How to Color Grade like Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker | DaVinci Resolve 16 Tutorial
What’s going on everyone. In this tutorial we are going to be recreating the Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker look.
Let’s first start by analyzing our Star Wars shot. The first thing I am going to do is pop in my color palette effect. From this, we can see the color scheme they have going on is analogous. It stays more in the orange/yellow color space than any. The whites are more off-white, not really a pure white.
Now let’s see what the scopes are telling us. If you look at where the greens are, that’s what is creating that sky. The reds and blues are below the greens.
If you look at the contrast, it’s not really pushed much.
The shot I chose won’t be easy to recreate this look because they are nothing alike, but I thought it would be a good example. I won’t be using my traditional node tree because this needs to be broken down differently, but you can mix the nodes and change things up. We want to start with these four nodes.
Starting in our exposure node, we want to bring the contrast up just a bit. It doesn’t need to be too pushed. Next, in our balance node, we will be bringing in saturation to about 65ish or 70ish. This node is going to take care of deleting the blue cast that is in the image. The best way to do that is with the gamma wheel. I am going to pull it in the opposite direction of the blue. Next, I am going to go into my lift and bring up that undertone of green we are seeing and then go into my gain and pull out some of the blue. Now let’s go into our look node and try and grab the yellow in our image. Go to color -> presets -> yellow.
You may have to move it around to make the key better, but this will work for us. Now, take gamma and gain at the same time towards yellow/orange.
Add a little bit of contrast and pivot to put us into the ballpark. Now we need to work with the image, adding both green and yellow to try and match the ground to our reference image. Sometimes, like in this shot, you need to play around with the wheels, moving parameters around to get it in the ballpark. Once that is done, we will want to mask out her face with a power window so that the changes affect everything but her skin. Track that power window. Staying in the same node, create a parallel node so that we can blend everything in. In this new parallel node, we are going to pick her skin by going to our color -> preset -> red.
We want to pull out some saturation. Then going into hue vs hue and select both yellow and red, and work them until they get into the same space as our reference image.
Then go into hue vs saturation and pull down the saturation a bit from the yellows and reds.
Finally, add some exposure into her face using gamma. Now, let’s create another parallel node to try and pick out the sky and getting it to match the reference. To pick out the sky, we want to take our bottom qualifier and bring the low soft to 4.4 and start pulling the low towards the right to grab just the sky.
We will need to use power windows to keep the highlights on the windshield out of our changes.
Next, we need to bring the exposure of the highlights up using our gain and highlights sliders. To match the colors in the skies we need to use the gain and gamma wheels to bring in yellow and green. Also, pull-out saturation as needed.
If we go into our look adjustment, we can move our saturation up or down to match, but also move our offset wheel around to see if we can use a global adjustment to help get us into the ballpark.
Now that our look is done, we need to create our three last nodes: sharpen, grain, and global adjustment.
As always, we will do .47 on our sharpening, 35 400T (with bringing up our grain strength) for our film grain.
There we go! It is done. I hope you guys had a blast learning how to match this grade!
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