What’s going on everyone! Welcome back to yet another epic tutorial! Today we are going over the tool that will make it IMPOSSIBLE for you to not upgrade to DR18…and it’s not what you think!

        We are going to be working on a few different shots, to do a few different things with this tool. But you might want to know which tool it is, right? Well it’s the depth map tool. Now let me be honest. With Resolve 18, the jump is not as significant as Resolve 16 to 17. That was a HUGE leap. With DR18, it’s more like an inbetween upgrade, but this tool gets me excited. I can’t wait for the full version (not just the beta) because one of the issues with this is that it chugs. It struggles regardless of the machine you are on.

        Now starting with the first shot, we need to first bring out our subject. He’s backlit and we want to light him better.

The best way to use this tool, is to not use it on a serial node, but instead, to drop it into the node tree.

As soon as you drop it on, it creates a really clean matte. Now it’s using Resolve’s neural engine (AI) to do a good job separating the foreground from the background. But we also have a lot of tools to fix everything if we need to. Which we do because it is selecting a bit of the background.

So what I am going to do is select the adjust map levels and start playing around with the parameters. I am going to move the far limits to the right a bit to give me what I want. Then if I move the near limit to the right, it’ll select more of my dude.

Then I want to select post-processing and it just kills it.

        Now that we’ve done this, we can turn off the depth map preview. Now we can create a serial node, and feed the key data from the depth map to the new node.

Then you can see in the node key that it will only affect our depth map.

        So now I want to start making changes in that serial node. I want to start cranking up my shadows first. Then I want to crank the midtone detail a bit to add some strong features to my subject. Then I want to make some color changes. I want to use my log wheels and add some magenta/warmth to his skin. Then I want to add a bit of red to the midtones.

This is looking really nice already. But I also want to use my lift to bring it down a bit, just to keep that nice contrast. Then I want to add a bit of warmth into the skin through my gain, but also to brighten it up a bit.

        Just look at how much that helped the image. And all we did was affect our subject. We didn’t touch the sky at all behind him. So this was the first implementation of this tool.

        Now I want to go to my second shot and all I want to do is clean up their skin a bit and then select the background and mess with that too.

So how do we do that? We will use our depth map again. So drop it on, select adjust map levels and then we are going to close in the far limit, and keep pulling back our near limit to get it how we want. Then I want to select isolation to really cut it in tight. Then turn on post-processing as well to help the effect even more.

Now this looks perfect so what I am going to do is create a serial node with a layer mixer. What I am going to do is take the key output to both of the nodes.

In the bottom node, we want to select our subject.

Then I want to take the gain and bring it up a bit to pull them out a bit. Now I want to subtract midtone detail from it a bit to fix their faces. I will exaggerate it for YouTube though. Then I want to add some contrast. Not a ton, but just a bit.

That’s another way to use this tool. But the beauty of the layer mixer node is that in the top node, we can swap our key to hit the background.

So now we are only selecting the background. Then I want to add some magenta to the background using our printer lights. Then I want to use the highlights wheel in my log wheels to pull down the highlights to keep from clipping.

Just look at what we were able to do, with no qualifiers, no keys, nothing. Just this one simple tool.

        Now I want to use this third example to warm up the background like it’s early morning and then contrast that with cooler tones in the shadow area.

So what I’m going to do is use my depth map again and set the parameters to this.

Now we are going to make changes to see how it looks. I am again going to create a serial and a layer mixer and feed the depth map into both of them.

        Now I want to invert it so that we can select the background.

Now that I’m seeing it, I want to remove some far limit so that I can select less of her face. And I want to take the near limit back a bit.

Now I want to start making changes. I am going to start in the bottom layer node, and start by pulling my gain down a bit. Then I want to add a bit of warmth.

        Then I want to go into the top layer node and invert the key in our node key.

Then I want to add some cyan using our lift.

This would be another use of this tool. You can obviously make more changes to the image, but this is what I wanted to show you all. This is just a different way to mix and match tools to create different looks.

        Now hopefully this made sense. I encourage reading through this again and implementing it in your workflow. Just mess around with it and try it out on your own projects to see how it works. There are unlimited possibilities with this.

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