Transcripts
1. Intro: I wish I would have had a course where someone walks me through a grade, has a look book, tells me what a client might ask for, do various rounds of nodes, get feedback from one client, and just to get a feeling for working on a project where you're trying to accomplish someone else's vision, not just your own. Hi, I'm Fred Trevino, and I've been a professional colorist for over 10 years now. I've graded over 50 feature films and hundreds of short-form projects for companies like Gucci product, ESPN, HBO, just to name a few. In this course, I wanted to take my years of experience and get you to the point where hopefully one day you can be professional colorist, or dramatically, improve your color grade. What's different about this course is that we're going to take a scene, we're going to go through it, grade it, pretend as if there's a client, so to speak, and go through various rounds of notes, take their vision, starting from look book images to the first path, the second path, working on secondaries, different windows, and mats, and being able to accomplish a look that is right for this project. It's a lot harder to grade something for someone else who has a specific vision fast and efficiently on time and on budget versus grading something for yourself. This course is for anybody who wants to improve their color grade and maybe one day become a professional colorist. When you need something done quickly, efficiently, beautifully and at a very high end, then this type of course that you want to take so that you can learn what it's like to grade something, to polish something, to maybe change directions in it, and take client feedback and make your project high-end, similar to what you would find in any post house. Let's get started.
2. Preface: Before we get started, I just wanted to go over a few things about the course. As mentioned before, we're going to be grading a scene together. I would say, if you'd like to do that, you can, but if not, and you just want to follow along, take notes, that's great too. If you want to download the media files and the project files associated with the class, then you can find that under resources in the Projects and Resources page. Now, I would say this course is meant for an intermediate level student. But if you're an absolute beginner, I wouldn't let that scare you away, you can still watch through it, learn a lot. But if I were to recommend a course to take before this one, it would be my intro with a pro colorist course. If you're not sure what shadows, mid tones, and highlights are, then I would probably take that course beforehand. But again, feel free to watch through because there is a lot of stuff that you will learn along the way. As I mentioned before, we're going to grade through a scene together. We're going to take the approach as if we're working with a made-up client who's going to give us a lookbook, who's going to give us direction, tells us what they want out of the scene, and we're going to accomplish that look and then do various rounds of nodes. What's great about this, is that what you'll find right away is that when you have a look, when someone sends you an image and they say, I want my film to look like that picture, you learn a lot more doing something for someone else because you have to figure things out, you have to learn the tools, you have to experiment with the different tools, and then, you have to place that across the entire scene and matching all the shots. One of the hardest things from being a colorist is not just creating a look, because we can make a look in a few seconds. What's hard about being a colorist is taking a look, matching that, putting it across the entire scene, and then when a client comes back and says, oh, you know what, I want to change it and go in this direction or that direction, to then quickly and efficiently shift the direction, change that look very easily, very quickly without having to regrade the entire scene. With that being said, let's jump to the next lesson.
3. Materials Needed: Okay. So very quickly, just a few things you'll need for this course. A computer obviously, and then da Vinci resolve. Anything that we're going to learn in this course though, is just very basic color correction, color grading tools that you would find in honestly, any program from Final Cut, Premier, anything else. I would do this in da Vinci resolve however, just so it's much easier to follow along. Then besides this, you'll need the media, of course, the da Vinci resolve project file. These can all be found under resources in the Projects and Resources page on the website skillshare.com. Now that we have everything you need for the course, let's keep moving to the next lesson.
4. Grading Environment: It Matters!: Another very important thing to go over before getting into the grading is your grading environment. We want to go over just a few basics to keep in mind when you're working on a project. One of these is your grading environment and the lighting. You always want to make sure that you're grading in a darker theater like room where the lighting is consistent. I would say go into a room, put down the blinds, close the door, turn off the lights, and you want your main focus to be your grading monitor. Now, if you don't have a grading monitor, then I would say if you're just using, say, your laptop screen or your desktop screen, then if you have a Mac and you want to make sure you turn off things like night shift or True Tone. That's because these are features that these computers have and also phones and tablets now. A lot of devices have a feature where they will auto dim, auto adjust the brightness on the fly, adjust the color temperature of your screen on the fly based on your surroundings. So you might be working on something and not realize that your screen is slowly getting darker, slowly getting brighter, slowly getting blue or slowly getting more orange. Obviously, if you want to be color accurate and know that you can trust what you're looking at, all of these features have to be turned off. If you're connected to a monitor or a TV, anything that says auto brightness, auto contrast, dynamic mode, dynamic this, film mode, cinema mode, anything like that, that's changing things on the fly as you're working, as the image changes, all that stuff has to be turned off. You just want a clean image going into your monitor. You want to make sure that what you're viewing isn't constantly changing. If you do want to learn a little bit more about this, I do have a lesson in my intro with a pro colorist class that goes into it in a little bit more detail. But I'm covering the basics here just so you get an idea of what to prepare. If you are grading, say in a coffee shop or in your bright living room, or in a bright office with overheads and a window next to you, then not only is your grade going to be a lot harder to do, but it's going to be very inaccurate and most likely if you come back the next day, it's going to look way different than you remember it. Even me with over 10 years experience as a colorist, if you were to stick me in a bright office space with fluorescence overhead and next to a window and the sun coming in, I would find it the most annoying grading environment where it's really hard to grade. There's glares on your screen and stuff like this that you have to keep in mind. Have a consistent room, consistent lighting, dark lighting. If you don't have something, lets say a 65K watt bulb, which is clean white light that's used in every color grading studio and having something like this as a back reference light is very helpful to prevent against eye fatigue and it also just helps your image come forth and help the perceived contrast so you can focus on what your grading on and not all the distractions around you. Another thing that you want to have is a neutral colored wall behind your grading environment. You don't want to set up your studio in a red room, a green room, a blue room or a room with really crazy distracting wallpaper and posters behind you. You want to have ideally an 18 percent gray wall behind you. Maybe white or maybe some shade of gray, something like that because this neutralizes everything. If you were to have a background that was bright yellow, it would completely influence everything you do and all of your images would look completely over-saturated in one way or the other and it influences more than you would ever think. Before you get started, I would say definitely take a few minutes to set up your grading environment properly and you'll find that it'll make your life a lot easier when you're grading and you'll get much more accurate grades.
5. Control Panels: So now let's talk about the fun topic of Control Panels. I wanted to go over this because as a colorist, it's probably the Number 1 tool you use when you're grading. I personally have a Blackmagic Design Control Panel that has all the controls. In DaVinci Resolve, I have the color wheels and the different control knobs, the controller contrast, and pivot, and highlights, and shadows and all of that stuff. However, when I was getting started, I didn't have that, and I basically just click on the "Interface" on your screen, which is how I'm going to do it through this course because I presume most people may not have a giant panel or even a smaller panel to work off of. But I did want to mention the benefits of a Control Panel just in case you want to go out and get one one day and/or maybe some people don't even know what a Control Panel is. I think it's important to just talk about it a little bit. What a control panel does, it makes your grade much quicker and much more efficient. It's a lot like an audio mixer. Think of it this way. If you're raising and lowering sound, for example, on the fly, it's a lot easier to be able to have your hands on a panel and it's a lot easier to drag the controls up and down. For example, in a color wheel, I can always raise the highlights while I'm lowering the shadows, then jump into the contrast and you can do multiple adjustments at once, which makes your adjustments be much, much faster. Also because a lot of times you're just adjusting a knob very slowly or gently, your moving the color wheels or the highlights and midtones, knobs back and forth. You can fine tune and really precisely dial things in. Working by clicking on a screen, make things a little bit more rough of an adjustment. It's a lot harder to get a very fine, precise, soft adjustment on something. That's what the benefit of a Control Panel. Again, I'm not saying it to go out and run out and buy one right away, but it would be a little bit bizarre as a colorist to leave this out. In this specific course, the benefits of Control Panel make things much easier when you're working with a client and you have to do things quickly and efficiently. Okay, so now that we have that out of the way, let's move on to the next lesson.
