Color Grading: Creating the Film Look in Davinci Resolve

1. Introduction: Hi everyone, I'm Carson with studio McKay. And in this course we're going to be learning how to color correct and color grade or digital video to make it look like it was shot in film. This is really the concept that we'll be talking about in this course is film emulation. The characteristics or qualities in the colors that you get from film stock. We taking a deep dive into how to recreate those for your digital footage. Now in this course, you will already need to have a basic knowledge of Davinci Resolve and the features and tools available there. So if you need to learn a little bit more about Davinci Resolve, then I have another course, color correction and color grading for content creators. You can check out and it'll give you a basic intro to the things that we'll be talking about in this course. So if you're ready to take your color correction, your color grading to the next level to make your videos look like film. Then let's get started. 2. Davinci Resolve Overview: All right guys, welcome to our color grading course. Now, in this course, like I said, this is built on the last course. So you will need to have some understanding of Davinci Resolve in order to follow along. But if you just need a quick refresher of the color grading interface within Davinci Resolve. Up here you have your viewer, then you have your gallery, your lats, your media pool, and you have the button to share your clips. Down here. I'm gonna go ahead and close the media pool. And then we have this little button up here, this little magic looking button. If you turn this off, Let's go to a clip dive graded. If you turn this off and back on, you can see you're turning off all of your nodes and all of your effects, which we'll talk about in just a second. So we're gonna go ahead and come back to this clip. And then you can also use Shift D If you need to turn them off and back on. That's the keyboard shortcut for that. And then you have your quick export, your timeline. If you want to open up your timeline in your color Grading panel, you can close that by clicking that timeline button again. Then we have all of our nodes right in here. If you need to open up your effects panel, that's right up here in the upper right, where you can search for any of the effects that you may need to drag onto a node if you wanted to add a radial blur, simply drag that onto the node. And there you go. I'm gonna go ahead and delete that by pressing all trash can button, close out of the effects by clicking the effects button again. And then down here you've got the individual clips that you'll be color grading. And then at the bottom, we've got all of our color grading controls, as well as our panels. So right here where you see keyframes, if you click on the little mountain range button next to it, you can find your scopes, your waveforms, RGB, Parade histograms, Vector Scope, things like that. All the tools that we're gonna be needing to judge our color. Then over here on the left you've got your primaries Wheels, your Log Wheels. Again, remember that your primaries are very broad adjustments. They make a wide range of adjustments when you adjust your lift, you're just seeing the whole image but with an emphasis on the shadows. As you adjust your gain, you're adjusting mainly or highlights, but it does bleed over into the rest of the image as well. And then with your log, these are very, very specific adjustments as you drag your Log Wheels, you're targeting a very specific area, specifically your shadows, mid tones and highlights. Let's go ahead and reset all of these. Then you have your HDR wheels, which are even more precise than your Log Wheels. So remember your primaries, very broad. Log wheels are more specific. Hdr wheels are even more targeted than your Log Wheels. Then we have some other controls over here, which I don't really get into that much. And then we have our curves right here. You've got your main tone curve right here, as well as your RGB curves back in here. And then you have your hue versus hue curves. So you can change the hue within the image, or right here you have your hue versus sat, where you can change the saturation of specific cues within your image. Your hue versus luminance, where you can change illuminance of specific hues. And they've got even more options like saturation versus luminance and things like that. Then you've got your color whopper, which I don't use too much. I'm mainly just rely on my primaries and Log Wheels and then my curves. But if you feel like you want to use the color whopper, this is similar to hue and saturation curves, but with a little bit more control. And then you've got your qualifiers right here. Power windows right here, where this is basically just your options to mask out certain parts of the image. And then you've got more like your trackers right here. And then you've got your sharpening and blurring over here. And then your mat controls over here. One other thing, you can create more nodes by pressing Option S or S on Windows. To create more nodes, you can delete them, select them, press Delete or Backspace on your keyboard, and you're good to go. There you go. That is a basic brief overview of Davinci Resolve just to refresh the interface for you if you need more information on the rest of this interface in Davinci Resolve, then again, I recommend you take my other course as that one gives you a much more comprehensive overview, since it is for beginners, this is a more advanced course where we will be diving deeper into color grading. So if you're ready, let's get started. 