Davinci Resolve Color Grading Essentials - Complete Workflow

1. Intro: Hello, my name is Mostafa Nassar. I'm an engineer and artist based in Toronto, Canada. On the side I make videos regarding the creative process, art, and investment. The biggest part of the YouTube journey is color grading and a good color grade can separate you from an amateur to a professional. In this course, I'm going to take you step-by-step on how I make my own color grades and a system that I do to follow on each one of them. Here's the breakdown of the course. Step 1, we're going to go through all the settings that are related to the color grading. Step 2, we're going to go through everything in the color tab, in DaVinci Resolve. Step 3, we're actually going to dive into the cinematic look of Hollywood movies. I'm going go through some of my favorite movies and dissect how they do the color grades and how the picture looks like in post-processing. Step 4, we're going to take our videos and color grade them. Step 5, we're just going to go through how I can make different looks for the same video. Hopefully, that'll give you an insight how people actually change the looks of the scene without actually changing the location. Step 6, just export and enjoy. I hope you enjoy this course as much as I enjoyed making it. If you have any question, just leave me a comment below in the discussion or just contact me through any of my social media. I have my YouTube channel linked to my profile and I would love to hear from you. 2. Davinci Settings: Welcome to the color grading course, where I'm going to take you step-by-step on how I color grade my clips, and I'm going to go through it from a beginner's perspective. If you have no experience whatsoever with color grading, this course is for you. Launch DaVinci Resolve and make sure that your settings are similar, otherwise the effects going to look very different. Currently I have everything as default. Just make sure that it's DaVinci YRGB and Rec 709 Gamma 2.4. For the broadcast safe IRE levels, make sure it broadcasts safe. This one doesn't really affect anything that you do with YouTube. But if you're sending your footage to a professional, let's say if it's a broadcast or a TV station, this will come in handy for their end of the spectrum when they receive your footage. It doesn't hurt to keep it on, but just do that. Now that you have every setting is adjusted, time to get the clips in. 3. Color Tab 101: Now that we adjusted the settings, let's get the clips. I have a couple of examples that I wanted to go through, so I'm just going to drag and drop. You're going to ask if I changed the product frame rates, I do not change because I already set it up in the master settings to be 24 frames per second, so I don't need to do anything else. Otherwise, if you drop it in it's going to adjust the frame rate that you have and you don't want to do that. Now that being said, before we even start with anything with color gradient, let's go through what is color grading and what's in the tab itself to get you familiarize with what's going on with it. We're going to start with the bottom right. This is the most important thing about color grading is your waveforms, parade, vectorscope, and histogram. Let me just give you an example here. We're going to go back to my timeline and add a clip. Once we go to the color tab, you're going to see something happening. When I click on this button, it's going to enlarge the scopes and it's going to put everything in there. To start with the waveform, now we're good. I need you to keep the parade, waveform, vector scope, and histogram. The parade is pretty much the colors segregated. The waveform is the colors together. The vectorscope tell you where is the color leaning towards, which quadrant, and the histogram just gives you pretty much the same parade but it's a little bit just different and just on the horizontal level. Take a look at this. You see these lines? That's pretty much that picture in RGB colors. Whatever you have in here is pretty much exactly the same. We'll give you an overview of what that picture looks like, just true colors. It comes in really handy if you want to see if something is overexposed or underexposed, and we're going to go through that with the examples. But that being said, let's just close that. The open effects is where you can put effects, and usually, I like to use the glow. But we're not going to cover it in this course, that will be in another course. You can have a lot of different effects in here, like the light rays and so forth. But this one comes in really handy if you have extra effects, especially if you wanted to add grain and stuff like that. The second thing is your node. This is the node system. It looks a little bit intimidating at first, but once you know how it works, it's actually very simple. It's almost like any of the other programs, they all use the layer system. Instead of everything is going on top, this stuff it just goes on the side and it's all interconnected. It just looks a little different, but know that when you get familiar with the system, you're actually on par with the color graders in the industry at the professional level. It's actually very cool to know and speak the same language, just in case if you are thinking about taking the next step and actually doing more commercial work or you want to just to do like an indie film. This one is your timeline, and basically just whatever you have on the timeline. The media pool is everything that you have in your media. The LUTs is if you have any external LUTs. If you created a look, you can just import it in there and you can just drag and drop onto your note. The gallery is something that we're going to discuss later on in the course. But basically, the gallery is a snapshot of your color grade, and you can take that color grade and adjust it on any of the other clips that you have, or you can do a comparison between one grade and another grade if you have different looks and you want to go and review with your team members. This one is really cool. The 2nd main thing in the color tab, which is your color adjustments. You have the primary wheels and you have the log wheels. The