adjust the luminous that you want to operate on as well. If you want to adjust the chroma of a specific point that you've selected, you can come over here and shift your chroma around a little bit. And then if you want to adjust the brightness or luminance of that specific point that you have selected, you can also come over to your luma and drag that up or down so that you are making a little bit more fine tuned adjustments. Let's go ahead and apply the color worper to another clip. Let's come to this one where we have the squirrel walking down the street. Come to our hero shot right here. Let's go ahead and darken this clip just a little bit. Somewhere right around there, maybe bring down our white point, bring down those highlights, something like that. Now we'll go ahead and create another node. Then we can come to our color worper. Now in here, again, we want to select which color range we want to be working with. I really want to work in that Telan orange range. I'm going to bring my axis angle quite a bit to the left, and we've got back to Telan orange right here. Then maybe I want to warm up those highlights, something like that. Maybe cool off some of these lower mid tones or warm those up, depending on what we're going for. And then cool off those shadows. Maybe I want to add a little bit of green into our mid tones as well, to take some of that little purplish color out of the sky, warm up our highlights again. And then maybe add a little bit more magenta back into those highlights. Something like that. Then you could fine tune this really dial in the colors that you're looking for. And then you can see that if we turn this off and back on, you can really change the way that your image looks because you're operating within very specific color parameters. The way that I see the color worper is that it provides some guardrails in place if you know the colors that you want to be working with. It allows you to very specifically adjust those colors and takes a lot of the guesswork out of color grading so that you can just focus on shifting hues towards those colors that you wanted. Then with the hue and saturation mode, then you can go ahead and compress color shift hues around that already exists in the image, things like that. One other way that you can use the color warper is to do some split toning. Let's come to this image right here, let's create another node. And then say we want to split tone this image create another, a teal and orange look again. I'm going to drag my axis angle to the left. Then we just want to drag our highlights to the right and our shadows down over toward the left. Then you can see we've created a split tone look. The color warper makes it easier to do this. A very simple way to do this, rather than using your primaries wheels. It's just a lot easier to do an effect like this in the color warper. There you have it. An introduction to the color warper and the way that I use it in my projects. So that I can really easily click and drag to color grade or start working within the color range that I intended for the shot. 8. Grading Phone Footage: All right. So we all know how phones look. The video that comes from them looks so digital. And the HDR effects just really are dead giveaway that it's not shot on a professional cinema camera. So today we're going to be looking at how you can tackle your phone footage and make it look like it was shot on a much higher end camera. All right, so jumping into Da Vinci, resolve to fix phone footage. We've got two clips we're going to be looking at today. This first one is going to be outdoors and this is going to have some more HDR problems. You'll see that we've got this pasty look in the skin tones. This does look okay, but it doesn't look all that natural. When it looks pink and pasty, the shadows, you can see a lot of detail in there like you would with phone footage because it has this HDR tone mapping going on, but it just doesn't look natural. Doesn't have that natural contrast and shadow roll off. We're going to go ahead and fix that first. What we want to do is we want to start by adjusting our contrast. What I'm going to do is I'm going to come over to my curve so we have a little bit more control over our contrast. I'm going to start by pulling our whites down a little bit here, something just like that. Then I'm just going to make our generic S curve here that we can do on pretty much any footage and start playing around with these shadows. Bring that white point back up. Now we can see we're getting some of this detail. The skin is looking a bit more natural. We don't want to look so pasty, and that's why we're introducing a bit more contrast. Then I'm also going to go ahead and bring up my black point as well, not too high, just a little bit all. Now what we're going to do is we're going to fix some of these saturation issues with phone footage. Often because of the HDR processing going on, certain colors, especially blues in the sky, can get over saturated very, very easily. We're going to go ahead and come into our hue versus saturation curves right here. And you can see that these blues are just out of control. All the other colors have more moderated tones, but the blue is just spiking up like crazy. The first thing we're going to do is add a couple of points around the blue. Make sure we get these in about the right spot so that we don't really affect the other colors