Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi everyone. I'm Carsten
with studio McKay. And over the last several years, color correction and
color grading has become way over complicated. And it may seem
overwhelming to learn, at least it was for
me a few years ago. But in this course, I'm
going to be breaking down my entire simplified
color correction and color grading workflow
for content creators. By the end of this
course, you can have the skills and tools
necessary to create consistent and unique looks
across all of your videos. So if you're ready, go ahead and download the sample footage, as well as my color grading presets in
the course materials. And we'll get started.
2. Software and Tools: Welcome everybody.
In this course we'll be using Da Vinci Resolve. Now you can follow along with the same techniques in Adobe
Premiere or Apple final cut. But just remember
that the buttons and features will be in
different places. So the first thing we
wanna do is import our footage into
DaVinci Resolve. So you're going to
navigate to where your footage is stored. I'm gonna go ahead
and double-click on the folder that
I've downloaded here and drag all of the
media into the media pool. We're going to click
on, don't change. Now our media is imported. Before we start with a color correction
and color grading, it's important to understand
how da Vinci Resolve works. Right now, by default, we're opened up
into the cut page. Over here, we've
got our edit tab. Here, we've got our Fusion tab, which is where we do our
visual effects work. And then right here we've
got our cover page. Well, I'm gonna do is
click on the Edit tab. And I'm going to select
all of my media. And I'm going to drag
it onto the timeline. Now coming over
to the color tab, we have all of our
color grading controls. And this is where things get
a little bit complicated, but I'm gonna go ahead
and simplify this. So the first thing we wanna
do is understand this layout. We're going to go
ahead and first start with our node
structure. Up here. This is where we have our nodes. This box represents
the original image. This box over here represents the final output of the image. Every node that we add
on this chain in-between these two boxes are adjustments that we're
making to the image. This box right here, or this node contains any
effects that we make on it. And then we can create
more nodes and add more effects at different steps along the color correction
and color grading path. Now, this is important because each step affects
the one after it. So if we D saturate the
image first and then the next node we try to add
saturation back in. It's using the information
from the previous node. I'll give you a
practical example. I'm gonna go ahead and
D saturate this image. I'm going to create a new
node by pressing Option S on my keyboard or Alt S
if you're on Windows. Now, we've desaturated
this node and this node. If we try to add
saturation back in, it's using the information
that this node gave it and there's
nothing to saturate. It's all still monochrome. So this is an example of why node structure
is important and order of operations are crucial for color correction
and color grading. I'm gonna go ahead
and reset this. Now, down here on the
bottom is where we have all of our color correction
in grading controls. By default, we are opened up to our primaries color wheels
and our Custom RGB curves. And then we also have
our keyframes down here. Over here we've got our
primary color wheels. These are very broad
adjustments and we've got offset or gain
gamma and lift. I lift controls the darkest
parts of our image. Gamma is right in the middle, and our gain is our highlights, and then our offset is
the image as a whole. So if I drag the offset to the right where brightening
the entire image. If I drag it to the left, we're darkening
the entire image. I'm gonna go ahead and
click this to reset it. And then with our lift we can brighten or darken our shadows. And then same with
the Gamma and Gain. Now, while these are
broad adjustments, if we move over into our
log wheels right here, these are more targeted,
more specific adjustments. So I'm gonna go ahead
and raise the mid tones. You can see this is pretty
targeted and specific word not reaching any of these highlights or into any of these shadows. I'm going to go
ahead and reset it. And if we come back to
our primaries wheels, if we try to raise the gamma, we're influencing all the other tonal
ranges in the image. So just remember that our
primary color wheels are broad adjustments
and our log wheels are much more
targeted adjustments. Now, if the log wheels are
still not targeted enough, you can move over
into the HDR wheels, which are even more
targeted and separate the image into even
more tonal ranges. So we've got our specular
highlights, highlights, our lights, and we've got our
shadows, darks and blacks. And then we, of course, we have our global controls right here. Let's go back to our
primary color wheels. Now with our color
wheel controls, we also have our temperature,
our tents, contrast, pivot, midtone detail,
color boost shadows, highlight, saturation,
hue and luma mix. We're only going
to be focusing on a couple of these
with our temperature, we can drag to the left
to introduce more blue or drag to the right to make
the image a lot warmer. This is for when our white
balance is incorrect and we need to warm up
or cool off the image. I'm gonna go ahead and
reset this our tint, we can introduce more green or magenta depending on the tint of the lighting in our image. I'm going to go ahead
and reset this again. Our contrast pretty
straightforwardly just increases or decreases
contrast in the image. And then our pivot controls where the contrast
originates from. We can choose to have
the contrast originate from the shadows,
from the highlights. And I'm gonna go ahead
and reset both of these. And then of course we
have our saturation and hue down here. And then our color boost
is similar to vibrance is saturates some of the less
saturated parts of the image. And our Custom curves,
these are RGB curves. We have more control over
the contrast that we create in our RGB curves. Up here we've got
our highlights. Down here. We've
got our shadows are black point and our white point. If we create an S, we're dragging our huts up, in our shadows down,
we're creating contrast. I'm gonna go ahead
and reset this. Under our Hue vs Hue curves. We can change the hue based
on the hue of the image. So we can see that we've got some blues
here in the image. I'm gonna go ahead and create
a point here, point here. And then drag up or down to change the hue of the
blue colors in the image. And we can do this with
any of the colors. We're changing the hue based
on the hue of the image. I'll go ahead and reset this. And then we come to
our Hue vs Saturation. Basically the same thing. Just instead of
