Hey, my name is Matt and today I'm going to show you a real quick color correction tutorial.
I'm not going to go into much detail, I'm going to try not to anyway.
Try and keep this down to about 15 minutes.
So what we're going to do is have a look at how I color graded this scene.
You can download this from my blog, matscotvisuals.com, it'll be under the download section.
And you can download the raw image sequence so you'll be able to work with the exact same
files that I'm working with, which are the 12-bit raw CinemaDNGs from the Blackmagic
Pocket Cinema Camera, a camera that I freaking love.
It is sick, especially if you want good dynamic range, amazing post abilities, and yeah, it's
just a fucking sick little camera, so get on that shit, it's mad.
Here's the end result.
I'm pretty happy with it.
A lot of people are going, oh, you know, what lots did you use?
Having trouble grading footage from Blackmagic, blah, blah, blah, and like, yeah, I've had
the camera for about two months, three months now.
And before I got an IR cut filter, I had some trouble with the grading.
But once I got this IR cut filter, everything changed.
So make sure you check out my blog, matscotvisuals.com, somewhere, you'll find it.
And the latest blog post, I talk about the IR cut filter and what it does, basically
removing infrared contamination to make your blacks black, and to take that sort of brown
tinge off the footage that you may be used to seeing on the internet.
But anyway, let's get, let's hurry up and get started.
I'm already rambling, and I'm not going to re-record this, like, if I fuck up, or if
I'm stuttering.
I don't care, I'm just going to keep rolling with it, because it's just too time consuming
otherwise.
Anyway, if you want to check out the full resolution version, go to here, and you'll see it, HD
in glorious HD.
Looks pretty sweet, but you don't even need to see that, because you're going to grade
the actual high resolution image yourself in DaVinci Resolve.
So go ahead and download the latest version of DaVinci, and make sure you download the
Cinema DNG sequence from the blog.
And then, all you want to do is import the footage.
So to do that, you want to go over here to your hard drive section on the media tab.
You'll notice there's four tabs down here, so we want to start on the media tab.
And if your hard drive is not here, or if the location that you saved that footage to
is not here, you need to add it.
So to do that, let's go to DaVinci Resolve, go to preferences, and then we want to go
to media storage and add the hard drive that you don't see there.
Pretty annoying stuff, but that's how that works.
It's just shit that you have to do that.
Who cares?
This is free, the program is free, so whatever.
Let's have a look, and I've saved the footage here, and here it is here.
So even though it is a sequence of lots and lots and lots of 12-bit still images, DaVinci
will recognize that as a file or an image sequence, which is fantastic.
So the workflow is pretty easy, especially if you've got a moderately new PC, so normally
I would edit that out, and I'd have to make this tutorial a little fancy, but fuck that
shit.
We're just going to roll with it.
So just drag that from the bin, because once you've grabbed it from your hard drive, put
it over here, drag it down into the bin, and then we go to the edit tab.
Just before we do it, let's just go back and just have a look.
So we're 1920 by 1080, 23976, and it's a DNG, telling us that it's 16-bit, really?
It's not 16-bit, it's 12-bit, but it's sort of upscaling it and doing some fancy shit
to put it into a 16-bit container.
Oh good, you're not going to notice the difference, well I don't anyway, so let's go to the edit
tab, and now you can see that we have our clip here ready to be added to a timeline,
but we don't actually have a timeline yet.
We've got a space for a timeline, so what we want to do is just right-click on the clip
and go create timeline using selected clips.
It's going to say, what do you want to call it?
We want to call it madsheer, and we want to create a new timeline, and then here we go.
We've got a timeline down here, we've got our clip, it's playing back in real time.
It's freaking sweet, but it looks shit, look at it, it looks terrible.
So let's go to the color tab and have a look at what's going on here.
So we've got this scrubbing section here, we can play the footage, we can loop the footage,
blah blah blah, we've got color correction down the bottom here, we've got our three-way
color corrector which is awesome, we've got curves here which is pretty cool, and obviously
just blazing, blazing over this stuff, but I covered it in much more detail in another
tutorial, go and have a look at that on my blog as well.