3. Preparing the Footage: So now here we are in Davinci Resolve. And before we start prepping the Footage, there is one thing we need to do. You'll want to come up to your Davinci Resolve preferences, makes sure that you are in the system tab and come down to the general section. Right here you'll see use Mac display color profiles for viewers. You want to make sure that this is selected. What this does is it'll display your colors accurately the way that there'll be exported. This means that when you export there'll be the same as when you saw them in the viewer when you were color grading. This is crucial because without this, we'll start to have kind of a gamma shift after you export, and it just won't look the same. So makes sure use Mac display color profiles for viewers is selected. Go ahead and click Save. Since I have this setup the way that I want, I'm gonna go ahead and press Cancel. And then now we can drag our footage into the timeline and start prepping it for the grading process. Now that the Footage is in the timeline, we're gonna come over to our Color tab here. Then we've got all of the options available to us. So one thing that we wanna do is we want to look through each of these clips kinda quickly identify what are some the key things that we want to fix these clips. Generally when we prep the Footage for Grading, we're trying to aim for correct but muted colors so that it gives a nice natural look without any styling added to it. With a lot of these clips, I'm noticing that they do lean a little bit to the cool side of the color spectrum. So for this first clip, what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go ahead and warm this clip up a little bit. Somewhere right around there. Looks good. And then maybe add a tiny bit of green that's looking pretty good. Now we're gonna go ahead and move on to our next clip here. Quickly identify any issues with this clip. Overall, the balance of the colors is looking fairly good, especially since we can see in our RGB Parade, everything is looking fairly even. So there's not really anything we need to do to correct this clip with this one. Similar story. Not a lot except maybe again, warm it up just a little bit so that we get those colors back. And then maybe add a little bit of green, just a tiny, tiny amount, and then warm it up tiny bit more, something like that. Now coming to our next clip, this one looks fairly accurate to me. I don't think there's anything we really need to do to this one. And then for this clip, this one is a little bit cool. We can see in the fence right here, there is a little bit blue and those whites. So let's go ahead and warm that up just a little bit. That looks about right, right there. Then again with this clip, again, looking a little bit cool. So let's go ahead and warm this up just a little bit. Somewhere right around there. Looks pretty good. Alright, so we've just gone through, you've corrected each of the clips. Now we're gonna go ahead and label each of these first few nodes that we've used to correct, will label them Color Correction. Alright, so now that we've gone through and corrected any little issues we saw with these clips, mostly white balance adjustments. But since we've done that now, let's move on into the color grading process and the next video 4. Modern Film Look: So now that we've gone through, uncorrected each of these clips and prep them for the grading process. It's time to start color grading. Now this first Look that we're gonna be re-creating is a modern Film Look. This has soft contrast lifted blacks color density, muted blues and reds Canvas, dual tone theme going on, and then lots of healthy Film Grain. So this clip is fairly neutral here, and we're going to be adding some color grading nodes after this color correction node. But I'm not going to label them just for the sake of simplicity for this course. So I'm just going to keep our color correction node up here and then bring all our color grading nodes underneath it so that we know where everything is at. So let's start on our second node here. And we're going to go ahead and start by adding some soft contrast. The way that we're gonna do this is by going into our custom curves and making sure that we have editable splines, selected. This at first it doesn't look like anything's changed. But when you click on either your white point or your black point, you get this little handle that appears. This allows you to adjust the contrast and very, very softly, making a smooth adjustment that kind of affects the entire curve, instead of just making a bunch of little points. So we're gonna go ahead and reset that and start adjusting our contrast. So I'm gonna go ahead and bring up the highlights here. And then we'll also bring down our white point just to give a smoother highlight roll-off. Now, if we disable this node, we can see that there is a lot of clipping going on up here in these clouds. But when we turn this node back on, we can see a much smoother highlight roll-off, giving the effect of greater dynamic range. So let's go ahead and just bring these backup a little bit, and then we'll start playing with our shadows. Will just start bringing these down. I'm mostly looking at her hair right now to make sure that that's sitting at a healthy point somewhere right around here is looking pretty good. Now, let's go ahead and find her here a frame just to make sure that we're grading this properly. And let's bring these shadows back chest a little bit. Something like that looks pretty good. The next thing we need to add for this modern film-like is lifted blacks. We want to go ahead and take our black point and drag this up just a little bit. That way we don't have anything sitting at pure black film stock generally you don't see much sitting at pure black in certain types of film stock. So we're going to recreate that look by bringing our black point up. And that's looking pretty good. Let's bring our shadows back just a little bit, just so that we get enough contrast without crunching our shadows. Somewhere right around there looks pretty good. Next, we're going to work on adding color density. This is a type of saturation that doesn't completely destroy your image. So let's go to node three, and then I'm going to show you what happens if we just add a bunch of normal saturation. As you can see, as we add saturation, certain parts of the image are getting a little bit brighter and the colors are getting out of control. So let's reset that. Now I want you to pay attention to the waveform over here and change this from RGB