too much. And then we'll go ahead and just start bringing down those blues somewhere right around there to give a much more natural look. If we feel like we need to, we can go ahead and try saturating our skin tones a little bit. Just something like that. Maybe bring down the saturation in the reds so the lips don't get all weird overall. This is looking much, much better, much nicer. Maybe reduce some of the saturation in those reds. Just a little bit more, somewhere right around there is looking pretty good. Now the other issues that come with phone footage we're probably going to have to fix in our color grading steps. You can see in my hair here. This is shot with like a cinematic type of a mode where the background is blurred out using software and it's not an actual optical blur. You can see some of my hairs here got caught in that the edge detection is not perfect. There's a way we can go ahead and fix that. We're going to go ahead and create a new node by pressing option S on our keyboard. If you're on Mac, all Tess on Windows. And then on this new node we're going to come to our primaries. Now when we fix this edge detection a bit, we're also going to be fixing the over sharpening that's happening within the image. I'm going to go ahead and zoom in to show you what I'm talking about on phone footage you can see that there's this really over sharpened a look that it has, especially with finer textures like hair. We need to really reduce that. The first thing that we can do to reduce the over sharpening is to take our midtone detail and just pull a little bit of that out. Not too much, nothing crazy. Just a little bit. Then we're going to go ahead and fix this edge detection here. If we drag our radius up, we're blurring out the image. If we drag it down, we're sharpening it. In this case, we're going to go ahead and bring this up just a little bit. Nothing crazy somewhere right around there. Just to soften up the image enough, then maybe go a little bit more, maybe up to 2.55 Then we're going to create another node after and we're going to go ahead and resharpen the image. Nothing crazy. Just down by about five points, maybe three point, something like that already. We've taken away that over sharpening and we've gone ahead and reduced a bit of this edge detection mess. Now another thing that we can do is we can create another node, come to our effects and look for grain. We'll go ahead and drag our film grain onto the footage, and then select the kind that you want. In this case, maybe eight millimeter, 16 millimeter, 500 might look pretty good. 35 millimeter, 200. Just play around with this a little bit. Figure out which one you like and then this grain will add a bit more character and artificial detail to your image. Now if we go ahead and zoom back out, this is looking a whole lot better than when we started. If we go ahead and turn off all of our adjustments off and back on, you can see we've gone from this very artificial phone footage to something that's a bit more natural, something that you could start color grading really well. Now, this next clip doesn't suffer from the same over sharpening issues and things because there's already a fair amount of, a little bit of blurring that's happening because of the noise reduction going on in this case. This pasty look again is a little bit different than last time, but it's still prevalent. We're not going to worry so much about the over sharpening issues because of the noise reduction that was happening in camera. What we're going to be primarily focusing on in this one is getting rid of this pasty look, not just in his skin tones, but other places in the image as well, with an emphasis on the skin tones. Then again, we're going to come back to our contrast. Phone footage is usually a little bit flat with those shadows containing quite a bit of information. We want to bring down those shadows just to make them a little bit deeper, a little bit richer. Something like that, in this case is looking pretty good. Let's go ahead and add some grain again. Think we'll go 16 millimeter 500. Let's see how that looks. Zoom in to 100% here. Maybe change the grain, 200. That's looking pretty good. Turn that grain off, back on. We're adding that grain in, which is making this look a lot more natural already. And then we're going to go ahead and just throw on a little lut here. Maybe throw on one of these old luts I created. Bring down that opacity a little bit by bringing down our key output. And then maybe even shift the colors a little bit cooler here. Create a node before this one by pressing Shift on our keyboard. And then we'll decrease the warmth in the image a little bit here. Maybe add just a tint of green, something like that. Make this image fit again. And then we might just go ahead and start pushing our color wheels just a little bit to create a little bit of a color grade here. Just add some more of that teal in those mid tones. Here we go, before and after. It starts out looking fairly flat like phone footage with a lot of nice information in the shadows, but because of the pasty look in the skin, it's a dead giveaway. That's phone footage. And then with everything else that we've done by adding some contrast, bringing down those shadows, which is a big deal with phones. Because if we go back to this other clip, you can see that a lot of information is retained in the shadows, not necessarily near the black point, but definitely in the shadows. Tone mapping, it tries to brighten those areas and then darken the highlights. If we can reverse that, then we get something that is a lot more natural, something that you would typically see on a much nicer camera. Just replicating that in our phone footage is going to go a long way to making it look a lot better. Then we added some grain, went ahead and did a little bit of color grading with our primaries and added a final lot on top of it just to make it look nice. And there you go. That is an easy way to tackle phone footage so you can get to look more natural, reduce the sharpening, reduce the HDR effects in the tone mapping, and then reduce some of those over saturated colors in the sky sometimes. 