Original subtitles

Hi, my name is Daria.

I am a colorist, a compositor and a the Vintage Resolve master trainer.

And today I'll be taking you through the vintage results color page.

So if you look at my workstation, I've already got the vintage

resolve launched and I'm currently on the project manager panel

in order to open the project file that I would have shared with you

on the training page,

you need to right click in the project manager

and select Restore Project Archive

and archive is a little bit different from a regular project file because it

doesn't just contain the metadata for the project in all its timelines,

but also all the media within that project.

So within my documents I can see I have colored

page underscore video part one that the array

you don't need to enter that folder.

You just need to select that on the surface, highlight it and click open.

It'll take a few moments and you should then see a thumbnail

of the project open and the project manager to enter.

You have to double click the thumbnail.

All right,

so when adventures are launches, it will place you in the last page

that you had open.

In my case, it was the color page, but if you need to situate yourself here,

look at the bottom of the program and check to see which icon you have selected.

So I have color highlighted.

Make sure you either

click on color or the little color wheel if you don't have labels.

By the way,

if you'd like to see labels, you can right click at the very bottom of the program

and you'll see that you have options to show icons only

or to show icons and labels.

Okay,

So in the color page, I have the standard layout.

If you're seeing something different, you can navigate to the very top

of the program, go into your workspace menu

and choose reset UI

or user interface layout,

and then you should be seeing the exact same

distribution of panels as I am now.

At first, the color page might look quite busy,

maybe a bit intimidating if it's your first time looking at it,

but it's actually much easier to approach if you think of it as a series

of relatively simple tools, all of which have, you know, just one

or two functions that have all just been amassed together on this page.

So once you start learning them one at a time, it's much easier to approach.

Let's take a look at the standard panels, the very top of the page.

You have three main sections.

You have the gallery in the top left corner

where you're going to be storing your stills.

Stills are a way for us to grab high quality image grabs of frames

from our clips, but they're also a way of saving our grades, you know, so we can

then re-use them at a later time or with different clips on the timeline.

In the

middle, we have the viewer, which I think is pretty self-explanatory.

It's showing us our color grade as we perform it,

but it also offers a lot of additional functionality based on

which panel you currently have active or which tool you're using.

So it's actually quite reactive to whichever tools are in operation.

And then in the top right corner you have the node editor.

This is where you're going to be creating steps

for your grades to ensure that your grade is nice and clean

and that your image signal integrity is preserved.

So that's something I will go into much more detail later on.

But just keep in mind that this is pretty much where the magic happens

underneath of you, where you have two forms of the timeline,

you have the thumbnail timeline which is represented with these larger

thumbnails that you can click amongst either with your mouse

or you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard

to navigate between the different clips of the edit.

You can also use the left and right key

to navigate between frames.

Underneath the thumbnail timeline.

You have the timeline ruler.

Now this looks a little bit more like the timeline on the edit page

in which you can see the duration of the clips, the relationship

to one another and different video tracks.

And so you don't always need

to see the duration of clips when you're color grading, but if you did,

then you can refer to this timeline at the bottom.

You can also select the play head

and drag to navigate between the media clips.

And then finally, in the bottom third of the page,

you have your collection of palettes,

which is all the tools that you're going to be using in the color page.

If you are using a desktop resolution of 1920 by 1080 and above,

then you will see a distribution of like three columns of these palettes.

But if you have a smaller resolution, then you'll find your palettes collected

into just two columns left and right

to navigate between the different palettes or tools

you need to click on the icons above the palettes,

and that will show you all the different tools that you have access to.

By default, you will have

the primaries wheels and the curves open at the bottom.

And then on the right hand side, you have some additional tools like

the keyframes palette and the scopes, which I'm going to select and leave open.

So with the scopes, I can see the analysis of the video,

see the signal strength in the luminance,

and also the red, green and blue channels, which is going to be really helpful

for balancing and matching my medium at the very top of the page.

As with all the other pages in DaVinci Resolve, you have the interface toolbar,

which is this very narrow strip that features a series of buttons

that allow you to hide or reveal panels based on what you need to do on the page.

So say instead of using the gallery, you needed

to have access to your lookup tables or the LUTS panel.

You can click on LUTS at the top and see that

you now have access to all of your LUTS collections,

but then

you can select gallery and that will switch it back.

On the right hand side.

I have access to my open effects panel, my lightbox, etc.

Another way that you can customize your color page layout

is by clicking the edges of certain panels and expanding them,

and you'll see that the viewer in this case

dynamically resizes itself based on the space that it's allowed.

And then if you ever

need to reset your layout, you saw at the beginning of this video

that you could go into the workspace menu at the top and choose Reset UI layout.

Some other terms that I'm going to be using in this tutorial is options.

So the options menu is found in most panels in the top

right corner and it looks like these three dots.

So these options menus tend

to give you a bit more control over individual panels.

Let you enable certain modes

or deactivate certain features.

You also have pop up menus,

which you will find in the top right of some of the palettes

and they have a little dropdown arrow next to them.

So with these you can switch between different pages of a palette.

For example, with the curves, we have a lot of Excel curves that we have

access to.

You can use this dropdown

menu to navigate,

but then it also has a corresponding DOT menu at the very top of the palettes

with which you can navigate between the different pages

of the palettes.

So again, you will find these in different palettes.

If I go back to my scopes, I will find this also has a pop up menu

for the different types of scopes that I have.

And same thing for the primaries.

And then finally, we also have contextual menus.

These are also known as right click menus.

Whenever you right click in an area of the color page,

you will find the selection of additional commands.

But what's interesting about this menu is that it changes based on where you click.

So you will have access to different commands or actions

based on the elements that you're right clicking on right now that we're familiar

with the layout, we can start looking at our primary grading tools.

When we talk about primary grading tools, we talk about

making changes to the entire frame of the image.

So we could do this for a variety of reasons.

The main two is first of all, corrective.

So this is where we want to balance the image, match it to another

clip in the timeline,

get rid of any color cast that may have been captured in camera,

basically make it look as nice and clean as possible.

And then there's also the creative reason for primary grading.

So this is where you design a look and you want it to affect

the entire frame or the entire scene.

We perform primary grading with a whole combination of tools,

but really the most common ones is the primary color wheels

and the curves that are open by default in the color page.

So you see these currently open at the bottom of my color page.

I've also got scopes open, which I like to use in order

to properly analyze and understand what's happening in the frame.

I'm going to navigate to the first clip on my timeline,

and I'm also going to change my scope type.

Right now we're looking at an R&B parade which is giving us a readout of the color

intensity of the red, green and blue channel.

This is really helpful for certain workflows,

especially when we're matching clips.

But in my case, I just want to focus on the tonal range of the image.

