How to Sharpen Footage in DaVinci Resolve 18 (FREE and PAID Version)
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How to Sharpen Footage in DaVinci Resolve 18 (FREE and PAID Version) - In this video editing tutorial, Alli will show you How to Sharpen Footage in DaVinci Resolve 18 (FREE and PAID Version)! This is a very useful technique that can make your footage featuring people look better. Alli will show you how to isolate someone's eyes and track the sharpening mask as they move.
GENERATED CAPTIONS:
In this video, I'm going to show you how to quickly and easily sharpen someone's eyes in DaVinci Resolve, both the free and paid version. Of course, you want to do your absolute best during filming to make sure that your subject is in focus, but if you get into post and you're finding their eyes a little soft, this tutorial will help.
I don't know about you, but a lot of times I find myself editing videos with people on camera who could use some help making their skin look even better. I'm almost finished creating a tutorial that we're going to be releasing soon about how to smooth someone's skin, reduce their pores, reduce, or even remove blemishes. So, to stay in the loop and see that video when it comes out, subscribe to our channel. Alright, let's hop into resolve and get started.
Okay, we're in resolve and here's a clip of me that's a bit soft around my eyes. Let's go into the color page and select blur, which brings up the blur panel. We'll select our node, but wait a minute, where are the nodes? If you can't see nodes, go up here and click on nodes to bring up the nodes viewer. If you're brand new to nodes and you're looking at this going "what the heck?" I was there too. I remember feeling so intimidated, especially because I was coming from a Premiere background. Either way, once you understand them, I actually prefer working with nodes now. I never thought I'd say that. Let me know in the comments below if you'd like me to create a video all about nodes so that you don't have to be intimidated or confused by them anymore.
Alright, let's get back to the tutorial. In the blur panel, under radius, we can click and drag up to increase the blur or we can drag down to decrease the blur and sharpen our image. I'll push it all the way so you can see what way too much sharpening looks like. Not so great. So, let's bring the radius to around 40. I recommend you don't push it too far, you don't overdo it, because especially when you're working with a person's face, you want the sharpening work you do to look natural.
Let's check out the before and after by clicking on the bottom part of our node here. And now, the nodes darken to indicate the effects off. Click again to see the effect back on.
Okay, we aren't done just yet. I don't know about you, but I don't want my entire clip to be sharpened because I actually like that my skin's looking a bit softer and I like the subtle blur of the background of our original shot. So, we're going to create a mask around the eye area only. I'll just click on the node to turn the effect back on and let's select this oval shape, which opens up our power window and gives us different shape options for our mask. Let's choose the circle and when we do, it creates this mask for us. Click on it and drag it over the eye area of our clip. Click on the anchor points, which are these little tiny inner points here, and drag down to decrease the size of the mask. And just to show you, if you were to instead select and adjust the outer circles' anchor points, you'd be affecting the softness around your mask. I'll show you what that looks like in just a second.
Let's just continue adjusting the size of this mask so it covers a bit more than just the eye area, which will give us a little extra leeway to gradually soften the mask into the rest of my face. If you need to rotate your mask at all, hover your cursor over the center until you see the circle arrow and move the cursor to the left or right to rotate.
Okay, now to get a look at the exact part of my face that's being masked, let's click on this highlight icon here, which highlights what the effects are doing. Click on this drop-down menu and choose "off" to turn off the mask parameters and get a better look. As you can see, it does have that nice softening around the edges, which is great because we want the sharpening that's taking place on our eyes to gradually soften into the rest of our face so you can't tell a mask has been applied. You can see here that our softness is around four, which works and reduces the look of hard edges.
Now we'll click on the highlight icon again to see the full clip and we're almost done, but we have one more thing to do and that is to track the mask so that as I move around while I'm talking, the mask stays on my eye area and moves with me. In the tracker window, let's bring our playhead to the beginning of the clip, that way we're just making sure that we're tracking right from the get-go, right from the beginning. Doing this means I'm going to have to adjust where my mask is slightly.
Okay, let's press the play icon to track forward and DaVinci Resolve is going to work its magic and track this mask to my eyes as they move around on screen. Let's scrub through to see if our mask tracked well, and yeah, it did. If, though, as you're scrubbing through you notice any spots where the mask goes off of the eye area a little too much, with your cursor in that spot you can just readjust the mask and that new mask position on the frame will be saved.
Let's check out the before and after. All right, that's looking much better. Let me know in the comments below if you're having any struggles in Resolve, if there's anything specific you'd like me to teach you and I probably will make a tutorial on it for you. We have lots of other Resolve tutorials on our channel as well as other filmmaking videos, so check those out, and I look forward to seeing you in another video.
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