9. Working with Difficult Footage: All right, so in this lesson I'll be showing you guys how you can work with difficult footage. So that you can color grade any project, whether the camera was shot with the wrong settings, poor white balance, or if the footage just isn't high quality enough for your project. I'll show you guys how you can work with these kinds of clips and how you can hide some of these issues in plain sight. So let's get started. When we look at dealing with challenging footage, there's a few things that are the most common issues that we run into. Number one is poor white balance. Number two is poor exposure. Then also, just like if the codec for the video can't handle the amount of grading that we would normally want to do, that can also pose a challenge. The first thing we're going to be looking at is poor white balance where the image was shifted a lot towards the cooler side of things rather than it being dead spot on. This is, as you can see in this image, it's pretty much all blues and purples that are just cast over the entire image. There are a few ways we can address this. Number one, we can start with our primary wheels. Then number two, we can use our curves. Now, I do like to ease my curves quite a bit. And we'll go ahead and start with our curves, and then we'll move on to our primary wheels, and I'll show you how to do this both ways. First what we're going to do is unlink these curves right here, and then we can see that we have too much blue. What do we do? We come to our blue curve and we start pulling that blue out of the mid tones. Now we're starting to warm this up, but we're also getting a little too much green as well. Now we're going to go ahead and take our green curve and do the exact same thing. Maybe not pull as much green out, but just enough. Something just like that. And then we start looking at other areas of the image that might need a little bit of work as well. We can see that this image is low contrasty. Now we know that this image is shot in log, it's fairly low contrast. I'm going to go ahead and add another node before this one pressing shift S on my keyboard. And then I'm going to go ahead and link these curves and just add a little bit of contrast just so that we can start to see what colors we're dealing with. Okay, now that we've added some contrasts, and the saturation also increases with contrast, in many cases, we can see that we're still a little bit too cool. Coming back to our second node here, we're going to come back to our blue, and we'll start pulling that out just a little bit more. Something just like that. Maybe pull out of those shadows a little bit, come to our greens and start just finessing this until we start evening out our skin tones and things like that. Now that we've really adjusted these curves, pulled a lot of that green and blue out of the shadows, introduced a little bit more red in the mid tones and the highlights. We've got this not perfect by any means, but a lot closer. If we go ahead and turn off this node and then turn it back on, we can see how much closer we've gotten to much more neutral colors, Then looking down here at our scopes, looking at specifically our RGB parade, we can see that these colors are a lot more even want to, we could start playing around with our reds a little bit to try to even that out a little more in those highlights, but then we start losing some of those skin tones. It's just a game of finessing this and making sure that we're taking out the right colors, introducing the right colors, and just trying to balance out the image overall. At this point, we can start color grading if we feel comfortable with it. This makes it actually a challenging image, even at this point to color grade. The first thing that I like to do is start looking through my presets and things that I've made to see if there's any that immediately stand out as helpful and something that would bring this image in a direction that we want to go. I'm just going to go ahead and pull the intensity down somewhere around halfway using our key output. Something like that. Maybe try different, let something else, maybe you can see we're already getting to a much, much better point. This can pass as a color grade, a little bit more work, and then you'll be just fine. Also, one thing you can do is you can play into the images weaknesses because if you can't quite recover the detail that you want, you can apply some sort of an overlay or something to give the effect of this being filmed on an older camera. What we can do is we can play into its weaknesses. So I've selected a let that I feel comfortable with, and then we can further