6. Monitors: Picking the Correct Specs!: Now we're going to cover the very fun topic of monitors. The number 1 question that all colorists get asked is, what's the best monitor? Now, this is a really hard question to answer because it really depends on a ton of different things. It's like asking someone, what's the best car for driving? It depends on your budget, it depends on what you're grading, it depends on who you're grading for, just your experience level. A lot of different variables are involved in answering that question. What I typically tell people and what I know a lot of other colorists typically tell people is the best monitor is the best one that you can afford. This might be a few 100 bucks, it might be 500, it might be $1,000, it might be $5,000. If I or anyone else were to answer that question just truthfully, what's the best monitor you can buy? We'd be telling you $50,000, $100,000, $30,000 monitors, which is obviously very unrealistic and it honestly would make you look pretty bad if you answered that question to everyone and a beginner came up to you and asked you and you gave them a $30,000, $40,000 monitor. With that being said, I want to go over just things to watch out for when you're choosing a monitor. Some of these things tend to really be available in, I would say, medium, moderate level to high-end monitors. Even if you can't go out and buy a monitor that has perfect Rec. 709 color space and a 2.4 Gamma and all these others features. Don't worry about it. Get the best one that you can afford, as long as that monitor is calibrated, I think you should be good as a way of getting started. If anything, if you know absolutely nothing about monitors right now, you probably want to start with something on the less expensive end because then once you start using that monitor and you start learning about grading and you start learning about other monitors, you'll find that you'll then start realizing what you actually need. If you were only grading projects 30-second spots through the web, you might just need a certain monitor that's maybe 1,000 bucks. If you're grading something for high-end clients or larger films that have a really good budgets, then yeah, you might want to spring for something that's $5,000 or $10,000. Very few people or even studios ever have those $50,000, $100,000 monitors. We're talking about big-budget Hollywood studios, that kind of thing. Honestly, also you're grading in an actual movie theater. Before I keep going on about that, here's a few things to watch out for when choosing a monitor and calibrating that monitor. Here are a few things that you want for your monitor. The first thing we want to talk about now is color space. The color space, ideally, you want something that will reproduce the Rec. 709 color space, at least 99 percent, if not 100 percent. Rec. 709 is basically a gamut of colors that's still considered the industry standard. Now, that is obviously changing and you are starting to see Rec. 2020 a lot more, and you could even make the argument that P3 is becoming more common as well. But for now, especially if you are getting started looking for your first monitor, the bare minimum I would say is reproducing at least 99 percent, ideally 100, of the Rec. 709 color space. Next let's talk about Gamma. You need your monitor to accurately reproduce a Gamma of 2.2 or 2.4. If you are working on stuff that's going to the web, such as something for YouTube or Instagram, or something that's going to be viewed online through a web browser, then you can probably have a monitor that is a Gamma of 2.2. That's actually what most monitors are. Other more high-end monitors will be able to reproduce a Gamma of 2.4 or say 2.6 for the cinema. But you do want ideally 2.2 or 2.4. Then from here, let's talk about contrast. Contrast is important because this will help show you accurate black levels, or at least part of that, as well as just basically how close you get in getting a good, accurate, sharp image and not get muddy blacks, for example, and so you would want in contrast ratio to be minimum 1,000:1. With that, I mean, a true contrast. There's a lot of display technology out there right now, as I've mentioned before, they have things like auto contrast, dynamic contrast, or a contrast where it's really software-based. You want to be true hardware contrast what you're actually seeing out of the display that you're purchasing. Then as far as the connections, some connectors that you want, some inputs and outputs, are SDI, which is an industry standard, as well as HDMI. You want to connect your monitor to DaVinci Resolve via a clean output. You really should ideally not be grading on your computer display, placing the viewer or something like that on a computer monitor because then without getting too technical into it, you're basically letting your graphics card of your computer do a lot of processing, do a lot of work that's not the clean image that you shot on camera, and by a clean image, I mean that what you want is the image that you shot on your camera, whether you shot on a Canon Digital SLR or a Red camera or an Arri camera or anything in between, you want your source camera image being output to your grading monitor with no graphics card intermediate, no software manipulation, intermediates of any kind. For that, you would want to get, for example, something such as the Blackmagic Design mini monitor 3G or just a mini monitor, as well as a UltraStudio HD Mini, or if you're going to be working in 4K and have a in 4K display, and have a 8K output, possibly the UltraStudio 4K. This, again, sends out a clean signal from DaVinci Resolve to your grading monitor. Then lastly, again, this is a quick overview because as I mentioned before, I could make an entire course off of this. All of this is completely worthless if you do not calibrate your monitor. Ideally, you would want a hardware calibration, which again is mainly found in higher monitors that can do hardware calibration, which means that you calibrate your monitor using a colorimeter. Then it creates a lookup table or lent, and it installs that into the monitor. That's why you have accurate calibration. Or a lot of these colorimeters also have software that you can use to calibrate. A word of caution about that is, if you do end up purchasing a colorimeter calibration device, make sure that whichever one you buy, the software that comes with it can calibrate according to video standards. A lot of those by default, especially if you get the less expensive ones, might only come with photo calibration that will only calibrate your monitor to, say, something like Adobe RGB, which that's not what you want to use for video. Make sure that whatever software comes with the calibration device that you purchase has a setting for video calibration. That is a very quick bullet point, a version of what you want your monitor to have. Again, you want to have your Rec. 709 color space, a 2.2 or 2.4 Gamma, 1000:1 contrast, you want to have professional outputs connected to a professional playback card such as a mini monitor, and you want to make sure that you're calibrating that device. That coupled with having the proper grading environment with a 65K bias light, a 18 percent gray wall, and you will be on your way to having a truly professional grading environment.
7. Look Book: What the Client Wants: In this lesson before we actually jump into the grading, I want to talk a little bit about reference images. So for any project that you grade for a client, they should always send you reference images that will tell you what look they want for your project. Some clients do this, some clients do not. If they do not send you these files, you should always ask for them. Some will have a very nice professional clean looking Look Book with multiple pages describing every scene, what they want, which is very, very helpful. But something I always do is once we get to the point of having the creative conversation where I'm asking them what kind of look they're going for, I always say send me reference images, do you have a Look Book? I want to see what you're talking about. The reason for this is because everyone talks about color differently. Everyone has a different idea of what say a cool look, a warm look, a contrasty look, something with pop, something you'll hear all the time, something that's cinematic. Everyone says these things has their own scriptures, and really you won't know what people are talking about for the most part until you see some reference images. For this project, these are the images that we're going to use as reference images. The images that the client, so to speak, sent us so that we can make our short scene that we're going to work on look like this. We have this clip, this clip, and then this black and white clip. So right off the bat, I can see that they're going for a cinematic, the dominant color that I'm seeing across the board except for the black and white image is they all have this green teal look to them overall. Definitely, a cinematic low-key look to them, and this one here, and then this one here. So now if I go over and jump into our scene, and I'll just toggle through the shots. Something that's always great to use to get a bird's eye view of the scene is the light box here in the top right. I can see by comparing this scene to this stuff. I can see that the reference images that were sent, they do make sense. I can see this shot or any of these here fitting and clicking with something like this. Now, just a word of caution, sometimes they won't click. Sometimes they might send you, let's say, you know the scene is this here and then might send you something that's, I don't know, super bright and colorful with blues, and greens, and yellows, and oranges, and purples, and all these different colors, it's super vibrant. You look at this image here. Well, you can see that the set dressing, there's a lot of white, brown, it's definitely a very muted set. Even the clothing is just dull colors. It's not a very colorful scene or set. Sometimes you do have to tell a client, "Whatever you sent me does not click with the scene. So maybe send me different reference images." Try to figure out what they're going for, for the most part. But sometimes you do have to tell them, "Okay, the way you shot this doesn't make sense for these reference images. Is there a different look you're going for because, ideally, the look for a project should begin at the very beginning before you even shoot, and that should be embedded in the set dressing in the wardrobe, in the lighting, in the cinematography. But in this situation, I think something like this will make sense of the scene." Again, the way we are going to work on this is we're going to get this look going, and then we will get different notes from the client and we'll go from there. In the next lesson, we will begin the process of making this project here, the short two-minute scene, look a little bit more like this, look that the client sent us. Okay, so see you in the next lesson.