bar wheels, really I don't use them because it's pretty much the same, but these two are the most essential ones that we're going to cover in this course. The camera raw is if you're shooting raw. This one is for color metric if you're using a checker. This is the primaries that we just talked about. HDR is a new addition to Davinci Resolve 17, but we're not going to cover it in this course. The RGB Mixer, hardly ever use it, and the motion effects. This one is not available in the free version of Davinci, but if you have the full version, this one allows you to reduce the noise and add a little bit of extra motion blur if you want to. But it's really not needed if you're doing something like YouTube, unless you already have a very expensive camera, so might as well invest into that to get a really crisp looking image. The next thing is your curves. These curves actually have a lot of different other functions. You can either click in here or you can press in here. These are pretty much the same, and you can just adjust the colors, manipulate your saturation, your luminous, and it comes really handy if you want to do some fine tuning. The color warper, I don't really use much, but it's pretty much if you use the curves, you don't really need to use this. The qualifier is the 3rd most important thing because this one can actually key out a certain color and will let you manipulate that color independent of everything else on the picture. This one was really good if you're trying skin tones and we're going to use that in this course. Same thing with the window, you can actually isolate a certain part in the image, or you can just adjust this window, excluding everything outside. This one is very cool, and this is how it looks like. This is the only part that you can adjust, let's say, if I wanted to go really high. See, that's how it really works. This one is for stabilization and your keyframes. This one is for blur. If you wanted to give your skin tone a little bit of extra smoothness or extra sharpness, you can do that from here. We're going to cover that slightly in here. This one is pretty much your opacity of each of your nodes. Let's say I have four nodes and this node is pretty dark. I can go in here and adjust the output. If I want it at 50 percent, I can do 0.5 and there you go. The sizing, we don't really use it, and 3D, we don't really use it. That's pretty much everything that we use in this color tab and let's get started. 4. What Makes a Grade Cinematic: Now that we know what the Color tab has, we should start with our color grading. But before we do that, I want to review some of the professional work first, to give you an idea of what they usually do. It gives you a perspective of what the professionals do, so you can take that and apply it into your own forage. I usually go to film graph and start to look down into some of my favorite movies, and see how the picture look, and try and apply that to my own videos, which I already downloaded some of these pictures. I'm just going to go in here and put them onto the timeline. Now that you have the pictures, we are just going to go into Color tab and study them a little bit. This one was from the social network and you can tell right away that the picture is very balanced. We don't go over 640. You can notice in here, this one is around 900 close because this was the light. But the skin tones are in there and they don't go over 640. In the vectorscope, there's something I wanted to touch on. In the vectorscope, make sure that your skin tone indicator is ticked on because this one will help you further when you do your skin tones. This one will tell you okay, this is the most natural skin tones that you can get. If you're always hovering around this line, you're going to get really accurate looking skin tones. But if you look in here, look at the shadows, the shadows are at 512 around the same, and even the background, even though it looks a little bit dark, see it's around 250. Everything like the black is not actually really black. It's a little bit blue, you can see in here. Everything is barely touching the bottom. When you notice, when you actually move that, let me show you something. Let's go in here and if I move this down, see now the image looks a little bit black because this is your black point, which is to be zero. The further you go down, the further the image goes into darkness, which we're going to go through later on. This is also from the social network. Notice the sky, it's actually bright, but it's not as bright as is in here. It's actually around 760. That tells you just understand that the balance of the image, when something is so bright, it doesn't go really bright. It actually is still controlled, and same thing with the shadow. The shadow is still touching the zero. Next shot. This one is a little bit blue if you notice, and from here you can actually tell that the blue is actually dominating over, and there's a little bit less red because if you look at the color wheel, red and blue are in the opposite of the spectrum, with one overtaking the other, then it's going to show in here. Same story here. Your max is at 768. This is from the arrival. This is very well-balanced and you can notice that the red is actually a little bit less, it's a little bit darker than 760, it's actually on 640. Let's take this one also from the arrival. They keep everything a little bit low in this movie, and you can tell it. This one is a little bit blue and green. The blue and green are overtaking the red. This one is from Blade Runner. You can see a different perspective, different color grading. This is actually very white background, but it's still hovering around 896. If you see in here the blue is a little bit less because this is a little bit warmer. The temperature is a little bit lenient towards yellow, you can see from here. But the skin tone is still adequate. Same thing, Blade Runner, the blue and green are overtaking. This is where her skin is. It's a little bit darker, right? Interstellar, a little bit more reds and yellows. The temperature is yellow and blue, so if it's a little bit more yellow, the blue is going to be down a little bit and you can see here that