adjusting the hue, we're adjusting
the saturation of specific colors
within the image so we can go ahead and
saturate those blues or D saturate them,
whichever you'd like. Go ahead and reset that. We've got our Hue vs Luma. We can go ahead and brighten or darken colors within the image. And then we have our
luma versus saturation, where we can saturate the
image based on the brightness. So if we want, we
can go ahead and saturate the brighter areas and D saturate the darker
areas or vice versa. I'm gonna go ahead
and reset this. Then we have our saturation
versus saturation where we can saturate the less saturated parts of the image. Or D saturate them, or saturate, or D saturate the more
saturated parts of the image. And then under our
SAT versus loon, we can control the
brightness based on the saturation of the image. We'll come back to
our Custom curves and then we're gonna move on
to the color warfare. This is where we
can control, again, some of the hue and
saturation within the image. We're not going to get
too in depth into this. But basically anything toward the center is less saturated. Anything toward the
edges is more saturated. And this little glob
in the middle kind of tells you where the colors
are at in your image. We can go ahead and drag left or right to adjust the
position of the colors. So we're adjusting
the skin tones, make them more yellow or green, or making them more red or pink. We're going to go
ahead and reset that. If we wanted to saturate the less saturated
parts that we can drag these little points
up toward the edges. And then we're not actually increasing the
saturation on the edge. We're just taking the
less saturated parts and bring them closer to the
most saturated points. We're gonna go ahead
and reset this again. Then we have a lot more
controls over here. But this is just a
basic overview of the controls that you have
available in Da Vinci Resolve. Now one question that a
lot of people have is how do you know what
your colors are doing? How do you know if you're
brightening it too much or if you're darkening
the image too much, That's where scopes come in. If we come over to the right, we've got this little mountain range button looking thing here. If we click that, we
activate our scopes. By default, we're set
to the RGB Parade. This splits the image up
into our red channel, our green channel,
and blue channel. We read the image from left to right within each
of these channels. So we can see that
there's quite a bit of green here in the mid
tones in the image. We can see that reflected
in these trees. And we can see there's
quite a bit of blue in the sky up here. We can see a heavy
concentration of blue right here toward
the top of the waveform. And then on the side here
we've got a lot more blue. This is our backpack
along the side. Now if we come down
to the parade button right here, click on waveform. This is basically just the
same thing except with all three channels
combined into one. This is one of the scopes
that I use the most sense. It's easy to see the brightness and contrast within the image. So if we go ahead and brighten the image using our curves, then we can see
that we're pushing all the information
to the top of the waveform up here at
10:23, that's pure white. Anything down here at
zero is pure black. So if we bring this
all the way down, we're also darkening the image. So if we add more contrast, we can see we're spreading the information
across this waveform, showing us that
there's quite a bit of contrast in the image. I'm gonna go ahead and
reset this control. Now coming over to
our vector scope, this tells us the saturation of the colors within the image, and it also tells us
where our colors are at. We've got our yellows and reds, magenta, blues,
science and greens. We can see we've
got quite a bit of yellow and red in the image. And we can see that's
reflected in some of these yellow
colors and the trees. We got the skin tones. Then we've got also
some of these buildings and this yellow
tint on the road. And then we can see we've got a little trail going
off into blue. We've got some sky and
this blue backpack. So we can see we've got
a good representation of the colors within the image. The further out the colors
reached toward the edges, the more saturated
those colors are. Alright, let's go
ahead and switch this back to our waveform.
3. Color Correction: Alright, now that you have
a basic understanding of the features and layout
of Da Vinci Resolve. We're gonna go ahead and get started with color correction. Now, let's talk about
the differences between color correction
and color grading. Color correction is where we find any issues
within the image, whether it's too dark to bright, the white balance
is wrong, anything. And we'd go ahead and fix
those issues that we see. Color grading is where we add a specific style and a
specific look to the image. So we want to do
color correction before we do color grading. That way, once we color grade, we can apply a similar grade across all the clips
in a sequence. It'll be a cohesive look
throughout the project. Alright, so starting
with the color grading, we're going to start
with clip one here. Let's go ahead and
find our hero shot. I'll scrub through this clip. And I like this shot right here. This is a good frame
to start with. Now sometimes it
can be hard to see if there are any issues
within the image. The primary things that
I look for our exposure, contrast, and white balance. So what I'm gonna
do is I'm gonna go ahead and on this firstNode, I'm going to
desaturate the image. I'm going to come down here
to our primary wheels. I'm gonna go ahead and take the saturation all the way out. And this way we can just see the brightness
information in the image. Go ahead and add a new
node using option S on my keyboard or
Alt on Windows. And what we're gonna do now is we're going
to go ahead and use our offset to
adjust our exposure. I'm gonna go ahead and bring
this down a little bit here. Just darken the image a little bit just till it looks right. And we get some of this
information back in our waveform. And that's looking pretty good. If you need to look
around on your image, you can always zoom
in or zoom out using this percentage
bar right here. Click on Fit to fit it
back into the viewer. And let's look at our
exposure adjustment before, after looking a lot better. Now, I'm going to
keep this image desaturated for the time being, because the next thing I
wanna do is add contrast. And I'm gonna go ahead and
do that on the same node. Now, I could use the
contrast slider right here, or I could use the curves. Personally, I like to use
the curves since it gives me more control and more fine tuning ability
over the contrast. So I'm gonna go ahead
and maybe drag some of these shadows down
a little bit here. And bring up some of these mid tones and create a nice roll-off
