Color Grading & Skin Retouch using DaVinci Resolve (Free Version)

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Jake, and sometimes I need to work with far from perfect skin in my videos. In this class, I want to show your free tools which you can use to apply natural skin retouching, which doesn't look like a blur filter. And the best part is that it takes just one minute to set up. Then you'll be able to control how much smoothen you want to apply. In this class, we will download and use a free version of Da Vinci resolve to achieve this result, which you can see on screen right now. The venture result is industry-leading color grading and editing software. This is why in this class, I'll also show you how to color correct your footage and how to apply color grading techniques, which will maintain skin tones similar to what you could see in movies. It's a really easy technique, but it gives you a very powerful results. Once you'll remember it, you'll be able to apply it in less than two minutes to any footage. This effect we will achieve by the end of this class, feel free to follow me here on Skillshare for more VFS classes. And now let's get started. 2. DaVinci Download and Installation: So first of all, we are going to download Da Vinci, resolve, install it, and I'm gonna give you a quick overview of the software. So what do you need to do is to go to Google and type Da Vinci. You'll get this website. If you click on it, you'll get to this website. You'll need to go to products, which is first item here. Click on it and go to the Vinci Resolve and fusion software, leftmost gluconate. And let's see what we have. As you can see, we can download the Vinci resolve for free. It's professional color grading software, which we are going to use and fun fact that Hollywood movies also use this software, as you can see here. And from this class, you'll know how easy it is to use and how us some results you can get. So just scroll down here to download the Vinci result for free. And here, as you can see, we have the Vinci Resolve and division Resolve Studio. This is the paid one. And for our purposes, we'll define with the preview version. So let's wait on free to download now. Then, if you're on a Mac, you can download this Mac OS, linux, and I'm on Windows. So I'm going to click on Windows. Kid, just fill out your information and click on Register and download. And you should be having this window which allows you to download Da Vinci resolve. I'm going to save it. So now we've done all our file. Let's click on it, and now we can just install it. It will unzip the folder and make sure that both of these checkmarks are set. And click Install, then just click next, except all the license agreement. You can read it and go next, installed in which ever folder you want. Let's click Next and install. Okay, So we've completed our installation. Let's click Finish of k. We can close this window and in Search, now we can just type Da Vinci, or it should be available here in Europe. Start menu. Here it is, and let's click on it. Here's a little introduction. Let's click continue and let's click Start. So you can see by these folders, I already worked in the software, and this is why I have a bunch of projects here, as well as my classes on Skillshare. And the next video I'm going to show you a little overview of the software. See you in the next video. 3. DaVinci Overview: Okay. So we've opened our DaVinci Resolve 17, or whichever you installed. You can save your projects to the local base or to your specific database. Basically, it means that you can create a folder where all of your project will be saved. You can create new database by clicking here said the name for it, and a location where you want your project to be saved. Basically, all your project will be saved in one place. For DaVinci Resolve my case. I already have it set up. So you can just type your name and click on location here, browse, and set wherever you want, and click Create. And then you can just create new project. So lets me, for example, create new folder. I'll call it color grading, and click Create. So now I can open this folder and click on New Project. Let's also call this project color grading and reattaching. And click Create. Name doesn't matter. So this is our software. It's really cool because it has a bunch of tools which you can use. You can manipulate the sound here. You can calibrate in this step. This is basically where we are going to spend our time the most. You can also add some motion graphics. Here. Here we can just edit. And here we can just cut it, our footage. First of all, what you need to know about the vinci that you need to click here on this settings, on this icon. And once you've set all of these settings, it will stay as it is. You'll not be able to change these settings when you'll decide to render your footage or to export your Publish to Web. So we need to make sure to set the right resolution and right frame rate. These are two things which we need to set up properly. So first of all, let's click Cancel and let's import some footage. We can import here, or we can just go to Edit tab here. And here we can just right mouse, click on it and click Import Media. Disrupt voltage will be available to this less. So you can just click on it and click Open. As you can see, our project is not the same frame rate as my video. So this is perfect time to click change. So it will adjust according to your video which you are using to set up your project according to your video, you just need to import it and click Change in this way, if we will click here on Settings, you can see that we have some resolution as my video. It's exactly the same full HD. And now it's not 24 as it was, is 30 frames per second because my video is also 30 frames per second. So from now on, we have this project and we will not be