the red is actually pretty dominant in this image. Let's just take another one. This is from Star Wars and you can see all the white and the darks, this one actually paints a really good picture to understand what is going on with the image. Look at here, this is his skin tone, and his skin tone is parked around 640 and the 384. It's right there. It's a little bit more red because of the lips and scars. You can see that translating in here. But this is a very well-balanced white, because the blue, and red are taken. But look at the green. The green is a little bit predominant. We can slightly see that in here. The last image we're going to see is actually from the Matrix. Even though this one looks very white, it actually doesn't even clip at the top, and look at the skin tone, it's parked around the same. The reason I'm showing you this, because when you look at skin tones, most of the professionals usually keep their skin tones around the same between 640 and 384, and you just can see that from here. This one is a little bit dark, because this is very dark. But if you look at her cheek, is around 512. It's still between those. Let's take one last one. Same story. Bottom line, it's always good to look at the professionals and how they do stuff, and if it's working for them, it's definitely going to work for us. Keep that in mind when you're working on your image, you're trying to keep your skin tones around the same to get that cinematic look. Because what we're trying to get is not just to color graded. We're trying to get that cinematic look for all of our pictures and images. It's always a good exercise to go into your favorite movies, grab the still frames from the movie, and study them. I'm going to show you how to do that in the next module. 5. Why Camera Profiles Matter: Now that you have your clips in the timeline, you should also know what your clips are filmed in. Most of the cameras they shoot in log, which is if you have the Canon, the Sonys and Panasonic. Then you have the pro-res if you're shooting a little bit more professional and everything has their own different profile. It helps a lot to know which profile you're shooting with because in the interest of actually have a lot to help you with any of these looks. Let's say if you have Sony, you can translate SLog to Cine, SLog3 and then if you have let's say a red camera, you can translate that to Rec 709, same thing with Blackmagic, Astro, Arri, and everything else really and you can download that. But with this course, we're not actually going to do that. We're just going to treat as if you're just very new and you have an image and you're just trying to work with what you have. But it's always a good practice to know the look you're going for beforehand and what camera or what profile you're shooting with because this will help you a lot when you transform that look to a different color profile, and it will help you with the color grading itself. It's really good to know what you're shooting with because down the line, let's say if you have the same camera and you're already graded lot for it, you can just take that lot and put it on it and you can cut your time in half doing that work. It's really good to keep that profile in your mind when you're working with an image. Let's say if you're using a Sony camera and a Canon camera, you have to keep that in mind because whatever adjustments you've done for the Sony is not going to work for the Canon because the color profile for each camera is different. But if you have two Canon cameras and you already saved that lot, you can just take that and copy paste it into the other one and have the same result. Just keep that in mind. 6. Outdoor: Warm Color Edit: Now let's go ahead and start color grading. Before you even start, you need to make sure that you park your image at, we call it a hero shot. The hero shot was going to represent your whole clip, and everything that you do to that shot will translate to everything. It will really behoove you to have that clip or that hero shot very very similar to everything in the clip. Let's say if you have already two clips stitched together, one is dark and one is bright, split that clip into two and keep the light by itself and the dark clip by itself. In this case, we have two clips which we already have them segregated. I want my hero shot to be in here. Good. Now we're going to start making different nodes. We're going to start with right-click and add serial, or you can click "Control S", and that way you can create as many nodes as you want. But what I want to show you is you should follow a system that will always allow you to come back and change something. Because if you do everything in one node, it's very hard to go in and get a compounding effect first of all, and you cannot really go and troubleshoot it. Because if let's say you already done so many adjustments and added red in here, blue in here, and added green in this one. If you wanted to see how this would look without the red, you can just go in here and take it off. Then you can see how the image is, but if you have everything in one node, and if you want to see it before and after, let's say it was a little red, a little blue, you cannot do that because once you take that node off, it will take everything off. It's always good to keep that in mind. But now we're just going to go and start labeling our nodes. I usually keep my first node as a spare if I would need it to do any global adjustments, if I wanted to get some brightness or slight color correction, I just do that with the first node. The second node, we're just going to go and node label. We're just going to call that primary. This one we're going to call it temp, which is our color temperatures. Actually, I'm going to just do that, temperature and contrast. The other one is going to be log. This one, I'm going to call, look. I'm not going to jump ahead. Let's just go and do our preliminary adjustments. To start with, we're just going to get our scopes out. Usually I have a second screen, but for the purpose of this course, we're just going to do everything in here. Now, let's go to our primary. What I'm trying to get my objective here is to try and balance