So I will switch from parade

to waveform.

There we go.

And it's currently giving me a single video readout of this

frame With the red, green and blue channels superimposed.

I might want to change this to give me just a luminance readout,

so I will go into my settings at the top,

switch from B to Y

and disable colorize.

There we go.

So we have this floating settings menu which I can pick up with my mouse

and move aside and you can see that the scopes in the background

are no longer have any colors.

They're just a white readout.

If I wanted to increase the intensity of this trace,

then I could go into my waveform parameter

here and brighten it up.

So now I have a really bright trace in the background.

So trace is what we call the graph that's giving us a readout of a video signal

and then to collapse the settings.

I just have to click anywhere outside of that box and they will automatically go

back to where they came from.

So what are the scopes actually telling us

as you read them from left and right across the image?

So imagine your eye traveling from the left side of the frame to the right

and then top to bottom there representing the luminance of the image.

So zero at the very bottom represents the black point.

This is the darkest that a pixel can possibly be, right?

So usually that's a value of 000 for red, green and blue.

Then opposite that at the very top of the graph

will be the right point or the brightest possible value that a pixel can be.

So as you're reading this graph,

you should see that there's a few very distinct shapes,

especially these little pillars falling towards the bottom of the graph.

And when we look at the image, we will find

that as we travel from left and right there are

these areas of dark shadow in between these wooden pillars, right?

So where there is shadow, the pixels are being reorganized and placed

towards the bottom of the scopes graph to tell us that these are dark regions,

whereas in between these shadowy areas we have a pretty neutral spread of pixels

where there isn't really anything distinctly bright or dark.

So they're, they're all kind of bunching around the midtown.

And if you look in the scopes, that's also quite well represented in this graph.

So they're all just a little bit elevated, but they're not necessarily

bright, right?

So they're not being thrown all the way to the top of the Scopes panel

with this kind of readout, we can understand exactly how

we need to adjust our primary controls to get a nice spread in the image,

but make sure that it's not too bright, it's not blown out

and it's also not too dark that we're not crushing the shadows.

So for

that, I'm going to use the primary color wheels.

Now, there's a lot going on here at first,

so let's first understand what the individual wheels are doing.

On the right hand side, you have the offset wheel.

This is one that will impact the entire image uniformly.

If I click the control point in the middle of the wheel,

I can hold and drag in any direction.

And you will see that I'm introducing that color into the image

in the viewer.

I can also double click

the control point in the color wheel to reset it back to its original position.

Underneath the color wheel, we have this black slider,

which is called a master wheel, and this will affect the luminance of your image.

If I click and hold it, I can drag left to darken my frame

or I can keep holding it and drag right to brighten the frame.

Notice that the trace in the scopes is moving uniformly up and down.

So that's exactly what the offset does.

It will impact your image uniformly, regardless of how

light or dark it is or how many shadows it has or highlight points.

To reset

my settings, I'm going to go into the top right corner

and click this round arrow to reset my parameters.

Every wheel, by the way, has its own reset arrow.

Plus you have a global reset in the top right

corner of the primary palette, as well as most other palettes

that allow you to reset the entire palette.

So on the left hand side,

you have three more color wheels, but these ones have distinct tonal ranges.

So they will impact a an area of the image based on its luminance.

These are called lift gamma and gain.

And a shorthand way of remembering what they do is that lift will control shadows.

Gamma goes after Midtown's and Gane goes after highlights.

So if I was to click and drag the lift color wheel,

I will find that the shadows between the fence

posts get affected more dramatically and they start to go red.

Whereas the highlights are the last thing to get affected.

And likewise, I can use the mass wheels underneath

those color wheels to then make the shadows even darker,

but then go in the opposite direction towards the gain

and make the highlights brighter and thus establishing contrast in the image.

So if I'm going to be using the scopes as a reference for,

you know, how to distribute or normalize this image,

I will make sure that my shadows are not touching the black point line,

especially during this point in time where I'm only balancing the image.

I'm not really applying a creative grade,

going to drag the master wheel slightly to the right

to land this trace right between

the bottom two lines of my scopes graph,

and then I'm going to do the opposite for the gain.

The master wheel. I'm going to drag it upwards

to brighten the video.

And normally I would want to land most signals

right under the second line from the top of the Scopes graph.

But in this case, because it's already a very dark image

and because we don't really have a good reference for a

well lit item, like a piece of paper or a color chart,

I'm going to keep it a little bit darker and instead I'm just going to use

the highlight on this hand

as a reference for brightness, which I don't really want to take over 75%.

So that's this area of the graphic can see there's very few pixels

representing that particular region, which is why it's quite faint.

But hopefully you can see that's just about touching 75%

and that's as high as I will want to take it

If I feel

that the image is still a little bit dark, I can still brighten that up

by going after the gamma master wheel, dragging that slightly to the right

and bringing the middle part of the trace upwards a bit

at the top and the bottom of the primary palette.

You have your adjustment controls.

So these are single purpose parameters that will further affect the image

in some way.

For example, we have a temperature control

which I can drag to the left in order to cool down the image

or drag to the right to warm it up.

This is very commonly used

for getting rid of a temperature or a color cast in the image.

If a camera was not properly white balanced one recording One way that

I can make changes to these parameters is to click and drag with my mouse.

I can also click and drag on the parameter name itself.

So by clicking temp,

I can still change these values.

And finally, I can also click on the numeric field

that the parameters in and type in a value

with my number pad.

And then when I press enter that's applied to reset

any of the parameters, you need to double click the parameter name.

So I'm going to double click temp

and then that takes me to the default value of zero.

In this case, what I would like to do is increase

the saturation of my image because I had a log starting point.

The image was quite flat,

not just in terms of contrast, but also in terms of color.

So I will go down here to the bottom adjustment controls

and increase my saturation to 75.

So I'm just going to lift it up to about three quarters.

I'll enter 75 and the number pad press enter

and you should see that a little bit more color has returned to the image.

Now that I've raised the saturation on the image,

I start to reveal more of the original colors

and any color cast or inconsistencies that may have been captured.

So how do we balance this image?

There's a lot of different approaches,

but we're going to go for one of the simpler ones.

That involves using the data that's already in the viewer.

I am going to navigate to the viewer with my mouse and I'm going to right click.

And in the contextual menu, I will choose show picker RTP value

and what that means is that when I hover over the pixels in the viewer,

I will now get an IDB readout of the values

of whatever pixel I'm currently hovering over and this will give me

a representation of whether there's a color dominance in any particular pixel.

Now in certain regions, that dominance makes a lot of sense.

If I'm placing my mouse over that plank of wood, you know, wood tends to be warmer,

so it will have a stronger red dominance, it will have less blue.