We've got the qualifier, the masks, the tracker, the sharpen and softness, the key which is
basically the opacity of certain parts of the layer, and then we can zoom in, rotate,
and do heaps of cool shit here as well.
So this piece of software is freaking awesome, and we're going to get into having a look
at how we got this look, it's a very different look to this, I mean look how shit that looks.
So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to crop this so it looks like the 2.35
to 1 aspect ratio that this one is, and I framed it like that in camera, so let's go
ahead and do that, instead of actually going here and going to edit sizing and cropping
the top off like so, something like that, that's a shit way of doing it because then
what you're doing is you're producing still a 1920x1080 image with black bars, but what
we want to do is we want to create a 1920x808 image, so an actual 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio.
So let's go to the settings, and you'll notice in the master project settings we have a timeline
resolution of 1920x1080, let's go ahead and change that to, where is it, custom at the
top, and then we can go for 1920x808, make sure we have square pixels, this is important
because we are working with aspherical lenses and we did record square pixels, we can't
change the frame rate, but that's alright because the frame rate matches our clip, which
is fantastic.
The next thing we're going to have a look at is the image scaling, because if we just
press save, and let's go ahead and do that right now, let's just press save, don't worry
about those stupid messages that my computer is fucking up, you'll notice that we have
this awesome 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio, but DaVinci is deliberately shrinking the image down to
make sure we don't lose any of our picture, thanks for that DaVinci, but we don't want
that to happen, so we want to go to the image scaling, and we want to go down to mismatch
resolution files, because we indeed are mismatching our resolutions here.
We want to scale this image to fill the frame and crop anything that it is scaled, so let's
go ahead, press save, press ok to that crap, you shouldn't see those messages, and now
we've got a nice 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio framed exactly the way I framed it on the day.
So first thing that I notice about this image, if I was looking at it and I didn't shoot
it, I'd be like, well for one, it's too warm, and two, what the hell is this clipping highlight
shoot, no one clips highlights, that's bad, well it is kind of bad, but I deliberately
did it, and you know I like to sort of test what I think I know, and one of the things
that I think I know is you don't clip highlights ever, but in this instance, and this was during
a workshop that I was running teaching people how I light, and how I shoot, and how I think
on set, I was talking about the importance of not worrying about clipping highlights,
if those highlights aren't important, and this whole workshop was based on ultra low
budget, low time, so for example, once we had the lighting setup done, which I'm going
to go into detail, into not so much detail in a second, yeah we had this clipping highlights
on his shirt and clipping highlights outside in the window, and you know the point of doing
that was to have a better exposure on his face, his face is more important than the
exposure on his shoulder from the backlight here, if I was to rescue that and make sure
that that wasn't clipping, then his face would be another whole stop, maybe even two stops
underexposed, so they don't have to bring that back with a power window, it's going
to look noisy, fuck that shit, don't worry about clipping highlights, as long as you
know what you're clipping, yeah that's the end of that rant, so the other thing is it's
super duper yellow, if we look at this shirt, it's nice and neutral, and so how do we go
about fixing stuff like that, well the beauty of RAW, this is what is so sick about this
little camera, the fact that it shoots to those tiny little SD cards, and it shoots
to RAW, RAW is just this word that gets thrown around these days and it just means high quality,
well to me it doesn't really mean high quality, because you can shoot really high quality ProRes
too, you can shoot high quality XAVC HD, whatever the hell it's called, or H264, what RAW does
is it allows you to push things around and change things, it gives you more flexibility
later on, that's all RAW does really, I mean in terms of quality wise or sharpness or detail,
we will get slightly better detail with RAW, but it's more about the flexibility, and I'm
going to show you that flexibility right now, so to access the RAW data in this clip, we
need to click on this camera here, and then we're going to decode, we're not going to
decode the RAW using the project, we're going to decode using the clip, we do that, it gives
us access to things like exposure values, sharpness values, the color temperature of
the clip, things like this, so we can also change things like ISO, which is pretty cool,
so I can make that say 200 ISO, all of a sudden the image goes darker, I can make it 400
ISO, which is the way I shot it, but the biggest thing here, apart from the yellow, is the
fact that we're looking at a color space of Rec. 709, a gamma space of also Rec. 709,
what this is kind of doing is replicating a LUT, well you know when I'm using the word
LUT to try and make it easy to understand, because everyone knows LUTs these days, right?
