An overview of adjusting color and exposure in Resolve

- Rob, you're one of the most well-known experts in DaVinci Resolve. You've got a lot of online courses on this. You teach on it all the time. But I'd really like to sort of see, you know, what can this application do with the footage that we specifically shot with log and raw. I know we don't have time to go into all of it, but can you give us good overview? - Sure. DaVinci Resolve in 5 minutes. Let's go. - [Rob] So, Rich, let's wrap up this chapter about DaVinci Resolve work flow. Talking a little bit more about some of the, you know, kind of overall color and exposure controls that we have in DaVinci Resolve. And I guess I actually want to start by revisiting some of the things that we talked about earlier in this title, and that is mainly a little bit more about raw controls. If you recall from an earlier movie, we talked about two different ways of controlling raw inside of DaVinci Resolve. I can come into my project settings and then over to the camera raw tab and adjustments that I make here are two different formats. Like RED and ALEXA and, you know, cinema D&G or global settings. They're going to affect all of my clips that I have in the project. But there's also, if I cancel out of that, tne camera raw tab where I can then treat clips on a clip-by-clip basis if I change their decoding to use the clip level instead. And this is, if you remember where we talked about doing things like, hey, this is a RED clip, maybe I want to put it into a log container. So I can take that and say actually, you know what? Let's start out with red log film on this clip and have a starting point as log. Again, remember, my point earlier in this title was raw controls are kind of like development tools to getting your clip to a place that you want to start. And also, the point that I made earlier but I'll even make again here is that each raw format is going to have different controls. So for example, if you look at this raw red clip right here, this R3D clip, it has one set of controls. If I click down over here to this F55 clip and look at that, go to clip, you can see that it has an entirely different set of controls. So depending on the format, depending on the manufacturer, you're going to have different raw controls. Now, again, if you can use these as sort of a starting point for your work, that's a good idea, but what about the rest of the tools that Resolve offers? Well, if you come to this tab, the color wheels tab, this is where you're going to find some of the most, you know, familiar tools, especially to editors and people who are, you know, relatively new to corrections. So the first tab we have here is our primary wheels tab. This is where we can make separate lift, gamma and gain. Think of that as shadows, midtones and highlights; right? Different corrections. These contrast sliders down here underneath of each one of these clips, these little wheels, will allow me to go ahead and add contrast at that portion of the tonal range, like so. I can then use the color balance controls if I say I wanted to warm this clip up a little bit. Something like that. I can do that very easily. What offset is, I like to think about it as like an overall control, the elevator control. If lift, gamma and gain separate out the image into different areas of sort of tonal influence, what offset does is it treats everything, kind of, as one signal. So if you look at my wave form over here right now, if I take my offset control and just drag up, notice that I'm not stretching the image. Everything's just moving straight up and down; right? Think about this offset, sort of, contrast ring here as kind of like a general exposure control; right? And the same thing is true with the offset color wheel. If I dial in there, I can treat everything in the tonal range, maybe I wanted a kind of antique-y look on this. I can just kind of bring everything to that kind of rusty kind of color, and real quick I have that look going on. Now, besides color wheels, down here below, we actually have two separate subpages. Here we can do things like traditional contrast control, we have pivot control, which allows you to adjust where in the tonal range your contrast is actually centered. So, for example, if I come to this RA raw clip, go ahead and add quite a bit of contrast. Not that much contrast. Maybe right about here. I can then use pivot to change where that contrast center point is, maybe a little darker. Where with negative values or smaller values, I can bring that center point up in the tonal range. Contrast and pivot are a great way of kind of controlling your overall exposure and overall contrast of the shot. Of course, we have saturation, which everybody knows what that is. And then hue, which is kind of like rotating all of the colors either left or right around the color wheel in the particular clip. But go ahead and click on page two. This where we have very familiar controls to a lot of editors. Temperature and tint; right? Also very familiar to, you know, say Photoshop users or Lightroom users. We have something called midtone detail. Any guesses what that is? - [Rich] That's going to really be something like clarity? - It's exactly like clarity. It's taking those midtones and kind of doing some sharpening and contrast enhancement to them to kind of make them work. Color Boost would be like vibrance and other tools, kind of saturating the areas that are of low saturation but leaving areas that already have saturation kind of alone. And then obviously we have shadows and highlights control that allow us to manipulate just the shadows. And I kind of think about these as like recovery tools; right? If you crush the shadows a little bit using the shadow tool, with a highlight tool it will allow you to recover a little bit of that detail. Now, if you're a real geek, you can come over to the second tab here. This is your primary bars. Gives you the same control as the color wheels overall, but because DaVinci operates in a Y, that's luminesce or brightness information RGB model, YRGB, you have a unique separate control for the luminesce red, green and blue channels at each portion of the tonal range and then overall the offset. So if you're somebody who's a little OCD like me, Rich, you can come in and just go, yeah, you know what? I just think the highlights in this clip need just a little bit more red by themselves without messing around with any of the other colors. And you can be very, very precise. And then the last tool here that's kind of interesting is this set of tools calls log, and I would tell new users of DavVnci Resolve to be very careful whether they're in the primary wheels or the log wheels. You'll notice that they look exactly the same except for the name. So the normal color wheels that everybody's used to are called lift, gamma, gain. But the log wheels are called shadows, midtones and highlights. You might think to yourself for a second, well, yeah, isn't that the same thing, Rob? It's not. The way that the log color wheels work is that they are very specific to that portion of the tonal range. So for example, if I use my shadow control here, you'll notice over there on the wave form that only that most bottom part of the wave form is actually moving. I'm affecting just the deepest portions of the image where as I did that same correction with the lift, gamma, gain controls, you'll notice that kind of the whole bottom half of the image moves down. With the log controls, let me undo that. With the log controls, you can have a lot of really specific, limited tonal range flexibility, and you can control what's a shadow and what's a highlight and what's a midtone with these low-range and high-range sliders. It lets you determine what the fall off is between a shadow and a midtone and then a midtone and a highlight. I tend to use this tool more as a secondary color correction tool, but it's worth knowing that it's there. And then finally, just review, kind of get you a little bit of an overview. We have curves here in the center of the page. This master curve here, whereas I can obviously dial-in something like, you know, an S curve to add a little bit more cinematic color to the shot. Right now, all my curves are linked. If I could quickly just click on the red, green or blue curves to make separate corrections like that. And then the rest of these tabs over here just give me the ability to do secondary corrections like, for example, if I wanted to do a quick vignette on the shot, I could come to my window controls and add a circular window, but I need to do that on a separate note. So let me uncheck the circular window there. Press option+s to create a new node. You'll see how it's linked downstream here. I'll add that circular window. Going to make it a little bit bigger. Something like this. We'll adjust it's aspect out a little bit. And I'll go ahead and feather that or add some softness there. And then I'm just going to invert that window and then I'll just darken the edges with my highlight control. Well, actually not my highlight control. I want to be careful about that. I want to do it with my gain control. There we go. And now you can see I have a traditional, kind of, circular edge vignette. So there's a lot of tools here inside of DaVinci Resolve. Again, you can work with LUTs. You can work with lift, gamma, gain. You can work with the primary color bars. Resolve is a very full-featured tool. It's worth a reminder here on the library there's a lot of DaVinci Resolve training including from our good friend Patrick Inhofer who is author of the behemoth of a couple of titles. Everything you ever wanted to know about DaVinci Resolve. So in a quick overview, that's some of the primary tools in talking about in this chapter a little bit on working with raw and optimized media and a little bit more about log. But, Rich, what do you say we jump into one last subject in this title? And that's about, sort of, exporting and importing and also manipulating.