Hello and welcome back to another awesome tutorial. Today we have a beautiful recreation from Knives Out. This was done by photochem and they are just fantastic in what they do.

        Let’s start by analyzing our reference. Start by dropping on the color palette to see the richness in the color.

        Now our shot was done on a GH5. We are going from an Alexa 65 (Knives Out), to a cheap camera. Let’s go! We need to pick our hero frame first.

Now let’s build out our node tree before we get started.

        First things first, I am going to start by using resolve’s built in LUT so that you all can be able to recreate this. We want to select the Kodak 2383 D65.

        I am going to go into my skin node, I am going to qualify his skin. It will need to be adjusted.

Then we are going to create a power window to restrict the selection to just our guy.

Now I am going to bring my gamma into that brown/red color space. Then I am going to take my gain in the opposite direction to add the cool tones into the skin.

        Now moving to my background node, I want to dial in the blacks. I am going to use my shadow slider in the log wheels to bring down those blacks.

        Then going into my highlights I am going to use my luminance slider to select just the highlights in the skin.

Now all I want to do is take my offset towards the cool tones.

In my look adjustment I really want to do this heavy push and pull. I want to use the lift, gamma, gain color wheels to push it and get this color separation. I am going to take my lift down towards the cooler tones, then bring my gamma towards the warm color space. With my gain, I am going to bring in the cooler tones.

        Now moving to my eighth node, I want to start playing with the saturation of colors. Starting with my red, I am going to slightly move it. But it is affecting the skin so I am going to send it to the skin node, and invert the key so that it does not affect the skin.

Now in the hue vs hue I am going to mess with our yellows to add some warmth. However it is affecting the female’s sweater, so what I am going to do is select our picker tool, and click on her sweater, then bring the hue down to 0.

Moving to our next node, we are going to use our hue vs saturation. I want to bring everything down, just a tiny bit. Now we do want to connect it to our skin node again, so that the skin stays the same.

In our next node, we want to go into our hue vs luminance. In film, there is so much depth in colors. That comes from being able to control your luminance of the colors. Just look at the next two pictures and see the change that’s brought on by just bringing down the luminance in the reds.

The skin became a lot more rich.

Then to help with our specular highlights and the overall feel, I want to go ahead and raise the yellow knob up a bit.

 Now I am going to create another node.

Now all of these past four nodes could be all in one, and I would do that when I grade a commercial or something, but I wanted to spell this out for you all so that you can see it in a more step-by-step manner.

In this new node, I am going to use this as a global adjustment to work on the contrast. I am going to go into my RGB curves and raise the bottom a bit, then click a bit higher and bring it down. Then I am going to pick it from the top and raise it a bit.

Now I am going to go into my log wheels and try to add some more warmth because the blue channel was a bit lifted.

        Moving back into our node prior, I am going to go into saturation vs saturation and bring down the top knuckle.

        I want to go back into my look adjustment and mess with the parameters just a tiny bit.

        Now moving back into the skin node, I want to bring up the gamma to deepen the color.

Now moving back into the tenth node, I am going to mess with my hue vs saturation. I will bring the red down a tiny bit, then bring up the yellow a hair.

        Now, moving to our sharpen node, we are going to need to add a good amount of sharpening to match how sharp our reference is.

        Then we are going to add film grain, starting at the base of 300mm 400T.

        Then we are going to add some deflicker that will take away the flicker in the lights.

        I am noticing that my shadows are a bit too saturated, so I am going to go into my luminance vs saturation and pull down on the shadows.

These are the little nuances that you have to do to dial in that look.

        Man, this look is awesome and the fact that it was shot on a GH5 just goes to show that it’s not about the camera if you have the time, patience, and skill. Let’s take a look at this beautiful look in full screen.

I hope you guys had a blast and c’mon. A thousand dollar camera? So look at what we were able to create with just the tools in resolve. So work hard, get obsessed and get possesed and I will see you in the next one!

MORE LIKE THIS