Likewise for this jumper, you could see that it's

naturally blue in color, which is why the blue value will be highlighted

When you're trying to neutralize an image or balance it, you are trying

to look at elements that should naturally be grayscale or neutral.

So for example, white pieces of paper, white T-shirts, of course, color charts,

if you have them.

In this case, we don't have any of that.

But we do have a rhinoceros and we can realistically assume

that his skin tone is going to be somewhere in that grayscale range. So

I'm going to hover over it and make sure that I'm not seeing a color dominance.

When I do this, I see that my red channel is always about ten points

higher than my green and my blue no matter where I place it, really.

So that's an indication that the image overall probably has a red color cast.

I am going to navigate into my primaries

and what I can do is grab my color wheel of

probably my gain would be a really good approach because the gain

is representing the light source, you know, hitting the environment

and I will want to pull it away from red to get rid of that color cast.

But it's a little bit harder

to do with an A wheel because you're kind of moving, you know,

with these three dimensional colors, you know, So it's a little bit more abstract.

The wheels are great for green of color grading, but when it comes to precision,

maybe not so much.

So we're going to switch our mode from wheels to bars.

If you go into your pop up menu

under wheels, you will see bars.

These are also known as printer lights, and these will allow you

to adjust very specific color casts in your tonal ranges.

So in this case, again, we're going after the gain, which represents

the highlights of the image, and that is anything that's being affected

by the light source, which of course is the rhino and everything in the scene.

And we are going to drag down in the red channel

to remove some of that red dominance

to interact with bars.

You can either click and drag down with your mouse

or you can also use the scroll wheel, which will give you much

finer control over the values you know, so it won't be as aggressive.

So as I scroll, I can see my image becoming more

and more cyan, which is the opposite of red.

I'll make sure that I don't pull it down far enough to reveal that blue,

and instead I'll just

make a very minor adjustment.

As you can see, the red is not too different yet.

Then navigate back to the viewer with my mouse and double check with

the values are looking like.

And now they are overall much, much closer to the green.

And the blue values are still a little bit heightened.

So I can probably take it down just one more notch,

but otherwise I'm pretty, pretty happy with this result.

With my image normalized and balanced,

I am now ready to apply a creative look for that.

I will probably want to create a new note.

I don't want to work on top of the changes that I've already made.

I don't want to undo anything that I've done in my color wheels,

so I'm going to go into the Node editor, right click,

add Node and add Serial

so I won't spend too much time talking about node structures in this video.

But for now it's really good to think of nodes as organizational tools.

You know, the fact

that you're going to have a separate node for every stage of your workflow

and you're going to use them to keep track of where you perform certain grades

so that you can return to them in the future and know

exactly, you know, where you created contrast, where you created balance.

And that way it's much easier to modify, you know, not lose track of your tools.

To help me with that, I am also going to start labeling nodes.

So the first node that I had open number one,

you could see there's a little icon at the very bottom

that's representing the tools that I've already used.

On that note,

when I hover over it, it's telling me that I've used the primary balance

and I've also used the adjustment controls, you know, So

that includes things like know saturation and lumens.

Next I am going to right click node number one, choose Node label

and I will just start typing

balance.

So that was my clean up node.

This is where I was preparing it for the eventual color grade.

Now, with the video signal nice and cleaned up,

I can select node number two and I'm going to label

that look.

By the way,

if you ever wanted to disable your color

grade to see what your image looked like before you started working,

you can always click on the number of a node to disable it.

So now you can see this is our original image.

It was much darker, much flatter.

And when I enabled Balance, you could see now it's looking quite clean, neutral.

And also the luminance spread is much more natural looking.

I can also use the shortcut

command D on a mac or control D on a PC

to do the same thing

without clicking on the node.

I'm now going to select

my look node and create some sort of look.

I think first thing that I really want to do is establish a deeper contrast

because it's still looking a little bit

flat to me, even though it's looking natural now.

So at the very top of the primaries palette in the adjustment controls,

you will find that there are these two parameters called contrast and pivot.

I can click and drag contrast and that will push the top and bottom

of the trace further away from each other, as you can see in the scopes.

So what contrast does is it increases the difference

between the lightest part of the image and the darkest part of the image.

And that then reveals more detail in the mid tones that makes the image

look more interesting.

It reveals the wrinkles and the rhino

then also creates much deeper shadows.

Sometimes, though, that does result in your image.

Looking overall, too dark or too light.

And for that we have the pivot, which you can think of

as a balance tool for the contrast.

So rather than placing the contrast in the middle of the luminance range,

it will actually prioritize either the highlights or the shadows.

So I can click pivot and drag and you can see that

even though the contrast is maintained and I can overall make the image

brighter or darker,

so I'll make mine just a little bit darker

and I'm pretty happy with that result.

To introduce a creative color cast, I'm going to go back into the wheels

in order to play with the colors, like in a nonlinear fashion.

So once again, that's our pop up.

Many in the top right corner, I'll select wheels to return

and I'm

going to apply the color to the overall frame using the offset.

Going to click on the control point in the middle.

The color wheel, and drag it a little bit towards like a cyan tone.

So that's like a warm blue or greenish blue.

Okay.

And whenever I perform creative color grading, my left hand pretty much lives

on the keyboard, on the command, the shortcut or control D on a PC,

so that I'm constantly comparing before and after as I'm working.

And that way it refreshes

my eyes and my mind and it lets me know if I've taken the grade too far

and it's starting to look unrealistic or, you know, just bad or distracting.

So in this case, I'm still okay with it.

It is a very strong look, but maybe, you know, that was my intention for the scene.

So I'm happy with it.

As well as dragging the offset towards Cyan, I'm also going to drag the shadows

towards red in order to counteract some of that blueness

and make the shadows appear more neutral.

Okay, so then overall, that has a pretty positive impact on the image.

It's giving us like a bit of a dual tone.

So it still looks quite unique, quite different from the original video

signal, but it's it's looking quite natural to my eyes.

And then finally, I'm also going to adjust the midterm detail.

This is a parameter in the top right corner,

and it's going to have the effect of sharpening the image, even though it's

technically not a sharpening tool, it is also a contrast adjustment,

but it targets areas of the image that are naturally high in detail.

So midtown's like the scratches on the posts, like the rhino's skin,

those are all going to be affected and their contrast is going to be raised

and that will produce the effect of increased sharpness.

So I'm going to click and drag

and you can see if I take it

really quite far, then the image starts to look extremely dramatic.

I'm going to dial it back to about maybe about 40 points.

And again, press command D to bypass the node.

Or if I'm not using shortcuts,

you can just click on the number of the Node two to do the same thing

and compare before and after.

All right.

And that was our first exercise.