8. Primaries: Here we are, finally down to the grading. Again, we are going to use these images here as a reference. I actually really like this one here. I think this fits the most with the scene. Here we go. Another thing to remember about reference images, is that you don't necessarily have to make your project look exactly like these reference images. They're only for reference, as in, they're just a general direction to take the project. A question that I do get asked a lot is, how do you know what to do? How do you know what decisions to make in a grade? How do you know how to make something look a certain way? Honestly, I'd say it's 50/50. The client who's hiring me to grade their project, it's what they tell me as far as the look they want, such as this. Then the other half is just my creativity and their creativity working together and the DP, director of photography. It's really a team effort and just trying different things. We might start off here and go somewhere different or if the project is shot well enough, we might be able to pull off a look that looks a lot like this. But do not even think that you have to make them look identical to this because, honestly, it's worse on the project. If you try to mimic something and make your project look exactly like the reference images, you're going to end up just forcing something, crowbarring your way into a look, and it's going to end up looking very unnatural, not very good, and it's going to look over graded. So with that, just remember that references are just guide posts and a general direction to take things and don't let that be a crutch on your creativity. A lot of times, I will simply look at a shot, remember it, this has a pretty good contrast, it's got to have a teal color palette to it, it's a low key image, and I just go from there. I might toggle back a few times, but you'll find that the more you grade, the less and less you toggle back to the reference images because eventually, the project takes a life of its own and it becomes its own thing. So with that being said, let's jump in. The first thing you typically want to do when you're grading something is that you just basically look over the scene, you see what the key shots are. Right away I'm seeing that this character here is on the screen a lot, then maybe followed by this kid here, and then him. There are a few white shots thrown in as well. I know that this shot here is very important. This is the key figure in the scene. Let's just watch through the scene a little bit. There is no sound by the way. He comes in, sets down on the plate. You can see the kids look scared. Smacks him on the head because he started eating before everyone else. We'll just go through a few of the shots. Then he sits. So even without sound, you can tell that this father figure here is the dominant character in the room. We're also watching this because you can't just jump into a movie knowing nothing about it and start grading even if you have reference images. It's always the most important to know the story, know the characters, know the feeling of the scene, know the tone of the scene, and you just know what's going on. For example, this one, which you can probably tell by now just looking at it, the father is a very dominant figure during this breakfast scene. He brings out their food and now they're eating, so you can see the level of control he has over them. Now it makes sense that for something like this, it's a morning scene. A lot of times by the way, reference images, make sure you keep the conversation going with the filmmaker. They don't always have to do with the look of the reference image. For example, this character here, he's behind bars. The angle of the shot, you're seeing him from a distance. He looks depressed and you can tell that he's in trouble. This guy is in a hospital bed. They all have that tone of something isn't quite right. Even this one here, is just muted, desaturated. This character looks like he's also in a dark place. Also it's the content of the stills that's important, not just the look of it. So with that being said, let's just jump right in. Let's just watch a little bit more. Basically, you've seen all the shots already in the scene. Let's just stop here. Again, because this father here is the dominant figure in the scene, we'll use this as the starting point. Let's see. I'm actually going to go click on "Parade" and we're going to go to Waveform, and we're going to start here. Right away, we can tell that this shot here, it was shot flat, it was shot log. So right off the bat, as a primary step in the process, this is known as the primary adjustment, we're basically just going to get this out of log and go from there. What I want this image to do, is again, half these reference images and just half my own ideas. I'm going to go for very rich shadows, very rich blacks. I'm going to look here, this is where the darker areas are. By reading the waveform here, we can also see that this is the shadow area here. To set the blacks, I'm going to pay attention to his back and then the back of his head. We're going to go to the Lift and we're just going to drag to the left. I'm watching this here and I'm also watching the image, and I'm just bouncing back and forth between the two. I want this to rest right on that line here, which is blacks, or the shadows. This up here is the highlights. Right now I'm just worrying about the shadows. I want this to just barely float over it. That looks good to me. That looks good. Just that alone, you can see I'm hitting "Command D" before, after. So these are the highlights here that line up with the curtains here. That's what I'm looking at. Then these little spikes here are the left side of his head here, which are also the highlights. Again, we are not going to crank these all the way up to the top. That's another misconception. Sometimes people think that you have to spread out this waveform and spread the highlights all the way touching the top line and the blacks have to be touching the bottom line. That's not the case. We're again, going for a lower key slightly dim cinematic look. That's what I'm seeing here. Something like this. So for those highlights, they are not that far off. I'm going to start here. I'm just going to raise them a little bit. Again, I'm bouncing back and forth from here to here. But in most cases, I imagine most people are viewing this on a monitor. As a colorist, I actually have a grading monitor to my right and I would be looking at this much bigger than this, so there's a little bit more detail. Again, that's something you definitely want at some point have a good monitor that's strictly for grading. You don't want to be looking at this because this essentially is like looking at a say seven or eight-inch monitor, which isn't the best thing to do. But you can also hit "Command F" full screen to look at it. Before, after "Command D." I'm going to leave the highlights right about there. Now I'm going to work on contrast because I want his face to really pop. Right now his face is a little too flat. I'm going to increase the contrast. Grab this and drag it to the right a little bit till it gets to a point that you're happy with. I'm going to go here full screen and just hit "Command Z". Let's just undo, redo. It's very subtle. I'm going to increase it more and already I can tell. Let's see. I'm liking that a little bit better, and you can see this is before-after. I'm hitting "Command" "Z" and then to undo, we can see the little bit more detail that's happening here. We're going to go here, and, again, this is where we started. Again, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to make a different note for every single little adjustment for the most part, just so that you can really see all the steps, and it sticks. For this one, I think I will leave this. This is a pretty good place for a primary. There's a lot more work to do but all we basically did here is adjust the shadows, the gain, we did the contrast, which adjust the mid tones a little bit, and let's see. We're going to just the pivot. I'm dragging to the left a little bit. Here's before and after. We'll just keep it here because this is morning and we do want it to look like morning and that'll be too too dark. For those of you who don't know what the pivot does, essentially it's connected with the contrast. What contrast will do is it extends the range of the brightest brights and the darkest darks. That's what contrast is. It's when there's a broad spectrum from the brightest point in your image to the darkest point in your image. Let's say that the pivot was set to 50 percent, so to speak, not necessarily based off this, but let's say it's set to 50 percent. That's basically determining at what point in your image do you start? Do things get brighter and things get darker? When you adjust that, you're basically adjusting the pivot point where the contrast decides what's a mid-tone and a shadow, and what's a mid-tone and a highlight. Just know that when you're adjusting it here, it's a great thing to play with because you're basically fine tuning the contrast a little bit. Now, we're going to do something similar to this next shot here. Let's just go to this primary shot here. Actually, I will jump. I always like scrubbing to a place where the character is in focus and this would not be a good place to make any adjustment. You always want to go to a place where you can cleanly see the character. Same thing here. I'm looking here so the shadows, his hair or the shadows. I can see the waveform here, these are the shadows. Same thing. I'm going to bring down the shadows and I want to just barely be touching the bottom here. Again, this is simply because I want deep, moody shadows for this project. Again, I'm just going to bounce in between looking at this and then also looking here. If this were, say a beauty commercial or something, then, obviously, this may not be completely down and they might want a frosty or lower contrast look and then the shadows might be a little bit higher. Again, now, I'm looking at the character here. I can tell that he has the highlights on this side of the face and the shadows on this side of the face. Right now, you can tell that the highlights are way too low. The window right now is up here but by looking at his face, which is this part of the wave forms, I can tell that they're right around the middle a little bit. For these two shots to match, let me go again here. I want that to go a little bit higher to match the previous shots. I'm actually going to raise these again. It's always bouncing back between this and this and I think that's a good place. I might go just a tiny bit higher on the gain because I'm going to increase the contrast now and drag this to the right. Again, this is just a creative choice. Drag the contrast to the right, to wherever you feel it looks good to you and to the scene and what the filmmaker wants based off the reference images. To me that looks good here. I'm just toggling between the two to make sure they're matching. Again, "Command" "D". This is where we were. All I did here is, in a nutshell, is take this out of blog by expanding the contrast, setting the lift or the shadows, setting the gain, and then tweaking the contrast a little bit. Then I'm going to adjust the pivot. I'll say that looks good. Again, so much of this is personal choice and what you think looks good. Now, I'm just going to play through the two shots and see how they flow together. That's looking pretty good. Now, watch through it again. Good. I think this could go a touch brighter because he is closer to the window. If we look here, we can see that looks like there's a window here. I was onset to stay here. I actually know there was window there, but even then, as a colorist, a lot of times you have to play detective and look at the lighting and have to develop the skill of breaking down the lighting by looking at the image. You can obviously see that there's light coming in from this window and they're eating so it makes sense based off these highlights that there's a window here behind this wall. He's closer. It does make sense for this shot to be a touch brighter than him. That's looking pretty good to me. We'll stop at the air with this shot here. Let's start with this here. Again, I'll do this one a little