Qazi & Co • Color Grading Studio

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How to get the Blade Runner 2049 look | DaVinci Resolve 16 Tutorial

      What’s going on guys. Welcome to another popular movie look. Many of you asked for this specific movie. Once you watch how I break it down, it’ll be a breeze.

But enough talk, let’s get into this. Let’s first analyze our image. Let’s pop in that color palette.

There are no true black points or highlights. Nothing is pure white or black. It’s living in the middle. This whole image is gentle, but so stylized. That’s the beauty.

Once you understand the intention and purpose, go for it. Eventually it can become legendary.

Obviously our shot is completely different from this image. It was shot on RED, so I am going to change our camera metadata.

This gives us the most amount of data in our image.

        Now that it’s set to go, let’s create our node tree.

        Alright, let’s start grading. Starting on our first node, we are going to crank our contrast, and bring down our pivot.

Moving on from our exposure node to our saturation node. I am going to do something interesting. I am going to go under my RGB mixer and turn on monochrome.

We really don’t need any other color since there is mainly just one color. This will just help me get there faster.

        Moving onto our look creation, I am going to really push my offset to get us into that world. Then I am going to go into my gain and pull it towards the yellow side, like in our reference. It is also too bright, so we are going to go into our gain and pull it down. We can also pull our high soft down (under RGB curves) just a little bit.

This is already looking pretty good.

        Now I am going to go under my window and create a window around the trees. Then I want to really soften it, as well as invert it.

Then I want to go under my primaries bars and take down just the luminance channel on my gain.

        Now I am going to create a parallel node. In this I will make a power window.

Now I am going to start raising my gain to create the shape they have in their scopes. Along with that, I want to add some more yellow into it.

Now I want to go ahead and qualify out the shadows so that it will not grab the trees.

Now I am going to create a third parallel and do the opposite. I am going to create a power window around the trees, and then soften it.

Then I am going to go into my qualifier and grab only the darker areas.

Now we can inject more contrast to get it closer to our reference image.

        Then I am going to create a look adjustment node and qualify just the darker parts of the image.

Right now our vectorscope doesn’t have the same curve as our reference. This is because we haven’t desaturated our dark points. So we are going to go into our saturation and pull it down. I am also going to dial back on my contrast.

I am going to reset the saturation and instead lift up my lift a bit, then also bring it up towards the orange/yellow color space, to inject that into the shadows of my image.

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

        I hope you guys had a blast and you saw how many intricate things we had to do to get it in the ballpark!


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