Parade to our waveform. And then when we go ahead and adjust our saturation, you can see there colors are shifting all over the place and in some ways it's getting lifted and exposure just a little bit, at least some of these colors are, That's because when you start amplifying the red, green, and blue channels altogether in certain colors, they will appear to be brighter. What we wanna do is amplify certain types of saturation without amplifying the luminance or the brightness of specific colors. The way that we can do this is by resetting this node and then changing the color space to HSV or hue saturation and value. Value is basically just a fancy word for exposure. Then we want to disable channels 1.3. Channel one is hue, channel two is saturation, and channel three is value. The only one we want to work with is channel two, so that we only increase our saturation. That way we're increasing the saturation independent of our exposure or the hue of the color. So now that we only have channel two selected and we're in the HSV, not the HSL, the HSV color space. Then we can go ahead and take our game. We'll start cranking that up. Now. I'm going to crank it up kinda crazy amount just going all the way with this. You can see that we have a very different result than if we had relied just on the saturation slider. The exposure and the hue isn't necessarily changing, but the amplification of the actual colorfulness of the image itself is. So we're gonna go ahead and reset this. And then we're gonna go ahead and just introduce a little bit of this subtractive saturation. That's the technical term for what we're doing. Alright, so now that we've done our subtractive saturation, the next thing is we want to start adjusting her skin. We can see it is looking a little bit purple because we have contrasting lighting. She was in the shadows And then there was some stuff reflecting onto her face that made it look a little bit purple. So what we're gonna do is we're going to come into our fourth node here. And we're gonna go ahead and take our Gamma. And let's start shifting that a little bit towards the warmer, more yellow side of things. Maybe even add a little bit green and red here, somewhere in that yellow spectrum. Now let's take our gain. Let's, let's cool it off just a little bit. Not too much. Bring that back a little bit. Take our gamma. Again. We're going to start shifting this. And then now we want to take our lift and we're going to counter that with a little bit of teal in those shadows. We're trying to aim for neutral colors here. We're just trying to fix some of this color shift that we see in her skin. Now what we're gonna do is we're going to come into our hue versus hue curves. Now we're gonna go ahead and select parts of her skin here. And then we're going to widen out this adjustment range. We don't want anything that is too narrow. That way we don't ruin the Footage that we're working with. And we're just going to take some of this purple range, drag it down more towards the yellow side of things here. We can see that if we turn this node off and back on, we really corrected some of the magenta shift that we see in her skin. Now let's create another node after this one. And we're gonna go to our Hue Versus Saturation Curves. Now, what I wanna do here is I want to saturate these blues in the sky just a little bit more. So we're gonna go ahead and select this blue range up here. Again, this is Kevin narrow selection area. So we're gonna go ahead and widen this thing out. Then we're just gonna go ahead and increase the saturation of the blues somewhere right around there. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and just create a really warm modern Film Look in our primaries Color Wheels. What we're gonna do is we're going to take our offset and we're just going to add a lot of yellow into the image. Really warm this thing up. Make this look like a summer sunset type of a feel. Now that we've done that, we're gonna go ahead and come into our gamma, start playing around with this a little bit so that we make sure that the hues aren't shifting too much in her skin. Again. Something like that looks pretty good. Then we're gonna go ahead and play with our gain. Now this gain control is pretty wild. So we wanna go ahead and make sure that we make very small adjustments with our gain at this point. So I'm gonna go ahead and add just a little bit of green. One thing that you'll see in a lot of new movies like the Romans, as they generally have some green in these highlights. Very warm, a little bit green, very moderated Colors. And then we'll come into our shadows and see if we can neutralize those a little bit by adding a little bit of teal, something. Just like that looks pretty good. We just subtracted 0.01 from red. And now let's play with our Gamma just a little bit more. See if we can neutralize her skin just a bit more. Something like that looks pretty good. Now let's just drag our playhead through the clip, makes sure that the colors are consistent throughout the grade here. This is actually looking pretty good, Very, very nice, classic, modern, clean filmic image. So now the final step here is we want to add a little bit of grain, will add, another node, will drag this one below, since we are going to add some effects to it, will come to our Effects panel and type in grain, drag that onto our node here. And then you have a lot of options. You can create your own custom a grain, generally I like to stick with eight millimeter 100 D. This adds quite a bit of healthy grain. If we make this full screen, we can see there's quite a bit of grain here. It looks pretty good at kava healthy amount. And if we drag through the clip, this is looking actually really, really good. Now, one other thing we can do, if you felt like her skin was a little bit too much in the shade here, we could add a node before our grain. We're going to press Shift S on our keyboard. And we'll drag the node backup here with the other color grading nodes. And now what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and qualify her skin. Now this is eight bit footage and most colorists will tell you that you cannot qualify, hey bit footage. That's actually not true. You can qualify 8-bit footage when you're qualifying based solely on luminance. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and turn off our hue and saturation qualifiers and just rely on luminance. We're gonna go ahead and press Shift H on our keyboards so that we can see what we're qualifying. And then if we take our high point and we drag this down, we can see the parts are in color or the parts that are selected and the ones that are turning gray are the ones that will be left out of the selection. So we don't want to take too much out of her skin. We just want to remove the sky and some of the buildings behind her, since those are significantly brighter. Now we're gonna go to our high software H soft right here. And we're going to increase our feathering in our high range. And then we'll bring our highs back just a little bit. Something right around here. Now we're going to keep this qualified and we're going to keep our selection or our highlighting on so that we can see what we're doing with gestures skin. And we're going to come to our curves. We're going to go ahead and raise our highlights just a little bit here. We're going to create some more contrast with our shadows, bring that down just a little bit, and then maybe even increase our gain a little bit. Now we're going to press Shift H again to see the effect that we've had. And now let's turn off this node back on. And you can see that we've creates more contrast in her skin tones since she was in the shade a little bit. So if you need to qualify someone's skin, you can do it based on luminance. And then you can select those shadows if they're in the shadows or if they're in the highlights, you can select just the highlights using the luminance qualifiers. Then we've added a little bit more contrast to her skin. And overall, this is a pretty solid grade, creating a nice modern Film Look with a little bit of healthy grain 5. Bleach Bypass Look: So now let's go ahead and create a bleach Bypass. Look, I'm gonna show you a couple of techniques to do this. And then we'll do a little bit color grading to this clip afterwards. So first let's go ahead and create another node. Let's drag our color correction node up here. Create a node after, drag that underneath, just like we did last time. And this first method is pretty simple. Again, we're going to have editable splines turned on. And then by default, all of your color curves are selected. They're linked together with this whole chain link icon. So why RG and B are all linked together? And if you start adjusting one, you start adjusting them all simultaneously. If we drag our middle point and down, we can see that we're also increasing the saturation in certain colors. But what we wanna do is we want to create contrast without creating any changes in saturation or the luminance of specific colors. So we're gonna go ahead and reset that. And we're going to unlink are wide channel from the rest of these. So click on the unlinked button right here. And now we just have RY channel selected. So this is our luminance that we're working with now. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and drag our highlights up here just a bit. And then we're gonna go ahead and create some more contrast using our shadows. So we'll drag this down. And then you can see that now we've added contrast without adjusting saturation. And in fact, you can see in some of these skin tones here, the colors are a bit muted. Even in these greens, they look very subdued. This is a very quick and easy way to create contrast and create that bleach Bypass Look without much effort and without playing with a bunch of other settings. Now a more advanced way to do this is what we're going to show you now. To create a more advanced version of the bleach Bypass. Look, we're gonna go ahead and reset this node. We're gonna go ahead and add another corrector node. Drag it just right here. And then we're going to also add a layer mixer. Now what we're gonna do is we're going to take our little cord from our output and drag that to our Lear mixer right here. We can drag this output from our other node and drag it to the input on our layer mixer. And then drag the output from the layer mixer to the main output of our clip. And then we're going to take the output of our correction node and drag that to the input of our third node. So when we put these all in kind of a string here, you'll be able to see the pipeline that we're working with. We've got input, our Correction, and then we have two nodes coming out of the Correction. And then all going into this layer mixer That's going to mix these two nodes together. It may seem a little bit confusing at first, but it's okay once you start working with this, it'll start to make sense. What we're gonna do is we're gonna go to our layer mixer and we are going to change the composite mode to overlay. Now from here, we're going to take one of these two nodes and we're going to go ahead and D saturate this thing. So we'll just drag this all the way down to zero. This is another way to create a more extreme version of the bleach Bypass. Look, It's a little bit more authentic, but it is a little bit more work. And so now we've got an overlay of one node on top of another, and it's in the overlay composite mode. Now what we can do is we can, Let's go ahead and just drag these down here. For simplicity. Then we're gonna go ahead and create another node by pressing Option S on our keyboard. And let's start color grading this thing. Well, let's play around with a little bit. But I wanna do is I want to warm up the skin tones, which are very clearly sitting in the highlights of our image. So I'm gonna go ahead and take our gain and just drag a little bit of yellow into their perfect, something just like that. Then let's play with our mid tones and our shadows. In our Gamma. We can go ahead and cool that off. Maybe add a little bit of teal green, counter that again with our game by warming up some more. Then let's play