into the highlights. I'm going to bring my white
point down a little bit. And that's looking pretty good. Now I'm gonna go ahead and label this node exposure and contrast. Okay? Now I'm gonna go
ahead and disable node one by clicking
on the number. And we can see that we've
adjusted our exposure. In contrast, if we turn off our exposure and contrast node, we can see the effect
that it's had. And we've gotten a lot more
information back in the sky, and we've created a much
more pleasing image. And we can also take a look at the white balance in this image. Now I know this was
shot during sunset, so there is going
to be somewhat of a yellow tint to the image. But let's just go ahead and play around with our white balance to see if we can balance this
out just a little bit better. I'm gonna go ahead and take
my temp and introduce some more blue into the image is
cool things off a little bit. I want this pavement here to
be more of a neutral color. So I'm bringing this
back a little bit here. And let's see. Yeah, this is
looking pretty good. I've cooled off the
image a little bit. If we turn off our
white balance now, turn it back on, we can
see the effect it's had. And maybe I want to
introduce a little bit of green as well just to
balance things out. Maybe bring our white balance
back a little bit here. Just something like that. Looks pretty good for after a lot of the colors that have been a lot
more neutralized. Let's take a look at our
tint a little bit more. Just kind of gently finesse
it so that his arm here still looks natural because
that's where I'm seeing a lot of this
tint taking place. I think I'm just gonna go
ahead and reset the Tint. Press Zero, Enter. Now I'm gonna go ahead and label this node white
balance or just WB. And we've adjusted our exposure, our contrast, and
our white balance. Those are the top three
things to pay attention to when you're color
correcting footage. Now I'm gonna go
ahead and delete this first node since
we no longer need it. And drag these over here. And we can see the
before and after by coming up to this little
circle button up here, turn that off, turn off
all of the adjustments, and click it to turn it back on. And I'm liking
what we're seeing. This is with no adjustments. And then once we
adjust our exposure, our contrast in
our white balance, then this is the result. So we can go ahead and apply the same process to the rest of the images
in our timeline. I'm going to come to this
next clip and I'm going to desaturate it just
like I did before. And then add a new node. And in this one, I'm going to go
ahead and brighten up things just a
little bit here. Take our offset up, bring our game
down to bring some of those highlights
back a little bit. I'm thinking I want to bring our left back down
just a little bit. Somewhere right around
there looks pretty good. Then I want to introduce
a little more contrast. We use our curves again here. And I'll bring my
white point back down. And that's looking pretty good. We're gonna go ahead and label this node exposure and contrast. And let's go ahead and disable this firstNode to
see what we've done. And we'll turn this
note off as well. So the before and the after, We've got much better exposure,
much better contrast. And I'm not seeing any white balance issues with this image, so we don't really need
to worry about that. I'm gonna go ahead and
delete this first node and we can go ahead and
move on to our next clip. So for this one, we're
going to go ahead and D saturate the first node
just like last time. And unlike in the exposure and contrast that
we're seeing here, I think the exposure is
spot on at this point. All we need to do is really
look at our contrast. We can see all of our
information is sitting somewhere here in the middle and a
little bit toward the bottom. So we're gonna go ahead
and create a new node. And we're gonna go ahead
and take our offset to brighten it up just
a little bit here. And we're going to introduce some contrast with our curves. Just something gentle like
that looks pretty good. And then we'll go ahead and
disable our first node, will disable our second note to see the adjustments
that we've made. And overall the
contrast is really bringing out some of the
colors in the image. It's important to recognize that when you're adjusting
your contrast, you're also affecting your
saturation at the same time, if you increase contrast, you'll actually be increasing the saturation a
little bit as well. I'm not seeing any
white balance issues in this image either. And now we're going
to go ahead and label our nodes as always. Our first node. Clean things up just a little
bit and we'll go ahead and move on to our next clip. Now for this next
one, I'm noticing these colors look a
little bit too cool. So if we go ahead and drag
forward in our timeline, let's look at our guy
who's walking by here, somewhere right around here. We're going to focus
on our exposure or contrast and then
our white balance. And I think that's
where we're going to do most of the work for this clip. First, we're gonna
go ahead and D saturate and then
create a new node. We're actually going
to create two of them. We'll just go ahead
and preemptively label this one exposure and contrast. And then we'll label
this next one, white balance or
just WB for sure. Alright, on node t, We're going to go ahead
and adjust our exposure. I think I'm just gonna
go ahead and bring up our Gamma in our color wheels, bring down our gain
a little bit here. And then in our curves, I'm just gonna go ahead and create some more
contrast and shadows. Something right around
there looks pretty good. If we go ahead and
disable this first node, we can see the contrast
that we've adjusted. This is a before and after we've adjusted our exposure in
contrast a little bit. And it's very subtle, but I think it brings out
some of the colors in the image and helps it
pop a little bit more. Now under our white balance, we're going to go ahead and take a look at our temperature
and our tint. This image is looking just
a little bit too cool. So we're gonna go ahead and
warm it up a little bit here. And we're going to
add some magenta. And that's looking a
lot more accurate, a lot more true to the colors
that we saw on location. Let's go ahead and scrub
through our clip here just to make sure that
everything looks good. We'll go ahead and disable
all of our adjustments to see the before and after. It's just small tweaks. It doesn't take much
to correct the image. Now sometimes you will have
to deal with bigger problems, but having these basic tools at your disposal can help you do much more extensive image
recovery and color correction. Or we'll go ahead and
delete our firstNode here. And we'll clean things
up a little bit. And we'll move on
to the next clip. Now in this one, the colors
are looking pretty good, but things are looking a little
