A SIMPLE Process To Cinematic Colors Every Time [Free Download] transcript

If your footage never looks cinematic, no matter how many LUTs or how many grades you put on top of it, it's not the look that you're missing, it's the order. This simple seven-node system takes any flat footage to cinematic footage, no matter the camera you're using. So, to quickly show the setup before we get into the first node, we're going to go click to our settings real quick. I'm on a MacBook, so my color management is set to DaVinci YRGB for the color science, and then the timeline color space and output color space >> [laughter] >> They're both Rec. 709 A.

Uh if you're working on Windows, I suggest Rec. 709 Gamma 2.4. So, with that out of the way, node one is CST in. This stands for color space transform. Now, ideally you're shooting with log footage. This is basically going to translate your log footage into a language that DaVinci can understand. You're going to find color space transform, you're going to go into your CST in, you're going to change the input color space to whatever you used.

For me, I was using S-Log 3 S-Gamut [music] 3 Cine, so I'm going to find S-Gamut 3 Cine for the color space, and then S-Log 3 for the gamma. There it is. So, from there, we're going to go to output color space, we're going to find DaVinci wide gamut, and we're going to find DaVinci intermediate. Let's add our next node. This is actually going to be our CST out. [music] Uh so, this is basically the end of the book. So, imagine CST in and CST out are our book ends, where all the editing is going to happen in between [music] those.

So, CST out, we're going to put color space transform, and we are going to use DaVinci wide gamut and DaVinci intermediate. We're basically bringing it back to normal with step one and step two, CST in and CST out. This is basically translating your footage. So, [music] here's a little key. Color grading is not meant to make bad footage look good. It makes good footage look great. So, at this point, you should be looking at your footage and you should be saying, "You know what?

That doesn't look half bad." If you're looking at this footage and you're like, "Wow, why does it look like absolute garbage?" Uh well, first make sure you got your settings right. Second, it could have just been that we shot it like garbage. There's a super interesting book. Uh it's actually one of 66 [music] books all on this one compilation. Uh but it talks about how uh he who attempts to build a tower without properly preparing lays the foundation and then realizes he won't even be able to finish the tower.

So, he just wasted all that time and wasted all of his money. Uh so, go into your color grade with a plan, all right? Set the foundation while you're filming, understanding that you want specific colors to pop where you want a specific color [music] contrast to occur, so then when you go into your grade, it makes it that much easier. So, this shot is actually staged. The lighting, the framing, everything was meticulous.

Everything was intentional. Uh but for those of us who are running around shooting run-and-gun style, we don't really have time to light things. We just recently got back from Singapore and I shot a bunch of super cool footage on my Sony there. All right, we've arrived. This place is insane. As we're doing this grade, I'm going to show you how the power grade looks on that footage as well to show you that this power [music] grade structure can work on any footage, really.

Now, step three, this is correct. Before we can give a unique style to this footage, we need to make sure that it is correct. So, what we're going to do here is I'm actually going to go over to the primary wheels. I'm going to go find my white balance. Uh you can either do a selection the dropper tool right here uh and you can go select what is true white and you select that and it'll move it to where it needs to be.

Um but something else you could do is you could go over to these three dots, make sure [music] that you have the display qualifier focus on, and you can see the circles kind of showing up as I'm going around this image. Uh we want to make sure that all those circles are almost completely in line with each other. So, we'll go to what I see as true white, which is right here, and we're already pretty close. Maybe Okay, that's pretty in line.

I'm going to go with that. Also, in this node, we are going to adjust our primary wheels. So, this is going to affect our exposure, but this is going to affect it in a way that is more broad. It's basically going to drag and affect the rest of the image. So, if we drag the gain, we'll see the highlights are moving, but also we can see the rest of the [music] image is moving with it. So, it's pulling the shadows and the midtones with it.

It's going to give you that smooth transition between highlights to midtones [music] to shadows. These numbers on my waveform right here, 768 is if it's [music] like getting pretty high up there. 896 is like, "Hey, that's a highlight. That's a highlight right there." >> [snorts] >> And then 1023 or above we're blown out. So, I usually don't want to go too high. I My style, I like to go ahead and contain myself to under at least 896 with my highlights.

So, I'll I'll actually put it at 768. We're already basically right there. And then my lift, I'll go to my lift next. That's all the shadows. I How I want to have this is I don't want anything clipping just yet. So, if anything is touching that line or below it, we're clipping. So, I'm going to have it right as close to the line as I can without clipping. So, that's 0.02. And the midtones, I want the midtones to be sitting at that 384 512 depending on the look of the shot.