bit quicker. Same thing what I'm doing. Behind this wall here we can see that this is where the shadows are and then this character's back and that's what we see here; shadows and then that character's back. Let's place the shadows where we want them to be. This is, again, a stylistic personal choice. I want this shot to almost have a semi silhouette look to it. I'm going to bring the shadows down and really touch these shadows that put true blacks down here. I'm looking at his shirt here and I say that's good. I'm going to raise these highlights here, which, again, are the curtains to match the point here. You can see the tips are just touching right here on this line 896. I'm going to go here and raise the gain and I'm just going to go up till they're just touching. I'm actually going to go down a touch just so that this wide shot seems a touch darker. Then let's just play through this. I'm going to scroll through, hit play, and I'm actually going to increase the contrast on this to touch more, now that I've seen them flowing together one after the other. That's better. Here we go. Now, normally at this point I would actually also increase the saturation, however because of the reference images, these are not very saturated shots. I'm going to skip that step for now, but I'll just crank it up a little bit to show you. Let's say here. Here I obviously overdid it, but just so you can see. Again, it's a scenario where if I was grading something that was more of a beauty video or something else, I might crank up the saturation more. But for this scene, I just feel that we're going to keep this low saturation that was built. We're going to bring colors in later as we bring in this green look, but for now I think it's a good idea to keep this muted, lifeless look for the scene, because it works for this scene. Now we're going to do this guy here really quick and again, I'm just looking for a good spot, maybe I'll go here. Actually, for his shot, I think maybe this is slightly better. We can see him a little more clearly, so we'll do that and same thing for the primary. Again, the primaries, should be the most easy part of the grading. Honestly, most people stop after the primaries. That's one of the big differences between a colorist and someone who just knows the basics of color correction, is that they will stop after this basic-look. This is the basic, shadows, mid-tones highlights, contrast, saturation, and then they'll call it done. Where usually a colorist will do 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 steps beyond that, that really make a difference. We're going to start here. Again, lift. We've set our contrast level, this is dark here, his hair, this shadow. I'm letting that touch the ground. Let's see here, we know the window is on this side and he's sitting across from this character who's his brother, and again, we can see that his highlight are around this area. So if we want those to match, we want those highlights which are here, they represent this little peak here. I'm going to raise the gain to there, and I think that's looking a little too bright, but I'm just going to drop it at touch. Also, sometimes it's not that it's too bright, it's that you were used to seeing somethings like this and by the time you get it here, it might be a little jolting. That's why it's good to constantly toggle between your other shots, like this shot. Then I'll jump here. See, and we have a toggle between these. It's looking good, like that. Then I'm going to crank the contrast up here, and I'm going to really increase the contrast because when you increase this contrast, it'll really bring out all of the dirt in his face, in his dirty shirt, and the stained. All this stuff gets brought out with contrast. Again, I'm just going to click and drag to the right. I'm really going to push this one and see how far we can push it before it looks unnatural. I'm going to go this far, Command D. I'm really pushing it far, but this is the before and we're here. Now, I'm actually going to go here, right-click on the dad shot, apply grade to copy that grade over, and I'm going to go here, right-click on his shot, apply grade, copy that over. Now let's watch these in sequence. It seemed going good. Again, things aren't supposed to look perfect right now. There's all these little things that I'm noticing that I want to change, but we'll probably do those later. I'm literally just command clicking here, command clicking here, and then right-clicking, apply grade, copy those over, right-click, applying grade. This is just so I get a feel of how things are flowing, is what we're doing right now. Here comes the latest shot we fixed and I think we're matching here. See little things, for example, the first shot we corrected, I believe was this one, he's not in the sun but then by the time we get here, he's deep into the light, and now I think that's probably too bright. So maybe for this one here, I will go to click on the 2, go to highlights. That's what HL stands for, and I'm going to drag to the left to bring down these highlights so it looks a little bit better. Same thing here, click, click. Because I can see in these three shots he dips into the highlights, right-click, apply grade and there we go. You're constantly going back and forth, back and forth, making these little adjustments, without getting too deep into that. Let's play this back, you can see the look is coming together. Again, what we've adjusted is simply the primaries. Last one click here, right-click on this guy. A cool thing about resolve, by the way, is that in this specific scene it's not the case, but usually what happens is if the shots were from the same take, let's say this was from the same take as this, say Take 2, it would automatically ripple over. Whatever adjustments you make to this shot if any other clip in the scene is from the exact same take, it will automatically copy this adjustment to anything else in the scene that's from that same take. In this case, every clip is it's own individual clip. So that's why we're having to right-click, apply grade, or grab them in bulk like this, and then right-click, apply grade. But typically, when you make an adjustment to one-shot, it ripples it to the other ones. So that was our primary adjustments. We still have a long way to go. But you can see that all we basically did here, again, was adjust the mid tones, the shadows, the highlights, the gain, the contrast. We didn't do anything with the saturation, because that's more of a creative stylistic choice. We're on our way to having a look at something more in this direction. Primaries, that's all we have here. Now I'm going to select this, right-click, and I'm just going to call that primary. Option S to create the next guy. We are now going to jump into the next lesson into secondaries, where we start doing a little bit more fine tuning. I will see you in that lesson.
9. Secondaries: Here we are now in the secondaries lesson. This, in the secondaries, is basically where most of the creative stuff is done. The primaries is really just getting the clips to a normal looking place, so to speak. Before we begin, though, I am going to apply the looks that we created. Here's our quick trick. I'm going to click on "Lightbox" here, select all of these wide shots, and then I'm going to click on the "i" in the top left. You can always tell which clips were already corrected by this little rainbow highlight around the number. I'm going to click on all the wide shots by Command clicking. Then I'm just going to right-click on one of the shots that's been already corrected. Right click "Apply Grade". Boom, it cops them over. Same thing with his shot. Command click. There we go. Then we're just going to right-click on one of his shot. Again, this is not going to have all the shots looking perfect, but it will get that initial look set because we're always going to look through this scene a ton of times and fine tune, and fine tune, and fine tune until it looks perfect. It looks like it's just those shots here. Right click, App Grade, and then Command clicking. I think we have everything. I'm going to go back to the first shot. Let's just watch through it a little bit. We're getting an idea or basically, we have the initial pass of the color. Maybe we'll just stop here. There we go. Clip 20 so we're going to click here. Now that we have the entire scene with a basic grade, we are going to start setting the look a little bit. Let's look back at this shot here. Here what I'm going to try to add to it now is give it this teal color palette to it. Again, what we can see here is we have a teal background for the most part, we've set the contrast. Really, I'm just going to jump in here, hit "Option S" or really the other way to do is go into Color, Nodes, and I added a Serial Node. After this, what I'm going to do is simply go down to the key. I'm going to key the background. Click here. See right now, I have another tool. I can always go here if it doesn't automatically select the qualifier tool. I'm going to click on the window. You can either hit "Shift H" to show you what you've keyed, or you can click on this little icon here. I like doing Shift H. Here we go. I'm really just going to select the entire background. I'm clicking and dragging. Here we go. It was a good key. Then I'm going to go to Blur Radius, and drag that to the right. That helps soften our selection. Really you just drag it to the right until the key looks natural and soft. Right now, we are actually grabbing a little bit of his shirt and Shift H, a little bit of his shirt and his hair. I am going to now go here to center. A little bit about this. Center is basically showing me what range of colors it's selecting, and then width is basically showing how wide of a range of those colors it's selecting. If I, for example, slide the center, you can see that it's selecting different colors as I'm letting those colors enter that range. As I will go into the greens and yellows, you can see it's selecting more of his face. Undo that. Then it's width, you can basically narrow that down or increase it. As I narrow it down to red, it selects his face. I'm going to actually expand this a little bit. Then the same thing with saturation. There's not much saturated, so it's not going to do that much. Then luminance is basically brighter and darker areas. I'm going to now, for example, high and low. If I'm removing or lowering the highs and luminance, it's removing the window because I'm telling it to remove the bright areas from the key. I'm just tweaking this and now moving the lows, or the shadows, which is what this shirt and hair is. I'm dragging it ever so slowly to the right. I don't have to completely remove everything from him. I can do that later, but sometimes leaving just a touch of things helps bring things together. Because if you separate the background too much, and there's absolutely nothing here that mimics the background, it can make him look like he's too forced or too overly graded, that kind of thing. Something this minor, really won't be noticed. I'm just doing this. I'll just keep that for now. Once I make the adjustment, if I notice something interfering here that looks bad, then I'll go over here and tweak these settings a little bit more. But for now, we'll leave it. I'm going to hit "Shift H", that's the background that's selected. What we're going to do now is introduce a teal background. I've selected the background. Again, let me label this just to keep you primary. Then this, here, we will name this background. I'll just do BG for background. I'm going to go to temperature. Temperature, usually, what this controls is your warm and your cool. If I drag to the left, it will cool things off. Remember, less is more. I dragged it to negative 1,130. Again, you don't have to do that. You can, whatever looks good to you. Command D to C. That's where we're going with it, already you're seeing a huge difference. If we know that that's part of the key, it's actually not bothering me too much. You can see also here's a little bit about color theory in the psychology of color. I have not touched his face whatsoever, but simply by making the background bluer and cooler, it makes his face look more saturated and more red. Because now we're introducing a complimentary colors. If we look at the color