out my waveforms, so that I see that my waveform are already on the higher end. Usually I go to the primaries, and you can see something called lift, gamma, and gain. The lift usually controls the bottom end of the scope. Shows here. The gamma controls the mid-range, and the gain controls the top. The offset, pretty much just offsets the whole thing either up or down. That being said, you just reset that. I see from here that my bottoms are not touching. I don't have any rich blacks in my image, so I'm just going to go down slightly until one of them touch, which is the blue and the green. You can see already I'm pressing "Control D" to see what's before and after. I'm trying to get my top to be around 780 because I want to give it a little bit of mood. That would be pretty much it for me. The temperature is where I'm going to control my temperature and contrast. Let's say for the first look, I want to show a little bit of golden hour. I'm just going to go into my temperature and go to the right and now it's a little bit in the yellow side. You can see from here, when you go in the yellow, the blue and the red are alternating. The more yellow you get, the less blue is in the image, and vice versa. I'm just going to give it around 920. The tint is the green and magentas. You can go a little bit into the green to try and get that film work. We're just going to go minus 25. Here we go, or you can just type it in. The contrast, I'm just going to give it a little bit of contrast. Here we go, and let's see before and after. Let's give it a little bit of saturation, not much. I just wanted to give it slight saturation. You can tell this image already looks way better than it was before. But now let's go to our next step, which is a log wheel. This one is self-explanatory, this one control the shadow, midtone, and highlights. You notice that between the primaries and the log wheel, this follows the same thing. The shadow controls the bottom, midtone, control the midtones, and the highlights control the highlights. But actually the way the color is manipulated is very very different. For the wheels, the colors are actually changed, not an absolute change. It changes a little bit of range in it, but when you notice in the highlights, it changes only the top. Let's just show you something in here, see it almost squishes your vector scope, it squishes the colors. It's not a very natural look. But let's say if you go into your primary wheels, it actually just squeezes it in. You see that? You see the difference? The color wheels, the primary wheels squeezes your colors, and the highlights actually eliminates it. It just cuts it down. It's a very sharp cut, and you can see the colors here, they don't look very natural. These one have a very small use that you can do, if you just want to manipulate the color very very slightly. Let's just say, for example, in here, I wanted to add a little bit of shadow, so I want to give the shadow a little bit of more blue. I'm just going to go in here, and you can see that the shadow is being shifted. But actually, I just want to give it slight red. It's a very slight. I usually just do that for my looks, which we're going to cover in here. Now for the look, the look is where you actually do a lot of the heavy lifting aside from these, these ones just correct what the image look. This one gives you a slight mood and this one is your whole look. Now I want to give it a little bit of red. So I'm just going to go into my highlights and give it a slight red, and then go into my Gamma and give it a little bit of oranges and in my Lift and just try and balance it out by grabbing this back into the opposite direction. If you see before and after, I think I pulled a little bit too much, so I'm just going to go slightly down, there we go. Here's where the magic happens. Let's say I don't want to change the color of the jacket in here. What I can do is, because everything in here is adjusting the color, I can do right-click and go to Add Node and I can add a layer. What the layer does it actually overrides everything on this node and it goes on top. If you notice, the colors are pretty much overridden. What I can do in here, I can just go down in my Qualifier and select. But you don't see anything? That's because you need to press "Shift H". Shift H pretty much shows you all the colors that you share. Let's say I just want to select this, I can just go into my Qualifier and drag with the mouse. I can just manipulate that color. Now that I have that color in, let's dial that in a little bit. I'm just going to go in here and add slightly, get into the Saturation, Softness just a little bit and in here. For the Denoise, I'm just going to do that because it looks a little bit too harsh. I'm just going to add a little bit denoise and clean the black because I don't want to get a lot of that in the back. That being done, I can press "Shift H" again and now I have the ability to just manipulate that color. If I go into my Gain and I can go in here, look, I got that back right away and it's not adjusting anything in the image. So maybe I just want to give it a little bit extra orange or something. This is before and after and now it blends in really nicely. Let's just add another layer node and I just want to adjust the green. I'm just going to go that now that I selected this, "Shift H". You can see that the green is actually taking a lot of stuff in the bag because the background is a little bit green, so we have to go in and refine it a little bit. We go in here and try and refine it. Here we go with slightly soft, and it's more like trial and error until you find the sweet spot that you want to work with. I don't want that, that's pretty good. Then let's go into Denoise and the Clean Black to clean it up a little bit and press "Shift H" again. Now we isolated that color. Let's just say, for example, I want to give it a little bit more blue. You can see that it's more blue, but this is very extreme. I'm just trying to show you how it's going to look. But in my case, I actually want to give it a little bit more green. I'm just going to go into Gamma because the Gamma controls my mid-tones, and this is not really in the darker side or