dark in the face up here. So we're going to go
ahead and D saturate just like we did in
the previous one. And then we're going to create
a couple more nodes here, come to our second node. And we're going to brighten
things up a little bit, drag up on our offsets. And I'm gonna go ahead
and bring the shadows down in our curves. Something like that
looks pretty good. We can go ahead and
disable our second node to see the adjustments
we've made, we've kept a lot of that rich contrast
in the shadows while brightening up the
overall skin tone and all the mid tones as well. If we go ahead and
disable our firstNode, we can see the effect
that we've had. If we disable the second node, we can see a lot of the
colors are fairly muted. It looks good, but it's just kinda dull and doesn't
have any life to it. And it's a little dark
up here in the face. But if we turn on
our second node, we can see that
we've brought some of that brightness
out a little bit. And we've also increased
a little bit of saturation by creating some
of this contrast here. Now, we can see that
it looks a little muddy up here because some of those blacks have been raised. So we're gonna go ahead and take our black point on our curves. And we're just going to drag
that ever so slightly to the right just to increase
that contrast in the shadows. And we'll adjust our shadows
just a little bit here. And we'll also adjust
our highlights slightly. Something like that
looks pretty good. I'm not seeing any white
balance issues here either. So we're gonna go ahead and
delete this third node, delete our firstNode, label, this node exposure and contrast. And we're gonna move
on to our next clip. Scrubbing through the clip, we'll find our hero shot or mainframe that we want to
look at it for reference. Let's stick with this one right about here.
I'm liking this one. So we've got some skin tones, we've got some sky and
some neutral brick colors. I'm noticing that
overall this image is leaning a little bit toward
the warmer side of things, but we'll get to that once we start doing our
other corrections. First, we're just going
to go ahead and D saturate just like
we've been doing. And we'll go ahead and create a new node option S if you're
on Mac or Alt on Windows. And then we're gonna go ahead
and adjust our contrast. I think our exposure
is pretty spot on, so I'm just going to create some contrast by dragging
these highlights up a little bit and
dragging the shadows down. Very slight, but it introduces a little bit more contrast and creates a little bit more
pop in those colors. Or you can go ahead and disable our firstNode and then we'll take a look at the effect
our second node has had. We turn this off, is
still looks kinda dull. Turn it back on. There's a lot more life and a lot more contrast
and rich deep colors. So we're gonna go ahead
and label this one. Contrast. And we'll add a new
node Option or Alt S. And on this one, we're
going to go ahead and take a look at
our white balance. If we go ahead and
right-click on the image, you click on Show color,
picker, RGB value. And then it will show
you the red, green, and blue values of any area
that you're hovering over. Here, we've got our red
value, which is 181, green 159, and blue 142. It shows us that
there's more red and green in the image
than there is blue. Which tells us that
the image is leaning slightly toward the
warm side of things. This color is usually gray
on these kinds of bricks. So we're gonna go ahead and
come down to our temperature. And we're going to
cool this thing off just a little bit here. Come back over our
brick and they're still a good amount
of red in the image. So I'm gonna go ahead
and introduce a little bit more green
to counteract some of that more magenta red color and will cool it off
a little bit more. Bring our green back
a little bit here. And while we're
not quite perfect, this is looking a lot more even. I might introduce just
a tiny bit more green. And that's looking better. We're going to go
ahead and label this node white balance. Now while this isn't perfect, We are a lot closer. One thing you can do is you
can also take a look at your RGB curves down here and use these to color
correct your image. We're going to click on
this little chain link to break them apart. And we're just going to
focus on the red curve. If we take the red
out by dragging down, we're introducing
more green and cyan. And if we introduce more red, It's more like red magenta. So I'm gonna go ahead
and reset this. I'm going to create
a point here. Just try to keep
it on that line. And I'm going to
take some of this red out of the highlights just a little bit here to
neutralize those skin tones, since we do see quite a
bit of red in the skin. Now I don't want to
take too much out and introduce any sort
of cyan colors. And by just want to neutralize
these colors a little bit, we can see the effect it's had. Its a lot closer to a more
natural neutral skin tone. So we're gonna go ahead
and delete this firstNode, clean this thing up
a little bit here, and we'll move on
to our next clip. Now this is more of a
YouTube style video, things that you'd expect if
you're filming yourself. And in here we can see that we do have a couple of issues. It's a little too
dark for starters, and our white balance
is a little bit off. So we're gonna go ahead and D saturate just like
we've been doing. Create a couple more nodes here and we'll come
to our second node. Now let's just go ahead and
re-link all of these curves. So we're gonna go ahead
and click on the y, then click on the chain link and they're all connected
back together. Now I'm going to go ahead
and brighten this image up a little bit
using our offset. Something like that. Bring our gain
down to bring back some of these highlights
that we were losing. And we're gonna go ahead and add some contrast using our curves. Something like that is
looking pretty good. Pretty happy with that. So we're gonna go ahead and
disable this firstNode. And we'll turn this second
note off, turn it back on. And overall we're getting
much better exposure, much better contrast
in our image. I'm gonna go ahead and
delete this first node since we don't
need that anymore. Go ahead and label this
one exposure and contrast. Then on the second node, we're gonna go ahead and
label it white balance. Now we're gonna go ahead
and focus on some of the color cast that
we see in this image. I'm noticing that things
are a little bit warm. This wall back here
shouldn't be so green, it should have a little
bit more blue in it. So we're gonna go ahead and call this image off
just a little bit. Something like that
looks about right. And then we're
gonna go ahead and take a look at our tint. And I know that this shirt doesn't look
purple in real life, so we're gonna go ahead and
add some green to color, correct that just
a little bit here. Now when we're