wheel and we're in this range here, and then his skin tone is in this range because they're opposites of each other. It helps them pop a little bit more which is part of the reason why the super popular teal and orange look works or any color wherever you're going across the color wheel that will create a pop or a separation of the two color contrast. Again, if you showed this to anyone, they would probably think that I saturated his skin tone a little bit more to make it pop. Let's go from this to this, I think that's good there. Because again, less this more and you don't want to push it too much because it ends up looking too fake. We'll do that, and then I'm going to toggle back here again. Let's just go ahead and we'll go with this green look to it. I'm going to do that. Right now it's moral in the blue spectrum. Now I'm going to go to the Tint which controls the greens and then the magentas. I'm going to push it to the left a little bit more of a green tone to it. Very good. I'll just leave that there for now. What I'm seeing now in the scopes here is see how it's suddenly we have. This is where we were when it was more balanced and neutral simply by adding that blue teal background. Now we have these spikes in the blues and greens, and they might be hitting a little bit too much and we don't want them clipping. I might go to the curve and then HS is high soft, which what this does, if I drag it to the right and you keep an eye on this waveform here, it does a soft curve of dropping just the brightest highlights. Before it was getting too close for comfort to the top to clip the highlights in the blues. I'm just going to very slightly bring it down a little so it stops, so it gets away from this line, and also if there are any highlights that are getting too hot, so to speak, they'll have a soft curve of framing them down rather than just cutting them off. Basically creating a soft curve, whether it's for the shadows or the highlights, is it'll have more of a roll-off when you're naming something or making the lumens little less soft, a little darker, you're rolling it off. It's a more natural, gradual look to it, rather than just a hard cutoff, which makes things look very digital and very fake and very noisy. That's our first secondary here. This starts getting to the point where you start getting creative on your own. I feel we're getting in this direction. This is a very bright shot. Now the next node, option S. You might call this one an adjustment node, and this is where you've done your primaries. I'm going to do option D to turn it all off. We've done our primaries, Command D, we've done our background. Now we're going to merge the two and make a quick adjustment. Again, this is just taste, there's no instruction manual on this. I'm looking at this and this shot is now looking too bright because usually, when you add something like blues to a shot, it makes the image brighter or look brighter. By looking at the waveforms, we can see that it did get brighter because we were here, where the highlights were peaking and all of a sudden the blues. The greens went up and this is touching the top, so it is brightest. I'm going to go, make an adjustment node, and I could do gain or I could do highlights. In this case, I'm going to do gain because I want the entire shot to be a little darker and a little moodier even though it's morning. It's just a tiny little thing like that. Something like that makes a big difference. I'm going to go a tiny bit more, 96 gain and that's all I did, little touch. It looks little bit nicer, a little bit more cinematic. That's the adjustment we're making there. Then on top of this adjustment, I want to stick with the green color palette. You can tell I'm really going with this one. If you look at his hair, you can see this bar here is true black. But if you look at his hair and you compare it to this, you can see that the shadows are actually lifted a little bit and there's a touch of green in his hair, which basically means that his hair are the shadows or the darker portions. I can see that there's a little bit of a hint of green in the shadows which psychologically, it creates a sickly feeling that something isn't right. I am now going to go here. I'm going to go to the Lift and I'm going to drag this a little bit towards the greens. That's too much. This is a perfect example of when a control panel would be useful because I could very subtly make this adjustment on the control panel. But clicking on this and dragging makes things a little bit harder. Actually, I'm going to make another node just for this so we can keep things organized. Node label, I'm going to say greens for the green shadows. Lifts are the shadows. Now I'm just going to take this in very simply, it's hard to see because that screen is so small but I'm just going to, sound like this, Command F, full screen so I can see it better. I'm toggling been seeing before, after. You can see there's a little green here, greenish shadows in the hair. I like this because it also takes the magenta look out of his face. Again, you can fine tune that however you'd like. But I think you get the idea, just edited a hint of green into the shadows to give it a sicklier look to it. I'm going to go back to the background. I feel that I did a little something to the background. I'm now going to go to the background. After adding the greens here, I feel this balanced the background a little too much for my taste. I'm going to go here and I'm going to actually saturate the background a little bit. Just a little bit. See, that's where we were, and I'm going to go up just a touch to 57. That's good. Secondaries. You can just look at this image starting to take shape. This is where we started, undo everything, Option D, primaries, background, adjustment, greens. Then we are here now. There we go. Really at this point, it's just your ideas, your creativity. I'm looking at this for a little. There we go. Looking at this image, one thing I like about this image is it's got a certain flatness to it. This is just bright. That's an example. This is just a bright image, the pillow is bright, his face is bright. This is a daytime exterior. It's a little overcast, you can tell, but it's also just got this flat painterly quality to it. You can see in the trees. I like how the shadows are. I like this and I think that's what the director was going for. I'm going to go back here and I'm going to add that. Here's where it all becomes your own personal choice, your own personal opinion, and also what the filmmaker wants. But what I'm going to do is add another node and then go to low soft. What this is going to do is, again, create a soft roll-off of the shadows and raise them up a little bit. If you look down here, which represents this whole area here, I'm going to increase this about that much. There we go. You can see we were here. I raised it up about that much and you can see just the shadows. It's getting that matte black look to it, which makes it look a little bit more like film. Pushing the shadows up a little bit. Again, these are all secondaries. This is what's considered secondaries. I think that's a good place to stop here so far for these secondaries. Now, I'm going to do something similar to this shot here. Let's just see. First, we're going to do background. Something I like to do a lot just to see if it works is I select this. It probably won't. In this case, I go here. Actually, I'm pretty sure it may not. Then I just clicked here, hit Command C to copy it, and then I created a node, Command V to paste it. Shift H to see what was selected. Then I can go click here, and then I'm going to re-select the background. Again, just by doing that, you can see that it looks like I saturated his face, but I didn't. I'm going to actually adjust this. I don't really like how it's spilling on his shirt too much so I'm going to reduce the width to get his shirt out of the way. Boom. With the center, and that's probably good. There we go. Here's the background. I like that blue. He's got a bluish shirt, so that helps a little bit. Then let's say go for an adjustment node. Background came out okay. Then here, I'm going to play from here. You can see it's really crazy that his face pops so much now, and you can see that it looks like we've really saturated his face, but we did nothing. Going to Option S here and I think I'm going to bring this down to look a little darker even then. Again, similar to the other one, like that. Again, we're going to go here. Actually for this one, I'm just going to maybe bring the shadows down. I'm already knowing that I'm going to do the low soft that I did here. I'm going to actually bring the shadows down a tiny bit more. Click on the two shadows just a tiny bit more to give it a darker, more ominous look. Because I know I'm going to bring that up anyway in a little bit, there we go. One little thing again, we're just going to jump around a little bit. I'm seeing this blue highlight in his forehead, which I'm not liking from here, so we're going to get rid of that. I'd say the quickest way is to simply create a window because everything else is fine and sometimes you just got to find the fastest most efficient way to work. Basically, what I'm doing is I created this window and I clicked here, which is telling it to make the adjustments. In other words, the blues. Make these blue adjustment in the background, which was a blue key that we created here. I'm saying make that adjustment to everything outside of this window. Because he's moving, now I'm going to go to the tracker. I typically just hit a button on the control panel or you can hit Command T to track that. You can see that's the information of the track. Or you can hit the back or forward arrows. I'm going to hit back. There, it's that easy. I track that. Now we can watch this. It looks good and his forehead doesn't have that blue shine anymore. Cut the ham, that's looking good. We're going to now lift these shadows. Actually, I'm going to do the greens first just like before. Lift, take the greens here and just subtly. That's good. You can see before, after. Very subtle. Actually, I might push them a touch more. I'm going to go back to the wheel and just ever so slightly. I'd say that's good. Before, after. Let me hit the up arrow to go here. We're getting that green dreary look. He's green. Good. You can see that the grading process is just basically all of these layers, one on top of the other, and now I'm just going to do the low soft. Same thing. I'm looking at the shadows here and I'm just going to raise them. It's probably good. Here we see toggled off before and after, before, after. You can see how it raised it. Before, after. There we go. We're getting our look going. That's basically it there. You can see what the secondaries do here. Then from here, it's basically we've set our look at this point. We've looked at the reference images here as inspiration. We've set a look. It's going in that direction based on how this was shot. Now I'm going to go to this guy here, and very quickly, again, go here, copy that, paste it. I think that's good. We have the background and I'm going to do this one quickly. Then you can go through and adjust the shots. I'm going to select that, it's the background. I'm actually pretty happy with where this one is. Here, I'm just going to add a touch of green and I like that level of green to really add to the sickliness and the ominous feeling. Then I'm going to go here and low soft. Again looking here, I'm going to raise this, Command F. I'm going to raise that maybe even a little more, and really give it a washed-out look. It's mainly because there's so much shadow in this shot with the over the shoulder here to make this shot a little more unique. Here's the greens and here's the shadows. You can see it's basically falling. I did not add the adjustment node here because I didn't think it needed it. Those are the secondaries. You can see that we could honestly stay here forever and keep adding and tweaking and making as many adjustments as you can. Again, we're pretty much deep into the creative process, where we're just trying things out, trying new things, seeing what works, what doesn't work. Then we just go from there. See you in the next lesson where we'll cover all of these things and just keep this grade going.