Let's move on to clip number two

For clip number two, we're going to be using the Curves palette.

This is the other primary palette that everyone should know for color grading.

It is just like the color wheels used for both correction work, for balancing,

but then also for creative looks and designs.

So here we're going to do a very similar thing just with an alternative approach.

Let's first get comfortable with the interface.

One thing I can do with the curves is I can actually pop out the palette

in case I need more control over the individual curves.

So in the top right corner, you will see this little icon

that looks like four arrows pointing in different directions.

When I click on it, I expand the palette

and I can

now be position it by grabbing it by the header.

Or I can click the bottom left corner

and resize it so that I can fit it wherever I need it.

On the page.

You have complete control over the individual channels,

the color channels that you work on in the top right corner.

You can see that by default these are all linked or ganged together,

but you can also select that little chain icon to disable it

and see that you can navigate between the different channels of the image

gallery. Link these as I continue.

Now, the main portion of the palette is taken up by the curve itself.

And this there's a lot of similarities to the Scopes graph that we just looked at.

So the very bottom of this graph represents the hypothetical black

point of the image and will impact the shadows.

If I select this point and I drag it upwards, I am brightening the shadows.

If you look at the Scopes graph, you will see that this image

is getting brighter from the bottom upwards.

Likewise, I can drag the

control points across the bottom and that will have the opposite effect.

It will deepen the shadows.

It will bring them down in the scopes.

The same is true for the opposite.

At the very top we have our White Point control.

I can drag it across the top to raise my trace

and eventually overexpose it completely across the image.

Or I can drag it downwards in order to darken the image.

So using these two control points, I can very easily establish

a tonal range distribution, or I can normalize the image

or create contrast.

What's really special about the Curves palette is that I can also create

as many control points within the curve as I want, and thereby

I can make very customized rates both for balancing and for creative looks.

It means that if there's a very specific portion of the image that I need to target

that I'm finding very difficult to adjust with the color wheels,

I can switch to the curves and make adjustments to that

very distinct range to create new control points.

All I have to do is click on the curve and start

to drag up or down to lighten or darken it.

Then I can create

more points to

start creating looks.

You can remove points by right clicking them with your mouse.

So I'm going to begin by dragging the black and white point

to normalize the waveform in the scopes.

Remember, we don't want to crush the shadows.

We just want to land them somewhere safely between the zero and the 128 line.

So I'm going to drag that point

and place it right over there

and then I'll do the opposite for the white point.

I'm going to drag it until the very top of the trace

and somewhere under or on the second horizontal line from the top.

So we absolutely don't want to be crushing this

because we will be losing a lot of data here, and that tends to look quite russet

in silver, but unprofessional.

So ideally, even the highlights we want to keep quite well preserved.

And you can see right now that area in the window is starting

to look like a block of white pixels, which we absolutely do not want.

So I'll pick it up and drag it downwards and we tend to be a little bit

more precious with highlights than with shadows.

So instead of placing it somewhere in between, I'm actually going to drag it

a little bit lower to make sure that we preserve as much detail

out of that window as possible.

Hopefully by now

you're feeling more comfortable with referring to scopes and reading them.

If we're reading it from left to right, then we can see that there's

a great area of raised pixels on the left hand side.

And if we look on the left hand side of the image in the viewer,

then you will see the brightest spot in this room,

which is of course an open window.

So it all makes sense of the rest of the image is relatively flat,

so there's not too many distinct shadows or highlights.

But then as you travel across to the right, you see this really

gentle transition from shadow to a lighter portion of the wall.

And in scopes graphs,

this tends to look like a really gentle gradient,

which is exactly what you can see hopefully

on the right hand side of the trace.

So just a little wave going upwards towards the brightness.

All right.

So I have a stretch, the top and bottom of this trace.

Sometimes you'll see that a change that you make counteracts

a previous change that you had created.

So, for example, the shadows have now been elevated, and that's perfectly fine.

A big part of color grading is reiteration.

It's going back to tools that you used earlier and making further

changes in order for the final result to look optimal.

So I'm going to grab the black point and drag it a little bit lower

so that once

again, we're filling a lower portion of the shadow.

And finally, I'm going to create another point in the middle of the curve

to control the overall lightness or darkness of the image.

So kind of like using the gamma in the color wheels I click and drag

could see that I can brighten the overall room or I can darken it.

I can also refer to the histogram that's in the background of the palette.

This histogram you can think of as an alternative

representation of the image from the scopes.

But rather than reading it from top to bottom, we're reading it

from left to right.

So left representing the shadows, right, representing the highlights.

So the majority of the image is actually quite low in terms of luminance.

It's all the way down here.

And if I want to target this region, I need to place the point over here

and you'll see that when I drag it upwards,

much more of the image becomes brighter, much more dramatically.

So I'm not going to be that intense,

but I will lift it up just a touch.

I can also perform a balance at this stage,

but this time, instead of using the viewer and the picture,

I am going to go back and to my Scopes settings.

So this is the little icon that looks like three lines.

And here I'm going to reactivate my red, green and blue channels.

So instead of using white, which represents luminance, I'm

going to switch to IGP and I'm also going to select Colorize in my settings

so that I can see what these channels look like in the Trace.

And then once again, I'm going to click off to remove the settings panel

and I can immediately see that there is a bit of a red dominance in the image.

One thing that's important

to keep in mind when you're balancing is to always keep an eye on context.

If this was a video of a forest, for example,

then I would naturally assume that the Green channel would be quite

dominant in the scopes, and that's perfectly fine.

I wouldn't try to neutralize that.

Likewise, if we had an image of a blue sky,

then the blue channel would be dominant.

But in this case we're looking at the interior of a room.

We have like these scales with what we assumed to be, you know,

usually they're printed on a white piece of plastic

or white paper so that we would assume to be neutral.

There's no reason really for anything in this room

to have such a strong red dominance as what we're seeing.

So the most likely thing is that we have a color cast.

So we are going to begin by

isolating a red channel in the colors by clicking are in the top right,

and I am going to

reuse the midpoint by selecting it and dragging it slightly down.

So you can see how the Red Channel

has separated itself from the previous gang channels.

So green and blue are still there,

but Red has now started to move on its own.

And when I refer to the scopes, I can see that

red fringe is starting to disappear a little bit behind the other channels.

Whenever you have pure white in the RGV scopes, that's when you know that

three channels are perfectly overlaid and you have neutral, you have grayscale.

I can also see that I have a bit of a blue fringe at the bottom of this trace.

So I will also isolate the blue channel

and drag that slightly upwards.

Right.

And hopefully you can see that the image has become a little bit more neutral.

If you need to make further tweaks, then feel free to do so,

especially if something doesn't look right in the viewer.

