What’s going on everyone! Welcome to another amazing tutorial. Now, context is king. What’s more important is making eye-catching images. That will not change. That is our primary job. I specifically picked this shot to have a level playing field. If it was done in a studio, the look would have been determined by the studio lighting.

Before we do anything, I want to introduce you to my three principles when grading a music video.

That may sound extreme, but that’s what you need to be a music video colorist. Now let’s dive into this.

Now this is the shot we are working with.

I’ve created a very simple node tree with a DaVinci Wide Gamut sandwich to convert it from log to rec.709. I’m not going to go over this because it gets repetitive and you can see the process in my previous videos.

Now getting more into the shot, it already looks really well balanced to me. Even the vectorscope is spot on, which means it’s pretty solid. This is a good starting point, so I am going to look at this and figure out what I want to do. Since this is for a music video, what does that mean? Music videos are usually pushed, over-the-top, and gritty. So if you want to get into this world, you have to respect that this is how it’s done. You need to do a similar thing, but in your own way.

This was shot in Morocco, so immediately I am thinking of warm tones. Plus warm tones are always well received.

What  I am going to do is be in my look node and I am going to use my gain and add warmth into the shot. Even though I like it, I am going to counteract it a bit with my lift and add some blue.

I like how everything is breathing, yet it doesn’t have the authority and pop I want.

Moving onto my next node, I am going to use my custom curves to get the contrast how I want it to look.

With this, I want to make sure to keep that music video pop. Things are always just kissing the edge. We get all this detail and pop into the image without losing any detail on the low or top ends.

You make think all these tutorials are the same, but that’s the wrong way to look at them. I am trying to show you that there are many different looks you can create. I mean let’s take shotdeck for example. When you type in daylight, look how many different looks you get.

The thing is there is a right way and wrong way to do things. Beginners tend to overlook the simple. For the look we have already, we used gain and lift. Two small changes that made a huge difference. There’s no color warper or OFX or whatever, people overcomplicate their grades because they think the pros do it. But you would be surprised when you listen to pro-colorists, to hear that their base grades are just lift, gamma, gain. Simple is key.

Now, we are going to start shaping some light. I want to put the focus on our talent. I’m going to add a vignette in node 4, and put it around our talent, then invert the selection.

We are going to keep the changes simple and simply just pull down the gamma wheel. We want to make this look realistic, but still dreamy.

We want to make it believable, but maximize the image.

Now what I want to do is use a great tool for working with people. That tool is glow. It really helps them pop. You can find it in the effects window. We will set the settings to these. We first want to set our composite to softlight, then bring our shine threshold back to the number in the photo. Then, we want to start messing with the gain and gamma sliders to make sure that it looks realistic. You’ll see the numbers in the photo, but play around with them. We will also pull back on our blend to make it less in-your-face.

Then moving back to our look node, we are going to drop our midtone detail.

This just smoothes skin, which helps make sure she looks flawless.

Now what can we do? Can we play on the colors in the image and maybe add more color contrast? Let’s add some teal into our lift, just to add some in the shadows.

I want to go back into the glow and raise the gamma and pull down the gain a bit, just to help our contrast out.

You are going to have to really play with these tools to get the desired look you want. I feel like glow does a great job of taking the colors and wrapping them around, but you have to play around with it.

Now no grade will be perfect or finished without some texture. So we are going to node number eight to add some halation. We are going to drop the Resolve halation effect onto the node. When you first drop it on, it’ll look awful. But don’t be afraid, we are going to drop back the threshold. Then we need to pull back the strength. Then we can tighten up the spread.

Now it looks very realistic and it has a really nice strong effect to it. Then I will go into the grain section and switch it on. At first it will be very heavy handed, so we will need to bring back all the sliders to about half.

One more thing we can do in our look node is go under our hue vs hue, grab our skin tones, and we can then move it up and down until we get to our desired color. We want to swing it up a bit to take out the yellows.

The last thing is I want to pull back our global saturation a bit because it’s a beautiful grade with a lot of class.

Then we can go under our hue vs luminance and we can click in the orange area and bring it down a bit, then same thing with the reds.

Then another tool we can use to have just a bit more granular control, is the mid tone wheel in our log wheels. This will help you pinpoint the green we are seeing to make a change to that specific area. We will swing it to magenta a bit more.

We did just a bit, but I feel like it’s all made the image better.

Now, let’s check this out in full screen!

If you noticed, we started broad and then we narrowed in and started massaging our footage into the world we wanted. And remember, work hard, get obsessed, and get possessed.