Color Grading For Artists: 2016

Here's a shot from a short I worked on. We shot with a 7D in a rented motel room using a couple of 1K's through diffusion for sunlight. The lights were gelled for daylight and we balanced for that. As you can see, the color of the walls themselves skewed the balance of the shot very warm with no way to balance it out while shooting without adversely affecting skin tones.

It's not awful. In a little indie short it might even be acceptable to many viewers. But the shot is nearly monochrome and lacks any counterbalance to the overall warmth. As we'll see, even the shadows are saturated with orange.

I'm going to show you how to get from that first state to this, in just a few simple steps.

The second version is much more sophisticated and cinematic. It cuts the orange, limits it to the walls and allows for cool shadows that round out the color profile.

Here's a direct comparison.

And you don't have to stand on your head to do it. Here's how I did: first, I used the Gamma Primary Wheel in Resolve to bring up the values in the mid tones just a little bit.

You can see the change in the scopes below – subtle, but significant in that it sets us up for the grading to come after.

The second step is a little more complicated. I'm going to use a new node to do 3 simple things that add up to a big change:

First, I'm going to make a selection of the lower values (Zone 4 and below)
Second, I'll desaturate those values considerably but not completely. Default saturation value in Resolve is 50 – I'll take them down to 35. This will not completely eliminate the warm bleed from the walls but will considerably reduce it.
Third, I'll use the Gamma Primary Wheel to shift the color in the lower zones towards blue/green.
Important note: I am using the Primary Wheels because of the tonal overlap of the controls, which blends the grade without creating noticeable edges. I'll also soften it in the HSL selection itself.

I'm going to make my selection using only the Luminance Tool in the HSL Color Selection Menu. You'll see in the screenshot that I have turned off the Hue and Saturation selection tools so that I am selecting only by Luminance.

For my specific selection I am going to use the forehead of the man on the right. I want only that tone and darker. I don't want to select any values lighter than that tone.

Returning to this screenshot again, you'll see I have also both extended the selection all the way to full black (the Low value is at 0.0) and, just as importantly I have used the High Soft control to soften the selection (H. Soft is a 15.6). That ensures no hard boundaries between what is selected and the rest of the frame.

Using Shift-H I can see my mask in my viewer window. Everything not 'grayed out' is selected. You can clearly see the subtlety of the selection being feathered with the High Soft tool.

Now I'll move on to the next step and drop the Saturation to 35 from 50 in my selection. Then I'll go back to the Gamma Wheel in the Primary Wheels menu and shift the color towards blue/green – just a little bit.

Checking our work, we see that all the heavy lifting is already done.

We're not completely done yet, though. Looking carefully at the shadows to the left of the man on the bed we see they are still very saturated and warm. To fix that, we'll go to the Curves Menu in a new node. On the right of the Curves dialogue there's a dropdown menu with the 'Versus' menus.

These options give you curve controls with very specific options. 'Lum Vs Sat', for example, allows us to select a range of tones by their luminance and drop the saturation, like this:

I've taken the lowest range of tones and completely desaturated them, completely removing any remaining color cast. If you look closely at the headboard of the bed behind the man's back, you'll see the change like this:

This gives us a much cleaner look, with no uncontrolled color or color where we don't want it. This is often done as part of creating a 'cinematic' look in a grade – the tricky part is deciding where in the sequence you want this to happen. Early in a grade it allows you a clean slate for added color, later in a grade like this it brings in the dimension of 'clean' blacks.

I'm also going to sharpen the whole image up just a little. The camera settings were for 0 Sharpening – I'd rather control sharpening in the grade than try to work with footage sharpened in camera. For that, we go to the misleadingly labeled 'Blur' tool in Resolve. When the values in the Blur Radius Tool are increased (raised) the image is blurred. When reduced, the image is sharpened:

Finally, I'm going to bring down the pillows on the left just a little bit. I am a bit obsessive about the edges of static frames. I don't want anything on the edges that is going to lead a viewer's eye out of the frame or away from the focus of the narrative. Those pillows are just a little too hot. To do this I'll use a Power Window.

You can see that shape creates the perfect curve on the left side of the frame to isolate the highlights on the left without affecting anything else. All we have to do is invert the selection: