Hero shots base grade: Using the color wheels

- Did I hear you say you wanted to learn how to color correct? Well, it's time to start color correcting. We have spent all this time going through all the different features, all the different tools. We've examined nodes and we've look at LUTs, and all this stuff, and now we finally have the tools to do our primary corrections. To kick off this discussion, let's first filter our timeline down where we flagged what I call our hero shots. And so, we've selected these eleven shots to use as kinda proxies for the rest of our color grade.

We're gonna get these looking the way we want then once we do that, once we get client approval, they buy in and then we unfilter this timeline. These grades will then get, boom, go out all over to our entire timeline and then we'll start at the beginning, and then we'll color grade this music video. Now, we've already done an evaluation of these images. I've looked at these images, I've come up with a basic concept of what needs to be done, and now it's time to actually execute on that concept. So, the first thing I'm gonna do, of course, is pull up my scopes.

Shift + cmd + W on the Mac, shift + ctrl + W on a PC. And now here in this chapter, starting with this movie, I'm going to select several shots and we're going to grade them together. And I'll leave you to do the rest and at the end of this chapter, I'll show you how I tackled the base grade and then we'll examine my work and determine what I need to do next. Remember, I have a kind of what I call a three step process for color correcting a entire timeline. In this case, I'm using video. And step number one is the base grade.

What's the base grade? We're doing a general image evaluation and fixing the overall image. If in the process of fixing the overall image something goes wrong, maybe, like the red and the yellow here gets blown out and overwhelms the image, I'm not gonna worry about that right now. I'm worried about the overall image. And frankly, what I'm really worried about are the people. So, I'm gonna make the people look good and then do a secondary pass where I then isolate areas of the image and fix whatever problems need to be fixed or enhance the image to create my final look.

So, this wide shot is a great place to start. I'm gonna put this into loop because the first mistake that beginning colorists make is you'll up and down arrow between shots, and Resolve will just drop you on the first frame of picture. Sometimes the first frame of picture is not a very good representation of that shot. Often times, the camera moves or the lighting changes. So, you really wanna just hit play and watch this shot down a couple of times. And what I'm actually gonna do is opt + F to give you a better view. I'll move these scopes out of the way and now let's hit play and loop, and all right, the camera moves a little bit but I'm not seeing any big exposure change, so I'll just pause somewhere in the middle here.

I usually like to see people's eyes. So, actually, let me hit play one more time and see is there a spot. Okay, the girl, her eyes look up at some point, so let's take that frame right there as our representative frame. And now, what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna lift up my Gain. I've got a point source of light in the background that's clipped out. All the detail is gone. As I've said before this chopped off mountaintop indicates that there's probably more detail out there that was beyond the range of the imaging sensor so it just chops all that detail out. And then I'm gonna go and drop our lift and bring the bottom of the waveforms to zero.

Now, I'm looking at the RGB overlay. I've got my RGBs here, so I don't need the overlay. What I'm gonna do is just turn off the RGB overlay and turn this into a pure Luma where it sums up my red, green, and blue together, and gives me a look just at my brightness values. And frankly, I usually like having my parade right next to my tools 'cause that's my primary color balance tool as well. I'm always looking for color imbalances when I'm doing my primary correction and by looking at them side-by-side, I can fix these primary corrections.

I get a sense of as I bring up my Gain, you know, what's the first color channel that clips out. And maybe what I can even do is drop down the red a touch and balance out in the highlights red, green, and blue, 'cause when they're balanced, then I've got a neutral highlight, and then I'll go ahead and lift them right up to pure 1023. Now, I doubt I'm gonna go with such a bright shot. You, if I look in the midtones, it's a kind of bright, happy shot, that's cool but I think I'll probably want something a little bit more moody.

Something certainly a little bit more dramatic, but I'm not gonna do that right now. That's kind of creating the final look. I want to see what this image has to give me. So, even as I drop my blacks, I'm not gonna get pure black clip out. So, I'll bring on my waveform here. I'll let it drop to pure zero but no further. I don't want to clip any detail out, I can do that later without a problem. But now I can take my Gamma and start adjusting it brighter or darker just to get a sense of where I actually want this shot to live. Play around with it a little bit, see if I see any kind of artifacting or problems.

This is a great time to identify all the different problems that you might have with your footage. And then I'll oversaturate this looking at their skintones just again, what have I got, and then back it off. This is a trick of a lot of colorists which is take it too far so that you can dial it back. You don't know how much room you have on your footage until you explore all the room you have on your footage. So, I'm gonna take the master wheel under the Gain control, and I'm gonna spin it to the right just to see what happens if I really blow out this detail.

And that's kind of interesting, you know, it's not so bad. I kind of adds a lot more... Kind of adds more interest into this shot and then it gives me some room to bring my Gamma down a little bit. But, you know what, I'm gonna bring it back to where it was because I don't want to start developing the look yet. But now I know where I might be going. But first, on this base grade, we're just gonna worry about getting the shot in a good place for us to in later nodes go ahead and tweak and fine tune this shot. Opt + F to bring us back and I'm just gonna go ahead and I'll name this node as my Base Grade.

Now, we're gonna color correct two more of these shots together and we're gonna do it using two different sets of tools. So, this is a great place for us to break and in the next movie we're gonna pick up right here.