3 Easy Steps for Beginners to Start Grading | DaVinci Resolve Tutorial
What’s going on everyone! Welcome to another epic tutorial. This is going to be for beginners or someone who wants to get into color grading, but hasn’t. I’m going to give you the tools, so that you have the essential skills/logic to get started.
Let’s get this show on the road. I’m going to start with this. Imagine you just bring your clips into DaVinci Resolve and you want to know what to do next. You will go in the bottom right to the little gear icon, which will bring up your project settings.
Make sure they are set to that under color management.
Next you want to move over to your color tab. Make sure the clips button in the top right is selected so you can see all your clips.
You should be seeing this on your screen. Or something similar.
Once you check that it looks like this, you need to select a hero frame which is basically a frame that gives you the best representation of what the video is.
Next you want to expand your scopes. To do that you will press the expand button on your scopes.
Then make sure that the four grids are selected.
I have them set up like this, but you can set them up however is best for you. Make sure that in your vectorscope, you have the skin tone indicator showing.
Okay, what do we see when we look at our scopes? It’s exposed very well. If the scopes are sitting in the middle, that means we have all the range at the top and the bottom to work with. This is what a well exposed log scope should look like.
Now I am going to create the most basic node tree possible. Three nodes. These will correspond to the three steps.
Now I want to start in the middle node. It is important to get the camera specs from the DP or director because you will need to know how to properly convert this footage to rec.709. In my second node, I am going to drop in the color space transform open effect.
Once you drop it on, nothing happens. So now, we are going to fill out the information it needs (input color space, input gamma).
Just like that we have our footage converted to rec.709. Now I will select the other two clips, right click and on our first clip, and select apply grade to these other two clips so I can take what I just did and apply it to the other clips.
When it comes to our color space transform, you will adjust this to each specific camera. Today we are working with Arri footage, so we used an Arri conversion, but if you use GH5, you’d use the Panasonic VLOG space, etc.
Now why did I do this in my second node and not the first node? If I do it after the color space transform, I won’t be color grading the log footage. I want to do certain things before the CST so that I am using the raw log footage. This ensures the cleanest results and can help me not break the image.
Now moving back to my first node we are going to use our primaries. I want to get the basic exposure, color, and balance correct. The first thing I am going to do is bring my lift down to add contrast. Then I am going to raise my gain to give my image a bit of pop. My main focus will always be making the subject look good.
We have to do this step to start seeing what’s going on in the image and see if the image is balanced. Now we can see that there is so much more red in that white cloth, so how do we fix that? What we are going to is use our offset. But you first need to make sure that our printer light hotkeys are turned on.
What I am going to do is I am going to hit the number 1 and add some cyan.
Now I am realizing that there just isn’t enough saturation in the image. So I am going to add saturation by focusing on his lips and making sure that they are sitting correctly.
Now I am realizing that there just isn’t enough saturation in the image. So I am going to add saturation by focusing on his lips and making sure that they are sitting correctly.
So this shot is almost done. You may notice a bit more warmth still on the sheet, and we can get that out in our third node. Our third node is for our secondaries. What I am going to do is use my saturation vs saturation curves and take the bottom part and pull it down. Now it does desaturate everything else, so I am going to bring back up the middle to keep his skin.
Overall this is helping us. Now under my hue vs saturation, we are going to click on our cyan channel and bring up the saturation in my cyan to pop out the sky more. Then I want to bring down my blue a bit.
Now, I want to go under my hue vs luminance and take my cyan and pull it down to bring more information into it. Don’t do too much or the image can crack. I want to do the same thing with my blue as well.
Then I want to go into our hue vs hue to make the blue a better color. So I am going to bring the blue up and make the sky a bit more cyan.
Just like that we are done. We did so much in just three simple, easy steps and it looks so beautiful as it sits.
I am noticing that this sky is just a bit too much, so I am going to go under my node key and drop the output a bit.
Now moving onto our next shot, we have already applied the CST and everything is properly converted. So starting in our first node, we can see that the white in the image is pretty magenta/red. So we will click on our eyedropper tool in our primaries, and selec the white part of our image. That white balances our image for us. However, I am going to show you a different way if you don’t have that much white in your frame. Now, we are going to start with our lift and bring it down. Then I am going to bring my gain up to pop out our girl.
Now again, we are seeing more red in the image so we need to add cyan. We are going to hit the number 1 key 3 times to add that cyan, then press the number 3 key twice to add that yellow.
Now with that change, you can see that the image got lifted a bit so we are going to mess with our lift and gain a bit too. Then we are going to add some saturation. Now I want to dial back the yellow once. Then I am going to add a tiny bit of contrast to the image and we are good to go.
Now we are going to move into our third node and make our secondary changes. The first thing we are going to do is use our saturation vs saturation again and pull down on the bottom. Then we are going to bring back the middle to keep her skin.
Then we are going to use our hue vs saturation to pull down our red a little bit. Then I am going to crank our cyan to bring up our background.
Then under hue vs luminance we can pull down our cyan to make it even deeper.
Just look at all we did with that image. She’s looking so beautiful, the colors are popping and we transformed that image with three simple steps.
Moving to our last shot, let’s park it on our hero frame.
Obviously this has already been converted, so starting in our first node, we are going to pull down our lift a bit to add some depth to our darkest areas. I don’t want to do anything else because the skin is sitting so perfectly.
Now again, there is too much magenta so we are going to press number 1 a few times to get that cyan into the image to balance it out.
I don’t mind leaving some magenta since it is sunset and magenta is one of the primary colors in sunsets.
Now I am going to move into my secondaries, and I am going to do the same thing I’ve done before in my saturation vs saturation curves.
Then under my hue vs hue I am going to take my reds and swing it a bit so that her skin looks a little bit more natural.
Then we are going to use our hue vs saturation and take our cyan and blue up to pop out the sky. I also want to pull down my yellows a bit to clean up those dirty yellows that come into the image.
Now I am noticing that the roses are popping a bit too much, so I am going to click on them and I will take the point it creates and bring it down a touch so that we can focus on her more than the roses.
So just like that we did three simple steps on all of these. It’s just crazy.
Hopefully you guys learned a lot and just know that once you become a pro colorist, you’re not going to toss out this method. It will be built on what you learned here. Once you understand all of this, you can use this as the building blocks. With that, work hard, get obsessed and stay possessed.
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