Pro Colorist take on Resolve’s New HALATION OFX! | Color Grading Tutorial

        What’s going on everyone! Welcome back to yet another epic tutorial. Today we are going to be showing you our take on the new halation OFX in DaVinci Resolve. While this new tool doesn’t do one thing amazingly, it does a lot of stuff well and helps simplify a formerly complex node tree to stack several different effects, can now be handled in one node. So does the versatility and functionality of this new plugin make up for the fact that I think some of these results can be better achieved by some third party plugins and some manual labor using Resolve’s tools? Let’s dive in and find out.

        Diving right in, we are going to check out our clip.

        Now the reason I chose this clip is it’s first off, very interesting. There is a lot of depth to the image. But two, it's got some serious contrast in luminance with this harsh keylight behind our subject and these shadows in the helmet, which will give us some good halation (as though it was shot on film). To get this set up, I am going to lay out a node tree that will be simple.

        Now, starting in the first node, we are going to do our ACES in conversion.

        Then moving to our third node, we are going to do our ACES out transform.

        Now we will be working within ACES (as you can see the halation node between the conversion). The reason for that is it gives us a lot of room to work with and that’s just a practice you want to work in. You want to work in the least restrictive color space for your grading.

        Now even though it’s already REC.709, the reason I am applying this CST and the film LUT after the conversion, is that the film LUT is a REC.709 LUT. So in our CST, we are going to convert it to a cineon film log space.

This is going to allow our film LUT to receive the proper input so that the film LUT applies properly and sends everything back to REC.709. The LUT we will be using is the Kodak 2383 D60 version.

Now it is important to know all of this because you want the order of operations done correctly, so that everything will apply properly. If you understand the why, you will be able to get much more meaningful experiments.

        With that being said, we are now going to bring that halation OFX into our node tree and set our processing color space to ACES (AP1).

Now that’s important because the halation tool is color space aware, as long as you tell it what color space you are working in. You want this to look as realistic as possible, which is why you tell it which color space it is. Now, we are going to go over all the tools in this OFX. Ironically, halation is the only tool I don’t use in this plugin, but we will go over that in a bit. Starting in dye layer reflections, we have strength, gamma, saturation, and spread. Pretty simple. If we add strength to the image, the red halation border around the edges will get stronger and stronger.

Then when you pull the gamma down, you’ll see that red go away. It’s kind of like the contrast that it’s using to analyze where that halation should be.

Then if we turn the gamma all the way up, you can see it’s a bit strong.

Ideally I leave it as it is, or pull it back a bit. Then we have the saturation, which is just the saturation of the halation being added. I usually use about .600 or .700.

Then you have spread. How much spread will there be. You can even fine tune that spread.

Those are the settings I generally like to use. Then moving to the isolation tab, threshold, it’s just a starting and stopping point of when the effect is starting to take place, based on luminance. When you check the view isolated regions button, you can see where it will be affecting.

If you increase the threshold, you can actually select nothing.

I do usually leave that threshold as is, because it does a pretty good job. Then next up is our secondary glow. This is another tool I don’t like to use too much. If you want to add some bloominess to the highlights, you can do that with this tool. But I do recommend increasing the spread, and reducing the gamma.

        Now my favorite tool in this is the basic grain. So we are going to append that, and adjust parameters. I will bring back my strength, and bring the size down. Then when you examine film negatives, you can see that there actually is color to the grain, so I increase the saturation.

This does look pretty good. You can start to see more realistic grain.

        Lastly we have the global adjustments and global blend. For the global adjustments you can reduce some of that artifacting that I am not a fan of over to the side of the subject. You do this by increasing the reduce highlight slider. But then you can also kill some of the halation effect. So I generally keep that at .500. Then moving to the aspect ratio, I love this tool. When it’s at 1.000, the grain looks normal. But if you increase it to 2.000, it makes it look like it was shot on anamorphic, then de-squeezed.

This just helps you get more of a realistic film look and helps you customize the halation even more. Then the last tool is detail loss. This comes in handy because film is not sharp, but modern digital cameras are. So by increasing this slider, you can help soften it out.

Then obviously the global blend just reduces the harshness of the effect over the whole image. However I will leave that as is.

        So now I want to talk about the placement of the halation node, and why it comes after the ACES transform node. If I am working on a real world project, I want to minimize the amount of steps I have to take. Then one other thing I would do if I was working on a real project, is I would convert this to a shared node.

This then makes it so that whenever I make a change to this specific node, it changes wherever the shared node is applied. Now the reason this works so well is that our processing space is ACES (AP1), so now we can paste this grade on another clip that was shot on, let’s say Arri Alexa, all we’d have to do is change the ACES input to Arri Alexa. This will help us with shot matching, but also help the rest of the grade apply properly. It doesn’t matter what camera footage is being used, because we have converted it to ACEScct already. The effects will apply very similarly across cameras and settings. This just helps us make fewer tweaks and makes sure everything matches up as it should.

        Now lastly, I want to talk about some of the alternative solutions. So I am going to add a node after the halation, and throw on Dehancer. Here we will set our source to ACEScct (AP1), and disable all the print stocks and film grain. All we want is the halation. To increase it, we will bring up both our local and global diffusion.

So the dehancer halation doesn’t look bad, the only problem is that when you hit play, it struggles to get full speed playback, even on my machine (which is very powerful).

        Now I want to show you my favorite way to add halation. I have mentioned this before and I actually have it done already, so I will click and drag onto the clip.

Now I’m not going to dive into that as this is more about the actual halation tool.

        Now those are my thoughts on the tool. I am not the biggest fan of how it looks, even though it is called halation. I like to build my own halation and have a bit more control so that I know fully what is going on there. But let’s check out the final look with the tool.

        Alright, that wraps up another color grading basics tutorial on the channel. With that, work hard, get obsessed, and get possessed.

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