working with skin, it's important to make sure
that we get skin accurate. What we can do is
we can come over to our waveform and click on
our vector scope instead. And we're going to go
ahead and create a mask. Just look at our skin. If you click on this
button right here, this is our power window button, you're going to
click on the circle and you're just going to
drag it over the face, re-size it just till skin
is filling up the frame. And then you'll press Shift H on your keyboard to see
only that selection. Now we can go ahead
and see where the colors are at on the skin. They're kinda
leaning towards red, but there's a magic line between yellow and red where we
want our skin to fall. In order to see that
we're gonna go ahead and click on these
controls right here. And then click on the Show
skin tone indicator button, click that and click
outside of it. And we've got this
magic line right here. And you can see that based on the white balance adjustments
that we've done already, we've brought the skin right
back onto this line exactly. So we're gonna go ahead
and disable our mask. Just go ahead and click this
button again right here. And we can go ahead and see
that we've brought all of our colors back onto
the skin tone line. Now some colors are shifting
a little bit towards green. And we can go ahead
and we can fix that. What we're gonna do is
come under our curves. And we're gonna go to
a Hue vs Hue curves. Now I'm going to create a
little point right here. Just click where you want
to adjust the color. And I'm going to
adjust this and make it slightly more red. Just a slight adjustment
is all we need. And I want this shirt to
be a little bit more blue, not so neutral gray. So I'm going to
click right there. I'm gonna go ahead and widen this selection area just to get a wider
area to work with. And I'm gonna go
ahead and adjust the colors just a little bit. Something like that looks good. And if we turn off our
white balance node, turn it back on. We've brought the color is
back to where they should be. Another thing we can
do is we can make sure that our whites are white. We can go ahead and click on our mask again and
then just drag it over towards any areas of the
frame that should be white. And we can see that there's nothing reaching out
toward the edges. All the color is
sitting right here on this center dot on
our vector scope. Now we're going to go ahead
and disable this mask. Now I'm going to
show you another way to white balance your image. We're gonna go ahead and
create a new node Option, or Alt S, to create a new node, click on the number to
disable our second node. And now we're going to
come back to our curves just to get out of this
power window option. And another way to white balance
or image is to come over here towards this color picker right here under our
primaries Wheels. Click on that and then come to an area that should be white. You're gonna go ahead
and click on it, and then it'll automatically white balance the image for you. If it didn't do it quite right, you can click on
another area that might have more of a color cast. Click on that and it'll
white balance and neutralize any of
those whites for you. This can give pleasing
results if you don't have a lot of time to
white balance manually. Art with our next shot. This is an interview
scenario and overall we've got
really good colors. The only thing that I'm
seeing that we need to adjust is our contrast. So we're going to go ahead and D saturate just like last time. Create a new node here. We're gonna go ahead and
just label this contrast. By the way, you can label
these whatever you want. Just make sure that it
reminds you of which tools you're using and what the
goal of this node was. So I'm just going
to use these curves to increase our contrast, bring our shadows down and our highlights up
a little bit here. Something like that
looks pretty good. Disable this firstNode, and then take a look at the
effect that we're having with our second node. Overall, we can see a lot of
the colors just pop a lot more and we get a lot
richer tones in his skin. At first everything was just flat and muddy and desaturated. But once we added this contrast, everything just pops a lot more. So we're gonna go ahead
and delete this firstNode, and we'll just bring
this back over here. Now one thing to know
about skin tones, all skin fits somewhere
along this line. It doesn't matter the
ethnicity or race. All skin fits on
this line because it's made up of the
same stuff and may have a slight yellow or red bias by will all fit somewhere
on this line. And the goal here is just to
get skin to look natural. Sometimes fitting skin
directly on this line may not always work for every scenario Depending on the other
colors in the environment. So just be cautious of how you color correct
your skin tones. If we move on to our next shot, we can see again, same guy here. And we can see that some
of our shadows here are a little too dark up
here in the hair. We can't really see any
of the details in there. So we're gonna go
ahead and again, D saturate on the first node, create another node after it. And I want to go ahead and take a look at my primaries
color wheels. I'm going to bring up my gamma because this is going to bring
up mostly the mid tones, but it's also going to affect all the other tonal
ranges in the image. I just want to bring it
up just enough till I see some of this detail and
texture in his hair. Once we see that, then I'm
gonna go ahead and bring back my gain because we've overexposed
on his forehead here. I'm gonna go ahead and switch to my wave form just to see
what I'm looking at, I'm going to bring back some
over again so that we get some detail on his skin without blowing out
past the waveform. Well, just go ahead and
bring that back gently here. And I'm gonna go ahead
and add some contrast. Now something like that
looks pretty good. We're gonna go ahead and
disable this firstNode to see the adjustments. Now, I'm can see that
I do want to add a little bit more
contrast to bring out his skin here just
a little bit more. So I'm going to
bring the shadows down just a little bit here. Play with these tones, maybe just delete that point and just bring this somewhere
right around there. Looks pretty good. Now, I'm gonna go ahead
and bring my black point to the right just a little bit here just to create more
contrast in our shadows. And I'm liking what
we've got here. I'm gonna go ahead and
delete this first node and label this node,
exposure and contrast. And we'll just clean this
up a little bit here. And there you go, my full
color correction process. Now sometimes you may have to do more extensive color
correction work. But since most of
these clips already, we're pretty close to the final color that we
want it to begin with. We didn't have to do a lot. In the next video, we're gonna be talking
about color grading.