able to change it later. It's a little work we should have ensure result has. So basically if you want to have different settings, you just need to create new project for it. Okay, in our case, it's fine because we are going to use full HD video with 30 frames per second or any other Polish will work fine. You can just fill him or herself and use it for this less. So let's click and drag here on timeline is you can see it's created video one, an audio track for it. And now we want to work on retouching and color grading for this da Vinci result has separate tab here and coloring. So let's click here on color. And now as you can see, we have completely different interface which allows us to make different changes. It's much more professional look, but also it's much easier to get to things which we want to use. So the next few videos we are going to color correct this footage. Then we are going to skin retouch this brutish. And finally, we are going to add some color grading. See you in the next video. 4. Color Correction: Okay, so don't be afraid of all of these panels. It's not that hard to use. And we are going to use just a bunch of these sliders. After all, this will be a really easy technique, but really powerful way to work with your footage. By the way, in this upper, you can also edit, hold your video or movie clip, whatever you want. It has follow it. You can cut it footage, blend footage. And I really recommend to use Da Vinci resolve because it's free and much more powerful than Premier Pro or other video editing softwares. So let's click here on color. As you can see, the software uses note system. Basically each effect, It's one node. However, you can apply a bunch of effects on one node, but it's not a good practice. It will be messy and it will be much harder to use this footage. So first thing which you need to do is to color correct your footage. So to see our hawkish better, we can just go to this icon here. Click on this enhanced viewer. As you can see now, we have our footage bigger. Also, we need to click here to notes to see our nodes. And on this note, we can select it. We will adjust our luminance. Basically, we need to click here on these curves to adjust this curve. First thing I want to do is to set this saturation to 0. Let's click on it and press 0 on your keyboard and click Enter, or you can just use it as a slider. Just left mouse click and click to the left or to the right. I'll set to 0 to see only the luminance of our video. Now again, see that my skin is a bit too high. So by clicking here on curves, I can adjust this curve. I can adjust one curve at the time by clicking on the red, green, blue. Or I can use this luminance curve. Let's click here on y or luminance curve. And let's maybe add a bit of contrast. And let's lower mid-tones. Basically this is shadows, this is midtones, and this is our highlights. So I want to lower a bit my mid-tones because I have pretty pale skin. So to get the colors from my skin, I want to set it a bit lower. This is how you can compensate for exposure in your camera. And let's set situation back to 50 as it was. You can click it and type it 50, or you can just double-click on saturation. It will set automatically to default. I've got a lot more color and my skin. See before and after, you can just click on this note, leftmost like an it and press Control D or Command D, if you're on a Mac to disable this anode or enable, as you can see before, my skin was pretty pale and desaturated. And now if I press Control D to enable this node, you can see that I've applied this luminous curve to make my skin tones not blown out. By the way, if you don't see these wheels, you just need to click here. It will enable these wheels has also here. And now we need to create a new node to color grade our footage, because as you can see, it's a bit yellowish and I know that this door is whitish, grayish door. Basically what collaboration means. It means that everything is in real life is white, should be white in video also. So let's make some changes to get the original colors. So what we can do is to create a new node, you need to right mouse click on this node and go to add node, add cereal. It will create a new node. It's much better to use one effect on OneNote to be able to disable it or enable it. And in here on this second node, we can color correct our footage to color correct our footage. We can play here and use this parade disparate of scopes helps us to visualize our image in red, green, and blue channels. Once you've set all of these channels to similar height, you'll get the proper color correction. So for my experience, the easier way to set these red, green, and blue channels to right height is to go here to color bars. You need to make sure that you were on the wheels, on primary scholar wheels, and you need to change to color bars. Let's click in it. So basically it just by using this gain, you can calibrate your polish overall. So for example, as you can see, the blue channel is too low. We can just hover with our mouse on top of this bar. And by using the scroll wheel on the mouse, you can increase or decrease this value. So I'm going to use scroll on the mouse up and I'm increasing this blue channel. You can also click here and drag to the right or to the left to change this value. And our goal now is to set these lines to same height. So let's increase a bit more. So now it looks like it's about the same size as our red channel, maybe a bit lower. And now let's do the same with the green channel and play around with these bars until you'll get your polish to the same height like this. So this looks pretty good for me. And now as you can see, my door is clearly was white. So now if we will select this node, we can press Control D on keyboard. And now you can clearly see that the results, and it's really important to calibrate your footage before color grading because it will be much easier to adjust the colors. And the next video I'm going to show you how to retouch our skin and how to color grade our skin in the way it would look natural. But still we are going to get the much more visual appeal result. See you in the next video. 