grade our footage by creating a really, really strong look, if we just start shifting our midtones toward blue a little bit, bringing our highlights, or again, a little bit warmer, something like that. And then bringing our lift back down towards blue. And then encountering that in our log to even out those black points just a little bit. Something like that. Maybe bring those highlights back a little bit. Now we've got this older film, teal and orange candle. Look with a golden hour sky. To make this sky a little bit more believable, we could add something like glow and maybe some Haalation. We'll go ahead and add another node. Drop our glow on here. And then we will change the composite type to screen something like that. And then maybe bring down the overall intensity under our global blend. Something like that. And then we could even reduce the saturation in our highlights a little bit. There's just a lot we could do to make this more of a stronger look. When you can't quite bring the colors back to a completely neutral place, then you might just lean into the fact that it's going to be a little bit off and just give it a more intense color grade to sell the look. Now, looking at a clip that is shifting in the opposite direction, we can go ahead and try adjusting this first. I know that this is also shot and log, so I'm going to go ahead and correct our color space here. I'm going to go into the lets provided by Canon. Since this was shot in the Canon 100 Mark two in Canon log. I'm going to come to our 33 point grid. Let then we're going to look at these two options. First, I think I'll go with the first option. This one looks a bit more neutral. Okay, Then we're going to create a couple more nodes after this. Then on this first one, we're going to go ahead and select it. And then press shift S on our keyboard, because we want to adjust our exposure a little bit before our color space transform. I'm going to come into my primaries, then maybe bring down that gain a little bit, bring up our gamma, that way we can pull a lot of that information back out of those shadows. And maybe bring down our lift just a little bit. Something like that gives us fairly neutral looking colors here or neutral contrast rather. And then on the node, after our color space conversion lot, then we're going to start working on the white balance. Now let's work with our color wheels here. First, we're going to go ahead and just take our offset because we can see that this entire image is shifting a little bit toward warm. And we're going to go ahead and just try to pull that back a little bit towards blue already. We're getting much, much more natural, neutral looking colors. One issue that we're seeing is that you can still see that there is more warmth on the inside of this building that he's in rather than the outside. The outside is still a bit cool. This is where we're going to need to use some masks. Okay, on this next node, we're going to go ahead and create a power window. And then we'll just adjust it to the size of the area that we want to affect. Mostly just this area by the door here where things are looking a bit cooler. Then just feather this thing out a bunch, that way we're not getting a harsh, a roll off and really negatively impacting the other colors. Then maybe bring this a little bit out, since this light from the window is reflecting off of the shelves here, then right here what we can do is we can start adjusting the outside light to be a bit warmer so it's a little bit more believable. We can go ahead and take our Gamma and then we'll just shift that a little bit towards something like that. Pull it back a little bit, maybe take our gain, warm that up a little bit too, nothing too crazy. Bring our gamma back, maybe add a little bit of magenta, maybe reset that gamma actually, and then something like that off and back on. You can see we've really even this out and it's no longer such a big difference in color. Okay? Create another node, and then from here we can start working on the image as a whole again and we can start color grading it. Now this one is easier to work with than the last one since this footage is going to hold up better. It is a stronger codec than the last image. What we're going to do now is we're going to start looking to see how we want to color grade this if we want to lean into the strengths of this image. Now this image is a little bit hard to work with because the colors are all over the place. Right now, what we can try doing is creating a little bit of a teal and orange look. A couple ways we can do this. We can use our primaries wheels and our log wheels. Or we can try using our curves, which I think I'll try in this case. First, I think I want to pull red out of these shadows. Okay, I'm coming to my red curve, then I'm just going to start pulling back on that red a little bit, then reintroduce it into those midtones that we maintain his skin tones right here. And then introduce a little bit more because you can see when this is pulled out, we're affecting more of the shadowy areas in his skin tones. If we can just bump this up just a little bit, we're still maintaining cooler shadows while retaining the nice rich red in his skin tones. Bring that up just a little bit, something like that. And then we might even want to pull some red out of our highlights. Then we can go ahead and take our green. I'm noticing that in these