How To Color Grade In DaVinci Resolve (CRASH COURSE for BEGINNERS)
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How To Color Grade In DaVinci Resolve (CRASH COURSE for BEGINNERS) - In this video, Will walks you through a crash course on color grading footage in DaVinci Resolve. He covers working with log footage and converting it to rec709, as well as how to setup Nodes and apply various changes including color temperature, saturation, hue, and more.
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Welcome back to another video. In this one, I'm going to teach you how to color grade footage inside DaVinci Resolve. It's an amazing program, and actually, it's the industry standard when it comes to color correction and color grading.
If you're new here, we have over 200 videography-related videos, so lots of content for you to learn from. And if you're interested in any of the equipment or the music we use to make our videos, all links are in the description.
Alright, let's jump in. Before we start doing our color grading, we want to make sure that the project is set up properly. So the first thing we're going to do is go into DaVinci Resolve preferences. We're going to go to General, and there's a setting here that we want to look at. So, use Mac display color profiles for viewers. If you are on Mac, I would suggest having this checked. If you're on PC, you don't need to worry about it. Again, if you're on Mac, give that a check. Then go to save. Then you can go to your actual timeline settings. Then go to color. And we want to make sure that the color science is set to DaVinci YRGB. And in most cases, you're going to be working with Rec. 709. That's sort of the industry standard color space. So we'll go to OK. And then down here, we'll also click settings for the project. We'll go to color management. And right here, we also want to make sure that the color science is set to DaVinci YRGB once again. And again, this is set to Rec. 709. Now, this stuff will happen most likely with your timeline and when you set up your project, but just so you know, that is where you can change this stuff. And then we'll head over to the color tab. And this is where we will do our color grading.
Color correction is very different from color grading, and in this tutorial, we're going to do both. And the general rule is, if you're doing any color grading, that means you've already done your color correction. In fact, I would suggest never doing any color grading unless you've already done the process of color correction. And color correction is essentially making sure that your balance is correct. So your whites look white, the blacks look black, and the overall exposure levels look good in your image. Color grading, on the other hand, is when you're getting a little more creative, and you're adding some color into your image. You're making some creative choices in the look of the video. And that's when it gets a lot more subjective because color correction, generally speaking, across the board, is a standard. You know whites are going to look white, whereas color grading, you could spend 2 hours doing a whole pass and you love it, and then you show somebody else, and they prefer it completely different.
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. And that means when I'm shooting 10-bit 422 footage on professional cameras, when working with that footage in an editing program like DaVinci, I'm actually able to work with and see that 10-bit footage. So I've left a link to that monitor in the description if you want to pick out the exact one that I have. It is an expensive monitor, but 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. And of course, we would always be upfront with anything we recommend. LG has no affiliation with us, and they did not send us the monitor. I purchased the monitor myself and have loved it and highly recommend it.
If your footage isn't in log, then that means the camera, by default, has added its own color space to the footage or color profile. And that means you do not need to go through a conversion process to get it to Rec. 709 color space. And if you're not sure what log footage is, basically, it's a way for your camera to capture as much information as possible in terms of dynamic range, which is the difference from the bright and dark spots of your image. And when you capture in this sort of washed-out, desaturated way, it allows you to pull a little more data from the highlights and shadows to give yourself a slightly higher dynamic range in the final result. And personally, I think it's a little overhyped. There's a lot of projects that I shoot where I do not shoot in log. Maybe the budget's not there or the footage itself wouldn't really benefit from a higher dynamic range. But in either scenario, of course, it is important to understand what it is still and when you should use it. For us, since, again, this was shot in the A7S3 in S-Log3, that means we do need to either apply a Rec. 709 conversion L or to do it inside the program without an L. I will show you both ways.
The first way is you would go on your camera manufacturer's website, in this case, Sony, and you would download their free Rec. 709 conversion L. And then in DaVinci, you'd right-click the node, go to L, and then you would find it. In this case, Sony S-Log3 to Rec. 709. Or you could go into one of these, and you can see by just clicking this, it added a whole bunch of saturation and darkened the exposure. And this is a lot closer to what it looked like in real life because it was a sunset. So from here, that would be your conversion L, and then you can add some other nodes to start adjusting exposure and your balance or color balance. And then you can do some additional grading later to give it its own look.
Now, if you don't want to use the workflow of using a LUT, then we can undo and instead go to effects, type in color, go to color space transform, drag that onto our node. And then in here, we can do a similar thing to what the LUT does, which is select the color space that was used to get the log footage. So in this case, the input was Sony S-Gamut3 Cine, and the input gamma was Sony S-Log3. And the output color space, we'll set this to Rec. 709, and the output gamma to 2.4. And then as you can see, it looks very similar to what we had before. It should be almost identical. So either way works. Sometimes you would prefer to use the color space transform when it does have the appropriate camera. But if it isn't displaying the camera or you see that something is off, maybe there's just a glitch or something, then you can go the other way of using the L from the camera manufacturer.
Alright, so let's close an effect. We'll right-click and go to label so we can give it a name. This one will be called "I'm calling it Rec. 709," but you could give it another name like "conversion" or "CSC" for color space conversion. But the name isn't as important as remembering to give it a name so that you can be organized.
Normally, at this point, it only took you about 30 seconds to set this up, but I gave you a little more context, so I hope that was helpful. At this stage, you have your footage converted to Rec. 709, and now it's important to understand where your nodes should go in order to get the best results.
I think for beginners, there's a misconception that you should convert your footage and then after the conversion, do all your adjustments. But that is incorrect. You should be doing any adjustments before your conversion. It is a little confusing because if you didn't do the conversion first and instead started with your color balance and exposure, you'd be working with washed-out footage in the log format, so it wouldn't really help you. This is why it's important to do the Rec. 709 conversion first, then go back and create your node for your adjustments.
Now, in terms of organization, you could create multiple nodes ahead of time and make every single one for the different parameters, like one for your color balance, one for your levels, or your exposure. But to keep things simple for the purposes of teaching you how to color grade, we'll just have one node before our conversion, and this one will be for both balance and for exposure. So let's go to node label and we'll call it CC for color correction.
So now that I've explained some of the context behind the technical aspects of log footage and everything, let's move on to actually doing some color correction and color grading. So on our color correction node, let's go down and click on our curves that opens up this graph. And on the left here, you will see some color wheels, so we have our lift, gamma, gain, and offset. If you look at this from left to right, you can visualize it by it being the same in your curves graph as left to right, so this section will be over here and this section over here will fill out more here and of course your gamma will be sort of in the middle.
If we look at our image, we can see that the shadows are very dark. So the first thing we're going to do is go to the lift section and pull that up. We're going to do the same to the midtones and with a gain, I might drop it a little bit because I want to maintain as much detail in the sunset as I can because the point of this clip was we wanted to feature the skateboard popping up and interacting with the sunset. So now that we've done a bit of the exposure let's now focus on the color balance.
So we can do that by grabbing the little white balance icon here, and we can select an area in our footage that is white, like on the shoe here. You can see that made the footage a lot more into the warm and orange. So the next thing is, once again, to think about the motivation or the point of the footage. Because this is meant for the sun, we want to make sure the color of the sunset comes out as intended. The color of the shoe is a little less important, so I think I'm going to roll back the temperature a little closer to orange. Because later on, I'm going to be selecting that orange and making it a little more toward red to emphasize a really epic, you know, beautiful end of the day sunset.
And then contrast, we can lower just a bit, just so there's some more details in the shadows appearing. And then with the midtones, I'm going to bring up the colors a little closer to red, and then in the shadows, I'm going to do the opposite so that our blacks remain black. And next, we'll go to the offset, we'll bring it up just a bit, and that introduces just a little bit more of a balance between our shadows and our highlights and midtones. Now, again, if you wanted to make things a little more organized, you could have this one just be for the, you know, color balance. You could have another one over here just for the brightness or your exposure. You could have another one for, you know, making color changes. But generally speaking, you can get away with just keeping it simple like this. And in a lot of cases, especially on smaller budget projects, time is everything. So you just need to get the job done and complete organization isn't necessary. Sometimes simple is better.
And now what we'll do is add a node, and this time we're going to do it after our conversion. Because now this is the part of the color grading where we're going to take what we've done and shift it overall and make some specific changes which will add a creative look in the direction that we want to have as color graders or editors. So for this one, we will label it. This is our grade. And once again, the motivation or intent of this clip was to have an epic sunset. So we're going to be focusing on the colors of the sunset and trying to exaggerate it to be a pretty bright, red sunset.
The first thing I'm going to do is go to the Hue, and we're going to just make it slightly more red, we'll increase the saturation. And then just underneath the color wheels and above where we made the main adjustments, you can control the individual colors, the RGB. So for the red, we're just going to increase the red, and I'll show you what that does. And we'll do the same for the highlights. You have to be careful though because if you push it too far, you can start to break up parts of your image where the colors transition.
And then from here within our curves, we can make some adjustments. So slightly lift, we'll do the same to there, and then we'll switch over to our Reds and lift up the Reds a little bit, which further adds a little more red in the overall ground here. I'm going go ahead and give that a play, and that's looking pretty good. I would say in a, you know, commercial paid client project, this is probably a little intense for how much, red I've introduced, but again, that's completely subjective. If you do like this, you can export it as is. You could even go the complete opposite way and you know, pump up some of the blues. You know, you can make the image very dark. And one thing that always blows me away is once I'm done a color grade to turn it off and compare to the ungraded footage and it really shows you how big of a difference color grading can make.
So on the keyboard, you can press command D or control D on the PC and that will turn off the grade. You can see that it goes from sort of a fall autumn look where it's kind of yellow and orange to a very bright, much more vibrant, and a lot darker for the shadows. And then if we turn off all of these, you can see what the original image looks like compared to this. And if you wanted to go a little more advanced than that, you could right-click, add node and add a layer. And then on this bottom node, you could click on the qualifier, and if your footage had, let's say, skin tone in it like, you know, there's a person speaking to the camera, you would click on their skin tone and then you could isolate it. Let's say we're choosing the green here, you can look at your selection by clicking the highlight button and you can make your adjustments. And then using this technique, you can only affect certain areas, so you could like retain your skin tone while affecting the rest of the image and vice versa.
So for now, we're going to delete that or beyond that, you could add another node, and on this one, you could add something like a glow, which is fairly common, and that can give it a really, really nice look because it will add sort of a bloom effect to your highlights. This is probably a little too too strong, it kind of looks like a dream sequence, but again though it is completely subjective, keep that in mind. So you might actually like this the way it is, but I'm going to pull it back and introduce it just a little bit. And then also I'm going to play with the spread so you can see what it does. And of course, there's unlimited things you could do for the color grade. You could add vignettes, you could do radio blurs. Radio blurs are cool because it's a rotational blur, so it'll affect the edges before the middle. And as you can see here, if you watch just the edge of the knee here on the leg, it affects that but it doesn't really affect where the skateboard is. And that might help draw the attention to the center where the sunset and the skateboard are featured.
And of course, I've covered such a small portion of what DaVinci Resolve offers. You can go to the color warper and this is a very powerful tool for adding saturation and dealing with hue. There's magic mask; this can give you some, you know, advanced results when you want to very specifically alter something in your video across many frames. And then you can do like blur effects or keying, let's say you're working with green screen and stuff. Alright, so that is how you color grade footage inside DaVinci Resolve. It's honestly pretty straightforward, you just have to remember do your conversion first because then it allows you to make the actual changes without, you know, viewing log footage. But if you're not working with log footage then you can just go straight to the color grade and make some creative choices. There's a million things you could do, it's essentially endless, but I hope this gives you sort of a basis of where to start for your color grading.
That's it for this video on how to color grade footage inside DaVinci Resolve. I hope it 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 videos, so lots of content for you to learn from. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you next time.
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