I want them LUTs to make my footage look good, but basically what this is, is a lookup table
that makes a log image look good, let's just leave it at that.
So when I'm monitoring the footage, I'm paying close attention to my scopes on the camera,
but it's not very nice to monitor a log image, because you can't really see what it might
look like, so I monitored in Rec. 709, but we can always change that, so let's go ahead
and change that to BDM film, which is Blackmagic Designs Log Mode.
When you do that, everything looks shit, but everyone knows these days that shit is good
when it comes to flat, right?
Everyone wants to shoot flat, because now we've got more freedom in post.
Yes, so now we actually do have more freedom in post, but I just want to switch back to
Rec. 709 for a second, because what we want to do is fix the white balance issue looking
at Rec. 709, so before we start color grading using DaVinci's tools, we're going to start
color grading by processing our film stocker.
That's how I like to look at this section here.
Here we are in the lab, and we're about to process the film that we've shot before it
gets into post-production, which is over here.
So while we're processing the film, do we want to push it or pull it a stop?
Well, I want to leave it at 400 ISO.
That's what I'm meeting for, and that's what I'm happy with.
Do I want to...
I want to change the white balance as well.
So to do that, we need to go to the white balance.
Instead of as shot, we're going to change it to custom, and just keep in mind that if
I was to change this back to BDM film and try and play with this white balance, it's
pretty hard to see any change at all, right?
So it's not a very useful correction tool if you're monitoring a color temperature white
balance change in BDM film.
So let's change that back to Rec. 709, and now you can see a drastic difference when I
slide that back left and right.
So I think of what was around 5600, something like that, and tint should be zero.
Point is, I did balance it for daylight, and it looks shit-ass.
Looks good in camera, but this is the beauty of raw.
What we want to do is we want to balance this closer to tungsten.
Tungsten is 3200 Kelvin.
Let's type in 3600, because I found that that was sort of a nicer range, maybe even 3800.
Just warm it up a little bit.
And the tint, what I'm looking for with tint is basically, I couldn't be bothered really
explaining this in too much detail, but the color temperature to the left is blue, the
color temperature to the right is orange, right?
So these are the basic colors that Planet Earth emits.
But then there's these other colors that human-created light sources emit, like fluorescent lights,
like coatings and lenses can fuck this shit up.
The point is that sometimes a color balance shift alone is not enough to correct the white
balance issues, and you need to adjust the tint as well.
So a tint represents green and magenta.
These two colors don't typically, they're not emitted from Earth's light sources.
So we have this correction value that allows us to add or subtract green or magenta.
So I'm looking at my scopes over here, and if I move this, first of all, let's put this
back to 3,800 Kelvin, and let's move our tint around.
So I'm basically just trying to neutralize this image as much as possible.
So I'm sliding it back to the left here.
You'll notice my blues and greens and reds are sort of separating when I go to the left,
to the right.
But if I go to the left, they sort of start coming closer together.
And this is good.
I'm looking at skin tones, I'm looking at gray areas, and I want them to be neutral.
We're just going to do a rough job here.
Here is a more technical, proper way to do this, but we don't have time today.
I don't have time for this shit.
So it looks pretty good.
Next thing is these clipped highlights, right?
So then our white balance, and while we're at it, let's change this color space back
to medium fill.
And let's have a look at these highlights.
Can you rescue them?
Sort of.
You can't because they're clipped.
Just because our histogram, our waveform monitor, shows something below 1023, which
is pure white.
It doesn't mean it's not clipped, it was still recorded above 1023, it was still recorded
above what the sensor can see.
So these areas here aren't clipped, there's no information right here on his shoulder.
It doesn't matter what we do with this.
We go down to 200 ISO, bring the highlights all the way down to zero, we're still got
holes in this footage.
So that's the cost of clipping highlights, right?
But I knew that.
I did that deliberately.
So how do we make this image look good?
Remember, this looks fine.
No one's going to look at that and go, oh, look at those horrible clipped highlights.