We can always reliably depend on the scopes to give you

an accurate readout no matter what monitor you're using.

So I'm going to press Command D to disable the note to compare before and after.

And you can see it feels almost like turning a light on.

You know, the image has become much brighter.

The contrast is more defined.

It looks more like real life.

And also it's been neutralized quite a bit.

So it no longer has that kind of yellowish or brownish tinge,

which means that I'm now ready to start performing other actions

in terms of creating this look, I really want to create some contrast,

but I don't want to keep using

the same curves palette because right now you could see it's quite broken up.

And if I start to make further adjustments, it's going to be difficult

to keep track of what was balancing and what was creative work.

So I would rather collapse this palette by clicking on the X in the top left corner

and create a new

node in which I'm going to establish contrast.

So I will right click on my existing node

and add a new serial node.

So a serial is just a standard corrector node that will appear after the

that you currently have selected.

There you go.

I will use this node to create contrast.

And for that we're also going to be using the curves palette.

And I'll remind myself that the previous node

was being used for balance.

All right, whichever node I have selected.

So it's highlighted with an orange outline, that's where

I will be performing the changes on the palettes.

Notice that when I select the contrast, which doesn't have any icons

at the bottom of it, the Curves palette is back to what

it used to be just a straight line, you know, from one corner to the next.

If I switch back to balance, then you can see the changes that I've just made.

So now I can work on contrast

without affecting or undoing anything that I did with the balance.

I will make sure that my curves

are all ganged up Once again.

I can expand the palette so it's a little bit easier to modify

and I will create what's known as an S-curve.

So S-curve is a shorthand way of referring to contrast in an image,

just like the letter s, it implies that you are darkening

the lower midtown's or the shadows and brightening the Upper Midtown.

So the highlights thereby creating this s shape.

So it's a really quick way to establish contrast.

If you have a dark image like this one, you might want to be very gentle

with the the severity of the shape and keep it quite,

quite subtle.

I'm pretty happy with the results.

You could see my before and my after.

I also want to work on the colors of this image,

but again, I don't really want to undo what I've already done,

so it's a good idea to once again create a new node.

But this time I don't want to make changes to the colors

after the current node because I do feel the contrast is a good change to place

at the end of a pipeline.

Instead, I want to make my color corrections between the balance

and the contrast.

So for that I'm going to right click the contrast node, add node.

But this time, instead of adding cereal, I'm going to add cereal before.

So now a new node has appeared

in that connection line between balance and contrast.

And this will be my look,

just like with the remainder of the nodes on this particular clip,

I'm going to be using the Curves palette to create the look.

Let me expand the palette one last time,

and this time I'll start isolating the channels.

Okay?

What's fun is that if you want to introduce

the color of a certain channel, you can selected,

create a control point and drag upwards to bring that color in.

But when you drag it downwards, you're not just removing

the color, you're actually introducing its inverse opposite.

So the opposite of green and the additive color space is magenta.

So you bring magenta in by dragging in the opposite direction.

If you ever have any trouble remembering the different color pairs, you can refer

to the color wheels in the primaries and see the opposite of green is magenta.

Opposite of red is cyan.

It's the light blue and then opposite of blue is yellow.

So if I

were to reset these parameters, go to blue,

I can introduce blue or yellow.

I mean reset

and also introduce red or cyan.

A quick way to create

a look using the curves palette is to introduce two

opposite colors into opposing tonal ranges of an image.

So, for example, if I have my red channel open,

I could drag down in the lower midtown's

to introduce Cyan into the shadows.

A rather you know what?

I'll drag in the opposite direction and introduce Red into the shadows,

but then drag the other half of the curve in the opposite direction.

And that's going to give me this really interesting,

almost a retro look on the colors.

So this is actually called cross process.

It's a reference to older photo development techniques.

And in this case it almost always produces like a really attractive color look.

So in this case, I've used the opposite ends of the red channel.

You could see before and after.

I can reset this and try the same thing for a different color.

And it will pretty much always work.

As in this case, I'm going to lift the bottom

half of the blue channel to introduce blue into the shadows,

but then lower the upper Midtown to introduce yellow.

It's opposite.

And that also gives us a really interesting result.

I'm going to keep these control points relatively close

to the original lines so that the colors are pretty subtle

to get this result.

All right.

If I wanted to look at this clip in full screen,

I can use command F as a shortcut or control F on a PC

and then continue to use my shortcuts to bypass the note.

Great. So command the

before and after.

And this is me creating that blue and yellow Look,

if I wanted to bypass the entire pipeline, not just one note.

There are a couple of ways I can accomplish this.

First, at the very top of the viewer, you have this icon

that looks like a little color wheel with some sparkles next to it.

You can click on that to completely bypass the entire grade

and you'll end up looking at the original video signal.

Or you can press shift the

and that will also disable the entire pipeline.

And you could see the very top of the viewer.

That icon, again, is getting crossed out to indicate to you visually

that you're no longer seeing the great.

Now that we've created a few looks,

let's save them for later use.

So I will right click within the viewer

with my clip to still open

and I will select grab still

and now a still

will appear in the gallery which contains, as I mentioned earlier,

a high quality one frame grab of this video

based on the frame that I had open at the time that I grabbed it.

But then also all of the color grading data associated with it.

I can even click underneath

the still to give it a custom name.

So in this case, this was the cross process.

Look,

in case you're unable to reach

or to click that area to start labeling a still, you can always right

click and choose change label and you can do the same thing.

Let's also grab a style of our first clip,

right click

grab still,

and that will appear at the very beginning.

Here. I'll click to select it.

And this was more of like a neutral, neutral cyan look.

So this is a way that I can collect all of my different grades, different looks.

Something else I could do is also organize these into albums, which is

the color pages version of folders or bins to access albums.

I need to click on the sidebar icon in the top left corner

of my media pool and you can see when I select it,

the sidebar opens up and I have my default album Stills one

I can double click to highlight

its name and I will call this my Looks album.

Then I can also right click

within the sidebar to generate as many new albums as I need.

So when I right click I can add still album

and that's my stills too.

So it's really quite easy to stay organized

when you're working with the gallery.

But now the next thing I'd like to take a look at is matching clips to one another.

So that is just as important as being able to read scopes

to be able to normalize and balance clips in preparation for the creative grade.

But we perform matching for a slightly different purpose.

So primarily it's so that you can have clips playing in a sequence

and they all look like they're all part of the same environment.

So let's take a look at three clips that I have in the timeline right now.

I will disable the loop function in my viewer

by clicking on the little orange arrow at the bottom and I will press spacebar

to play through these three airplane sequence clips.

And even though

topically they all make sense next to each other,

they all look extremely different

because they were captured on different days on different cameras,

you know, and it's perfectly natural for this to happen to footage.

