How to get the TENET look Part 2 | DaVinci Resolve 16 Tutorial

What is going on guys, welcome back to yet another awesome tutorial. Many of you have been asking for me to do more look recreations from this movie. This look is one of a kind. This is the modern “green and magenta.” This grade is going to be very easy to use from shot to shot.

    Alright, let’s start analyzing our reference image. We are going to start by looking at the scopes. If you see that the reds are lowest, the greens are next, and blues are highest, that’s giving us that teal/cyan color throughout the lower areas. In our midtones/highs, our blue is lower than our green and red, which is giving us this warmer yellow in the highs.

Now moving onto the anchors we have in the image. Starting with the blacks, they are very in your face, high contrast so that is something we will need to keep in mind. There is a huge dynamic range between highs and lows. There is a bunch of teal throughout the whole image, plus that yellow-green color throughout. There is also this off-white color in the image, which will be a huge factor in our look because both of the girls are wearing white shirts.

        Now moving to our shot, we need to pick a hero frame.

        Now let’s build out our node tree.

        Starting in our FPE node, we are going to go ahead and drop on our lut, which is the Kodak 2383 D55. This lut can be found in resolve.

Now obviously when you first drop it on, it looks nothing like what we want but that’s okay because this is just a base for the image.

        Moving to our primaries node, we are going to bring our gamma and gain up, then we want to take the saturation all the way to 100.

Then I want to warm it up a bit in my temperature, and with my tint I want to drop it a lot to get that green into the image.

We are already very much in that tenet look already, but we still need to dial them in.

        Moving to my exposure node, I am going to drop my shadows to try and match my black points. I do need to balance the shadows, so I want to pull out the red that is there.

        Now the skin tones are very out-of-whack, so we are going to go into our skin node and open up the hue vs hue curves. I am going to select the yellow channel and raise it up until her skin starts becoming that magenta color we want.

        Now we are going to move to our hue vs options and start again in our hue vs hue. We are going to take our cyan channel, raise it up a bit to start matching the cyan in the highlights of our reference image. Then I am going to take my green channel and bring it down.

        Now I want to move to my look adjustment node, turn on my editable splines (go under the three dots in the top right and it's in the drop down menu), and then I want to raise the top to match the pop.

Then, to get that final vibe in, I want to put a bit more blue into the image with my offset. Just a tiny pop.

 Real quick note, look how fast we were able to achieve this look. That goes to show that when you do the research, have the correct lut/base, and you attack it the right way, you set yourself up for success. We were able to create a complex look in about seven nodes.

        Now we are going to add our grain, starting with our base of 35mm 400T.

        Now we are seeing a bit of noise in her face, so we can add some noise reduction if we want. Here are the specs

Noise reduction is why getting the paid version of DaVinci Resolve is 100% worth it.

        And that’s a wrap, let’s check out the final look in full screen.

        I hope you guys had a blast recreating this look! But most importantly, I hope these kinds of tutorials help you understand that having a gameplan and attacking the image in the right way will set you up for success. These looks are hard, but sometimes going simple is all you need.

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