shadows and things, when we add that more teal look, we are getting a little bit too much green. I might just pull green out of the image as a whole. Just a little bit. Come to our blue curve and then start playing around with this to see if we want to add some more blue into our shadows. Pull that out of those midtones so that we're not getting a purple a look. Maybe pull that back just a little bit, something like that. See if we want to bump up the blue in any of the highlights and just play around with the image. Just see what's starting to look the way that you intended it to. If we turn this node off and back on, you can see we're already creating a bit more natural look. We can add another node. Play around with some of the lots and presets that we have here. We're just going to play around with some of these lots. See if we like the direction any of them are going. I'm liking this one, so what I'm going to do, it is a little bit intense. I think. I'm just going to reduce the opacity of it just about halfway. And then on the same node, I'm just going to go ahead and bring up these shadows a little bit. Relink all of our curves, bring up those shadows just enough to bring out a little bit more of that detail that was there something like that. Now what we could do is we could add a vignette or anything else we wanted. But let's just go ahead and take a look at where we started. Here's what we did first, we went ahead and added our color space conversion. Let then we noticed our exposure was way off and our contrast was a little too cunchy. We brought up our exposure a little bit using our primaries, and then we started to tackle our white bounds. We used our primaries wheels to affect the image overall to a much more natural a look. And then we notice that this area by the window was a little bit too cool, so we warm that up in this next node using a power window. Then we started to play around of their curves to create a little bit more of a look. And then we finalize that by adding a lot on top of that to just bring in the final touches to the image. Then after this, we could add grain halation vignettes. Anything else? We want to really bring this image into the colors that we're wanting to look at. Just a quick recap. The biggest issue that most people face in color correction and color grading is poor white balance. But if you correct it as much as you can, you lean into the tools that you have. Then once you've corrected it, to the extent that's possible, you can lean into it and start creating a heavier look as we did in this other image. And then once you create that more heavy look, all of a sudden those imperfections can disappear and they look more like stylistic choices. I would encourage you guys to use these same tools and techniques and experiment so that you can take your footage if it feels poorly white balanced, or poorly exposed. I want you guys to use these and practice them so that you guys can be prepared to tackle any projects a client gives you. 10. Shot Matching: All right. So when I first started color grading, shot matching was one of the most difficult skills to learn and there just wasn't a ton of good advice out there. In this lesson, I'll be showing you guys how shot match clips from different cameras shot in different lighting. All right. So now we're talking about shot matching. And there's a lot of different ways you can go about this, but the way that I find works the best in most cases is what I'm going to show you in this video. First, we're looking at this shot. This is one that we worked on a little bit earlier when we were talking about the color worper. What we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and get rid of our color grade. Right click on the node reset node. And then what we want to do is want to match this shot to this shot. Now you'll remember that with this shot we had to do quite a bit of color correction. And then we had to lean into some of the issues with the image to give it a stronger color grade so that we could create a more solid look. And so that we can hide some of the imperfections that were in this image. What we can do is we can take this image because it's shot well and it's well exposed. The white balance looks pretty good on this image. What we can do is we can take this and we can match it to this shot much more easily than we could doing it the other way around. First things first, what colors do we need to match? While the most important colors you're going to be matching are your skin tones, your shadows, and your highlights. Right now, we're seeing in this general warm cast to the image, this one. We can go ahead and start by creating a warmer look. First, we're going to come to our second node here. It's been reset, so there's no adjustments on it. Then we'll come to our offset under our primaries color wheels and we'll go ahead and just warm this thing up a bunch, not too much. Maybe add a little bit of red, something like that. And then when we come back to this image, what we're going to do is we're going to right click on it and then grab a still. Then we're going to double click on the still from our gallery. Come back to our image, and now we can see both side by side, so we can really start matching these colors. Okay, what we're going to do is we're going to take our Gamma and I'm going to just try to add a little bit more red. Match those skin tones a bit more