So, this shot is more of a bright high key shot. Uh, so I will find my midtones sitting at like in between 384 and 512. Like you can see that's the majority of the image. There. So now it's very simple, but we can see we fixed our white balance and we brought [music] the exposure kind of where we want it, right? >> All right, so we're currently headed to the cable car. So the cable cars are like they're going to take us to this mountain like on the edge of Sentosa, which is where we are.

We're like on Sentosa Island in Singapore. >> Arriving at Hotel Michael and Crockford. >> Along with correcting our image, we also have this really cool tool. Now, if you go to workspace, uh, go to workflow integrations, there is a section right here called Higgs Field. You can download this ability through the Higgs Field website. If you weren't able to afford to have [music] extras on your set, you wanted to have birds in the sky, but for some reason the birds weren't flying that day.

Higgs Field, you're actually able to dive directly into editing your video through Higgs Field. Say for this shot I wanted to have birds in the background, right? I would go into Claude, I'd upload my video as well as type in the the prompt, I want to add birds into this video. I want them in the background, I want them slightly blurred, they should be subtle. All right, so then Claude is going to generate a prompt for me.

I'm going to plug that into this Higgs Field extension and after a few generations I'm able to add subtle enhancements to my footage to just help direct the viewer's eye or to help enhance the footage in a way that keeps the creative perspective while using the modern tools to bring it to a level I wasn't able to afford onset. There's currently a lot of controversy with Higgs Field, with AI in general. Are you actually creative while you're using it?

People say it's a tool, you can use it properly or improperly. Some people say it's more than just a tool, it literally replaces you. Here's my thought. I do believe it's a tool, just like a hammer. A hammer can be used to build things or can be used to I'm going to have to bleep that. When using AI, make sure to understand how are you changing as you're using it. See, I'm not using AI to replace anything I'm doing. I'm actually using AI to enhance what I'm doing and in turn, [music] it's increasing my skill level at what I'm best at and that is filmmaking.

I know AI is still a touchy subject and there's probably some of you who are like, I I want to use it, but also I don't because I don't want to get replaced. Like, am I no longer creative? Try it out. There's a link in the description if you want to test it out. Give it a month. See what happens. See what happens personally. Does your creativity skyrocket? Or do you start to get lazy and you start to no longer use your skill set that you've been blessed with?

Test it out. Link's in the description. Let me know how it goes. Now, let's move on to step four. Now that we've corrected the image, we've made it true, now we are going to direct the image. Note three is all about your direction. What story are you wanting to tell through your colors? The exposure, what story were we wanting to tell? This is where we really get to craft the story that our colors are displaying. But this is pretty cool.

I've got blue greens, which look cool. And then I've got these roofs that are like orange or these uh where is it? There it is. The little life preservers, life savers that are orange and the roofs are kind of have a red tone, so maybe you'll get some cool stuff here. So, at first I actually go to my HDR wheels. The HDR wheels are going to affect specific exposure levels, but where the primary wheels were more broad, the HDR wheels are surgical.

So, there won't be as much smooth transition between all the exposures, uh [music] but you are going to be able to manipulate each line level. So, let me explain. There are six different wheels here. So, we have black, >> [music] >> dark, shadow, We have light, highlight, specular, global. As we go up, these are just different levels. We have black, which is already the clipping area, but because we made sure not to have anything clipping, technically we don't have anything there yet.

[music] Dark is our lower levels. This is like 0 to 256. Uh and then we have our shadow. Shadow is basically going to affect [music] most of the image. It's doing, you know, 128 to 512. Uh and then we have our [music] light, which our light is going to be mainly affecting areas 384 and above. Then we have our highlight. [music] Highlight is mainly going to affect areas that are above 768, but because I protected myself from that higher area, there's not much [music] that's going to be there.

And then for the specular highlights, where actually that would be the blown out portion, so we don't have any of those, so those won't affect anything. Uh so this image, I actually want to have that high-key [music] look to it. I want to have kind of a Teletubbies look to it. That's the best way I can describe it is I want I want to see Teletubbies when I see this, all right? Uh so I'm going to actually [music] make sure that the shadows are a little bit brighter, but I want to maintain some contrast still.

I'm going to bring the light, keep that light at 768. [music] The shadow is going to make sure to come up a little bit. There. So that's that high-key Teletubby look. Uh but we're going to get our contrast back [music] in the curves. Oh, no. Pause. Pause my chair. No. I almost just died. My chair broke. I need to get a better chair. I understand this, all right? Stop judging me. Now we're going to go into the curves.