Maybe they will.
Point is, there's only so much you can do in here, right?
So we've balanced our image-ish, and we can try and gently bring down highlights a little
bit if we like.
But I tend to do this sort of stuff in resolve itself.
The other thing you can do, I like to do is take sharpness to zero.
This is sort of like a pre-debarring sharpener.
This is sharpening during the processing.
I like to add sharpness to areas.
My philosophy with sharpness is, what's the point of sharpening everything in the frame?
You don't want people to look at this back wall with great detail, do you?
I mean, very generally, very rarely would I want to sharpen every single pixel.
Oh, and I want to sharpen his face, or sharpen the pen, or sharpen the cigarette.
You know, that's my idea with sharpness.
So what's the point of adding sharpness here?
Fuck that shit.
Let's back that off to zero.
Let's go ahead and get started in the grade.
So first thing I want to do after I've processed my image in the dark room is get away from
this camera icon, go back to this color grading icon here, and I'm going to open the Curves
panel because what we want to do is start playing with the luminance values of our
image.
Now, I'm not going to go into too much detail, but I always end up going into too much detail.
Bottom left hand corner represents your shadows, right?
Bottom right hand corner represents your highlights, and everything in between represents everything
in between.
The cool thing is with the Curves, you can lock off certain areas and only affect the
luminance values of those areas.
How sick is that?
If you right click on one of these points, they disappear.
What we're going to do is grab a anchor point or place an anchor point in the shadows, push
it down.
We're also going to place an anchor point in the highlights and push it up.
So if you do that, it looks kind of better.
We've created some sort of contrast, but it looks a little bit shit.
So I want you to go in there and just massage a level of contrast that you like.
So having a look over at our scopes, making sure that we don't go below zero or crush
this stuff to zero, because then, you know, you're clipping information.
But maybe that's what you want to do.
Keep that in mind as well.
There's no hard and fast rules.
So I think this is looking pretty good.
I'm trying to remember those highlights.
Look how sort of harshly they can clip depending on your curve, right?
If you have something like this, it's sort of like a quite a hard edge there, but if
you sort of do it like this, maybe, it's sort of a bit gentler, okay, not bad.
So now that we've got our contrast, we can press Ctrl D for deselect.
You can see the difference.
Here's our original image.
After the processing in the dark room, press Ctrl D, that's just disabling this node.
That node, and that shows us the image before we added this color correction, enable it
again, and it shows us what we've done with this curve.
You'll notice that it's actually quite blue all of a sudden, and that's because I accidentally
fucked with this a bit earlier, so let's just reset that.
So Ctrl D on and off.
Now we've got contrast.
Beautiful.
That's bringing it better.
That's bringing it to a nicer place.
The next thing I want to do is add saturation to this image.
Now there's two ways of adding saturation in Resolve, or three or four, but there's two
main ones.
One of them is in the pre-processing room, in the processing lab, and we can go to the
saturation.
We can just increase that to 100%.
So what's the difference between doing that and increasing saturation here?
Well, let me prove to you right now, I'm not a great deal.
If I just grab a still of that, right-click, grab still, that's going to add a still here,
which saves all the color correction, and then I reset that back to 50.
And then I go to the processing lab and I change this saturation to 100.
And then I can double-click on this still, and that will bring it up here.
Now fuck you.
See, normally I would have to restart this tutorial, figure out why my drive is disconnected
and blah, blah, blah.
The point is you can compare these two images, and you can see that there's a bees-dick of
difference between adding saturation here or adding saturation here.
So for the sake of this tutorial and to keep things moving, we're just going to leave the
saturation in the pre-processing lab at 100.
Next thing I'm going to do, okay, so we've added saturation, we've added contrast, things
look okay, but the problem is if we have a look at our final shot, where is it?
You'll notice it just looks better, like there's a few reasons why it looks better.
But one of the main reasons it looks better is because the focus is more centered.
And that's very important when shooting, when lighting, when framing, and when color grading
as well.
So this is the focus of this scene, okay, so we've got desks on the side, we've got
some shit in the front here, we've got a coffee, we've got a bright window in the background
and some wicked arse, old vintage walls back here, but the actual focus of this story and
this image is him.
