Juice it Up | Commercial vs. Film Grading | DaVinci Resolve 16 Tutorial

      What’s going on guys, it’s Qazi here with another tutorial. Today I am going to be explaining/showing the difference between a commercial look and a film look. So get out your pen and paper and let’s dive right in.

        Our first look is going to be our rec.709 look/natural look. Don’t over complicate it and remember time is money. You will know which camera this was shot with, so in node 2, drop in the rec.709 conversion LUT for the specific camera.

Now the reason I have a node prior to the LUT, is for the primary adjustments. You want to make all the primary adjustments before the LUT for the cleanest look. To start with our primaries I want to drop the offset just a bit, and bring up the saturation a touch.

With this, a little tip, if it is shot well, this may be all you need. Sometimes just correcting and throwing on a rec.709 LUT can really bring out the depth and beauty that is needed.

        Our next look is going to be our commercial look. I am creating a separate version so we can compare all the looks at the end. Now reset our node tree and let’s begin again.

With a commercial you can really take your time and qualify, create windows, really massage the image. You are only working on 15-20 shots, so you can take your time.

Let’s build out our node tree.

I am going to start off with my exposure by adding contrast. One thing to keep in mind is not too much. In a commercial look, you want all the detail. Now I am going to bring my gain down to get the detail in the highlights. I want to bring up my gamma and bring the lift down.

        Next we are going to move onto our saturation node and just crank the saturation. Especially if it is a commercial, crank it.

Our goal as a colorist is to make things look better than in real life and saturation makes the stuff pop.

        We needed the separation that saturation brings so that we can have the cleanest key on her skin. Now let’s go into our qualifier and try to qualify her skin. We will really have to play with it and finesse it to make it perfect.

Now we want to give her skin some juice by moving up our gamma and gain.

If the qualification is bugging you, you can create a power window around her so that you can control it a bit more.

Now we are switching to our dark grass node, and like our skin node we are going to qualify and finesse the darker grass until we have a perfect key.

Now the stands don’t bother me, but we will create a window anyway just to go the extra mile.

Now we are going to take our gain and start adding green. The reason I am doing this is that it really helps pop out the skin more and compliment her skin.

Now I am moving into my light grass node and I am going to qualify the grass here and finesse it to make the key as clean as possible.

Now I am going to go into my gain and add warmth. I am trying to create that drama to contrast with the darker green grass.

In our eighth node I want to add some depth into our image and what I am going to do is go into hue vs luminance and just pull it down. It is pulling the yellow down too much, so I am going to create a point and bring up the yellow.

Now moving onto our sky, I am going to qualify it by selecting only the luminance value.

Now I am going to move our gain more towards the cyan to give it a nice, pleasant warm tone.

Now if we go into our look adjustment node we are going to move our offset around a bit to see if we like any specific area. I am going to leave this node untouched just because everything is looking perfect.

        Next we are going to move into our vignette node and create a wide, soft window around her. We will also invert our selection so it will affect the areas around her.

I am going to go into our curves and select it around the middle and pull it down.

Then I want to go into my outside node and push this image to make it pop. I want it to jump off the page. I am going to click on my editable splines and bring up the top portion.

Next I am going to go into my global adjustment, and with editable splines on, I am going to pull up on the top portion of it to give it a bit more pop.

Then I am going to go into our sharpening tab and add our standard 0.47 selection.

Now our final step is to add some noise reduction to make the image as perfect as we possibly can.

        Now let’s check out the full grade in full screen.

Okay, let’s create another version and reset the node tree to start our film grade. Now let’s get our node tree done.

 The inherent difference between commercial and film is that with film, you want to create a look DNA because you have tons more shots and way less time than you would on a commercial.

        Starting with our grade, we are gonna raise up our contrast. Then we are going to pull down on our gain and lift, but pull up on our gamma a bit as well. Finally, we are going to crank our saturation to 100.

Next I am going to go under my layer mixer and choose composite mode -> softlight.

Going under our look node, I want to dial back the saturation all the way to 0. Because it is a layer mixer, it won’t kill all the saturation. Next, I want to dial back on the contrast. We are going for a film look, so we want the creamy look.

Next I am going into my look node and starting by qualifying her skin. It will need to be finessed a bit, but just work the parameters until you get a good key and then blur it.

Then I want to take my gamma and gain and start raising the color wheels on them towards orange/red. Then I want to take them and lift them a bit to add some exposure to her skin.

Now I am going to go under my look adjustment and this is where the real look will take place. I am going to go under my RGB curves, unlink them and I am going to pull my blue channel down from the top, but bring it back in the middle to save her skin tones. Then I am going to take the red channel from the top, and move it to the left.

Now I want to turn my luminance mix to 0 and go into my primaries bars. Starting with the gamma, I want to pull my red and blue down a bit, then go into my gain and lift my red up a bit and take my blue in the gain down. Then I am going to come into my lift and bring down the green channel a bit to add magenta, and then take some red out on the lift.

Then I want to go into my global adjustment to lift up the contrast a bit more. To do this I am going to bring my gain down and bringing my lift and gamma up, then going into my LOG wheels and pulling the shadows down. I will be shifting my low range to make sure I control what I adjust. My final adjustment is to add some contrast.

        Then, moving into our glow node, I am going to add glow by moving my midtone detail down to -30.

         Then in our grain node we are going to drop in our grain.

Alright, we are done with all three looks. Let’s go ahead and take a look at all of our versions to see which one we like best, but also just to compare.

What I hope you see is how beneficial it is to approach each look and how each look is achieved. The beauty with color grading is when you keep adding to the image, it can change in awesome ways.

        With that, we wrapped these grades! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and be ready for the next one!

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