4. Color Grading: Alright, now we're talking
about color grading. This is my full color
grading process. I'm going to show you
two different ways to color grade your images. I'm going to show you using the presets that I've developed, as well as how to do this
and create your own presets. So the first thing
you wanna do is load the color grading presets
into DaVinci Resolve. So go ahead and open
up to the folder where you downloaded the
color grading presets. And what we're gonna
do is come into Da Vinci Resolve and click
on File project Settings. And now you're
gonna go ahead and click on color management. Under color management,
if you scroll down, you've got this open
lot Folder button. Go ahead and click on that. And now you've got both of
your finder windows open. Now you're just gonna
go ahead and drag my preset folder into
this folder right here. These are all the files, all the color
grading presets that DaVinci Resolve has access to. I've already imported mine
into da Vinci resolve. So I'm just gonna go ahead
and close out of this. But once you've brought
them into here, just go ahead and
close out out of this. Just go ahead and press Cancel. And then under here
you've got your lats tab. You're gonna go ahead
and right-click anywhere and just
click on refresh. And then under here, you'll click on the film colour
lot pack by studio McKay. Now these are all the
color grading presets that will be included
in this LUT pack. And we can go ahead and scroll through here to see how each of these presets are going
to affect our image. We're going to go ahead and
click on our first image, create a new node. And we're just going to go
ahead and label this one LUT. Now this first one
is a technical law. This is where you
can add contrast if you shot in Sydney style. And then we also have some
of these more creative ones where we can add different
film looks to the footage. So we'll just go ahead
and scroll through here, see which ones we like best. So the one I'm liking the
best is film color 915. I'm gonna go ahead and
double-click that to add it to the node that
we have selected. And we can see that we've
added a color grading preset. If we turn it off and back on, we can see that my preset has increased some of the
saturation, the blues. It's created more color
separation between our skin tones and are
more cool blue tones. And it looks good. There's not a lot we need to do with the image from here on out. We're going to go
ahead and apply these lots on some other images. And I'll also show you
towards the end how I color grade from scratch
without these presets. So coming to the next image, we're going to go ahead
and create a new node. We're just going to go
ahead and label this LUT. And then we'll
scroll through here and see which ones
we like the best. Now if these look too strong, you can dial this back
a little bit here. And I'll show you how to
do that in just a second. I'm liking this 927. I'm going to go ahead
and click on that. And then to dial back the
intensity of the slot. You can come here to
your key controls. And under our key
controls right here, we can change our key output, which basically just controls the overall opacity
of this node. So if we dial it back, we can see the effect
that we're having and just gently introduce this, let just tasteful amounts of it and we can go
ahead and disable this node and turn it back on to see the effect
that we're having. Now we'll go ahead and apply
a couple more presets here. Now on this next clip, I'm gonna go ahead and
create a new node, label it, and scroll
through my presets here. I'm liking this film color 109. This kinda just
brings out some of those blues in the backpack and creates a more realistic
rendition of the colors onset. And we can also see that
we're getting much cooler, much more rich green
tones in the image and it doesn't mess with
our skin tones that much. So I'm liking how this looks
coming to our next image. We'll just go ahead and
scroll over to our hero shot, something just like that. We'll go ahead and
create a new node. And we'll scroll
through our lots to see which one we want to
use on this image. I'm gonna go ahead and
use film colors 629. This is very strong. So again, we're just
going to come under our key controls and bring
down our key output. And then just gently introduce
it as it looks good, something like that
as looking good. And then I'm
noticing though that some of these colors,
or just overall, they're kind of
blending a little bit too much into the image. It's all starting to look
a little bit yellow. So I'm going to drag this out. I'm going to press Shift S on my keyboard to create a
node before this one. Under here, we're just gonna go ahead and reduce
our temperature, just bringing it to the left a little bit to introduce some of those blue tones and
increase our green as well. Now we're just
gonna go ahead and label this one grade fix. Then we'll just go
ahead and select both of these nodes here. And then we'll
press Command D on our keyboard to disable
these two nodes. We can see the before, just
after the color correction. And then once we apply
our final grade, very subtle, but I think it brings out some of the color
in the image pretty well. Now coming to this next clip, Let's scroll to our hero shot. Something right about,
there looks pretty good. I think I want to color
grade this one from scratch. So what I'm going to go
ahead and do is create a couple more nodes here
just to give me some room, come back to our second node. And I'm thinking just
for the color grade, I do want to add a little bit more contrast
using our curves. So I'll bring down my
shadows just a little bit. I'm liking how that looks. And then I'm going
to also come over to our SAT versus sac curves. I'm going go ahead and increase the saturation and some of
these less saturated areas. And I also want to saturate my highlights a little
bit using my luma versus saturation curve,
something like that. And my yellows are a
little too saturated, so I'll come to my Hue vs sat, bring down some
of those yellows, bring up all of
the other colors. And I want to bring out some
of this blue in the sky and some of these cooler
colors in the trees. So I'm gonna go ahead
and just jack up the saturation in my blue's a little bit here,
something like that. It's looking pretty good. Now I do want these blues to
look a little bit more teal. So I'm going to