I don't want you looking at that shit, maybe for a brief moment, but the whole point of
this shot is this dude here, Reese Manning, freaking awesome actor, worked with him a
few times, your legend.
Yeah, thanks for helping us out with this workshop there.
Anyway, so focus.
How do we create focus?
Well, thankfully in Resolve, we've got what's called secondary color correction and we're
going to use a mask to create focus.
So let's click on the mask, which is the third one across, sorry, get rid of that.
See normally I'd get rid of that as well, start the tutorial again.
Let's click on the mask, click on the circle.
Now if I do that, what the hell's going on?
We've got a mask here, which is fantastic, but it's only masking our new color correction.
So we want this mask to be on a separate corrector.
So let's go ahead and undo that.
And what we're going to do is Alt S for Sam or Alt S for Serial Node, and that's going
to add another Serial Node out here.
So our first node is over here, if we double click on that, it's got a red line around
it.
Second node is here.
This one has no color correction added to it just yet.
What we're going to do is add a circle.
Now the circle is cool because once we have a circle there or a circle mask, we can then
go to the curves again and we can brighten it or darken it, or we can make it a different
color, pretty cool.
So in other words, we can localize a color correction.
So let's double click on this second node, go to the mask tool, turn the window circle
one off, and instead of using a circle, we're going to use a square.
Now this square is pretty cool.
If we use the wheel button on our mouse, we can scroll it backwards, zoom this shit out.
Better still, whenever working with masks, because if you press Shift F for Fred, then
you've got a much bigger window.
So what we're going to do is we're going to reshape and position this mask.
So what I'm going to do is try and emphasize this shaft of light that's not there.
So what I've done is created a shape, a pretty rudimentary shape here, but you'll notice
that outside of these main shape mover dots, there's these extra dots, these red ones,
what they allow you to do is soften the edge of this mask.
So if you press Shift H while the mask is on, you can actually see what's being softened
and what's not.
So what I want to do is create a super-duper soft thing here like so, and yeah, let's just
go ahead, press Shift H to turn the selection off, Shift F to get back to our normal view,
and let's go to our curves, and now let's have a look if we do this.
We go up and down, you can see we're almost creating this, like we're almost relighting
the scene.
That's pretty cool, pretty cool.
So this is what I did, is exactly what I did to create that look from before, and we're
not going to make it exactly the same as before, but we're going to make it something similar.
You are master of your own domain, you can make your own color grade.
You can tell me one shit.
I did a David Fincher style look one this morning, but I don't know, you know how he's
like super-duper dark, way less contrast than this, and green, looked all right I guess.
Anyway, so that's looking okay, it's looking better.
So we've added contrast in two ways now.
We've added contrast with a simple contrast curve globally, and then we've added contrast
using a focusing window.
Another cool thing about Resolve is now that we've drawn that mask, and if you click on
the mask icon, you can see the shape of it there, if we want to affect everything outside
of the mask, what we do is right click on that, and choose Add Outside Node, and that
creates this special node, there's an exact opposite of this node.
So if we double click on that second node, and we go back to our curves, now we can actually
darken everything outside of that.
That's pretty cool as well, right?
But you've got to be careful, you don't want this shaft to be too punchy, to be too noticeable.
You don't want people to be like, ah, I see what you did there.
You put a mask in Resolve, I know Resolve.
So we don't want that shit, and I mean it's pretty bad here, but we don't have time, I
don't have time for this shit.
I'm going to add another node, I'm getting old and grumpy.
So here's the fourth node, we've added a fourth node by double clicking on the third
one and pressing Alt S to create a new serial node.
Now what I'm going to do is add another mask, a serial, a circle node, sorry, and I'm going
to soften that one big time, just push it down here, and I'm going to inverse the mask.
So if I press this button here, it's automatically going to focus on the outside of that shape.
So we get our curves, check this shit out, so it's going to darken the whole scene off
a little bit, looking pretty cool, and then I'm going to go Alt S again, add another node
and this time I'm going to go mask again, Shift F, it's going to get me into this mode
here, Shift F goes back again.
