3 Must Have Tools MISSING from DaVinci Resolve Free Version | Color Grading Tutorial
What’s going on everyone! Welcome to yet another epic video. Today I will be showing you three tools within Resolve studio that makes it worth purchasing. These are the tools used by professionals. This could be what you are missing as a beginner colorist.
As always, let’s get this party started. Here is the shot we are working with:
And here is the node tree:
This has the CST already applied, so that shot has been converted to rec.709.
Now starting in our second node, we are going to use our first tool: glow. You may wonder why we aren’t doing contrast or using our primary wheels, but you’re about to find out the power of glow is unreal. What I am going to do first is drop on glow. Then I am going to change my composite mode to softlight. Now I am going to bring back my shine threshold. Then if we want to do more of an aggressive look, we can pull our spread back to 0.
Look at this beautiful cinematic image. That’s from glow and CST. Nothing is blowing out, nothing is crushed, this is just gorgeous. This tool is also one of the best as you can see.
Now moving to our first node, you can see tons of noise in our image. This is dirty RGB noise, not grain noise. So we need to take that out using our noise reduction.
To get rid of this, set the noise reduction to these settings.
Just look at what this does.
Now that we’ve done that, we need to counter that. We are going to add grain.
The difference between noise and grain is that noise sits in your RGB channels and is noisy and gunky and gross and it makes your image look unprofessional and low quality. Grain is that film quality and texture that we try to replicate. This is happening on a monochromatic level.
Once I have dropped the grain on there, I want to change it to 35mm reversal. Then under my advanced controls I want to crank the midtone and then add strength and size.
Just like that we are done. Let’s go ahead and check this out in fullscreen.
Look at how gorgeous this image is and we didn’t touch the primaries or secondaries. This just shows you the power of the paid version tools.
Now if we do a quick price breakdown on grain plugins, look at the cost of these.
Almost $300 for grain. Then for noise reduction using neat, you add another $100.
This puts you a little over $300, where resolve is $295. It’s well worth the money since it’s a one-time fee. So what are you waiting for?
With that, work hard, get obsessed, and get possessed.
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