So the first clip looks really quite warm

Afterwards.

You go into this very neutral clip in the middle

and then continue into this darker color clip.

So we would like all of these to look pretty cohesive.

I will begin with the automated match function individually is off

because I feel that it's quite powerful and really quite useful.

The first thing we need to do is decide on our ideal

starting point or our key shot as it's also known.

And I think the middle clip in the sequence

makes the most sense because it is a very neutral looking shot.

It's nice and bright, but also the contrast is appropriate.

So we have nice deep shadows

and very good highlights that are not blown out.

I will select my third clip

and right click on clip number four.

All right.

So this is a very important distinction to remember.

The clip that you are changing

has to be the one that you have selected, but the one that you want to match to

is the one that you want to right click and choose shot match

to this clip.

It might take a moment,

but hopefully you will see the colors shift

as your opening clip now changes to match

the look of the subsequent clip could see that both nice and neutral.

Now they have the same color.

Tarmac even sets the ground, same color fuselage on the planes.

They both look

very similar in terms of color balance, but also in terms of contrast, you can see

that the shadows underneath the airplane are just as rich in both cases.

So now, if you were to see this as part of a documentary or a feature,

this would look a little bit more natural that they belong next to each other.

We'll try the same thing for clip number

five once again using clip four as my key.

So I will have five selected.

If you right click

the active clip you will not see shot match to this clip as an option.

So you have to make sure that you are right clicking the key instead.

Shot match to this clip.

All right.

And that's also given me a pretty good adjustment.

Remember, you can continue to disable a note

or press a command D to temporarily hide the grade.

And that absolutely has been a substantial change,

but it may be not strictly as accurate as the previous one had been.

And that's fine.

So in this case,

I can see, for example, that the shadows are much deeper in our key shot.

If I look at the wheels or if I look at the engines

and also refer to the scopes, you can see that these fall pretty low down

right above the zero point line.

But when I look at number five, those points are elevated.

So they look a little bit flatter in the viewer and they're also much,

much higher in terms of the scopes.

I will go into my primaries

palettes and drag the lift master wheel to the left

to darken that range of the image and try to get it into

the same position in the scopes as it was for clip number four.

All right, so the shadows are looking much better.

I think the highlights are also pretty good.

You could see they're a little bit lower, perhaps in clip number four,

a little bit elevated in number five,

so I can drag those down.

But then overall, the image I think I could use with a brightening,

you can see here the spread is much more even, whereas here

it's a little bit more concentrated in the upper mid-teens.

So pick up the gamma, drag it upward slightly.

I'm still seeing just a little bit of warmth,

I think, in this image compared to the key.

So once again, we can return to the primaries, switch from wheels to bars,

and I am ever so slightly

going to lift the blue channel at the very bottom here in the lift.

So I don't have as much of a

separation of colors at the very bottom of my scopes.

So by not even dragging, but just by using the scroll wheel

once on the blue bar and raising it

by a factor of 4.01,

my shadows have now started to look more neutral,

and I've achieved a much better match with clip number four.

So this is a really nice on the fly way of color matching,

you know, being able to very quickly navigate down the timeline

and making sure all the clips match each other,

especially if they were captured in the same location.

And there's enough context, enough visual references

for the software to understand what it's seeing and match those elements up.

In some cases, though, you're not going to have those types of helpful references,

in which case you will need to perform all of the shot matching yourself.

And that's a very powerful skill to have, and I'm about to show you how to do it.

I've got these two clips near

the end of the timeline, numbers six and seven,

which don't really have a very clear

reference for whites, you know, like a white piece of paper

or a white T-shirt or in this case, the fuselage of a plane.

So here we have a slightly more busy environment

in terms of there just being more vegetation.

So things with a naturally stronger color cast.

We do have some pretty good references for shadows.

They don't take up a large portion of the frame, but they are still there.

So we know what the deeper shadow should look like.

In this case, we also have the same environment,

but it was captured at different times of the day,

which is another reason why you might often have mismatched footage.

We want in the end for the sequence to look like this.

We want the warmer daytime look rather than the sort of sunset cooler look

for this, I am first going to grab a reference image,

so I'm going to open up a brand new album in the gallery

because I don't want this to end in my looks.

I select stills too, and then I'll right click the viewer when I have clips.

Seven open and choose grab still.

There we go.

In this case, are not grabbing this for, you know, color grading or look purposes.

There's absolutely nothing in the note editor for me to preserve.

I need this purely as a visual reference and in fact,

I will label this still as reference

in the gallery.

And that way that's a reminder to myself that there's nothing important

that I'm going to lose in case, you know, I delete it later on

and then going to select clip number six

and I am going to double click the reference thumbnail

to wipe it in the viewer

so you can see a few changes have occurred in the viewer right now

in the top left corner of activated one of the icons, which is the image wipe

and that has not produced a split line down the middle and it's showing me

my reference on the right hand side and my active clip on the left.

On top of that, in the top right corner, I've also revealed

a lot of additional controls for how the image wipe behaves.

By default, you're going to get this horizontal wipe.

We have a single line in the middle that you can pick up with your mouse

and move left and right to pick the ideal point for matching.

But then you also have a lot of alternative white modes,

you know,

based on the context of the scene, based on, you know, the placement

of your characters.

And so you can check these out.

I think they're pretty self-explanatory.

But in our case, really what we need is this kind of divide where we have

a good environmental reference, right?

So we can see the ground in both frames.

We can see the mountains in the background, in both frames.

And those like few references to shadows are also present in things like the

the dog's face, for example, the wrinkles in the man's clothes.

But then also the horses eyes and mane are all going to fall in the same region.

I'm going to

change my scopes from a waveform to an RG parade that makes it really easy to see

exactly what the signal strength is of every individual channel in the video.

So I'm going to use my pop up menu

to choose parade, and the default setup should be enough.

So we have red, green and blue.

The actual distribution of the trace

is exactly the same as it was with the standard waveform.

You're still looking at the signal strength

from weakest at the bottom, the black point to strongest at the top,

the white point, and you're still reading it.

Left to right, except now the video signal is a bit compressed,

so it's much more narrow, but it's still the same shape.

If I was to jump back in to say clip number two,

hopefully you'll recognize that bright window on the left hand side.

But it's got slightly different strengths for all three channels.

So in

this case, I am looking at the image on the left,

but you can actually see the white line between the two as I move it around.

So the parade is giving me a readout of both,

which makes it much, much easier to match the two because I just have

to get the height correct in all three channels.

So matching is a bit different from balancing in that sense

because you're not trying to get three of them to line up perfectly.