So what we want to do is click on a circle, and I'm going to draw a very small circle
and it really helps to go Shift F in this case, zoom in and get this shape just right.
What we want to do is just create a very small shape like so, and we're doing this to help
the tracker, because what we're going to do is track this guy's face.
So if I was to draw a mask like this, which is what I eventually want, something like
that, and I go to my tracker here and I track this shot, the tracker is going to have a
pretty tough time sometimes.
You'll notice that it has a tough time, a tougher time.
It has more pixels to deal with and more shit that's going on.
So instead of doing that, what I like to do is let's go back to Shift H and let's go back
here, find a frame like this, and I just want you to create a much smaller mask like so.
And now, just around his eyes, something with contrast, that's the key, with contrast.
And now what I want you to do is track this shot.
So what you do after you've done that is you click on this motion tracker icon, which
is the fourth one across, and let's untick the Zoom box, because this image doesn't really
zoom in or out.
He's not moving back or forward, right?
And what we want to do is just start tracking forward.
So we press the play button and check it out.
It's tracking.
Now, if you press Alt D, it's going to disable all of the other nodes, and now you're tracking
just sped up.
Shitload.
And that's because we've just disabled all the color correction and your computer has
less to think about.
So basically, if you're doing any tracking, it's always good to disable all of your color
corrections.
That's going to give you better performance for that node.
We probably should have disabled 3D as well.
You can experiment with that.
That's a new feature in Resolve 12.
The tracker is just overall better.
So now we started our tracking at this point.
We want to reverse the tracking as well.
So let's click.
Let's drag this icon, this timeline indicator, back to where we started that first track.
Somewhere there.
And then click Reverse.
And now that's going to track backwards.
Oh, problem.
So look what happened here.
The folder crossed his face during the track, and DaVinci just stopped everything and goes
nut fuck this shit.
Can't do it.
So what we're going to do now is click this frame button, which is really cool.
This allows you to sort of jump in there and give DaVinci a bit of a hand.
So click on frame.
And now what happens is if we move this, we click on this mask, it's automatically going
to add a keyframe for that position, rotation, size, all that sort of crap.
So what we want to do is just put that back on his little nose bridge there.
And let's scrub forward, sorry, back in time to where the folder is not in shot.
And then put it back on the forehead again, rotate it to how it should be.
And then we can go back to clip and click Reverse again.
Problem solved.
It screwed up a little bit there as you can see, but it should be okay.
We're just making a real basic soft mask here just to re-light his face and add a little
bit more punch to that bouncing light coming off the white sheets.
Speaking of bouncing light coming off the white sheets, let's have a quick look at the
lighting setup that I did here with the crew.
So here's the beautiful little tiny camera on this massive tripod, you know, fuck the
red skull.
We don't need it anymore, right?
And now we've got this 300 watt tungsten for now bouncing into a whiteboard here which
is adding some fill into the room.
You can see that on his face there and on the side of the cabinet.
Then we've got this backlight which has a CTB gel on it to create a daylight colored effect
which is matching the same colored light coming from this double diffused LED overhead which
is being cut off the side of the room to maintain contrast.
So that is the lighting setup.
Obviously I've oversimplified that and gone over it way too quickly, but here is a much
more detailed view.
Get out there, start practicing lighting.
It's fucking sick.
It's one of the most important things of cinematography.
Don't stop practicing.
Don't stop trying shit.
Don't be afraid to fail.
I'm going to start using the word life journey soon.
So we've tracked our shot.
Great.
Now this thing sticks to his face.
Once that's happened, make sure you don't have frame turned on.
If you do, it's going to add a key frame and it's going to animate over time.
We want to make sure it's on clip, okay?
Now we can reshape this.
Let's go back to shift F mode and we can soften it.
If I just reposition it, hopefully that's going to look okay.
Let's just scrub through here.
Not really.
But you know how to fix that key frame by key frame now, right?
So hopefully you track this a little bit better than I did.
I'm just going to make it smaller.
Maybe that's going to help my cause.
You don't have time for this shit, okay?
Shift F goes back, Alt D will enable and disable all grades.
Make sure you run the final node here, which is the one without new mask.
Go back to the curves and check it out.
