A Few EASY Steps to Isolate Colors in DaVinci Resolve

What’s going on guys. Welcome to another epic video. Today we are going to be creating a sin city look. We are going to build it from the ground up. There are a lot of little technical things you need to understand to achieve this look. You have to be very careful with this look. You don’t want to overuse it. There’s a time and place for it (music videos and commercials).

        Alright, let’s get into it! First thing I want to do is analyze our image. The first thing we notice is that the image is pushed.

Look at those scopes. Our blacks are crushed and the highlights are high, with nothing in between. What people don’t realize is that sin city isn’t truly white. It’s got this staircase thing going on that’s adding red to the highlights.

        Moving to our image, this is the shot and frame we will be working on.

I am going to start building out my node tree.

        Now getting started, I am going to open the lut tab and select the Arri lut that is supplied by DaVinci Resolve. This comes directly from Arri.

        Now, moving onto our yellow node, we are going to qualify our yellow.

Even though we worked on it, there is still a lot selected, but that’s okay. When you are working on a music video or commercial, you are going to put more work into images because there are less shots and you can do more. Now we are going to add a custom shape around our yellow and then we will also track it.

        Now I can move into the black and white node and I can go to my RGB mixer and select monochrome at the bottom.

        Now after the layer mixer nodes I am going to add another node. In this I am going to use contrast and pivot to really push it hard.

        Now I am going to create another node called sharpen. I am going to go into my blur tab and add some sharpening.

Then I want to take my midtone detail and crank it to like 75ish.

        I am going to create another node called texture pop. I am going to drop on the texture pop OFX. Under the detail slider, I am going to add some detail.

It’s adding a lot of grunge and grit to our image.

        Now, adding another node called sin city. This is where we are going to dial in the sin city look. I am going to first start to create the contrast by dropping my lift. In order to fix the clipping on my shadows, I am going to bring up my low soft in my curves.

In order to get that sin city look, we need to move to our printer lights to add color. In our gain we are going to add red into the image, and subtract blue to add some more warmth. I also want to take down our green a tiny bit.

        Now we can see that we are clipping so I am going to go into my highlights node and use my luminance qualifier to select just the highlights.

Then I am going to bring down my gamma and gain.

        Now I want to go back into my sin city node and blue down the blue in the gain channel.

        Now the last step would be to take our yellow and pop it out more. To do this I am going to go into the yellow node and crank the saturation up to about 75ish.

Now I am noticing that it is more gold than yellow, so I am going to swing my hue to fix that and make it a more true yellow.

        Just like that we are done! That sin city node really did a lot to help us get into that world. Let’s check out the look in full screen.

        Hopefully that was fun! As I said you won’t be using it a lot, but it is definitely good to know how to do it if the job requires that. With that, work hard, get obsessed and stay possessed.

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