How To COLOR CORRECT Footage In DaVinci Resolve FAST
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How To COLOR CORRECT Footage In DaVinci Resolve FAST - In this video, Will teaches you how to color correct footage fast inside DaVinci Resolve. He'll walk you through all the steps he uses to correct he color of footage with several examples.
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In this video, I'm going to teach you how to color correct your footage quickly so that you end up with correctly colored footage every time. Now, this is not an advanced tutorial where we dive deep on how to color grade. If you're looking for that, I have a longer color grading tutorial on this channel. In this one, I'm going to walk you through a bunch of the settings that I do for every edit to quickly get my footage balanced.
If you're new here, we have over 200 videography-related videos, so lots of content for you to learn from. And if you want to know any of the music or the gear we use to make our videos, you can find all links in the description.
Let's jump in. As I mentioned, this tutorial is to help you get really quick color correction done. Maybe you're on a tight deadline and you just want your clips to look good. So that's what we're doing today. Let's get started. The main concept behind color correction is you want to correct your footage so that the color looks good or correct. Before I start, I just kind of watch my footage back, and that gives me an example of the various colors in the footage.
This is from British Columbia, uh, this is all BC footage. There's going to be a lot of greens and blues, you know, forest, nature, natural colors, and that should be kept within the final color correction. We want things to look natural, as they should in nature, and we want to help out the footage just a little bit by maybe bringing up some of the shadowed darker spots, bringing down and controlling some of the highlights, and maybe adding a little bit of vibrance or saturation, but nothing too strong.
Again, color correction is just to get your footage looking like it should, and color grading is when you actually apply a certain look or style to your footage.
Alright, so let's go back to our first clip here. If you're really tight on time, you can literally, in the color tab, just go down to where the A is, and you'll see that this is for auto balance. If you click this, as you can see, it automatically will color correct your footage, and generally, I think this does a pretty good job. Especially if you're just looking for a one-click result, this can be sort of a passing grade, so to speak.
But I tend to not really use the auto balance button because there's a couple of things that I don't like about it. One is, like I said, it doesn't do a perfect job—the results are sort of average, and it tends to create some shadowy darker spots. Two, it doesn't actually change any of the numbers down here or show you any of the changes that it chose to make during the auto balance process. I wish it did, because then I could pull things back or boost shadows or whatever I wanted to after it did its thing. So, hopefully, they do change that in the future. That would be a nice improvement.
I'm going to undo that change, and I'll show you instead what I typically do to quickly color correct footage. So down here, beside the auto balance, is the color picker. This is the white balance color picker. With that selected, the goal is to try to find a spot in your footage that is white. This is typically your first step in color correcting footage—you’re going to try to get your whites to look white, and that helps push all the colors in your footage into a direction of where they should be.
So, over here in the white caps in the rushing water, I think that's a good spot for white. Naturally, this will have a little bit of greeny blue in it, and that changed the temperature to 339 with a tint of 10.75. From there, you can actually click on the temp and go left and right to fine-adjust it. I'm going to back that off a bit to about 220 or so, and that's just based on my taste and what I prefer. Whatever you end up on is mostly subjective.
After I change my white balance, the next thing I do is look at the shadows in the footage. Right away, I can see that all of this section here is too dark. So, let's go down here into the shadows, and we will increase that. Around 30 is good. Normally, you have to play around with the highlights after you adjust the shadows. Let's go up and down, and I think around 34 is good. This way, we have a little bit more details in the shadows, and we've made some of the white caps in the water pop a little more because they're a brighter white now. The lighter colors in the rocks also are popping a bit more.
The next stage I do is pump a little bit of saturation. It used to be 50, so now it is 57. Because this footage has quite a bit of natural colors in it, it might be good to also boost a bit more of that color. There is a color boost section here, and I wouldn't go too much with this, but 10 is pretty good.
Once those steps are done, I hone in on individual colors in each clip. For example, this one has this sort of aqua color and the green, and we can control those a little more in our gamma section. You can treat the lift as your shadows, gamma as mids, and gain as highs. We'll go into the gamma, and we'll grab the middle section here. I brought it just a little bit further down in between where the blue meets the green to emphasize the color of the water and the trees.
Now, as a final step, you can play around with the contrast. But keep in mind, you can drastically change the look of your clip with the contrast. You can make it pretty dramatic or washed out just by changing this a little bit, and you can quickly get into the range of more color grading as opposed to what we're trying to do here, which is color correction. You can see if I push it a little further, it gets pretty dramatic—more of a Hollywood film look. If you go the other way, the footage looks a little older, maybe like it was shot on an older camera and it's a little more washed out. I normally add just a little bit of contrast.
So, for very quick color correction, I would say that is done. If you wanted to go more in-depth, of course, you could go to the curves or the color warper or the qualifier.
