3 Easy Tips for Beginner Colorists | DaVinci Resolve 16 Tutorial
In this tutorial, I will be giving you three easy tips to help you start grading like a professional.
The first tip is to pick a hero shot. When starting a project, the first thing that comes to mind is you want to start grading the clips sequentially. That is an amateur mistake. What you really want to do is pick a hero frame, which is a clip that best describes the scene you are working on. Always go with the wider shot if you have the chance. Using a wider shot allows more detail in the scene, which can help you when grading up close shots.
The second tip is to keep it simple. I have seen way too many amateur colorists that have way too many nodes because they think it will be very impressive to the client. This gives away that you are a big amateur.
Get the most, by doing the least amount of work.
You want to stay efficient. You may have hundreds of clips to grade, so you have to think ahead. It is just not sustainable to have 25 nodes for every shot. The other thing with this is I see too many people creating tons of points on their curves, completely disregarding their primaries.
This is terrible. It will completely crack your image if you do not know how to use curves properly. The best way to get that “filmic” look is primaries.
Finally, tip number three is to go big or go home. Yes, this is kind of contradictory to my previous point…but not really. What I mean here, is that you need to push the image as far as you can, then dial it back. In all my tutorials I always say, “Go too far, then bring it back.” That’s what I mean here. You’ll never know where the breaking point of an image is if you don’t push it past there. So, push it, then dial it back. Looking at this example, you can see, the primaries version is so much better than the LUT version.
It took maybe a minute longer, but the results are 100 times better than the LUT version. Even if you apply a LUT and add some saturation, it still doesn’t have the same color vibrancy as the primaries grade.
There you go! Three tips to help you start grading more like a pro!
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