come to my Hue vs Hue and then just gently massage these colors where I
want to be bringing my skin tones back so
they look about right? Make my yellows just a
little bit more orange. Something like That's
looking pretty good. We've done all that
just using our curves. So I'm gonna go ahead and
label this one curves. Then in our next node, I'm going to go ahead and take
a look at our Log Wheels. I don't want to use my primaries wheels since
these can affect the coloring, the overall image, I just want to be targeting
certain ranges. So I'll come to my Log
Wheels and I'm going to go ahead and take some blue
out of our highlights. So I'm just going to
come to my blue here and pull that down
just a little bit. I'm gonna come to my mid tones. And again, I'm going to
warm up those mid tones by pulling out a
little bit of blue. And I'll also pull out just
a tiny bit of green as well. And then in my shadows, I want to call these
off a little bit. So I'm gonna go ahead
and take out some red to add a little bit more
teal in those shadows. Now, I am noticing
that this image is shifting a little
bit towards green. So I do want to fix
that a little bit here. I'm going to go ahead
and introduce a little bit more magenta
into the image, might warm it up a
little bit as well. And then just to top this off, I think I will use a
preset on this one. So I'm just gonna go ahead
and label this Log Wheels. Then on this last one, I'll just top it off with
one of these presets. Now this one is quite strong, so I'm going to come back
here and bring down my output all the way and just gently introduce some of this
preset right here, just till it looks about good. Then we can go ahead
and see our before without any adjustments
and are after. If we just want to look
at our color grade, we can select all three
of these nodes and press Command D. This is just
after our color correction, and then command V again
to re-enable them. And this is our final color, Greg, coming to our
next clip here, I'm noticing that is quite a bit of purple cast to
our blue tones. So what I'm gonna do is
I'm going to come to our hero frame right about here. And I'm gonna go ahead
and create another node. And I already know what
tools I'm going to use to create a nice
color grade on this. So I'm just going to
label this curves. And I'll come back to my color curves now
under my Hue vs Hue, I do want to change the
color of the sky here. So I'm just gonna go ahead
and click on the sky and it creates a couple of points
automatically down here. I'm just going to up
these colors a little bit towards that more cyan region. And that's looking pretty good. I'll widen the selection area just to make a more
gentle adjustment. And I'll bring it up a
little bit more here. Something like that
looks pretty good. We'll disable this
and bring it back. Okay, now we are seeing a
little bit of reds here. So I'm gonna go ahead and bring these red colors down
towards yellow a little bit, not too much, just a little. And I'll bring these reds
back up a little bit here. Looking pretty good. Now, I'm going go ahead and saturate some of these shadows. So I'm going to come
to my room versus SAT. I'm going to saturate those
shadows a little bit. Then just bring our
mid-tones right back down, something like that
looks pretty good. Now we can add a little
bit of a teal tint to the shadows if we wanted to create that
blockbuster film look. So I'm gonna go ahead
and create a new node. And then under my Log Wheels, I'll just bring out some of this red pull that back
a little bit here. I think I'll cool off
those mid tones as well. And then just warm
up those highlights. And then we'll just
label this log. And then we'll go ahead and
disable these two nodes. And this is just after we've
done our color correction. And then this is
our color grade. Very subtle differences,
but you can see that we're adding a little bit of a
stylistic look to the image. And if we want, we
can go ahead and tap this off with a preset. So I'm gonna go ahead
and come to my presets, see which one I like
the best on this one. I think it's film color 629. And I'm just going
to go ahead and dial back the intensity
a little bit here. Something right about
there looks pretty good. I'll just go ahead and
label this node lot. And we'll move on to our
last three clips here. Now in this clip,
we're going to go ahead and come back
to our curves. We're going to
create a new node. And what I wanna do
is I want to just cool off everything except
for the skin tones. We can use our
qualifiers to do this. Now, disclaimer, your qualifiers
are very powerful tools, but if you use them properly, they can totally
ruin your images. So for this, we're just
gonna go ahead and select some of these
skin tones here. I'll just drag to
select and then press Shift H on my keyboard to
see what I've selected. Now, you can see how this
is a very splotchy, a mask. We've got a lot of
pixelation going on here, and it's not really masking
out these colors super well. This is one of the
issues with using qualifiers on eight-bit footage. You can use them. You just have to be careful so that you don't get a ton of weird artifacts and pixelation
going on in your image. You can see it's
kinda dancing around right here on this table as
they play through the frame. And we don't want that. So I'm going to come to my
hue and I'm going to increase the width just a little
bit to select more color. I'm just gonna go ahead and
disable the saturation one. I don't need to select anything
based on the saturation. And I'm gonna go ahead and
disable my illuminance. Now, I think I'll bring that back and I'm just gonna go
ahead and soften this out. I'll increase the low soft to increase the feather
in the lower range, increase the highest soft to increase the feather
and the high range. And I'll just adjust
my low and my high. Something like that
looks pretty good. Then to clean this up just
a little bit more because we can see we still have some
pixelation going on here. I'm just gonna go ahead and
increase the blur radius. This is just going to blur out our mask a little bit and make it a little less obvious
that we used a qualifier. Now, if we press this little
invert button right here, we're inverting our
selection and we are selecting everything
but our skin tones. And we can see that we have a little bit
of work to do here. I'm going to go
ahead and increase this width a little bit here. And I'm now going to press
