How To Sharpen Footage In DaVinci Resolve 19 (3 Different Ways)
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How To Sharpen Footage In DaVinci Resolve 19 (3 Different Ways)
In this video, I'm going to show you three ways to sharpen eyes in DaVinci Resolve, both the free and paid version. Depending on your footage, one option might work better than the other. Although, I’ve got to say the last option usually works the best for me.
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. If you're new here, I'm Ally Will, and I work on commercials and social media videos. We release weekly YouTube videos all about editing in DaVinci Resolve, as well as gear reviews. Coming up, we'll be sharing a video that will show you how to save hours and days editing, so subscribe to see that when it comes out. Now, let's hop into Resolve.
This first technique you can currently do in both the free and paid version of Resolve. I wish I could find a frame of myself where I'm just smiling like a normal person, so here's a clip of me that's a bit softer on the eyes. Let's go into the color page, zoom in on the program window, and open Blur. Under Radius, if we drag the slider way up, we can increase blur. If we drag down, we can decrease the blur and sharpen our image. I'll just push this all the way so you can see what sharpening way too much looks like. Yeah, not so great. I find somewhere around 40 looks good.
I recommend you don't push it too far because when you're working with a person's face, you want the sharpening work to look natural. I don't know about you, but I don't want my entire clip to be sharpened because I like that the original shot has the background a bit more out of focus, and I really like that my skin looks softer. As of now, our sharpening work has also sharpened these pimples here, which I'm not so into.
We can select this oval shape, which opens up our Power Window and gives us different options for our mask. Let's choose the circle mask, and oh, because we're way zoomed in, it’ll be a bit tough to adjust the default size of this mask. So, press the keyboard shortcut Z to bring the program window back to fit screen. Nice. Now we can easily click on the mask and drag inward on these inner anchor points here to adjust the shape and size of the mask. Hovering your mouse over it and clicking allows us to drag the mask over the eye area.
I'm just going to zoom in a bit here, and just to show you, if you were to instead adjust the outer anchor point, you would be affecting the softness around the mask, and I'll show you that more in just a sec. Okay, hovering your mouse over this area shows this circle arrow, which lets you rotate your mask left or right if you need to. Let's adjust the sizing of our mask so it's just a bit bigger than the eye area, which gives us some leeway to gradually soften the mask into the rest of the face and create a more seamless, natural look. That's what we're going for, so we won’t even be able to tell that a mask has been applied.
You can see down here that the softness of your mask is set to around 3, which works fine. We're almost done with this technique, but we have one more thing to do, and that is to track the mask so that as I'm talking and moving around, the mask stays on my eye areas and moves around with me. In the Tracker window, let's press this double arrow, which tracks your mask forward and backward. DaVinci Resolve is working its magic to track this mask to my eyes as they move around on screen.
Now, I did notice that about midway through the clip, the mask started to come off my eyes just a bit. So, we can scrub our playhead to that part. Let's go to our Frame tab so we can easily place a new keyframe at this point, which will appear when we adjust the position of our mask. There it is. This holds the new mask position at this frame in our clip. Now, let's click this forward arrow to re-track the remaining part of the clip.
Okay, awesome. Let's check out how this is looking. That looks much better.
On a side note, if you want to know our favorite drive, it's this one right here that we edit all of our videos off of because it's super fast, super portable, and super tiny. Or, if you want to know any of the gear that we recommend and use on our commercial video shoots as well as our YouTube shoots, then check out the description below.
Let's now look at a super simple way to enhance your eyes in the Edit page. With the Inspector panel open, scroll down to Super Scale and turn it on. Super Scale uses AI to enhance the look of your entire clip. While it's typically used if you're working with lower-resolution footage on a higher-resolution timeline, I found it also works really well for eye sharpening purposes. Clicking on the drop-down menu gives you more options: 2x, 3x, or 4x Super Scale, but depending on your footage and timeline settings, some of these other options might not make a difference.
As you can see, 2x enhanced is usually my go-to choice, and you can also use the Sharpness slider to increase the sharpening. Doing this may introduce some noise, so feel free to also adjust the Noise slider until you find a balance you're happy with. Here's the before and after. Nice.
In the Color page, let's make sure our Node Graph is open. Open Effects and search for Face Refinement. Nothing's happened yet because first, we need to click Detect Face in Frame. This green box shows up around the face. You could move it, but I've never needed to. Let's click on these double arrows to track back and forth, and Resolve's using its AI magic to track my face.
Awesome. Now that it's finished, uncheck Show Overlay. I love Face Refinement. There are so many incredible things that you can do with it, but focusing on the eyes right now, scroll down, and under the Eyes tab, you can increase your Sharpening slider. I find around 0.54 sharpens the eyes but also maintains that natural look.
Another thing, bonus tip, that I like to do that makes people's eyes look healthier and stand out more, which also tricks your brain into seeing them as sharper, is brightening the whites of the eyes. Around 1.47 makes those eyes pop without looking scary, and the Brightening option is just one more reason that I prefer using Face Refinement for eye work. Let's check out the before and after. That looks much better.
Okay, and there you go. Those are my three go-to ways to sharpen eyes in DaVinci Resolve. Ooh, and I just released a video showing five creative mask techniques, and one of them I’ve never seen taught anywhere, so check that video out next to learn my masking secrets.
I hope this video was helpful to you, and that you have a lovely day.
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