I rather you're trying to get them to replicate the relationship

of your reference clip in which case, as we're reading this,

we can see the blue channel absolutely does have to be reduced

because right now it's a bit higher and the red channel needs to be raised

because it could see that the reference image has a slightly elevated red channel.

So we are going to perform our match using the curves palette.

I already have a blank node already

and in fact I'm going to label this color match

and I'll begin by isolating my red channel

and I will raise its white points to drag the top

half of this red parade.

And I only need to drag it a little bit.

You can see that it starts to match the arc of the reference Red Parade,

and that's perfectly fine for me, and I'm happy with it.

I will now do the same thing for the blue channel, so that's a little elevated.

I will do the opposite.

I will select Blue Drag, the White Point

and lower it.

So once again it matches the arc of the reference.

When I look back at the viewer,

the color grid is looking very, very close.

All right. So that's already a very good match.

And that just required two very small adjustments to the red and blue channels.

One, maybe

final thing I would like to do is also match

the bottom of the green channel, which right now I can see is a little bit

elevated in my active clip versus my reference.

So I will isolate my green channel,

select the black point

and drag it down ever, ever so slightly.

Okay,

So now we have a pretty good match between the two.

In fact, I can disable my white mode in the top left corner by selecting

this wipe image wipe icon

and I can use my up and down arrow keys to cut between the two clips.

And then I can also play these back to see how well they match each other.

And I think that's looking really nice.

Much, much closer than what it used to be, which was of course

this the much cooler look followed by the warmer one.

But here's where the real magic starts.

Once you've achieved a match between clips,

you can now start to design looks for your scene

and you don't have to recreate the look every time you need to use it.

You can simply copy and paste it across different clips,

and as long as they have the same starting point, they will continue to match.

All right.

So it's all about getting it out of the way in the first note of the pipeline,

for example, in this case, I can create a new node,

add node, add serial,

and this will be a node for contrast,

I will once again use my curves, but this time I will combine

all of my channels or gang them, and I will start by maybe dragging the top

and the bottom

points in opposite directions to really drag out

the potential of this image.

Because this is a creative contrast.

Look, there's not really as many strong rules around it.

So if I start to, for example, click my shadows, it's not as big a deal.

But let's see, I'm going to click downwards

to maybe deepen the midtown, which I think looks really nice.

It produces more color, more saturation in the image,

and then drag the highlights up to give me

a bit more separation, to reveal more

detail in the ground.

Great.

Once again I'll press command f

see this image and press command D

to disable you see, this is before and after my contrast,

and I can also press shift D to bypass the entire pipeline

and see that this was my original image followed by the great.

If I wanted to apply

this exact same contrast to the following video,

I can select this node in my pipeline

and I can either use my edit menu to choose,

edit copy, or I can use a standard keyboard shortcut

which is command C or a control C on a PC.

Select that.

Now I can navigate to clip seven

and choose, edit and paste

or command v Control v.

The contrast has been pasted

and the look between the two clips has been maintained

because they had the same starting point in terms of prominence.

The next thing I'm excited to show you

is the filter option and the color page.

So remember when we looked at the interface toolbar at the very top,

I told you that there were certain panels that you can reveal and hide

by pressing on certain buttons.

One of those buttons is clips, which collapses

your thumbnail timeline underneath the viewer.

But if you look right next to the clips button,

you'll also see this little dropdown arrow.

When you click on it, you reveal

a series of filters that you can apply to your timeline.

So by default, your timeline will show you all clips.

But sometimes you might want to isolate what you're seeing.

For example, right before delivering a project

you might wish to check out what all your ungraded clips are.

If there's anything that you may have accidentally skipped or forgotten.

When I click on ungraded clips

that leaves just one clip in my timeline,

which was that airplane clip that we used as a key shot.

So I can select that and I can review this clip.

Now, this has no impact on your actual edit.

If you look at the edit timeline underneath,

you could see that all of the clips and the cut points are still present.

If I was to jump back at to the edit page,

my entire timeline is still just as it was.

It is only what we're seeing in the color page that changes.

Let me go back to my filter and I could select all clips and these all come back.

So filters can be incredibly helpful when you're trying

to focus on a subset of your media for whatever reason.

For example, we have two clips

that we're going to be performing secondary grading on in a second,

and I will mark them in order to remind myself where they are.

One of those clips is number two, so I will

right click and I will add a flag to it.

So select flags and make it yellow.

And you can now see a little yellow flag in the top left corner indicating that

for whatever reason, this has been, you know, indicated with this flag.

And I would also like to mark clip number eight

for secondary grading work.

So I'm going to right click Add flag and yellow.

I can also add flags in batches.

So to select multiple clips, I can either

hold the command modifier on my keyboard

and make multiple selections,

or I can also hold the shift key to select a sequence of clips.

So with number three highlighted, I've held shift.

I pressed number five and that gave me that exact sequence of clips.

I can now right click

Choose Flags,

select Blue, and now all of these have adopted a blue flag.

So what does this have to do necessarily

with organization or the filters that I talked about a second ago?

If I go back into my clips filter list,

I will find that one of my options for filtering is flags.

So I could decide, you know what?

For the rest of the afternoon, I only want to focus

on this airplane sequence so I can choose to filter by blue flags.

And now I don't have to be distracted by any of the other media on my timeline.

And granted, this was a relatively short timeline.

There's not too many clips, but when you're working on

an episode of a show or a short film or feature film,

you are going to have potentially hundreds of clips to work through.

And it really helps a lot to have flags to indicate exact features

that you want to address, you know that you want to focus on for the day

and not have to constantly back and forth on the timeline.

So for this next portion, I'd like to return to our main timeline.

I'm going to navigate to the Clips dropdown

menu again and set it to all clips to remove the filter.

And the next thing we'll be

doing is working with secondary grading tools,

secondary color grading is when we target only a portion of the frame

when we're performing color grading or applying an effect.

So we do this primarily using two techniques.

One technique is referred to as masking in the vintage resolve.

We accomplish this using power windows, and in this technique

we are isolating a portion of the frame using a shape,

you know, something like something basic, like a circle or square

or even a custom shape that we draw ourselves using a vector.

And then alternatively, we can also perform secondary grading

using keying techniques, which is where you select

the portion of the frame based on hue saturation or luminance.

So in the vintage result, we accomplish this using the qualifier tool.

We're going to use both of these and the next couple of exercises.

I'm going to start with clip number two, which we've already worked on.

So here we've performed a balance, we've applied a creative look and contrast.

But in our case, I also want to isolate the face of these scales

in order to make the detail here pop out even more, because that's

obviously the purpose of the shot, is to get the audience

to look at the detail right in the middle.

So I'm going to try to make it as clear as possible.

Now, where would you place a node for this type of secondary grade?