So up first, I'm going to log down the shadow right here by creating a point uh towards the bottom. From there, I'm going to drag this. I'm going to bring it up a little bit. This kind of fades the shadows. If I did it intensely, you can see where it's >> [music] >> fading it right there. See that? Uh so, I'm going to bring it just a little bit. And then I'll bring my mid tones back to 768. There. And [music] then I'll leave the highlights where they are.

So, I don't really do much changes in the exposure curves. I kind of already did it in the HDR wheels. But, where I'm really going to have some fun [music] is the colors. So, I usually don't mess with the hue. The blue I may bring to a slight more teal. Like barely. And I'm not going to I'm not going to bring it way up, obviously, cuz that looks cool. [music] But, there's going to be some more stuff done in the near future on some future nodes.

Uh so, I'm just going to bring it up a little bit to encourage the teal look. And then I'm going to go to my saturation. And here's something that I heard not too long ago. I think it was a Lightroom tutorial, but I use it cuz I really [music] like this technique. I make a bullet point at each line, like each color per se. And I bring all of them all the way down. And I look at the colors from black and white. All right.

So, I'll go one at a time. So, first the most prominent color in the scene is the green yellow. So, the grass right there. Do I want [music] to make it super saturated, or do I want to keep it desaturated? I'll bring it I want it to feel natural, so I'll maybe bring it to like right there. It's a little more saturated than natural. When I bring the greens up, it's going to affect the yellows just a little bit. Now, the aqua teal area, that's a lot of the sky.

Uh I really like that saturated for this look. So, I'm going to bring that probably to about right there. The blues are going to affect the same thing. Look at that. I'll bring it I may bring both of these down a little bit. About right there. Cool. The purple {slash} pink isn't really doing much. It's really just affecting the outside of the red X's. So, I'm just going to delete that and just mess with these reds. See, I can bring it way up here.

But, it's starting to distort. Like there's some There's some damage that's happening in the reds now, so I'll bring it I'll bring it down a little bit. I'll probably bring it to about right here. Yeah, keep it saturated, but like natural. There. All right, now I'll go to I usually don't mess with the hue versus luma. I'll go straight to luma versus saturation. So, this is going to basically affect the saturation in different exposure levels.

So, if I were to bring the saturation up down here, I'm bringing the saturation in the shadows way up. And then if I were to mess with the saturation down here, saturation in the highlights is coming way up, right? So, where you get a lot of your color noise is whenever you have super saturated tones in your highlights or your shadows. So, what I'll naturally do is I'll bring the highlight saturation down probably two lines, and then same for the shadow.

And then I'll go back to where most of my information is, which is usually around the middle, maybe a little bit further back, about right here. Uh and then I'll bring it back up, and I'll go until I like what I see. Now, because I want this Teletubby look, I'm going to bring it up a little bit further than most people would. There. Now, you can see what happened with the colors. I'm kind of setting that tone. I'm creating the story of hey, look at this fun poppy saturated look.

The contrast between the green and the red. Let me move out of the way for you. See? [snorts] The green and the red. Uh it looks pleasing because of that color contrast. And then when I go to color grade it, it looks even better. Now that we have directed the image with step four, [music] now we're going to move into step five. I call this the dream node. Uh so, you're going to go to your effects, you're going to find the glow [music] effect here, and drag that on.

You're going to go to shine threshold, bring it all the way down. You're going to scroll down, go to advanced controls, and you're going to find [music] composite type, and set that to soft light. And now what I like to do is before I change anything, obviously this already you can kind of see what this is doing already. I'll go to color filter. I'll drag this to a color that I want to kind of introduce into the story.

So, I'm going to start to bring this into like the orange and yellow. I don't want it too red. There, that kind of gives you an orange look. Now, I'm not done there. I obviously this [music] is really heavy. Uh I'm going to go to global blend, then I'm going to adjust the global blend. This is basically blending the original before you made any to your [music] change. So, if I drag this all the way down, it's gone. All the way up, it's there.

And then everything in between. Uh so, usually what I'll do is I'll do that. I'll go all the way to the bottom, all the way up, and I'll go back and forth until I find like where I want the image. There, so now we've created this like dream look. That's so cool. I love that. That's such a cheat code. I I freaking love the glow effect. And then what I'll do sometimes, if I don't want the heavy dream effect, but I really like the hue or the color that it's introducing, I'll bring the blend down so the effect isn't as heavy, but then I'll go to saturation up here in color and composite, and I'll bring the saturation up, and it introduces that color back into it.

