5 Easy Steps to get the FILM look | DaVinci Resolve 16 Tutorial

      Welcome to another tutorial everyone! In this, we are going to go over 5 easy steps to get that film look. Your footage can be shot on 8-bit or Arri and these tips will still apply. So let’s go ahead and jump into the tips.

        Before we do anything, we are going to drop in the Canon CLOG_2 LUT.

Now with this you can see that we’ve lost everything. So, we don’t want to do that. We are going to reset the node tree and then start from scratch.

Let’s create our node tree.

We are going to start by using contrast in our exposure node. If I were to use the lift, gamma, gain technique, I wouldn’t be able to achieve the same results.

Now I am going to go under my balance and do a light adjustment. I want to pull out some of the red by adding a bit more blue. Then I am going to go under my gamma to try and level it out a bit more. Then I am going to lift up my reds a tiny bit.

        Alright, moving onto glow, the first thing it is going to do is blow everything out. You want to go under composite mode and change it to soft light.

Then I am going to start raising up my threshold to add some detail. This makes the highlight rolloff look smooth and very nice. Then I want to bring my spread down just a bit and we are good to go.

Now I am going into global adjustment and using lift, gamma, gain, I want to add some separation. I am going to start by bringing my lift towards the cyan space, then bring my gain and gamma up towards orange.

Now our highlights and shadows are starting to be crushed and clipped, so in my RGB curves, I am going to mess with my low and high soft to protect those.

        Now we need to clean up that RGB, digital noise. We are going to add some noise reduction.

        Now we are going to add some film grain to the image. This will help add some detail back into the image. I am going to use the 35mm 400T as the base and then increase grain size and strength.

Another pro-tip is that using film grain can help be-band your image too.

        Now our look is complete! Just check out the difference between our rec.709 look, vs this look.

There we go. No qualifiers used, or hue vs options. Only some OFX and a little lift, gamma, and gain action. This grade was meant to be easy and usable for whatever projects you have, on any camera. What you saw here is what you need to build that look DNA. Hopefully this was helpful.

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