How to Create Vibrant Looks in DaVinci Resolve 17

What’s going on everyone, welcome to another epic video. This time we are going to be creating a Rom-Com look. There are a lot of little details you need to pay attention to or else it’ll look cheap. I will also be showing you a new technique that is brand new to DaVinci Resolve.

        We need to first analyze the image to see how we are going to achieve this look. The first thing is her yellow jacket/pants are too hot. We have to bring it down so that the focus stays on her face. You can also tell the image will be very saturated when we add our global saturation, which means we have to be selective where we want to put emphasis where we put the chroma values. Finally, we have to take everything in the middle/lower mids and lift them.

        Alright, let’s get into this. We are going to start by building our node tree.

Now I am going to start in my primaries node by cranking the contrast. Then I am going to raise the gamma up, then bring gain down. Then I want to bring in enough saturation to where her face looks good, but not too much saturation overall.

Now moving to the temperature and tint node and I am going to start pulling in the temperature to bring in the warmth. Then with my tint I am going to pull a bit of green into the image.

        Now in my saturation vs luminance tab, I am going to go into my saturation vs luminance and I am going to take my shadow areas and lift them up a little bit, then bring my brighter areas down a bit.

        Now moving into my red node, I am going to qualify the red channel and add a bit of denoise.

Then I am going to dial back on my saturation a bit.

        Now moving to my yellows I am going to qualify them and then open it up a bit.

Then I am going to bring my highlights down to take some of the sting out.

        Next I am going to go under my vignette and create a nice window around her and add a lot of softening, then invert it.

Once that is done I am going to go under my curves and aggressively bring it down.

        Then in my global adjustment I am going to go under my log wheels and pull down my shadows. I will then use my low range to control that to affect just the darkest parts.

        Now moving to our glow, I am going to drop it in and change the composite mode to softlight. Then I am going to open it up.

Now to restrict that, I am going to luminance qualify the image so that I am not getting those top highlights.

Just look at the difference it is making. These are the things you have to do to make your image pop. Remember I was saying you need to pull up the midtones, well we did it. This is the trickery that you need to do to sell the look.

        Finally we are going to add grain. This time I am going to go with 16mm Reversal for the preset, then I am going to add size and strength.

        One thing before we are done, I am going to add another node after the parallels, called pop. I am then going to turn on editable splines in my custom curves section and just bring the top up a bit to add that pop.

        There we go. We are done. Let’s check this look out in full screen.

        So as always, the way I build these looks, you guys know you can save it as a powergrade and apply it on the next project. But I hope you learned something from this tutorial!

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