Color Grading Made Easy (Ep 3) |DaVinci Resolve 17 Tutorial

What’s going on everyone! Welcome back to yet another awesome video. Today we are doing episode three of my series Color Grading Made Easy. In this series we take one clip and make three different grades out of it. Today we are doing two looks: a very warm look, and a very cold look. I am basing this off of geography. You would use these depending on the region that it belongs to.

        Before we continue, what do we mean when we say telling a story with color? When we see saturated popping images, we think of happiness. When we see dull colors, we associate horror or sadness. Same thing happens when it comes to different regions or different parts of the world. For example, when we think about the Middle East, we think of warm colors. These color palettes have been around for decades.

        Alright, let’s get into this. Let’s first build out our node tree.

        Starting in our third node, let’s go under our film looks luts, and pick our Kodak 2383 D55, which is the warmer version of the lut.

Moving to our primaries, we are going to move our gamma up to open up the image, but counter that with gain down to level out the highlights. Then we are going to bring our lift down, just to get the blacks looking a bit better.

Now moving to our temperature and tint, we are going to start by raising the temperature. Remember, go too far, then pull it back. Then I am going to add some green into the tint.

While this is looking good, I am noticing the saturation is a bit heavy so I am going to move back to my primary node, and take some saturation out.

        Now I am going to go under my look adjustment and go under my curves and with editable splines checked on, I want to pull up on the top a bit.

        Now as I do this, I am going to move back to my primary node and move the gain down, while moving the gamma up to open up the image.

        Now the last thing we need to do is drop in our film grain. We are starting with the base of 35mm 400T and mess with the settings.

        Just like that, we are done! Let’s check out our look in full screen.

Alright, now we are going to create a new version, and reset our temperature and tint node, but leave everything else.

        First thing we are going to start with is our temperature and tint. We are going to take out our temperature and really cool it off, then we are going to add some green into the image.

        Next I am going to dial back on my saturation.

        Now going back into temp and tint, I am going to push it a bit more.

        Now I want to move into my primary node to just open up a bit more because it is more of a vintage look.

        Now moving to our look adjustment, we are going to reset it. Then we are going to qualify to select just the highlights.

Then to match that green in the highlights, we are going to move our gain wheel towards green a bit.

I am also going to pull in some green under my highlights wheel in the log wheels section.

        Now I am going to create a parallel node to bring up the lift a tiny bit.

Then I am going to move to my log wheels and under the shadow wheel, I am going to counter it a tiny bit. I am going to control it a tiny bit with my low range.

        Next I am going to dial back on our grain just a bit.

        Alright! We are done. See how easy this was? Let’s check it out in full screen.

Hopefully this gives you a genuine idea of the power of color grading and how quickly we can take the same shot and create completely different looks. I hope you learned something new in this tutorial!

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