Color Grading with DaVinci Resolve

Color Grading with DaVinci Resolve

“My final project During the course, I did the color grading of the short film Piscina, directed by Carlos Ruano and photographed by Enrique Silguero. It's about two friends spending a hot summer day in Madrid, looking for a pool to cool off in and everything happens while one of them is worried about something he doesn't know how to tell his friend. The short film seeks to convey the stifling heat of the summer in Madrid where you don't know where to go to cool down and joins the anguish of one of the characters who is overwhelmed without knowing how to tell his friend something. While they talk and look for a pool to swim in, they find a cool place to spend some time. This second location seeks to convey freshness, cleanliness, something neutral, and is where the character resolves the conversation with his friend. The aspects of the project To achieve all this, we have sought two different temperatures, the outside, warm with a clear dominance of yellow and the interior cold and more bluish. Two textures and sensations have also been sought, the dense and marked exterior and the soft and light interior. Accompanying the character's sensations. When facing this project we know that we have two worlds to achieve. We chose a representative foreground with which to work and choose the look of the exterior. The general plane is perfect for that. We did several tests to see how the material behaved and in the end, we decided that we would work with a LUT that we neutralized with a previous node so as not to be too conditioned. We raised light and removed contrast and saturation in that first node and together with the LUT we have an image that gives us a feeling and texture that brings us closer to the world we are looking for. In general, we work the image warming up and taking it to warm tones, we will take halftones and high lights to yellows and oranges. We contrast and lower little high lights to make it a more dense atmosphere. For more detail, we work on the secondaries and make selections. In the first sequence, we look for the dense sky, removing the blue to get that suffocating daytime sky. In order not to lose the green, we select it and keep the colour so that it is not too yellow or a cold green outside the warm world. The result This first sequence is more contrasted helping to give density to the feeling of heat and placing the scene in a hot hour of the day.

In the interior sequence, the aim is to cool the atmosphere, with cold tones and leaving the warm ones located in the characters, with their clothes, or the lamp that illuminates the receptionist. The contrast is softened and the feeling of density and suffocation is gone. We enter the second world, where everything weighs less and helps the character to tell what is happening to him. To achieve all this we do the same process as in the previous sequence. In this case, we are going to work without LUT, as it is a very different environment. The LUT is quite marked and the texture was perfect on the outside, which was denser, but on the inside, which was lighter, it conditioned us too much and we didn't get the smoothness we wanted. We started then with two nodes also in which we will reach the contrast, light, and cold tone that we look for in a general way working with primaries. We mask and work in a secondary way to give the points of light and maintain more localized warm tones. In this way, we have achieved those two worlds and temperatures that we want to transmit visually and that accompany the narrative of the short film. Now it's your turn! Now I look forward to seeing your projects. It would be very practical that you do as I have done uploading the before and after master frames and tell a little to everyone how you have come to this image. Explain what you want to transmit and what process you have followed with the program. Don't forget that the project is not finished until you make the render and the importance of seeing it in play. I can't upload my finished project because of the rights issue, but you can upload it so we can see the good work you have done and the colorist inside you. I also encourage you to give feedback on the work of other colleagues. By helping each other we can make learning and improve much easier. Thanks and see you on the forum! ”

Partial transcription of the video

“Hi. Let's see a little summary than what we have seen during the course. First of all, I have told you a little about myself so you know me better. Afterwards, we have seen my influences, the things that I like. We have continued with color theory to understand a little its importance in the world of cinema. Then we have started to open DaVinci. We have seen a little of its configuration and we have already taken a walk through its interface. We have seen the Media tab to see how to import and manage all the files that we will use later. Then we have gone to Edit, that although we are not g...”

This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.

Course summary for: Color Grading with DaVinci Resolve

• Level: Beginner
• 89% positive reviews (522)
• 15232 students
• 5 units
• 24 lessons (4h 55m)
• 10 downloads

• Category

  Photography & Video

• Software

  DaVinci Resolve

• Areas

  Audiovisual Post-production, Color Correction, Film, Film, Video & TV, TV, Video, Video Editing