the brighter side, it's in-between, so I'm just going to try and play little bit with that. There we go. You can see the color is slightly changed from before. Let's just see before and after. It's very tiny change. But if you look at the whole image and what I do is I select everything and press "Control V", and this is how it looks before and after. Now that we have done that, you have your first and the last node. The first node is for any adjustments that you see. Let's say I was like, "Oh crap, I actually added a little bit more red." I can just go into my Gain and subtract some of that, see immediately, everything looks a little bit different. But I don't want do that right now, I want to do it in the final, subtract some of that red, go. You can see right away, the yellow overtones are actually down to a little bit more natural looking. In here, it's really not recommended that you change any colors in the first one, it's only recommended, for my findings anyways, that you just adjust just the looks. You can either use your Curves and the Curves is basically: in here is your highlights, in here is your mid-tones, and in here is your shadows, so you can just adjust those. Or if you're not very familiar with that, you can just go into here and do the same thing. I just want to give it slightly bit more. I want my blues to be in here, that is still not clipping, so it's good and with my mid-tones, I want to give it a little bit more brightness. You can see it's lifting the whole thing up. You know what? I want the blue to be touching so I'm just want to give it slightly richer shadows, so there we go. I got all of them close and you can see just that first node, that so much changed to that look. I actually like that so much. Now let's say if you wanted to compare different looks, one thing can do is you can right-click in here and select, Grab Still. Grab Still is going to add just a still image into your gallery and what that does is it actually can compare all of your looks. Let's say if I just deselect all of that. Now they're reverted back to where it was before and I click here. I can actually see before and after. You can see we have already done so much to this image. It looks really gorgeous. But the main use for that also is, let's just say you accidentally deleted everything and was like, "Oh crap, I actually lost everything." You don't have to start over, you can just go in here and grab and you're back in business. This one actually saves your color grading into your DaVinci and you can just grab that into any of the other and just grab it in here. But obviously you see what I was talking about before. If you are shooting something in daylight and something in night time, the grade is not going to look the same. Actually, it makes it look worse so we don't want do that. That really helps to know what are you shooting for. If it's the same look, then you can actually adjust and add that same look to it. But if it's something completely different, because this clip was actually shot in a very different color profile than this one. So it's going to take a little bit more finesse or actually completely different grade. We're not going to talk about that now. 7. Outdoor: Cool Color Edit : But let's just say for example, we wanted to do another look. We already know that we saved that, so I'm just going to go in here and delete and I'm going to start a new node tree. We're just going to go in here and start it over. Just going to label them the same. Let's just say for example, I want to give this one a little bit more of a cooler look. Let's just go ahead and adjust the same thing, because I want to have everything a little balanced. I've got my primary, my temperature. I'm going to play a little bit different now, I want it to look, let's say if it was a Canadian winter, I just wanted to do that, just going to get it slightly more into the blue, [inaudible] the contrast and a little bit of green, not much. For my Log Wheels, I'm actually going to give it a little bit more blue in here and the highlights, I'm just going to go slightly into the opposite side just to balance it out and now we're going to play with the look. My look is already too blue but don't worry, we're going to adjust that now. You can just go in here. I noticed that my blues are taking up, so I want to balance that out, I'm just going to go into the opposite direction of the blue to bring it down. You can see that happening now, and I just want to bring this up a little bit. Now, my gamma looks like the green is actually predominant in the blues, and the blue is predominant a little bit more. What I can do is, I can even push it down a little bit more towards the blue, but that doesn't look natural so I'm just going to try and adjust that blue down and you can see that the gamma actually goes in the middle and stretches everything so I'm going to do that in here. For my game, which is the highlights, I want to give it a little bit more blue, so I'm just going to do that. Now that we have that look, we can just add, I'm actually going to add a parallel node this time and you notice the parallel node doesn't override. It actually adds on top, but it doesn't overtake the look, because I want to add a little bit of compounding and I think from what I'm seeing here. I see that the green is taken over and I want to reduce that, I'm just going to add a little bit tint since I'm trying to get that color to adjust and there we go. I'm just trying to get that color to overlap but this is my sky. But at the same time, I don't want the blue to take over, so I'm just going to go down a little bit on the Gain, there we go. Now that we're playing with that, we're going to go into my Midtones. I'm actually going to go back to my Shadows and I want to adjust a little bit of shadows in here, so I'm actually going to go to my shadows and I see that the shadows in here, I'm trying to get a little bit more blue in green, I'm going to go up to just that then I'm going to crush it down. Here we go, or I can just go up. You can just go up and down until you see something that you like and I like it that way. We're just going to add another node and this time we're just going to do with the qualifier, I want to isolate the sky this time. So I'm just going to go here and just going to go in there and denoise. You can see that this guy is taking a lot, there we go. I just going to press "Control H" again, and now that's being done I just want to adjust that slightly and I'm keeping my scopes down there just to have an idea of what I'm doing. I'm trying to keep it as 768, a little bit of blue in here and that. There we go. I'm just trying to get that to overlap. All of that compounding changed it from this to this. Now, for my final adjustments, just going to pick a quick look, we're lucky that we don't have to deal with skin tones otherwise would probably have to add another isolation in here to isolate the skin tones. But so far I think the image looks pretty good and I'm just going to go into my highlights and just see if I can add a little bit extra and lift it up slightly. Here we go. That's not bad at all and now let's do another still and let's take a look of our work. This is look number 1 and this is look number 2, completely different. This is before, this is after. 8. Outdoor: Cool Color Edit V2: But let's just say for example, we wanted to do another look. So we already know that we save that. So I'm just gonna go in here and delete. And I'm going to start a new node tree. So we're just gonna go in here and started over just going to label them the same. Let's just say for example, I wanted to give this one a little bit more of a cooler and cooler look. So let's just go ahead and adjust the same thing because I kinda wanna have everything a little balanced, right? So I've got my primary, my temperature. I'm gonna play a little bit different now. So I wanted to look kind of like let's say if it was a Canadian winter, right? So I'll just wanted to do that. Just gonna give it slightly more into the blue little bit contrast and a little bit of green. Not much right? And for my Log Wheels, I actually want to give it I'm actually going to give it a little bit more blue in here. And the highlights. I'm just gonna go slightly into the opposite side. Okay, just to balance it out. Now, we're going to play with the Look. My Look is already too blue, right? But don't worry, we're going to adjust that now. So we can just go in here. And I noticed that my blues are taking up, right, so I want to balance that out. So I'm just gonna go into the opposite direction of the blue to bring it down. You can see that happening now, right? Okay, and I just wanted to bring this up a little bit. And now my gamma, it looks like the green is actually predominant. And the blues, right? And the blue is predominant a little bit more. So what I can do is I can even push it down a little bit more towards the blue, but that doesn't look natural. So I'm just going to try and adjust that blue down. And you can see that the gamma actually goes in the middle and stretches everything. So I'm gonna do that in here. And for my gain, which is the highlights, I kinda wanna give it a little bit more blue. So I'm just gonna do that. Okay? Now that we have that Look, we can just add, I'm actually going to add parallel node this time. And he noticed the parallel node doesn't override. It actually adds on top, but it doesn't over. Take the look because I want to add a little bit of compounding. And I think from what I'm seeing here, I see that the green is taken over and I want to reduce that. So I'm just going to add a little bit tent seat. I'm trying to get that color to adjust. And there we go. I'm just trying to get that color to overlap. This is my sky, right? But at the same time, I don't want the blue to takeover. So I'm just gonna go down a little bit on the gain. There we go. Now that we're playing with that, I will go into my mid tones. I'm actually going to go back to my shadows. And I want to adjust a little bit of shadows in here. So I'm actually going to go to my shadows and I see that the shadows in here, I'm trying to get a little bit more blue in green. So I'm just going to go down to just that. Then going to crush it down. Here we go. Or it can just go up. You can just go up and down until you see something that you'd like. And I kinda like it that way. So we're just, and I add another node. And this time we're just going to do with the qualifier. I want to isolate the sky this time. I'm just gonna go the here and just going to go in there. And the noise. You can see that this guy is taking a lot right? There we go. And just going to press Control H again. And now that's being done. Just wanted to adjust that slightly. And I'm keeping my scopes down there just to have an idea of what I'm doing. Okay. I'm trying to keep it as 768. Little bit of blue in here. And there we go. I'm just trying to get that to overlap. So all of that compounding changed it from this to this. And now for my final adjustments, which is going to take a quick look, we're lucky that we don't have to deal with skin tones. Otherwise, we probably would have to add another isolation in here to isolate the skin tones. But so far, I think the image looks pretty good. And I'm just gonna go into my highlights and just see if I can add a little bit extra. Okay. And lifted up slightly. Here we go. That's not bad at all. Now, let's just do another still. And let's take a look of our work. So just see. This is Look number one and this is Look number two. Completely different, right? This is before. This is after 9. Indoor: Orange/ Teal Edit: Now that we finished adjusting the first clip, we're going to move on to the next one. This one is a little bit darker, is shot in a complete different color profile, so we're just going to go ahead and treat it as such. Now with this one, we're just going to create the same nodes that we usually create. What we can do is you can just copy and paste those nodes from the gallery and have them in there, and then just reset everything. Just reset the nodes. Reset, there we go. Now that we have everything the same, we're just going to remove. Now that we adjusted our tree, let's just go ahead and do it the same way. For this one, however, I want to play around with the curves. With the primary, instead of going here, I'm going to show you how you can adjust it with the curves. Just want to do something around there. To give ourselves more real state, I'm just going to do that. That way you can have a little bit more control of what you want to do. I'm trying to get my skin tones to be around this ballpark, and you can already tell that our skin is actually pretty balanced. The thing is when you start to adjust your look, all of this is going to jumble up a little bit, so we're going to go ahead and play around. The look I'm going for for this one, I'm trying to get to a look that was done in the boys, so this is going to be a little bit tricky. I don't want to play around with temperature so much, I just want to try and get my look. That being said, the temperature here is okay, it's already too yellow, I can do slightly blue to balance that out, and for my logs, I want to give my shadows light red just to bring some of my cheek and the skin tone a little bit better. You can see that in here it's adjusting that curve, just so slightly. Now with that look, we are going to do something, I want to get that background to look a little bit more green and blue, so we're going to go ahead in the shadows and play around with that. Not much because I want to change it just slightly so I don't have to do so much work in with my skin tones. I can just balance it out a little bit with that and go ahead into the lift. You're already seeing here that everything is screwed up, but just don't worry about it for now, we'll just try and get that look the way we want it. Because we can just go in here and lift it up slight, but we don't want to do that because we're going to a very different extreme, so right now I'm just going to try and balance. Now that we have our look, let's add a layer node, and this one is going to be our skin tone, it's just going to go in here, and we're just going to add a little bit denoise, and a little bit of that. We'll just add a little bit more. I want to add that cheekbone to it, so I'm just going to add this one here. Oh, I accidentally clicked. If I select this, I get back, so I don't want to really select that. I'm just going to try and select this and get it a little bit soft and as wide as I can. There we go. I think that's not bad. Now that being said, I like to give my skin tone a little bit more red, so I shift my hues by two points, and you can see in here, when you shift your hues a little bit, everything changes, and you can tell it's changing into a little bit red. I'm just going to go into half of that, so I'm just going to do 3.5, 3.25 is fine. That being said, let's go back to our vector scope, everything seems okay, but I can just change it slightly in here, so I can just add a little bit of shadows. You can see that I'm bringing some of that skin tone back to life, and a little bit down to the lift and offset. Here we go. It's the look that I was going for. Now that we have this done, we can go and adjust the whole look in here, so I can go into the shadows. I just want to go back to a better look for that. For the offset, I want to give it a little bit of blue and slightly. When it comes to lift, I'm going to lift it up to balance it out a little bit, and same thing with the gamma, I'm going to go down here, and for the gain, I see that the red is overpowering, but that's okay, because that's part of the look. See the green is overtaking the dark, which is pretty good. It looks a little bit contrasty to my liking, so what I can go in here, I can go in the top, the very first and reduce some of that contrast. You see what I've done here? So much of that work. If I try and adjust any of those is going to be so much work, but because I left this one open and that's really before it affects everything after and it makes it look really cool. Then now with this I can just add a little bit of shadow in here. I want to give it a little bit more red. Look at that, up to your liking. You can add a little bit of saturation at the end, and you can add the detail. Now, look at this, is cranked up. If you want to give it a little bit of softer look, you can go to minus 20 and it will remove some of that wrinkles, but I'm a guy, I don't care, so I'm just going to go up a little bit, and there we go. I'm going to add that as look number 1, and we're going to do another look. 10. Indoor: Desaturated Snyder Look: Now that we've finished the first look, we're going to go ahead and try and do something different. I wanted to give it a little bit of matte in the back and a little bit grayish. I wanted to give it a clean look, but at the same time kind of preserve the skin tones and have a little of a desaturated background. I made an effort to put everything the same as before and we're just going to go ahead and adjust. That being said, we're just going to go to our primaries. We're going to use this and go back and adjust. I'm just going to give it a little bit of range. For the temperature, I'm going to keep it the same. However, I want to desaturate it a little bit and when it comes to the log wheel, we're going to do the same thing with the shadows. We're just going to give it a little bit red. You can tell from the back, already changing up. I've lifted up the green to give it a little bit more red. Now with the look, this is where it's going to be a little bit tricky. We already isolated the skin from before, right? We already isolated the skin from before and now we're going to go into the shadows and try and desaturate it. However, we still want to give it some life. I'm going to give it some contrast. I'm keeping my eye on the scopes in here. I don't want anything to take over and I know everything looks a little bit desaturated but we're going to fix that skin tone right now. That being said, we're just going to add that saturation back to the skin tone and lift. You can see before and after. I want to come to the skin tone. Let's just go back in here and here we go. Didn't mean to do that. Now you see that we took away a lot of that in the back and in here. We're just going to go do a global adjustment. I'm just going to give it a little bit of blue for the temperature and when it comes to the lift, just going to try and neutralize. I just want to bring this