10. Matching: In this lesson is where we're going to cover a little bit about matching, that's what's coming up next. One thing that I do want to point out is that matching shots is probably what really separates professional colorist from everyone else. This is probably the part of the process where most people get tripped up, gets stuck, their grade falls apart, they spend hours and hours and hours, sometimes months and months and months, and they just can't get their scene or their film looking right. It all happens in matching because it's honestly, you could say relatively easy to take a single shot, give it a grade, make it look cool, make it look however you want, maybe even two shots like this. What makes things really hard and what's the toughest part, and where the heavy lifting of color grading happens is actually when you have to apply that look to all the other scenes. That's difficult because different clips and different angles, different setups, they're all shot at different times of the day. For example, this might have been shot at 9:00 AM, this might have been shot at 12:00, this wide shot here might've been shot later in the day or a different day altogether. The lighting setup might have been slightly different in someway, you're using different lenses, which let in light differently into the camera. You might have accidentally hit the wrong thing on the camera here as far as white balance. All these things affect how something is graded and how easy or difficult it is to match a scene and make all the shots match. Now, if you have something that's very well shot like this, it's definitely a lot easier. It's not the easiest thing in the world, but it's definitely a lot easier. If you have something that's poorly shot, then it can be very difficult to impossible to match the entire scene. If you take something that's poorly shot and match it with someone who's not an inexperience colorist, then you will most likely never get that scene looking perfect. There'll be always be a shot that looks off or something about it looks off, it's too bright, it's too dark, skin tones might be too saturated. Keep that in mind. What I'm going to do in this scene is really just go over and match the first couple of shots. Maybe I'll go through the first few setups, the first few clips, just to show you the basics of different tools to match the different shots. Then if you'd like, you can take the project and from there match the rest of the scene because it's definitely great practice. If there's one thing that teaches you a ton about color correction, it's learning to match shots, and it's much more than me just showing you what to click on and what to do and you watching me do this. It's something that you won't really grasp until you actually get in there, do it yourself, mess up, try different things. That's how you really get it. It's one of the areas of color grading that you can really truly really get once you start getting in there and doing it yourself, hands on. Let's go ahead and get started with this. Just as a little refresher here. So far we've established a look on this shot here and into this next shot here, and then the shot here of the brothers. Those three scenes. We have not applied the look to this one yet. One of the reason I did that is because one thing that you'll learn is in color grading, wide shots, just like in cinematography or anything else, wide shots are the toughest thing to grade, and it's because they tend to have a lot more going on in them. We're going to try to copy this look that we've established to this one. Again, we've already done the primary, I'll go ahead and right-click and label here. We've already done the primary and we've established the primary, the blue background, the adjustment node, which in this case brought it down a bit, the greens and the shadows, and then here we establish the, let me label that one, the soft shadows, which, again, in here it's called low soft down here. As in the lower shadow areas are softer and elevate a touch. Let's try to apply that here. Again, the primaries are complete. I want to just maybe pick this. I'll hit Option S. This is going to be the background. There we go. Just so you know, this is definitely going to need a little bit more work than the other ones. This lesson is definitely one that I could make five or six hours spent grading this entire scene, but I'm just basically going to show you a quick run-through of the tools that we can go through just because I doubt that anyone wants to sit here for five or six hours watching the work of matching every single shot. I'm going to, instead, go through and cover in pretty good detail grading all of the different setups for you and then leave you to have a little bit of fun of finishing off the scene using all the skills and all the tools that I'm about to show you. Here we go. Background. I'm going to key this background. I'm going to select here Shift H, and that's actually pretty good. It did not select the main window, but that's fine. I'm going to set at the 55. The reason I'm setting up to 55, I just found that's a good sweet spot for blurring a key. We're going to do that. I'm going to actually add a second adjustment here, Shift H to turn that off. Again, to turn that on and off, you could also click up here, Highlight. But I like shortcuts and also on a control panel, which, again, I'm used to working with, it's just a button that you push and it turns things on and off. I'm going to then select. You can see that the key, let me just soften this touch too. I think that should be good. It notices that when I do key this, it's obviously different characteristics of the hue saturation and luminance, or HSL key, for short, for the room itself and here. That will make things a lot easier to sometimes key things in segments.
11. Primary Out: In this lesson, we've gone through already and matched all of the clips up, done all the matching. What we're going to do now is once you've done that, you want to go through it, see it with fresh eyes, and then we'll start doing things, you could call them an initial adjustment layer. Another word for this part is the primary out, where you've established the look, you've graded the scene and you've matched everything up and now, you go through with it and start doing the fine tuning. You can also do things here. Well, maybe you start playing with things like film grain and maybe some special effects. If you have the full version of Resolve, you might have some of the open fx available for you. If not, it's fine. Honestly, most of the time, you won't be using those. But sometimes, it is good to play with them and just see if it relates to the scene or not. Here, I always like starting out with getting a bird's eye view of the scene. A lot of times by doing this, you'll be able to see if a shot stands out, for example, you might notice that something might be a little too blue or orange, or dark, or bright. This is a good starting point. Everything looks pretty good here for me. Really, the next part is only a two minute scene, so it's really just watching through it and seeing what stands out. We have the scene here. This clip. Good. Already I'm seeing, I think the wide shot here, I'd like to boost the contrast on the wide shot a little bit more. This is also part of the scene where you can start grouping clips or grouping the entire scene, so that if you make an adjustment, it'll apply it to everything else. We've got that. Looks good. I think this gives me a good idea of how things are coming along. Sometimes it helps just to toggle through the same shots. I'm clicking on the primary just because the mass can throw you off a little bit. I'm blocking the view. Again, if you have a secondary display, those mass will not be on the secondary display. It'll be much easier to see things on a bigger screen. But when you're working off of the viewer, like if you only have a MacBook Pro or a laptop or whatever, it might be, it just a little bit easier to turn those off by clicking on the node. Now, I think what I'm going to do is go here, add a node here. Maybe I'll name this one, Primary Out. Again, lots of different names for that. Some people call it everything from a last look to a final adjustment node or anything like that. It doesn't matter, whatever you want to name it. I'm going to call it the primary out here. Going to full screen and I'm just going to increase the contrast, the touch. I've increase the contrast a lot, but I think it works. I'm just going to take this and command C. Go here, add a node, command B, full screen. I think this wide shot is just know little more contrast, and so here's the first shot. He walks in. I'm liking that a little bit better. This good. Now, we can go into the bird's eye view. I'm going to command click on all of the wide shots. I'm going to start grouping everything together. Then you want to right-click, Add Into a New Group. I'll call this Wide shot. There we go. Now, we're in a position to where we can make an adjustment and it'll ripple across to everything else. You could call this first one an experiment. I'm actually going to rename that, so it's easier when I say PR out so that you don't have two nodes that say primary. I'm going to copy this, but then delete it. Then delete this one. Now, since they're all connected, I'm now going to go up here to this other third little dot. Now we have something called Group Post Clip which basically means it's the grouped shots after the primary out. Everything that's grouped, and I'm going to Command V and paste the contrast. That you can see just by looking down here at the timeline. It's pasting it across the board. I'll do this other bird's eye view, all the ones with this little green chain link, right here, this link tells you that they're grouped and see you can see them all changing. Now, let's just go through and I like this high-contrast wide shot. He comes in. Good. I do you like this darker, moodier, wide, I think it works much better. It gives this whole scene a grittier look to it, and he sits. From what I've seen, I think that really will be the only major global change for the whole scene. I'm seeing something there. Anytime I do this, I always see a ton of little things that I can change and you just have to decide which one of those are crucial and which ones you want to keep moving forward with. So far so good. Good. Now he's sitting. I'm thinking the only thing that really will need the most global change is that wide shot here. Then he leans forward. I think that covers the basis of most of these scenes. I do like this darker shot here. It's always important to watch through your scene several times and to step away and watch it with fresh eyes and see how things come together. This one specific little scene here, clip is looking at touch, too bright so I'm going to do the same thing. Full screen and just to touch more contrast. Again, this is all stuff that's personal choice and stuff that you think would make the scene better. There's no guidebook, there's no magic numbers that I can give you or magical tricks that will adjust everything and make everything look good. A lot of this is just your personal creative choices to fix the scenes and see that little tiny amount of contrast is all I did. I'm going to drop the midtown to touch and the highlighted touch like that, and rewind and play from here. That looks a little better to me because we really want to maintain a darker moodier scene throughout. I think this could benefit with the exact same so I'm going to copy this and paste. Good. Here too, paste. Let's copy to that one too, paste, so there we go. He says something to the older son. We want to end on this down note of darker colors. That's the scene and so there you have it. We just made really the main key key was the wide shot. Like I said, we could go in here and tweak a million things. Part of it is just knowing when to stop and keep moving forward and then one thing to remember is that when you're working with a client, after a while you're going to have their input. Another reason you don't want to kill yourself and work this to the bone is a lot of times you'll overwork yourself and then they'll watch it and they'll say, "Wow, I think you've overdone this." Or they don't like half of what you did, or they have a ton of nodes and then you basically did that work for nothing honestly. It's always good to stay focused to what the scene is supposed to be and it is good to add some creativity to it, but it's just a balancing act of knowing do you want to really stay on this one shot for two or three hours and draw a million windows and do all These things or that only bother you or do you want to do a good job, stay focused on what the client asked for and add a little bit of creativity and then show it to them. Then you can bounce ideas back and forth with the director and the director of photography and do those kinds of things. Because something that also happens with clients sometimes is if you take on something and go too far with it and go too crazy with it, and take too many creative liberties with it, they won't like it for that specific reason. They'll basically say, "If you were going to go this far with it, you should have told me that you were going to go this far with it. Sorry, you did all this extra work but maybe pull back on this and that and the other." It's kind of a balancing act honestly. If this were your