We're just going to add a bit more bounce to his face.
We're gently going to add some bounce remembering that I did actually soften this mask because
if you don't soften it, you're going to get this very hard edge and it's going to look
shit out.
So make sure, shift F, make sure you soften the crap out of that.
All right.
So things looking pretty good.
We are grading the absolute shit out of this.
It's looking awesome.
The beauty of raw, huh?
But we don't even need raw.
It just did really help with that white balance issue and exposure and all that sort of thing.
But you can do this pro res, no worries.
Actually did record this scene in pro res too.
Graded it in pro res, no problem, although the white balance was a lot more difficult
to fix.
So that's basically what I did in this other grade that you may have seen on the blog.
Obviously, I spent more time on this, did a much better job, did a skin qualifier as
well.
We don't have time for that shit today.
But what we do have time for is one last thing.
And I just want to quickly cover what's important about this shot and why it works so well.
It has to do with the color palette.
So you got this beautiful magenta curtain.
You got this magenta-ish skin tone.
And then you've got yellow in the scene.
So we've got yellow and magenta.
Basically they are two main colors in the scene.
Whenever you have more than two main colors, shit can start looking shit.
That's just something to keep in mind, obviously I'm oversimplifying that as well.
But two major colors complemented by greys, blacks and whites.
So we have a white t-shirt.
We've got gray cabinets and we've got blacks in the shadows and his hair.
So if you keep that in mind, I look at any good looking image, any Hollywood film that
looks awesome.
Except some of Wes Anderson's stuff, which is a little bit different.
But typically speaking, two colors that complement each other will work well together.
And the rest is a monotone image.
Next is black, white and gray.
So what I did in this shot, in Da Vinci, is I had a quick look at it and I said, oh,
where are all the yellows?
There's too much yellow in here, even though I've balanced it using my white balance.
These mustady yellow color draws just look shit.
So what if I turn them to gray?
So I'm going to add another node now.
So I'm going to alt S and add another serial node here.
I'm going to go to my mask, I'm going to go to this custom shape tool.
And I'm just going to quickly, in shift F mode, draw a real crappy quick shape just
to give you an idea of what I did.
Okay, pretty cool, he's an awesome shape.
Thankfully the camera doesn't move, so we won't have to track that.
We can just soften it up a little bit, especially on the inside.
But what we can do now is just desaturate that.
So let's go to the saturation and back it off.
Look what an amazing difference that does to the scene.
I don't know really why, but it has something to do with color, research that shit, figure
it out.
I don't know, but I practice this shit all the time, I think about it all the time.
You should do something as simple as that, completely transforms this whole shot.
Yellow, gray, yellow, gray, fuck yeah.
Get on this shit.
Another thing you can do is create a skin selection.
So the best thing to do if you're ever doing selections like based on qualifications of
skin, highlights, all that sort of thing, you want to do it before you start adding all
this focus.
This is what I call focus nodes, and this one's a little bit different with the desaturation.
But if you want to add qualifiers, you want to do them, I usually do them after my first
correction node.
My first correction node adds contrast and saturation.
So I'm going to double click on the first correction node and then press Alt S, and
that's going to allow me to add a second node here.
Then I might want to select his skin, click the eyedropper in his skin using this qualifier
thing.
Remember, I've covered all this stuff in great detail in a previous tutorial, check that
shit out.
Shift H will turn that selection on and off.
Let's narrow the selection to only show his skin.
Then we can clean it up a little bit, blah, blah, blah, you get the idea.
Shift H, then we can add saturation to his skin, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Or in some cases, what I do is desaturate the skin actually, make it like 40, and then
push the color of skin that I want into it.
Now one thing you will notice as well with this final shot is that his skin and that
background curtain are quite different colors.
So even though when I've created a selection here, it's pretty impossible to select his
skin and the background separately.
So I painstakingly went through, created a mask around him and selected them both separately.
But you get the idea.
Hopefully this tutorial has been entertaining at least.
I know I said it was only going to go for 15 minutes, but whatever.
Yeah, I've been promising tutorials for a long time, but they're hard.
You have to perform.
I just want it to be really good, so here's the shit one.
Enjoy that.