Shift H on my keyboard. And we've selected
our skin tone, then we inverted it so we're
selecting everything else. Because what I wanna do
here is I want to cool off all the other colors
outside of the skin tone. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and
come to my primaries wheels. And I'm going to just bring out some of the red
from our image. I'll just bring that down. Subtract a little bit of red, and we're adding
some teal and to all the other colors
in the image. I'll also take out a little
bit of the green as well, just a tiny bit
to make this less obvious that it's a teal color. There we go, looking
a lot better, a lot more natural and neutral. So I'm gonna go ahead and label this fire and then wheels. Then we'll create
another node after this. And I'm just gonna go
ahead and increase in the saturation of
the overall image. Something like that is
looking pretty good. Alright, so now I'm just gonna
go ahead and scrub through my image to make sure
everything looks good. Now, I'm going to
create a new node here. And I'm going to come to
my Hue versus sac curves. And I'm just gonna
go ahead and D saturate this shirt
a little bit, but saturate all
the other colors. Just a little bit here. A little bit is all it takes. And then I also want
to adjust the hue of that shirt just
a little bit too. Something like that
looks pretty good. And I will bring my
skin tones right back to where I want them
somewhere around there. And we'll just label
this one HSL curves. Alright, if we just go ahead
and disable our grid here, we can see our color correction, and then we can see what
we did in the color grade. This is a preset that
you can go ahead and save and use in other color
grading projects as well. If you want to turn this into your own color
grading preset, you can just right-click
on your file down here, click on Generate
lot 33 point cube. And then from here, you can just save it wherever you want, call it whatever you want,
and you're good to go. Alright, moving on to
our last two shots here, we're going to
create a new node. And for these, I'm just
gonna go ahead and scrub through my presets
here real quick to see if there are
any that I like. And this film color 927, it is a little bit strong, but I do like what
I'm seeing from it. So I'm going to come to my
key output and just drag that back down a little bit and
then increase it slowly here, right around 500, looks good. And I'll just label
this node a lot. And then same thing on this one, create a new node. And then just scrub
through these presets. I am liking this film color 629. That looks pretty cool. So I'm just going to bring down our key output a
little bit here. And I think on it, saturate the image a little bit. Something like that
looks pretty good. And then I'll just
label this one. Alright, so just a final recap. If we look at our
first image here, we started by color correcting
on these first two nodes. We started with our exposure, then we went to our contrast
and our white balance. And then we calibrated using a color grading preset called
a lookup table or a lot. And then we also did a couple of examples here where we
did it all manually. We started with our
color corrections, and then we started
Color Grading our image with a unique look
without having to use any of these color
grading presets. A couple of things I
do want to show you before we wrap up this
course is power windows. We just kinda brushed over them a little bit by
do you want to go into them just a little bit more on this clip I think
I'm going to use, I'm going to use this
clip right here. I'm gonna go ahead and
create another node here. And then what I
wanna do is like if I just wanted to
brighten up his face, what I could do is I can
come to my power windows. I could create a window, drag it over his face, size it to the right position. And then I could
increase the feather here and just drag it
to where I want to be. And then let's say I wanted to either brightness face or
darken the rest of the frame. I like the brightness
of his face here. So I'm just gonna
go ahead and darken the rest of the frame
coming to my curves. Now, I'll pull this down. Now you may be
saying whoa, whoa, whoa Carson, it's
darkening his face. Don't worry. We're
going to fix that. We'll come back to
our power window. And then we can
use these controls here to invert our window. Now when we click
this right here, we've inverted our
power windows, so we've darken everything
else outside his face. But you'll notice
as we go through the shot because this
was a moving shot, it's starting to slide off
his face a little bit. So what we can do is we'll come back to our first frame here. And then we'll press Command
T on the keyboard on a Mac or Control T on
Windows, Command T. And then it'll track this mask all the way through the shot. You can do this if you need to. Brighten or darken faces
are really just track any adjustments to a specific
area within your image. You can also use power
windows to just adjust the color within a specific area within the image, just
like we did here. So I'm liking what we've done. And then if we wanted to do a similar adjustment
on our next clip, we could go ahead and
create a new node. We'll just go in and
brighten things up a little bit here, something like that. And then if we just want to localize this adjustment
to justice face, we'll come back to our mass care or power windows and then will only adjust the brightness of this range within
our image or his face. And then we can of
course track it, do other things like that.
So there you have it. My simplified color
correction and color grading workflow
for content creators.
5. Class Project & Outro: For the class project, go ahead and use one of
these sample clips. Use your favorite clip or
you can use your own clips. And just go ahead and
screenshot your adjustments. Go ahead and screenshot
your node graph over here so that we can go ahead and see what adjustments
you made to color correct. And grade your footage. Go ahead and upload your screenshot. Let me see it. And
I would love to know what you guys create. Thank you guys so much for
joining me on this course. I would love to see
what you guys create using these color correction
in grading techniques. And as always, if you have
any questions, let me know. I'd be happy to
help and I will see you guys on the next course.
Carson McKay, Colorist & DP