with our lift. Let's try to add a little bit of a teal kind of effect and our lift, maybe we'll just neutralize a little bit, will just reset our lift back to where it was. So now we've created kava Kevin extreme bleach Bypass Look, right? And so even if we add a little bit more orange into our highlights, we can see that this is overall kind of an extreme look, but it works. So let's try the same color grading. But if we used the other bleach Bypass technique to see how they look, kinda how they compare. We're going to go ahead and turn off this color grading node right here, and then right here on node two, we're just going to do the same thing with RY channel that we did the first time. Add that nice crunchy contrast and create a more gentle bleach Bypass. Look. There we go. Something just like that. And then let's turn on node three. This is gonna be pretty extreme, but it actually works. I think I like this version a little bit better. We can even come back into our node to desaturate it a little bit, just to give it more of an authentic bleach Bypass kind of a vibe. And then even cool off a bit. And still this looks really, really good. Maybe add a little bit more orange into those skin tones. Then we still have a pretty good kinda muted bleach Bypass. Look going on here. One common style that we see with bleach Bypass Look is that the skin tones are nice and kinda muted, but still have some warmth to them. While the rest of the image is kinda cooled off a little bit towards blue and green, but mostly just kinda desaturated. So now let's go ahead and finish out the grade here. What I wanna do is I want to create another node, and I'm going to add a power window right over our subject right here. And then we'll drag this to the general shape of the subject. Maybe make it a little bit bigger here and then Feather these edges quite a bit, something like that looks pretty good. And then we're gonna go ahead and invert our selection here. And then let's go ahead and just cool off the rest of the image here. I'm going to do that with my Gamma. I'm just going to pull a little bit towards kinda teal range here. And then we'll go ahead and take our power window. Bring that a little bit closer end toward the subject. Something like that looks pretty good. And then drag this down a little bit. We want there to be some overlap. That way we create a nice natural feathering into the rest of the frame. Then we wanna make sure that we clean up our shadows here. So we're gonna go ahead and counter that cool tone with a little bit of warmth in those deeper shadows. And then we can create another node after that one. Let's turn off node four, and back on. We've cooled off the rest of the frame. I might also want to desaturate that just a little bit here. So take our saturation slider, bring that down a little bit, something just like that, and maybe even bring this power window in just a little bit more. Come to our next node here. And we can see that we've created a very nice kind of cool background with a warmer subject. Now in this last node, we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and add our classic film grain. So we're gonna go to our effects at our film grain. And then again, Let's go eight millimeter, 100 D. We can close out of these effects, make our Grading full screen. And we can kinda see we've got good, healthy Film Grain, cooled off background, warmer, gentle skin tones with nice soft contrast that you get with that bleach Bypass Look overall solid, solid color grading. Here is the before before all of our Color Correction and grading. And then we have the final look. Overall, very solid grade 6. Vintage Film Look: Alright, now let's get started with the vintage Film Look. Now the vintage Film Look, this is gonna be a little bit more pushed, have a more unique aesthetic than most other types of grades. With the vintage Film Look, we do get some soft contrast lifted blacks, lots of color density, warm tones, things that we've seen in some of our other grades, but we also get quite a bit of a highlight tend to a warmer tint. Sometimes we even get a little bit of magenta tint, those highlights. Let's go ahead and reset our magenta slider there. We also get some Revelation, some glow edge blurred toward these corners of the frame since the lens is used on a lot of older cameras aren't as clinically sharp as most modern lenses. And then we also have that vignette again because of some of the imperfections in those vintage lenses. And then we also have grain as a final finishing touch to our vintage look. Alright, so the first thing that I'm gonna do is I'm going go ahead and get started with the soft contrast and adding some of that filmic color tone that we see in a lot of vintage film stock. So we're going to start out by making sure we have editable splines turned on in our Curves panel. We're going to come up to our white point and we're going to just drag that down. Nice right here. And then we are going to bring our highlights up. And then looking at our wave forms, I want this sitting right around 900, somewhere right around there looks pretty good. Okay. Then we're just going to drag this thing way out, somewhere like that. Then we're gonna take our black point and our shadows. We'll drag our shadows down a little bit. We don't want to crush them too much. We just want to create some nice, healthy contrast. Something like that looks pretty good. And then we'll drag our black point up a little bit. Somewhere right around there is looking pretty good. If we turn this off and back on, you can see that we've gotten rid of some of this nasty jumps between our white point and our highlights. We've brought those together a little bit more, taken out some of the contrast and highlights, but really created some contrast in the mid tones. This is something that you see in vintage film stock where it's kinda muted and very software the highlights and into the shadows. But the difference between the highlights and the shadows is fairly pronounced, but the difference between the black point in the shadows isn't as strong and the difference between the highlights and the white point isn't as strong. We have more contrast and our mid tones than we do in the lower or higher ranges of our image. Alright, so now let's go ahead and start adding some of this color tint. I'm going to first start out by taking my lift and bring that kind of towards this teal range. Now, this is very, very strong. I wouldn't normally go this far except we have a trick that we can use to clean up some of this color pollution that we see going on here. First, let's bring our black point down chest a little bit. We don't want to lifted quite as high as we have it. There we go, something like that. Then we're gonna take our gain and we're going to push our gain warmer more toward that orange yellow range. And if we look at the greens here, we're getting much better greens than we had before. If we turn off our node, we can see we have these very digital looking greens. Then in the skin tones, everything just kinda looks clinically clean and digital. Hawaii turn our grade on, we're starting to get somewhere. We're getting these very nice, natural cool greens, very calm, muted skin tones. But we are seeing some issues with the color of our image because we have a lot of color pollution in these darker parts of the image. So what we're gonna do is we're going to come into our log wheels. Now these are more targeted adjustments and then our primaries wheels, but we are going to use them to just introduce a little bit of warmth into our shadows. Not so much to undo the adjustments we made, just enough to counteract some of the color pollution in the black point and the image. Let's go ahead and bring our lift down a little bit more towards teal, something like that. And then we'll go back to our log and then balance that out again using the orange range of our shadow control. Something like that is looking pretty good. Now, we're gonna go back to our primaries. Let's play around with our gamma a little bit, see if there's something we want to push in here. Maybe warm up those mid tones just a little bit. Something like that's looking pretty good. Now if we turn our node off and back on, you can see we've already gotten a lot closer to the Film Look that we are going after. We're going to create another node on top of this one and we're going to start doing our subtractive saturation trick by changing the color space again to HSV, not HSL. We want to work in the hue saturation and value color space. Then we're going to go ahead and disable channels 1.3, leaving only channel to so that we're just working with our saturation. Now we're going to take our game. And let's go ahead and push this up to maybe 1.17 should be good. Add some nice color into the image and look at this. This is just beautiful. The colors that we're getting with our subtractors saturation much better than if we just use the normal saturation slider. Now the image is looking fairly warm overall. So let's go ahead and create another node. And this time I'm gonna go into my HDR wheels We can adjust our temperature using our primaries, and I do that quite often. But when we go into our HDR wheels, we get a unique temperature slider here that works a bit differently. It has more of Kevin natural effect. So we're just going to pull this towards the cooler range a little bit just to take the edge off of this yellow and the image. Now let's turn all our adjustments off and back on. I'm liking where we're getting so far. Though we've cooled off the image a little bit. Let's cool it off even more. Because I want to add a little bit more yellow into just the highlights or the gain range of our image coming back to our primaries. Adding chest that little bit more yellow into those highlights. Boom, something like that. Come back to our HDR wheels and then cooled off a little bit more, will just come back to our firstNode and then maybe even add a little bit more teal into those shadows using our primaries wheels. Don't want to do anything to extreme. Somewhere right around there. Looks pretty good. Now let's come back to our node over here. And you can see, especially looking at the skin tones and these greens and then some of the blue in the sky. This is what is your key points to look at when creating a unique Film Look, we want to look at the skin which is more red tones. We want to look at the greens of grass and trees, and the blue of the sky when you have these three colors, correct. And they look natural than the rest of the grade will fall into place. If one of these was off, the rest of it might feel a little bit off as well. And so we want to get these three colors looking natural. The three primary colors of digital footage, which has red, green, and blue. Let's turn off our final grade and turn it back on, looking really, really good. Now let's emulate the rest of these film-like characteristics that we talked about in the beginning, we want the revelation, glow, edge, blur, vignette and grain. So let's create some more nodes as create just a few more right here. We'll drag this underneath these ones. And let's start with our emulation. We're going to come into our effects and type in hello relation. And then we'll drag that onto our fourth node here. And we've got this nice isolation effect going on. Now, I am going to reduce the saturation of it since it is looking a little bit strong in those skin tones, bring that down just a little bit, something like that. And then with our fifth node, we're going to add this edge blur effect. So we're going to create a Power window here. And then we're going to make this power window a bit bigger. We're going to feather this thing out a lot. We want nice gentle feathering going on and then make this a little bit bigger, something like that. And we're going to drag the radial blur effect onto this node with the power window. Now at first you're gonna see that it applies to the center portion. We need to invert our power window. So we're going to press that to invert it. And then we're going to bring the strength of our blurred down a little bit here, something like that. It's looking pretty good. Come