Now, one thing I would highly suggest when color correcting or color grading is to work off a good monitor. As you may have seen in a previous video of mine, I'm using the LG 5K 2K monitor. A lot of you have said you've gone ahead and purchased it after I recommended it, and that you've loved it. I personally have been using it for over a year now, and it is amazing. One of the main reasons I love this monitor is because it's 10-bit, meaning it's capable of showing significantly more colors than the average monitor. When working with that footage in an editing program like DaVinci, I'm actually able to work with and see that 10-bit footage.
Here’s the monitor and desk mount I use:
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I've left a link to that monitor in the description if you want to pick out the exact one that I have. If you're doing any professional work, you know, you're getting paid to do video editing, you want to obviously get something that will make your job easier and more accurate.
Now I'll go through the rest of the clips, and I'll show you how quickly I normally get it done in real time. In this one, since there isn't much white, what I like to do sometimes is I will hit the auto balance, and this will give me an idea of what it's trying to do. It made it very bright, and then I will undo it. That'll give me sort of an idea where to start. I'll change the temperature manually, without selecting a white balance. I'll push it toward the orange a little bit and the tint slightly toward the green. That's just because there's quite a bit of green in the footage.
We go to the shadows, go to the highlights, increase those, bump the saturation, and give it a little color boost. This time, if we go toward the green, it'll start making the bird look green, and I don't think that's a good look. So instead, we'll go sort of away from the green and then cycle back just a little bit, maybe a little bit more to the reddish yellows. I think for this one, we'll take away a little bit of the contrast, we'll go up with the gain, and also for the color boost, I think we'll go a little more with that.
I think that's pretty good, and we can check the before and after by going up to this little symbol here that shows the stars and the colors. That's how it was before, and that's after, so quite a big difference.
This one is the first one where we don't have much green, so we'll just keep that in mind. But we do have some white here in the palm, and that brought our temperature to -44, which is a little different. I'm actually not really a fan of making this clip more cold or blue, so just like our last clip, I think I'm actually going to go to the orange side. Then we'll boost the shadows, boost the highlights, saturation, and color boost.
Now, because this is a pretty dark red, I think I'm going to pull the lift away from the red just so the red is a little less dominant. Then, for the gamma, once again, I think going a little bit toward the yellow and the reds helps the tones of the feathers pop just a bit by taking a bit of the natural sort of green hues that show up in the lighter parts out of the feathers.
We'll add some contrast, and then I think I'll go up a little bit more with the gain here. All right, and then we can check the before and after.
All right, next we have a clip of quite a lot of water, and we can probably get some really great tones out of this one. So, let's once again choose our white balance. We'll choose white—that pushed it quite a bit orange, so I think that's a little too much considering the colder side is where we'll get a lot of that blue color. So, let's roll that back to get a lot more of those blues—around -100, I think, is fine. Then, for shadows, we'll pump those a bit.
For highlights, because the clip is a little bit washed out at the top because there was some fog on that day, I think it's important to not go too high with the highlights on this clip. Next, we'll go up with saturation, and because we really want to emphasize that blue, we'll go up a little more—about 65, maybe 70 is about the max. In fact, I think I'll actually go back to about 60 and then use the color boost as the image will be a little cleaner going that way.
All right, next, some contrast, and we'll increase the gain. For the aqua bluish-green color, we can go with the highlight area, the gain, and go into the blue and sort of pump that a bit, and also into the greens. All right, let's check the before and after.
All right, and lastly, we have a clip with myself in it, a blown-out sky, a glacier, and some water. This was later in the day, so the sun was past the mountains, and the clip itself, due to the blown-out highlights and the darker shadows, is going to be a little tricky to work with. But I do think we can improve this with a quick color correction.
So, let's choose the white—I think that did a pretty good job. Go into the shadows, pump that by quite a bit, because we didn't have much detail in the backpack before and in the hair. Then, for the highlights, I think I'm actually going to pull it down a bit, maybe minus 15 or so, and that's just to retain a little bit of the detail as the glacier and the top of the mountain sort of transition into the sky.
We'll bump up the saturation and give it a color boost. Since the background is a little bit washed out, it can benefit quite a bit probably by increasing the contrast, so let's try that. Yeah, and you can see a lot of the detail comes back. However, if you go too much, it can also break up the footage like we were talking about before with the colors, so I wouldn't go too heavy, but that's pretty good.
Then, there's quite a lot of reddish tones in the skin tones, so I think for the gamma we will roll back some of the red. Since we took out a bit of the red, that means there's going to be a little bit more green showing up—you can see in the hat—so I think we can go the other direction just a little bit with the lift, and that helps some of the rocky, darker colors not have such a harsh green tone to them.
For the gain, let's go up a bit, and I think for just spending a quick minute on this, that's a pretty good color correction. Let's check out the before.
In terms of color-correcting footage quickly, that is my approach, and I hope it was helpful. All right, that's how you color correct footage inside DaVinci Resolve. I hope the video was helpful. If you liked it, give it a thumbs up and subscribe to see more videos from us in the future. We have over 200 videography-related how-to and review videos, so lots of content for you to learn from. If you want to know any of the music or the gear we use to make our videos, I've left all links in the description. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you next time.
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