closely. Something like that. Warm up our gain with a bit of yellow, and then pull in some teal with our lift. Something like that. And then maybe introduce a little bit more red into those skin tones. Now we'll go ahead and turn off this little overlay here. We can see we've got this, a very warm look. Turn it back on, and you can see we're still missing a bit of that red. And also you can see in his shirt here, it looks totally different on both of these clips, one of the issues that we're running into is an exposure problem. We can do is we can come to our curves and start just pulling down our midtones a bit here. Maybe make it a bit darker, something like that. Then we could come to our hue versus hue curves. Then we could take our blues and see if we can match these blues just a bit more closely. Maybe by pulling them down a little bit, then bringing our other colors right back up to where they should be, somewhere right around here. Let's go ahead and zero both of these points out here. Now if we wipe back and forth, or if we turn our display off, back on, we are getting closer. His shirt is not perfectly matched, neither of these shirts are. But there's a lot more we can do. We can come back to our primaries and start pushing these around just a bit more. I'm going to see what happens if I add a little bit more red into those skin tones. Counter that a little bit more with a little bit more teal, something just like that. This is getting us a lot closer. At this point we're to a point where we've created a nice neutral, warm look on both that could honestly be convincing. What we might try is taking this other image and start shifting it even closer to this one. We're going to go ahead and actually turn this off. Grab a still from this clip. Double click it, and then come to the other clip that we corrected. Then we can start coming back to our node right here where we had a lot of our color grading adjustments. We can start seeing if we can shift some of these colors a little bit closer to this other one. We'll come to our curves, hue versus hue curves. And we'll just start playing around and seeing what we can do here. If we bring the hue on the blues up, bring everything else back down just a little bit. Go ahead and zero out our other points so that we don't affect those colors too much. Just focusing on the blues. Then we can also desaturate the blues a bit as well, something like that. Again, bring these other points right back up to one and then start finessing this because that blue I find is the most clear giveaway. That these were shot with completely different camera settings. Something right about there looks pretty close. At this point, I'd be comfortable using this. If we turn this off and back on, wipe it across, you can see we've got fairly consistent colors. The only thing we might want to adjust now is the skin tones. I like the skin tones from this other image better. On this first one, we can go ahead and start playing with our skin tones a little bit. Here we could try shifting them. Bit warmer, not quite green. I don't want that to be green. So I'll bring some of those back up, something like that. If we bring these down too much, you'll see that they get really green really fast. We just want to really make gentle adjustments to our curve that we're not introducing too much green into the image. Then coming back to our primaries, see if maybe we can add a little bit more red in here, something like that. Maybe add a little bit more green or even a little bit more red into those mid tones. There have a look at our before. This is where we're looking at the image. Now. This is looking a lot better. And then coming back to our other image, This is a much closer match. Not perfect, but a lot closer. We're going to go ahead and match another image here. Another way you can match colors is first we're going to go ahead and do a color space transformer color space conversion on this image right here. We've got this guy walking somewhere. And it goes along with this shot with the same guy working in his workshop. Right on this first shot, what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and come to our lets and look for a good let that will give us a good color space conversion. I think I'm going to go with probably this first let, since it's more neutral, create another node and then right click on this clip and match shot to this clip. All right, so that we're trying to match those colors now it's also going to match the contrast and things like that. This is a solid way to do it. I'm like the colors and contrast we're getting. I do feel like the shadows are a bit crunchy, but if we look back and forth, the colors look fairly consistent along with the contrast. This doesn't always work, but in this case, I think it works pretty well. Now let's look at another clip here. We've got this clip right here of this girl who's like putting on her headphones and things. And then we've got this clip of this Sky, this is all part of the same commercial, these two clips are, they look very different because they were different lighting. We're also working with different skin tones. We want to try to make sure that these clips match as closely as possible in a way that maintains the authenticity of the subject that we're filming and the environment. But we want to create a consistent look. So how do we do that? Well, first I'm going to go