back to our power window controls. And then we're going to just make this a little bit bigger. Something like that. There we go. Now, another thing we're gonna do is we're going to add a vignette will come into our curves panel. And we're just gonna go ahead and take down the mid tone section of these curves. And you can see it we're just affecting those edges of the frame. So now for this one, we do want to turn off editable spline since it is kinda messing up the way that we're wanting to pull down our mid tones. So turn editable splines off. And then now I can just bring down those mid tones along with the rest of the image, looking pretty good, something just like that. And then let's add some film grain. We're gonna go ahead and type in grain in our effects, drag Film Grain onto our sixth node. And then again, I like eight millimeter, 100 D, a lot of nice, healthy natural film grain. And you can see if we close out our effects, turn off our grade. We've gone from some very digital looking footage and then turning our grid back on, we have a very filmic style kind of a clip. And then as we drag through the clip here, we can see that the rest of the lighting just looks really, really Natural, very, very film-like turn this off. You can see we've got this very digital blown out highlights on his shirt. But when we turn it back on because of the revelation, everything that we've added, we've really created this nice glow with that relation. Added some vignette on the sides here, created that Film Grain. Very nice natural looking saturation. Now this might be a little punchy for your taste. I like this. You can always bring back has saturation just a little bit. And even when we come into these highlights right here, where we can see part of his skin. Let's turn off our nodes. We can see his skin is very, very hot, very bright up here. And it's like very close to being blown out, not quite blown out, but very close. Turn our grade back on and it looks natural, very filmic, very classic looking kind of a grade here. So that is how you recreate a classic, older, vintage film stock. Now if you wanted to create a super eight film stock, you would add a lot more magenta into our highlights. So let's come back to our firstNode and let's see what that would look like. We're gonna go ahead and add some of these magenta into the highlights. This is something that we see a lot in older Super eight film stock will counter that with some green in the mid tones here. Not too much, nothing too extreme, something like that. And we're getting that kind of magenta tint to those highlights. We can play around with our HSL curves to really bring his skin back under control, get that more yellow looking skin, something like that, correct? The rest of this make a nice broad adjustment here. And overall, this is looking very good. You can actually manipulate this grade a lot to get to look like a lot of different film stock. So this is just a nice base grade to get you started creating vintage film stock. And we've added a lot of the imperfections that you would expect from vintage lenses and cameras. Just a quick final recap of our Look. Remember we added a lot of teal into these shadows and then we countered that by neutralizing the shadows using our log wheels. And then we move on into our subtractive saturation and our second node. Then in our third node, we played with our HDR wheels and HDR temperature control to really cool off the image. And then went back to our primaries to add a little bit more warmth into our highlights, as you can see right here, and our gain control. And then we moved on to our fourth node, where we added that emulation. And our fifth node, we added our edge blur and vignette. And then in our sixth note and our lastNode, we added the Film Grain. So very simple, very clean node structure. You don't need a lot of nodes to recreate a classic Film. Look. This is a very simple and easy way to do that. 7. Three Secrets for Natural Colors: Alright, so now let's go over three Secrets to make any color grade feel natural and realistic. Three ways that you can sell any color grade. And so looking at the color grades that we've done so far, we can see that in each of these, there are a couple key things that make these grades realistic and believable, even though these are fairly strong color grades. Number one is that our shadows and our darks are very, very clean. We've made sure that there's not too much color pollution in these shadows. Let's add another node real quick, just to show you what I mean, now, we're in our primaries wheels. Let's go ahead and come into our Log Wheels and just try to pollute these shadows a little bit. You can see as I drag a bunch of blue into the shadows as starting to look a lot less believable because there's so much color pollution and we would never see this amount of blue in these parts of the image. So if we bring that back, we can see that we've got very, very clean shadows, very strong grade, but very clean shadows. This is one of the keys to creating a solid color grade is to make sure that your shadows and your darker tones are accurate and believable even when the rest of the image has a very strong color grade to it. Now let's come back to our filmic color grade, right? Let's go ahead and turn off all our adjustments by pressing Shift D on our keyboard. And you can see that we started out with an image that was already properly white balance. This is key. When you have images that are improperly white balance, it throws off the entire grade. I'm going to show you what I mean. I'm gonna go ahead and create a node before our firstNode. I'm going to just go ahead and mess up the white balance first, I'm going to disable all of our other nodes by pressing Command D. And then let's turn on this firstNode and let's mess up our white balance. If we had shot this with white balance, that was just way too warm. So something like this. And then we turn on the rest of our nodes here one by one, we can see that the color grade is just getting more and more distorted because we weren't working with accurate