5. Skin Retouch: Okay, so let's now work on our scheme. Let's select this note here, right mouse click it and go to add node, add cereal. Now we can just select this node, and this time we don't want to use the course. We want to use this qualifier. Just click on it and then just click on your skin to see your selection, you need to click here on Highlight. And now if you will click here, click and drag. You can select your skin. This result is pretty good. And with these three sliders, you can adjust the selection. First of all, we can add some softness. So this selection would be a bit more softer. We can increase this blur radius so it would blend better with the edges of our browse and hair. And we can change the saturation a bit to include or exclude part of our face. For example, I don't want to include my lips. So with this saturation slider, we can just cut out our lips. And we can play around with this luminance of this color and maybe include a bit more of our cells. In my case, I want to exclude the hand because I don't want to apply some smoothing of the hand. And with this later, you can just control how much you can include or exclude from your selection. Just make sure that you included all skin of your face. By the way, don't be afraid if some of the background is in your selection, it will not affect that much. So now what we want to do is to go to effects and to see our Effects panel, we want to exit this enhanced viewer. So click here on this icon and now we can see our effects. And here in search, we need to type Word soft. Keep in mind that this is part of paid version of this software. But before we are going to use this, let's see what we can do with built and sliders and this software. So let's go back into enhanced viewer. Now we can see our Polish better. And let's exit this highlight mode. And just by changing this detail, you can degrees the details in your skin. As you can see just by changing this lighter, you can degrees the details from your skin. And let's go to the notes, select this node and press Control D on your keyboard. And this way you can see before and after. And as you can see, just by changing this meat detail, you can resize your skin to make it a lot more smoother. And it's falling minus 15. You can go to minus 100 if you want maximum perfect looked of your skin. But I wouldn't go that far because it may look too smooth. But minus 50 is really looking good just by looking before and after, you can clearly see that it's settled result. But it gives you a lot of smoothening on your skin, which is still looks pretty natural. And you can just decide how much of it you want to use. I'll set to minus 60. And by the way, I like to change the temperature of my skin. If you want to add a bit of more colors to your skin, if you have pale skin as mine. So basically by 80 and temperature and mid detail, you can increase look of your skin drastically. As you can see, it's only by changing two sliders. And it's really amazing what you can do just with two sliders of the software. By the way, if you have Da Vinci Resolve studio, I also want to show how effect works. So let me quickly go out from this enhance viewer. But if you don't have the Vinci Resolve Studio, you can skip to the next video where I'm going to show you a color grading part of this class. Basically, if you will use discipline and sharpen tool and just drag on this qualifier. And what's cool about this plugin? If we will reset this meat detail just by double mouse clicking it, it will set to 0. You'll see how powerful this effect is. Basically we can just decrease our mid texture. We can also decrease the large size texture. And basically it's really similar to this mid detail. So if I'm going to zoom in here on my scan and see before and after. You can see that we get really cool result, which is basically as emit detail. But what is cool about this effect? That you can increase the small texture. As I am increasing this small texture, it adds details to my skin. And in this way, it's still removed most of imperfection on my skin. But with this small texture which we've added, we've created a field like here is still a texture of the skin. This is why this effect really powerful. But let's stay on free part of the software. So as the deleted, I'm going to press Control Z a bunch of times. And let's stay on this mid and detail. I'll set mine to minus 70 because it's really good result. Also, as you can see, if I'm going to press Control D remote, most of unprofessional my skin. And it didn't last too much details. So it's really great result for free software. And the next video I'm going to show you how you can calibrate this footage. See you in the next video. 