ahead and start with this clip. Okay, I'm going to start with my curves, just to bring out some of the detail in those shadows. Since this was a bit underexposed, I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually head back to my primaries real quick. Bring up our exposure or our offset. Bring down that gain just a bit to not really blow out those highlights. Then I'm going to go ahead and bring down my shadows a little bit here. Maybe bring down my black point instead of my shadows, because all I'm trying to do is recover the detail in the shadows without making this image look low contrasty. Now we're going to also add some saturation, since this is pretty muted, somewhere right around there. Then now we can go ahead and start trying to create a look, right? Create another node. And then we'll start playing around with our lift. Maybe add a little bit of teal into the shadows. Add some warmth into our gamma here, just to really bring out his skin tones and make those pop. And then maybe warm up our highlights a little bit, something like that. Now we've got a fairly warm, clean look. Maybe cool off those shadows just a little bit more. And then we'll come to this other clip. Now we're going to create a similar level of contrast. We'll come to our curves, add some contrast here, just like that. Come to our primaries, maybe you reduce the saturation a little bit in this case, because I want their skin tones to seem fairly, even in terms of saturation levels. Now the hue and luminous values of their skin tones are going to be different. But what I'm primarily concerned about is the environment that they're in. As long as their skin tones look natural and as long as the colors are accurate and these gray headphones are actually gray and not shifting towards blue or red or anything like that, then I think we're good. It's the environment that I really want to make look neutral and natural between both of them. And you can see that on this one we've created this warm look. And with this one I'm going to try the same thing. I'm going to go ahead and warm this up using our Gamma. Don't want to introduce too much red into those skin tones. I might just go with my offset to warm this whole thing up, something like that. And then bring this back using my gamma. We'll introduce a bit more red and then we'll bring our lift down towards teal a little bit just to neutralize that and balance that out. Then with our gain, we can introduce a little bit more warmth as well, something like that, to bring our lift back a little bit here. Now we're creating a nice warm teal and orange look. We turn this off, back on, you can see we've already gotten really close and now we've created a solid look on both of these. We've experimented with both. And we've evaluated which ones we like overall between these two. I do like the look of this one better. It's got more teal and orange tones, whereas this one is mostly on the warm side because the white balance was set for the shadows. So I'm going to go ahead and try our other little trick again where we're going to write, click on this other clip and then match shot to this clip. Make sure to do this on a separate node so that you don't affect your other settings. Okay, that's looking good, we can work with this. So now we're going to go ahead, come to our curves. Bring that back up a little bit. Now remember that in this clip he is going to be walking, the lighting will change on him just a little bit. Right here, we're getting some more brightness on his face. What I think I want to do is I want to warm this clip up a bit. Now I'm going to come into my Primaries and use my temperature slider to warm up this clip. And now we're getting a nice teal and orange look on this clip that could flow well with this clip, you wouldn't really notice a huge difference between the two if they played this in a commercial. So when we talk about shot matching, there are times when you want to match the colors exactly as close as you can. But then there are other times where you're just trying to match the overall style and apply appropriately to the situation in the environment that the character is in. The most important colors to consider are your skin tones, your shadows, and your highlights. When you can balance those out and you can make them consistent across clips, even when you have two different actors in two different environments, they can still cut together in the same commercial. So it's more about creating consistency in the tone rather than creating 100% identical colors on every shot. Obviously, in an interview type of a scenario, that's going to be different, but you'd also likely be using the same camera with the same camera settings. So there you have it, my simple workflow for shot matching. 11. Final Thoughts: Art. You guys congratulations for making it to the end of this course. I'm genuinely proud of you and I hope that these skills that you've learned will be valuable in your career. I know they have been in mine. Now what I want you to do is I want you to take these skills and apply them to your projects. Go ahead and download the sample footage provided, follow the project instructions, and I'm excited to see what you guys create. And as always, thank you for taking this course. It means the world to me. If you have any questions, go ahead and reach out. I'm here to help. And I will see you guys in the next course.