colors to begin with. Now this might be the style you're going for, but it is much, much easier to start color correcting and color grading when we have inaccurate image to work with. So again, disable these. We can see that there is a warm tent. When we turn our other nodes back on, we can see that that warm tint carries over. And so if we go ahead and disable this node and we shot it with good white balance, properly white balanced, we can see we have much more neutral colors and more range to adjust our image. So making sure that your image is properly white balanced and that you've adjusted and color corrected the image to fix any white balance errors is gonna go a long way and making sure that you have good place to start color grading and making your color grade much more cinematic and effective. And finally, for our third tip, looking back at this first clip that we graded, let's come to our hero frame right here. Let's disable our color grade. We can see that one of the big dead giveaways that this is digital footage is our blown out highlights. Very strong contrast between our highlights and our white point. What we've done and the main trick here is to create a softer highlight roll-off. Let's turn on grade back on. You can see that right here in our curves, we brought our white point down and we brought our highlights up and creating nice, very soft contrast so that we're creating less contrast in our highlights. Let's turn off our grid and back on. You can see we've got this strong contrast between our highlights and our white point. Turn it back on a very, very smooth gradation in those brighter tones of the image. This is crucial because in films, we rarely see such a strong contrast between our highlights and our white point. Ban digital footage, it's a dead giveaway. Make sure you have your white points brought down, your highlights up a little bit so that you can create less contrast and your highlights giving the illusion of greater film-like dynamic range. So those are the three Secrets that we've been applying throughout all of our color grades that make these color grades realistic and believable, making them look like they're actually shot on authentic, original film stock 8. Creating Presets: Alright, now let's talk about how to create your own color grading presets. Where are we covering two methods, power grades and lots. With power grades, you're able to save all your adjustments and all your changes, as well as your plugins as a preset so that you can apply across different clips and change your settings without any of the settings being baked into it. Power grades allowed to accommodate other cameras and other styles that you can change things up, add nodes in different parts of your pipeline if you need to. This flexibility is why many colors prefer to use power grades over other types of presets. But the biggest downside of power grades is that you can't just apply them in Premiere Pro or Final Cut if you want to be able to apply your color grading to other programs as well, not just Davinci Resolve. And that's where let's come in. Let's, or Lookup Tables are basically instructions and recipes that the computer follows to recreate specific looks on different images. Let's are compatible across many different programs, photo editors, Video Editors, and more. But the biggest challenge with bloods is that they only save hue, saturation and luminance data, meaning that if you add film grain or emulation, that's not going to be saved into the lot. The lot will only save the color information of the adjustments that you made. Lots are great if you're trying to create a specific color look. But if you're trying to add specific qualities like film grain, edge blur vignettes, things like that. You're not going to be able to save that in a lot. And you'll have to recreate that and other programs, which is really not that hard to do as long as you know where all the buttons and features are. So to save power grade, you're going to make all of your adjustments onto your clip and then right-click in the viewer and grab a still from that clip and then drag that still into your Power grades folder. You can also export it as a separate file that you can save other places and share with others if you want to apply those same effects, to apply the effects back onto another clip, you simply navigate to your gallery than two power grades. Then click on the power grade you want and drag it onto the clip to save a lot file, where you're gonna do is you're going to right-click on the clip and go down to the lacZ option and select 33 point cube. This type of file saves in a lot of information and still maintains compatibility across a lot of different programs. I prefer to use the 33 point cube over the other options in Davinci Resolve. One important thing to note is that when you are saving your LUT, do not save your color correction or your color space transform as part of it. You want to remove those that you're only saving the nodes that used to color grade. This is important because if you're working with other cameras and other color profiles, then you want to make sure that you're not copying that Color Space transform from a Canon camera and applying it to Sony footage, it just isn't gonna work quite right. You wanna make sure that when you're saving your life, you're only saving your color grading information and not your color correction data. 9. Final Thoughts & Class Project: All right guys, thank you so much for taking this course now for the class project, here's what I want you guys to do. I want you to create your own color grading preset, your own filmic preset, whether it's a lot file or power grade. And I want you to grab a screenshot of the original footage, as well as your color grade version and upload those to the class project section. Share your work with others and be sure to comment on each other's and give people helpful feedback that will help them improve their color grade. If you guys have any suggestions or questions, go ahead, let me know and I'd be happy to help and I will see you guys in the next course.