6. Color Grading: Okay, in this video, we are going to color grade this footage. First of all, let's exit this effect type and let's create another node. Let's right mouse click on this one and go to add node, add Serial Node. And now we can just really play around with this footage. We can click here on Viewer and also on the notes to see them both. Let's scroll on the mouse to the man. And basically with our color rating, what do we want to do is to change the background. Because with this technique which I am going to show you right now, our skin will still be as it is right now. So now let's play with color grading. First of all, I want to add color gradient in style of teal and orange, but more on color tones. This is how we can do it. We can just like this note here and go to curves. So here by selecting this red channel, we can click about here on this line and drag it down. Mislead what you want to look is on the background because skin tones, we will adjust manually a bit later. And by the way, now when we set it, our color correction properly from first part of this less, you can see how easily it is to add this teal and orange kind of look. And if I will disable this color correction part, it wouldn't be as easy to add this teal and orange effect. So let's enable it by also pressing Control D. Select this final load with our color grading. We can also go to blue shell. For example, you want to more cooler tones in the background. So what you need to do is to select this part of the blue line and drag it up like this, and maybe decreasing here in mid-tones. You can also play with the green curve and drag it a bit up. And with this technique of color grading, you should be really looking at the background of your footage. Because now I'm going to show you how you can introduce your colors of your skin into your calibrating. For example, you'll like this look. It's more like a metrics, cooler tones kind of look. And here what you can do, you can select this note and press Alt L on keyboard. As you can see, I'm holding Alt on keyboard. I've selected this foolish. I've pressed Alt and letter L. As you can see, it created another node. It blends to announce together into one output. So basically, this layer node right here will be applied on top of this node with color grading, we can even drag it up. So it would make more sense because it will be on top of our color grading. And then we can just click on this square and attach it to this arrow. Just leftmost. Look at it. Hold and drag to this triangle and release it. It will connect it. And as you can see now, our skin tones are on top of this color grading. It looks pretty cool but not natural. So let's try to blend it more nicely. But before I want to show you that individually result, you have a cool trick how to maintain a proper skin tones in your image and on different screens, it can be different. So to make sure that your skin tones are properly set up, you want to go to not to operate. You just need to click here and change to a vector scope. And basically this line here, it represents our skin. So what we can do is to select these both nodes just by clicking and dragging to select both of them. Press Control D to display them. And let's go back to our skin. And now with this vector scope. And if we will click on this highlighter, we can check if our skin tones are right color. Basically what we want to check is that your skin tones are on top of this line. This is proper skin tone color. And that was again, see our colors of her skin just on point, which means that we did a proper color correction. So now we can just enabled these two notes just by selecting one of them and then select both of them and press Control D. And then we can exit this highlight mode. And we just need to blend with our proper skin tones. So what we can do is still select this note here, just like here to deselect any of the notes. So like this one. And it will go to this icon here. Click on it here, and key output, we can set to 0, which basically will show us all the, our color grading. And by slowly increasing the gain of the output, we can blend our natural skin tones with our color grading. So this is why you don't want to go to poll one number because it's too much. You want to stay about 0.6 as maximum. Or just play around with this value to get the look which you like. By the way, you can always go back to this qualifier and go to Color Wheels right here. And you can always add some orangeish. Don't do your skin if you want, if you want more tense scan and not so pale is mine. So as you can see if I will disable this node right here, you can see the biggest difference in this color correction, how much light you can add to your skin. As also with these color wheels, you can adjust the tone of your skin. And now basically when you have set up all your system like this, you can always go to this node here, which represents your color grading. And basically go to this curve tab and play around with these curves to add any kind of color gradient which you want. By the way, if you want to reset some of these points, you can just white mostly guide. It, will reset it. For example, I can go back to this color tone if I want, which looks pretty cool to me as well. You can once again see before and after. And also, I like to add a bit of temperature to my skin if I wanted to separate myself more from background. So now as you can see, my background is cooler tones and my skin is a lot warmer. And just by playing with this temperature, or maybe even adding a bit of color boost, you can really make cool looks with this technique. This is what we've got out of the camera. And after you can really color grade in every way which you like, you can even add some warm tones to it like this. And our skin will still be really appealing to our viewer. So once again, before and after, you can see that we can apply really cool looks as also we've added this settle reattach into our skin, which looks pretty natural, much better than it was in camera itself. I hope you like this less. Feel free to follow me here on Skillshare and check out my other classes. This, for example, is only 12 minutes and this amazing result you'll get only after 12 minutes of this class. Also you can click here on See More button to see a my other classes, basically, if you like visual effects, I have a bunch of places for beginners. I have glasses on After Effects, has also a cinema 4 D is also text animation and after effects and even places on VFS in Premier Pro. Just make sure to follow me here on Skillshare and I'll be happy to share my knowledge with you. See you in my next class. They give for watching.