Now, up next, we have [music] the look. What's going to go in here is you're going to look up in your effects, you're going to look up film look creator. All right, this is something that makes it super easy. It basically takes a bunch of different effects and different color tools and just puts it into one effect and you can manipulate it straight from here. So, whenever I'm doing a color grade like this where it's simple, but it works on everything, I usually throw this in and manipulate it from here.

So, the first thing that I do, because it automatically puts a bunch of effects on there that I really don't [music] want to keep for this shot specifically, I will go down to split tone, vignette, halation, bloom, grain, flicker, all these different effects, and I'll just do the drop down and make sure they're not >> [music] >> selected. So, what we're going to do next is we're going to go to the core look here and you can select through these.

Cinematic, Rochester [music] Rochester Rochester. Don't laugh. It's I in my head my voice in my head always says Rochester, but I could be wrong. Uh I also have always read that as Alaska 100% read that as Alaska this whole time not Akasaka. [music] Whoa, that almost sounded like I was being mean. But, you can scroll down all these core looks and you can kind of see what they're all doing. I'm going to push cinematic just because I think elated is leaning a little too teal for me.

We're going to take this color blend, drag it all the way down. Film look blend, drag it all the way down. And we're going to go back to them and we're going to slowly figure out where we want it. So, color blend is not going to change even though it sounds like it would. It's not changing the different tones that we just introduced. It's literally just changing the exposure and the saturation. Uh so, you can drag this back and forth and see where you want it.

Personally, that's way too much. I'm going to introduce it just a small amount. Let me uh I'll go 0.5. Then we're going to go to film look blend. And the only issue is I like what it's doing to the sky and the grass, but I hate what it's doing to the reds. Like it's taking the red completely away. Uh so, I'll introduce it just a little bit. Honestly, this looks sick. Oh my gosh. The shadows on the stairs look crazy. Now that we have our look, now we're going to go for our tone.

Now, our tone is something that I feel like people do not utilize and you can use this on the free version. We're going to utilize the log wheels. Now, the log wheels what we're going to do, I'm actually going to start to change the color of the different areas in my exposure. So, we have shadow, mid-tone, highlights. What I'll usually do is I will drag backwards on these reds into the negative cuz that gives us a cyan teal look.

Uh and then I'll drag the blues forward. So, a cyan look, but we're leaning more blue rather than towards the green. Um and then we're going to go to offset, and I'm going to drag this blue backwards to kind of introduce more yellow into it, and then I'll drag the red up just a little bit, so it's [music] getting a little more orange. Um and it's subtle, but you can see what that did a little bit if you look at like the mask.

There's a little bits of change going on. Uh in the shadows, you can see little bits of blue and teal introduced. There. So, now we have our complete seven-node system. We have our correct, our direct, our dream, our look, our tone, and our bookends, the color space transform in and out. And best part is it looks good on this shot, but it also, as you could tell throughout, it looks good on all the other shots that we got throughout Singapore.

So, the reason you want to use a power grade, even as a beginner, uh a power grade in DaVinci Resolve makes it so that you can plug it in, automatically does what it needs to to your footage, but say you're using a Canon, you're using a different log format, you're not using Sony, well, then go into your CST in and change the settings to the settings of your camera. >> [snorts] >> Um if you're not even using log, if you're just using Rec. 709, cool.

Just delete the CST in and CST out. And if you want to get this power grade for completely free, make sure to use the discount code mask and click the link in the description. It's just going to be called maskman color grade. So, use the discount code mask and get it for free. But, if this video was a little too slow, you want to go more in-depth, more advanced, and you want to get into the multiple node tree system that really separates the Hollywood-level films from the average YouTube video, make sure to check out this video, and that is the in-depth power grade with multiple different styles and it's all kind of fun stuff.

And lastly, I I don't know if you all heard about this. Hold on. Of the Higgs Field box. Now, this comes with a Logitech 3S mouse. It comes with a super cool mouse pad. It comes with a year's worth of Higgs Field, some drip coffee, and we're going to throw one of our little plushy guys in there from the music video. So, if you'd like to be a part of that giveaway and have a chance to win it all, uh make sure to like this video and comment in the last video create for the creator.

Now, you have to be located in the US. Sorry. It's just it's easier for this first one. All right? All right. If you don't If you're not in the US, just stay tuned. We'll do more. Remember, it only takes one to start color grading. It only takes one to start making content. It only takes one to make a change, and it only takes one to change the world, and that could be you. See you next time. >> [music] >> They said I'm one in a million.

Funny. I thought that meant special. Trapped in my soul while I'm all alone.