up a little bit, and when it comes to the blue, here we go. Now it's a little bit gray because when you look at here, everything is white. This is before and after. I just tried to get that blue to match, to give it a white background, so now this one looks very white. This is the hues, right? We don't want to play with the hues, we want to play with the saturation so we're just going to go and select here because I don't want to saturate everything. So I'm isolating the colors from red to the green, a little bit of blues. What I can do is I can just go in here and get everything in that range so pretty much all of my skin tones, and I can just go up a little bit, give it some life. When it comes to everything else, I can just desaturate it down. With that being said, I can just go up in here in the shadows and give it a little bit more red and for the midtones, just give it a little bit of more blue. The highlights, you don't want to really play with that because when you do the highlights, it changes this, and I'm going to demonstrate in here. See the highlights only moves the top which you don't want. Now let's go back to our very first node and see if we want to do any global adjustments, sort of just see before and after. So we already done a really good job of toning down the back, and what you can do is if you want, just add a little bit, bring this up. It's really up to you how you want to do it. I want to give it a little bit more contrast, something like this. There we go. So before and after. The orange is very, very saturated so what we can do in here is we can just go in and desaturate that. That's the power of knowing where is everything. I just desaturate that and I can just add a little bit more red in the lift. If I want, I can just add gamma, but you can play around with it a little bit and see. But the thing is, it overpowers everything because we desaturate the background, so we don't want to do too much. But something can do is you can add a little bit of green to power down that orange. Just a little bit to tone it down, and that being said, here we go. Just go to the key Output and take it down slightly. There you go. This is a specific look, it's not something that I would normally do but if that's something that you are looking for, you can completely get that done. If you just isolate that color and then go down with the saturation and isolate your skin tones and go ahead with that. You can always go in and add a little bit more life to it by adjusting and it should be good. Okay, so we're just going to add that look, and now you just see look one versus look two. I'll just try and get the same hue image. See before and after. It's completely different vibes that you can create, just using the same node tree. 11. Drone Footage Edit: Now the final clip that we're going to use today is a clip from a drone. Usually clip drones, it depends on what settings you're having. For this one it's a little bit desaturated, so we're going to show you a good way to get it back to where it needs to be. In here, they already have a lot of LUTs that you can already add to your image and have it improve. They have one for Phantom 3, Phantom 4 and a lot of other stuff. What you can do is you can add another node, and drag and drop. There you have it. It's a very quick look and easy to do. Just look around for all of the LUTs that they have. But let's just say you didn't have any of those LUTs and you just want to do something real quick. What you can do is just follow the same steps. I'm just going to do that. Everything looks already pretty good, but I want to lift up my highlights and my shadows down. I'm going to go to the Log Wheel. I'm going to add a little bit of contrast. Go crazy with the contrast. Don't worry, you can always adjust, so you can go crazy and then adjust back and forth. Now you have saturation. You can add a little bit of saturation. Look at that, you already fixed the look. But you can just take it one step further and go into your look and see where do you want to adjust, if any at all? Because sometimes you don't want to just so much. But let's just say I saw that the blue is already taken over and I want to give it a little bit more green or something. Let's just see. Yeah, I want to actually give it more blue because I want to show it's daylight. I can go back to my set and then add a little bit more blue, or I can add a little bit more warmer tones, it's up to you. I'm just going to add a little bit more blue tones. If that's the case, I can go in here and bring my gain slightly to make it good. For final adjustments, I can just go in here and let's just see what I need to adjust. Maybe I can lift up the shadows a little bit, so I can just go on the lift and do that, and I can go in the shadows and bring those down to crush. There we go. There you have it. This is a very quick way to adjust an image, which if you don't want to have a specific look can just go into the saturation and add contrast. Then just make sure that your shadows are aligned and your highlights are aligned. You don't want it to be too crazy. That's about it. Just once you understand how the scopes work, you can pretty much manipulate any image that you have. 12. Creating a Lut: There we have it. This is how to edit any picture with DaVinci Resolve. This works with both images and clips. If you even have an image, you want to adjust it, you can do that in here. One thing I want to show you before we go further. Now, let's just say you wanted to extract that look to, let's say, any other program like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. You can just go into, let's just say I want to extract this look, I can go right click, "Generate LUT", and click. Once I save that LUT, let's just say this is the Course LUT, I already know where it's saved. I can save it. Once that's saved, I can just go into my LUT section. I have it as Course LUT. There we go. I can just right click, open file location, and use it in anywhere I want. There we go. It's right here. I can just share that with my friends, or my clients, or my editor, and have that look in any of the other projects that we use. That's how you create a LUT in DaVinci Resolve.