What’s going on everyone! Welcome to another epic video. Today we are continuing our “Common Beginner Mistakes” series with talking about highlight recovery. Not handling your highlights properly is the easiest way to give away that you’re an amatuer. It’s not easy and it takes practice, but you need to know the right way to do it. These concepts can be done in every NLE.

        Let’s get into it! Before we get into the grade, let’s analyze some professional work and see how they deal with highlights.

Take this image from Hacksaw Ridge. You can see the circled area are the blown out highlights that won’t come back (they are still looking good). Then farther into the fire you have the highlights than can come back. They are living within the upper portion of the scopes, but not specular.

        Moving onto our second example, we’ve got a whole other scenario. Our sky is sitting low enough because we have a camera with incredible dynamic range where the sky looks perfect and our subject is looking great too.

Now you’ll notice that in the red channel there are specular highlights. That’s his face.

Specular highlights are blown out highlights that usually appear on shiny things. In this case, his face is reflecting light. These are impossible to recover, and that’s okay. There are recoverable and non-recoverable.

        Now moving to some examples from the boys, look at this.

These right here are non-recoverable. They are blown out, but that’s okay.

These are recoverable. What you don’t want to do is try to bring down the specular highlights because the footage will look muddy.

        In this shot again, there are specular highlights.

Something you need to keep in mind is that with specular highlights, you want to keep them as white as possible because this is how our eyes perceive it.

Those are recoverable highlights. So I hope you see the difference here. Specular highlights are okay to have as long as you keep them looking proper. We are going to be dealing with recoverable highlights today.

        In our shot, you can see that we have some highlights of our own.

Now looking at the scopes, know that the sharp lines mean it’s not recoverable. It’s blown out. Once you apply a rec.709 conversion, it will blow out.

These are the recoverable highlights.

        This is the first thing you need to do to figure out what you are up against, and what should be your strategy.

Now let’s start going through the mistakes, starting with mistake number one, neglected highlights.

The first thing to do is to convert it to rec.709, which we will do by adding the rec.709 lut from Arri that is included in DaVinci Resolve.

Now that it’s applied you can see that the window is blown out.

        The next step a beginner would take would be to add some gamma to open up the image a bit more, then bring the lift down to keep the contrast. Then they’d add some saturation.

You can see in this image that the highlights weren’t touched. They were just neglected by the colorist.

        Now the second mistake a beginner colorist would make is to suppress their highlights. To show this, I am going to create another version and reset my node. So once the rec.709 lut is applied, they would freak out and pull their gain down a ton. Then they would lift their gamma and bring their lift down. Then they’d add saturation.

When you first look at this you’d think it looks good, but there’s so much of the image we are missing. The contrast is just gone, and you’re not taking advantage of the dynamic range. The highlights look a bit muddy and it doesn’t look graded at all.

        Now the third mistake that would be made is to qualify the highlights. This would be a bit more advanced of a colorist, but not advanced enough. The colorist would bring up the gamma, down on the lift and gain to keep the contrast good but open up the image a bit more. Then they’d add saturation.

        Now they’d think they knew a bit to recover highlights so they would go ahead and create a new node and qualify the highlights using the qualifier picker tool.

They’d look at this and think we are good and then they would take their gain and drop it.

It would look weird so then they would try to open it up a bit more and think it’s looking somewhat decent.

You can notice that little halo around the highlights and it is very noticeable and distracting.

        Okay so now onto the professional way to recover your highlights. I am going to stick with a very simple node tree and stick to the basics.

        Once we apply the lut to our image, we want to make our primary adjustments before the lut. Why? Because I want to borrow as much information as I can from our log image. Not what happened after applying the lut. What’s gone after applying the lut is gone. So in my primaries, I am going to raise my offset wheel to where my dude looks good. Then I am going to bring my lift down a bit to keep the contrast, then raise my gamma up a tiny bit. Then I want to bring my gain down a tiny bit.

        Now I am going to go after my lut node and go into my log wheels and pull down my shadows. I am going to open it up with my low range to keep my dude looking good.

        Now I am going to create a new node and add some saturation.

Now the best way to recover your highlights is to make sure that it is the first node in the node tree. In this node I am going to go into my qualifier and use my luminance qualifier to grab my highlights. Look at the softness in this qualification too.

Now we need to bring it down, but understand that these won’t be recovered. So I am going to bring down our gain pretty far. I am going to then start moving the gain wheel around until we start balancing out the color in the highlights.

Now our highlights are protected. If we have multiple shots in this scene, we can copy and paste this and the highlights will all look the same.

        Now let’s go ahead and look at all four versions of this image.

You can see that in the first one, the highlights are just blown out and don’t look good. The second one, the highlights look decent (not balanced though), but the contrast is off. So just look at these highlights and how our professional version is just so much more natural and controlled.

        Now I have the itch to just keep going with this image. So I am going to create another node and I am going to use my log wheels to perfect the skin. I am going to take my mid tone up and add some color and life into his skin.

        Now we are going to create another node and use our curves (with editable splines) to try and pop the image a bit more.

        Now because we have our highlight recovery node, we can bring our gain down a tiny bit to level out our highlights.

        Now to top it off, let’s add our grain. I am going to use 16mm archival print on it.

When building your looks, the foundation is the key. If your foundation is off, the rest of your grade won’t work. You have to have all the building blocks correct first, then you can build more on top of that.

Now let’s check this out in full screen.

        Now you can see how important it is to build a correct node tree. I hope you all learned something with this and can take this into your next project!

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