How to Color Grade like The Jungle Book | DaVinci Resolve 16 Tutorial

      Hello and welcome to this tutorial! Today we will be recreating two different looks from the Jungle Book movie.

Before we start grading, we first need to analyze the shot. The first shot we are recreating is so dark and so desaturated, which allows for that moody emotion to shine through. One thing I am noticing is that there are more reds in the shadows than greens or blues and the whites are also somewhat balanced.

Now we can start grading. Let’s create our node tree.

Starting in our primaries node, we are going to add a little bit of contrast. We want to use our lift, gamma, and gain to get it in the ballpark. We need to bring down the lift and gain wheels to add more cyan and bringing my gamma up towards orange and red to pop out the skin. Next, we want to go into our hue vs sat to pull down the saturation on both the yellow and green.

This will make it easier to get us in the ballpark in our look node.

Now we are going to start creating the look using our layer mixer nodes. The best way to get us into the ballpark is by using offset. Starting in our top node of the layer mixer trio (making sure nodes five and six are disabled), we want to bring our offset and gamma down towards blue/cyan. Also bring the saturation down as needed to help get the same color as our reference.

Once that is done, we are going to go into the fifth node, activate it, and start to key out the darker brown parts of his skin. For this example, we will need to mask out his skin. We want to bring a bit of saturation out of his skin, and we are going to use this by taking down the color boost by about 6.

I don’t recommend this approach if you are grading a narrative, but if it’s a 30-clip spot, then it could be an option.

Now activate the sixth node and key out the brighter parts of his skin. Copy and paste the mask of his skin that we did in the fifth node. Now that we’ve gotten the keys of his skin pulled, we will need to blend in the blue so that it matches the reference image. Keep it to about .7.

Moving on to our look adjustment node, we will move the offset wheel around a bit just to see if we can globally get us into the ballpark. We also want to go into our LOG wheels to dial in the black points a bit more. The main problem now, is how bright it is compared to the reference still. To mitigate that, we want to go into our curves and pull down on the highlight knuckle.

For our contrast node, we want to take the shadows up a bit to bring the contrast more towards our reference image. We will also dial up the saturation a bit. My focus is matching the brightest part of the image. Next, I am going to add that film grain that I like.

        And that’s it! We have done the first look. Now onto our second.

Moving onto our second look, this is going to be very interesting because it will be without any keys so that it can be used on the entire film. That way all you have to do is make micro-adjustments on a per clip basis. This is very popular for feature films.

        As always, we are going to start by analyzing the shot. This will be a lot easier to get to. The reds are a bit lifted, blues are a bit crushed, but otherwise it’s balanced, though slightly shifted towards reds and yellows.

Okay, it is time to start grading. Let’s start by creating our node tree.

Starting with our primaries, we are going to bring up our contrast. Don’t be shy, as the reference has a lot of contrast. We will also bring our low range and shadow down to match the reference, but that’s about it. Moving to our balance node we are going to try and get these colors looking better. We are going to move our gamma and gain towards that red/yellow space on the wheels.

On the creative LUT node, we will be using a LUT from impulse, under their rec.709 generic LUTs. The LUT is the 5207 Kodak Vision 3.

Even though this node got us close, we do need to match the images a bit more. Switching over to the RGB curves node, we are going to bring our shadows down by bringing the low range down to about .190 and dropping the shadows. Moving to the curves section, we are going to break the chain and select the blue channel and drop the highlight knuckle down to add more yellow and remove blue.

Then we are going to go under hue vs hue and bring up our green quite a bit, and the yellow just a bit.

Now even though the look is done, I am going to do a little extra credit thing. I am going to go into the FX and add light rays.

I will also use a power window to control the light to make it look realistic.

In my curves, I will bring the highlight knuckle down to remove some intensity.

Now that we are done, we are going to add our sharpening to .47 like we usually do and add the same film grain we did in the other Jungle Book.

Last, we will add that noise reduction sauce.

Just a quick thing, my whole goal with you guys is to learn ways to do things that are not just applicable to one shot by entire scenes, or projects. I also want to make you aware of all the tools so you can tackle anything. With that being said, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial!

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