personal project, then you can sit here and tweak it to death but even then, I would say that always ask yourself, "Is what I'm doing making the scene better? Or is what I'm doing making the scene different?" As in are you putting all your efforts into something that's not really making the scene better or are you just constantly changing it because you can't make up your mind and you don't know what you want, or things constantly look weird because you've been working on a scene too much. Just ask yourself, "Am I making this scene better or am I just changing it and making it different?" The answer should always be that I'm making the scene better. I think we're at a good point where we could keep moving forward. I'll just click on "Timeline", "Option S" and there's a lot of different kinds of grain that I have here. I have the DaVinci Resolve grain and a bunch of others but in this situation, for the timeline I'm going to actually add this film convert grain, which is pretty great. I'm not going to go over too much obviously film convert because again, can be a class of its own. But basically I'm just going to add the default grain for now, which is this Kodak film stock, a 35-millimeter grain. I'm going to remove the film curve, and I'm going to remove the film color and I'm only applying the grain at a 100 percent. Let's go here. Full screen so you can see it before, after, before, after, next clip, before, after and you can see the difference. Grain really can add a lot to a scene, especially when it's good, high-quality grain. There's a lot of cheesy filters out there that kind of just applies the same level of grain to everything and some of the higher types of film grain will add certain levels of green to the shadows, certain levels of grain to the highlight, and it kind of adjusts the grain on the fly based on the image, which is really what you want to look for. Now let's play this through and there's the grain. I'm liking this amount of grain that I've added. Again before, after. Something about grain that I'll bring up is when you add grain and a lot of times it will tend to increase the sort of micro contrast in the scene. You can see here and also it's very slight, but it will make a clip or a scene look just a hair darker and a hair more contrasty. You can see here before, after and sometimes when you do add it, you have to slightly adjust the color. For example, here you can see how it almost desaturates the blue in the background. Now I'm just going to go back to the beginning and play it through with the screen. You can see that that's what we do in this step of the process, is to watch through the entire scene again and make smaller adjustments. For example, in this scene, all we did was really increase the contrast in the wide shot and added grain throughout the entire scene but you can do things like that. Resolve also has things like different light beams, lens diffraction, lens blurs, all this stuff; where if you do have the studio version, you can go through and just drop these in one at a time. There's all kinds of stuff you can do here: zoom blur, radial blur, different transform tools, lens flares, for example. Very easy to go overkill with that kind of thing. I'd say maybe staying away from those [inaudible] more kind of thing. Otherwise, your grade can look like you just dumped everything on it. You can see we've come a pretty long way with this grade. We've initially gone through and adjust the primaries and then adjusted the background, that we've created windows to put them over the actor's faces and tracking, we have brought up the greens and the shadows and we also lifted the shadows up. Let's go to something like this for example. Turn everything off. We had our primary out. Our background is where we did our adjustment node for some and maybe not for others, and when we boosted the greens in the shadows. Here's when we did the lifting of the shadows with a low soft tool. Timeline-wise we added grain to everything. You can see that it's just kind of a process. Building blocks or you're slowly adding things, playing through, watching through the scene. This is at the point where I would send this to the client. I might rewatch it once or twice again just to make sure I covered everything. Let's go back here to our initial look book. This is where we started our inspiration, initially, these kind of greener math looks and from that working with our scene, because it is a different scene, it isn't those exact shots, we came up with something that looks a little bit more like this which you can see and we have the grain and everything. I will see you in the next lesson where we will cover nodes that were given by the client. We are now going to send this to our "Client". See what sort of feedback they have so that you can learn how to quickly shift gears depending on the nodes, how you change things or fix things or go in slightly different directions because really it's all about if you do want to be very proficient in a color grading or maybe even be a professional colorist; a lot of it has to do with being able to shift gears, take nodes, take feedback, make those changes quickly and efficiently without it feeling like, "Someone gave me nodes and now I have to regrade the whole thing." It should never be that way. One of the reasons that we have been grading the way we have and kept things organized in different nodes is because if the client, for example, comes back and tells you, "I don't like that green look you have to it." I can just turn it off. Rather than doing everything in one node or just mixing everything up and keeping things a little sloppy. If they don't like this, you can just turn that off. If they don't like this, you can just turn that off. There we go. Next lesson we will see what our "Client" had to say and give us nodes and change things and we'll go in a slightly different direction and we'll take it from there. I'll see you in our next lesson.
12. Client Notes: In this lesson we will go over what are "Client had to say about the grade". We sent it through in the last session, we added a little bit of grain and made some final adjustments. What they said is that we now have to go through and they said they loved everything about it, the look that we gave and everything, but they want to see the wide shots be just a little bit desaturated, which I agree with, and maybe leaning a little bit more towards the greens, which I also agree with. What we're going to do is make a very easy, quick adjustment to all of the wide shots. One thing you've might have noticed is, and this will happen a lot of times when you're grading scenes, is really all the close ups of all the characters were generally easier. The wide shot was the most difficult, had the most windows, had some tracking, had the most adjustments that we had to make. You'll see that because we kept things pretty organized any adjustments that we make will be pretty quick and easy. Then another note they had, which is a little bit more complicated and it's not extremely common, but it will happen from time to time and just wanted to throw that in you to throw a monkey wrench into things is, they sent two shots here that they want us to edit back in. Now, we're not editors. It's not something that you typically want a client to make a habit of doing, of sending you shots and reediting their scene. If they do that, obviously you charge a little bit extra for those things. But in this case it's generally easy, they just want us to insert these shots. This one at the beginning, this one at the end, and then to match them so that they fit the scene. They said they definitely want them to look a little cooler than they are here. A little bit of the kind of blue teal color that the scene has but they also wanted to feel like it's obviously outside in a different environment. They sent no references, which also happens from time to time so we really just have to pop these in and then do our thing and make them match. I'm going to grab both of these here and just drop them into our media pool. Go to the first shot and they also said they just do the first three seconds, which I can just scrub through and I'm looking at this clock up here. We'll just do the first three seconds nothing too crazy. O for out and I'm just going to insert that and then at the very end, we are going to stick the shot in here. There we go. We're going to trim that down, it's a long shot, the first four seconds. There we go. That's easy, nothing too precise and scientific, just so they have those shots in there. Now let's see how they fit into the scene. We cut that in and then we cut to this. Then at the very end, looks like we're going to have the last shot of the scene here, and then we are going to cut to this shot here. First let's take care of the wide shots. We went over this a little bit before. For the wide shot, it should be pretty easy. If I go in here, if you remember from last time we've already grouped the wide shots, they'll have that little green link on them. It's going to be honestly as easy as going into selecting any of the wide shots. When you select the wide shots, you're automatically selecting all of them once you go into this group. If you remember what we did last time on our own is bring the contrast down on this guy here. That's the adjustment we made and now the client wants us to desaturate the wide shot so we're just going to pick this and then maybe bring it down, which I agree. Because if we compare it, say to this shot here you can see it does look a little more saturated. Now we are just going to maybe take the saturation and dial that back a touch to about there. Full screen command F and there we go. We were here and then they also wanted us to bring those a little bit more towards the green, so I'm just going to actually do this and add just a tiny bit. Just remember that when you do click on another shot and you're no longer in the group, it resets to the node tree of the individual clips. What we want to do is go here and make sure that we're on the group post clips section if you select something else. That's a slight desaturation, and then we're going to go here and by dragging this to the left, add just a hint of green. Here's where we were and if I say compare it to this one now, I'm going to go into full screen and we're just going to toggle it off and on so that we can see that it matches this shot here. At this point in the game, it's a thing where the adjustments start becoming so fine tunes, so particular that you can line up 10 different people show them the slight comparisons and they will all have different opinions. Color is one of the most subjective things that you can work on. Someone might look at this adjustment and say, "Oh I like this better." Some people might say I like this better, look at this and say " Oh I don't know, that's weird." They don't match because they're looking at maybe just the window or maybe just this, or maybe just the characters. Everyone looks at color differently. But what you will find happens is if you were to then just show this to someone who hasn't seen every subtle little tiny change and has seen the before and afters of every little adjustment, this scene will flow, it'll look good, they won't notice all these little adjustments. That's one of the things that the colors that you have to train yourself to see things objectively, to see things with fresh eyes, and to not let your eyes get just to think so quickly that every little adjustment looks weird or looks bad. That is something that I find happens to a lot of people that don't have too much experience with color grading is, they get to a point where nothing looks right, everything looks weird. That's when you start changing things over and over again and you go into this vicious cycle where no matter what you do it looks wrong, it looks bad, it doesn't match. That's what you want to stay out of, and really it's just experience of grading things every day over and over again that you learn to rest your eyes. You learn to see things objectively and not get caught in that kind of vicious cycle. Again, this is the group and so now all of these wide shots have that adjustment applied to them. Very easy to do, very quick adjustment. Now we are just going to again start this one from beginning so we are going to take this shot here and let's make sure that the wave forms are on. We're going to have it match the scene so I'm going to drag the shadows down, makes it look nice and rich in contrasting. I'm looking at the shadows, make sure they hit that line and the highlights. Actually I want the midtones, maybe I want to bring these down to really give this a dark low-key look to it. The highlights I want to bring those into touch too. I can't see, but maybe I went down a little too much in there. Now I'm going to erase the midtone to touch and I'm going to increase the contrast quite a bit. There we go. This is where you'll probably really see the pivot in action. Now I'm going to pull back on the pivot and see how this detail is coming back. Again, that's because what is happening is you're changing the pivot point of where the midtones and shadows meet and the highlights meet, so that you can have the contrast that you added in. But the place where those shadows drop and the highlight come up changes so that it matches the shot a little bit so you're fine tuning the contrast. Here or here and here. Good, and I'm happy with that. You'll see how quickly we can grade here. I'm going to then secondary make a window here. Actually I'm going to reverse this, like this, bring that down. I want to grade a little bit closer to my typical speed and I want these to come up a little bit more. I want the contrast to increase a little bit more. That little shift in detail. I wanted just on the trees, more contrast, more pit. Here's what I did. I just added that little pop just by drawing a window just for this area and added that little bit of a shift and option S. Again, this was the primary, the secondary and here we're going to do a look adjustment. I'm going to go a touch darker, just a touch. Then here I'm going to actually cool this shot down. I'm going to do a little of this. Then in the midtones here, the cam, I'm going to also push it a touch and then cool this down even more. It looks a little magenta. I'm just going to add a touch of this tint, balance it out with the green. Because if we're looking a little magenta, we want to add green on the opposite end. Now let's just play it through here. I'm sure we're going to have to make more adjustments, but there we go. You can see it's not quite there yet, so I'm actually going to really cool this down and really shift the hue. Something a little bit closer here. We don't want it to necessarily match this exactly. That's not what we're going for. We want it to feel like it's in the same world, but it's in a different environment, if that makes sense. The outside establishing shot shouldn't match the inside of a house. But we want it to feel like it's part of the same world. What I'm probably going to do is I'm just toggling back and forth between this here, is going to then add an additional window similar to what we did before. But this one is going to be just for the sky. I feel like the sky is too just blue. Getting slightly unnatural. I'm actually going to bring the sky back just a tiny bit like that. It's not just a solid blue. I'm just going to play with the green a tiny bit. You can see we're slowly building to make this match. Then another one here. For this one I'm just going to increase the color boost just a little bit. Now let's see how this fits. I think we're getting closer. I think that's working. Let's watch through the establishing shot again, fullscreen. Come back. Here, to me that is now working. Now we're going to do this shot here. I have no idea if this no, I would not copy and paste the first shot to this. We're just going take a similar approach and then just quickly bring this down to the shadows. Very nice. Now, I think just this tiny, bring it up a tiny bit. Really contrast D bring down the gain. I want this again to keep our dark, ominous look to it. Even crushing the shadows. Yeah, these are just creative choices which as you're grading, basically the more you grade, the more you develop a library of looks in your head and you know where to go. When I see this shot, I know immediately I've seen a lot of dark, moody cinematic shots. I've seen stuff that's brighter, darker somewhere in the middle. You basically develop the experience to be able to jump in know immediately, this shot has a lot of shadows and there's a little bit of highlight here. I want to almost make it seem like the car is moving into a dark, creepy forest. I want to crush the shadows here and make it really dark, really dreary looking, which is where I'm going. We were here and then brought that down. It might even bring it down even more by going to the shadows and just dropping those even more. We go and maybe even pushing it and dropping those, making it almost a little too much. There we go. Next, we are going to then cool this off. Just like the other shots. This is what we cut too. You can see as we're cooling it off, get some magenta things. I'm going to, again balance that out by adding a little green. There we go. Now I'm going to bring down these highlights, just a touch. I don't know if they're bright enough too for this to work, but we'll give it a shot. Just tiny bit. Option C is another keyboard shortcut that makes a window right away. I'm going to really bring this. Then we'll just put the cylinder here. Let's just see what the car does. Does that and it moves. I'm actually going to just maybe put this right in the middle of the shot and just raise just the middle of the shot. Just a tiny bit. Just so it almost looks doing this rather than putting this on the current. I think if you track the car, it'll look a little phony. But if we do this right in the middle, it'll give the effect of a lens that has heavy vignetting or something along those lines and we'll keep the darkness but will also be able to see the car a little bit. Maybe I'll shoot it down a little bit more. Just like that. That's good. Let's maybe add another node. Now we'll just check it coming from here. Fullscreen. Then I'm expecting some adjustment. Actually that's not too bad. I think I want to see a little more green in this. The third node here, I'm going to push the tint. At this point, some of these adjustments might be so subtle that might be hard on your end to view these. I'm going to really push it so you see what I'm doing? That looks a little better, we were here. Really, what I'm looking at is this is the before, and I might push it even more to make sure you can see the road has a touch of magenta to it. Here's after I added more green overall to the scene. Now maybe cutting from here, it'll as we said, seem like it's in the same world but in a different location. I think that's working and we have to remember, I'm going to go here. If we remember before we added this green to the entire timeline. Now we'll be able to check this out with the grain, grain off, grain on. We can see that thing happening that I mentioned that whenever you add grain, things get slightly bit darker and more contrasty. There we go. There's the first shot with the grain. Here's our bird's eye view of our scene. I think it looks good. We added the two shots and we paste the adjustments, or we copied the look, sorry. Not literally copy and paste it, but we then move the look over to these shots, which I'm pretty happy with. Then from this point, we've done the client nodes. We went through the wide shot and desaturated those very simple nodes. Happy with everything else. We added the two shots in and graded those two shots. Now this is the part where we would basically send this back to the client and see if they have anything else that they'd like to do to the scene. But I think it's very close. Maybe let's just watch through the scene one more time from the top. I'm just going to play through the scene here. If you remember, you can go back and see all of the different things that we've done throughout for all of these scenes. The fact that these were shot in log, flat from the beginning. We've tweaked the background, we've tweaked the characters the contrast, added a different windows and added a little bit of a green hue to the shadows, and we worked off of the reference images. The scene has really come a long way. It's looking good. Also you can see that how much the grain just
13. In-Person Vs Remote Grading: Okay. That's the scene. Congratulations, the client loved the scene. It looks great. I hope you followed along, and if not, I do hope you learned a lot by just watching through it and taking notes. One thing I do want to cover is remote grading versus in-person grading, working with someone in the room with you. Now obviously this was something of a scenario where we worked with a client remotely. Really in the real-world, it's a little bit of everything. The ideal situation is for the client to be in the room with you the entire time so that you're both in the same grading environment, looking at the same monitor, and you can talk through things, try things and you know you're looking at the exact same thing. It's tough sometimes when you're in your grading studio with a calibrated reference monitor, a client monitor that's also calibrated. You might have a third monitor that's calibrated with all your scopes, and the space is correct, the right lighting and everything, and you're sending it to a client halfway across the world, you don't really know what setup they have. Which by the way, a lot of times I do ask, what's your scenario like? What's your grading environment like? What monitor do you have? Just so I get an idea of what we're working with. But realistically, they're not always going to be in the room with you. As you all know, sometimes, especially this day and age, you have to work remote, which is perfectly fine. You just have to be able to communicate with them, ask them questions, and tell them things like I've told you, make sure that you watch this in a dark room, calibrate your monitor, turn off true tone, turn off night shift, all that stuff, so that at least you have some consistency to what you're viewing. In an ideal world, they're in there with you sitting right next to you looking at the same thing, but that's not going to happen. Okay. The typical situation would be something where the client comes in at the beginning just to establish the looks, you work through a few clips on key scenes and you set up the look, and then they leave and then you work on your own, do the first pass, second pass, send it their way. Then they might come back somewhere around the middle just to touch base and check in, and then they'll come back at the very end once it's presumably done, you come in, you sit together and watch it one last time with that person in the room. That's what the typical scenario is. However, like I said, people are busy, scheduling is tough. Sometimes it has a fast turnaround and they can't be in the room with you. With that being said, I just wanted to bring up those differences of working in person with someone as the ideal situation. But realistically, you need to get used to possibly working with someone remotely, or maybe a combination of the two where they come in and check in and do that kind of thing. Again, just be sure to communicate with them regarding their grading environment, their monitor, their lighting setup, and to turn off, any auto features, auto brightness, all that kind of stuff. By doing this, you'll find that it'll be a little bit easier to work remotely with someone versus, say, somebody who you don't know if they're checking your stuff outside in their backyard in the bright sun on an old laptop with a horrible display, and then they're sending you notes that make no sense to you. Again, communication is key. Working in-person versus remote, know the differences, that way you can be prepared. That's another thing that's important, being prepared, so you know what to expect with a client and you get the best, most accurate grade possible by talking to that person and communicating with them. That way it's easier for everyone involved.
14. Final Thoughts: Okay. That's the course. You've reached the end. Hopefully by this point you have an awesome looking scene. I just want to say we covered a lot of things in this course. We've covered everything from monitors to setting up the proper environment, we went over primaries and secondaries and we keyed different things, we keyed the background in the scene, we track the windows, we went through the matching. It's definitely a tough thing to do, and even if you're scene didn't turn out perfect, the key thing that you want to bring out of this is that you need to practice, practice and practice. Because as you learned when you're grading something and trying to create a look, it's a lot harder than having your own footage and just playing with DaVinci Resolve or playing the controls until you get something that you like. The important thing is learning to match. Remember that, that's probably the toughest thing to learn as a colorist, and really that's what separates a real professional colorist from everyone else is not just being able to make a look, because sometimes making a look is the easiest part, it's taking that look and applying it to an entire scene. So with that being said, please, if you did grade the scene, share it with everyone, I'd be happy to give you feedback, and if not, and you followed along, then I would say definitely download it, play with the footage, even if you just grade two or three clips, four clips, post them to the project page. I'd love to see what you were doing. Just remember that to be a professional colorist, you don't only need to be good at making something look good, you need to be able to work with people, fulfill their vision, and that's how you get the clients and that's how you get the reputation as a fast colorist, a talented colorist, how you'll get return client, how you'll get new clients, and with every project, you'll find that you'll get better and better. I find that I always grow the most as a colorist when I work with a client who has a sharp vision, they know what they want, they have a look book, they have a very specific look in mind, and I have to solve that puzzle of figuring out how to get the look they want based on the footage that they shot. Again, thank you for taking my course. Any questions, don't be afraid to reach out in the discussions, and by all means, check out my other courses, my intro with a pro-colorist, working with log, or if you have 20 minutes, just check out quick tips from a colorist. Thanks again and I'll see you in my next course.