So far we've

been mostly keeping things sequential, but in this case,

I want to work on top of the cleanest version of the signal.

So I'm going to place my secondary grade right after the balance node.

I will select it right click, add

Node and add serial.

So I'll use my labels

to indicate that this will be a secondary grade

on the scales in the scale surface.

And for this it makes the most sense

to use a shape as pretty straightforward, a circular shape.

So I will go into my Windows palette, the icon to enter.

It looks exactly like a circle,

and underneath that you have a series of preset vector shapes.

I will select the circular window and that will immediately appear

in the viewer as this little interface that I can interact with.

So I can drag the corners to make this window larger.

I can click anywhere in the empty space in the middle

to move it around as a single unit.

I can also

stretch it or crush it, pull it in various directions

and also rotate it using the little anchor anchor in the middle.

Feel free

to also move around the viewer itself.

So right now I can't really see the bottom of the shape too well.

So I can middle click my mouse, so I can click on the scroll wheel

to maneuver around

so I have a better control over the bottom of the frame.

I can also give myself a bit

more room by collapsing some of my other panels.

For example, I very often collapse my timeline

panel here to give the viewer a little bit more breathing room.

And remember, it's dynamic.

So if I resize some of my other palettes, then

it will reshape itself and make it larger.

So now I can see my selection a little bit better.

I can see that the circle is not perfect, and it's kind of up to me to decide

whether I'm happy to make this compromise and keep it the shape that it is,

or whether I want to be more exact in my selection

in the window options.

So that's the three dot menu, the top right corner.

I can choose to convert the shape to base here,

which means that I can now

break apart this preset shape

and turn it into a series of custom points that I can pick up and move around.

And every single point has these brazier handles that I can also

maneuver in order to get the best possible angle on this point.

So I'm dragging these around using my mouse

and then also modifying the handles

to get a better selection.

This does take a little bit of practice.

If this is your first time encountering vector shapes or your points,

but you do get used to it over.

So I'm going to pick the bottom point up.

This is my last modification.

It's okay that this is outside of the viewer, that it's off screen

because it's about getting the most accurate shape or arc as possible.

All right.

So I'm pretty happy with that selection.

I can now go into my standard primary controls,

my primaries and my curves and make further adjustments.

This is also a really easy way to get rid of the window interface.

That little white outline

is quite difficult to color grayed when you're looking at the shapes.

So by clicking on a different palette in the central palettes, I get

to get of that.

So in this case,

I am going to begin by brightening

the overall region using the Gamma Master.

We'll go to click and drag the slider to the right.

All right.

And you can see how this is already a little bit more appealing.

It draws the eye because it's a little bit brighter.

I can also adjust the contrast and pivot in the adjustment

controls to further enhance the detail.

So make the difference between the white backplate

and the numbers a little bit enhanced.

Great.

That's even better.

And then finally, I can still use the Middleton detail to further enhance

detail.

The numbers and the little lines running

across the perimeter.

Great.

And I can disable the scales now to see before

and after, and you can see how much more vibrant it's become.

But because this note is followed by the look and the contrast nodes,

they are still affecting the end result in terms of the look, right?

So we haven't undone of that cross process that we created any of that contrast.

So it still fits very well into the overall appearance of this clip.

If you feel that the edge of your circle is starting to look a little bit

harsh, a little bit sharp, you can always return to your window

palette and use the softness controls

to maybe make it a little bit less dramatic.

So that's still going to be hard to do with the window outline,

which means that I can go into my viewer pop up in the bottom left corner.

These are my on screen controls.

These determine what kind of tools or outlines I see in the viewer.

I'm going to select that and set to off.

And that way I'm still working in the window palette,

but I no longer have to see that circular outline.

Second click and drag my softness control.

And you can see that makes it really easy to conceal the fact

that I have placed the window there,

but I don't want to take it too far.

They still want there to be a bit of an edge.

So the last thing I need to consider with a shot

like this is exactly how going to play.

I will re-enable the looping function at the bottom of the viewer

and I'm going to play through

it doesn't

look too bad, but as these scales swing,

they kind of move out of the influence of my window fight,

activate my outline.

You can see that as the scales swing forward, they're no longer being graded.

And that's not great.

So I would like to have the window follow the movement of the scales.

That is

relatively easy to achieve in the tracker palette.

You'll find this right next to the power window.

So the two of these are actually quite intricately linked.

The tracker will always react to any windows

that you apply to the viewer, and in fact, you can't really run a track

in window mode unless you already have a power window enabled.

So with the tracker palette open.

I have analysis controls accessible to me.

In the top left corner.

I will click, Analyze Forward

and keep an eye on the window in the viewer because this is quite

a short take.

It happened very quickly and the track was complete.

I can now drag the play head in the graph, the tracker,

or even underneath the viewer and move back and forth to check

the accuracy of the track.

And I think that looks really good.

The window is now moving with the scales, and my secondary changes

have now applied successfully to the whole clip.

Something else that involves using power windows

that is also a secondary grading change is adding a vignette.

So this is another way of drawing the attention of the viewer

and redirecting it to a single point.

It's used most commonly to pretty much draw us to the center of an image.

And traditionally vignettes were just shadows

cast by the matte box around the camera lens.

But now when we work digitally and,

the shadows of matter are not as much of an issue.

We produce them artificially because there is a certain esthetic quality to them,

and we do like the way that they can help us frame an image.

So I will apply that to the very end of my pipeline.

I'm going to choose my contrast node, right click, add node, add serial.

Don't worry if your nodes start to get thrown around the node editor.

By the way, the position of the nodes themselves does not matter so much.

The most important thing is the connection line.

So as long as the connection is running in the right order

and the right sequence, then you're good.

So I can even start in a second layer of nodes underneath here.

I can also choose to make the nodes smaller by going in the top right corner,

and you'll find that there's a little scroll bar that allows me to zoom in out

and I will right click,

add a label

for my vignette

and return to the window palette.

Once again, I'm going to activate the Circle Window preset,

but this time I'm going to stretch it out to pretty much fill the frame

because that's what a vignette is, right?

It should just be the darkening of the very edges or the very corners.

One of the most important thing

about vignettes is that they have to be extremely subtle.

As soon as you can see them, as soon as you're aware of their presence,

then they immediately become quite distracting.

So it's very important that they're nice and gentle in the eye.

So I'm going to use the red point over here

to soften the very edge of my circle.

I can even see what my selection looks like by going into

top left corner and clicking on the magic wand.

Right?

And that actually gives me my selection.

And as you can see, the red point determines

the very softness of the edge and then allows me to blend it out nicely.

I can always, of course, drag it beyond the visibility of the viewer

itself, either by navigating, by middle

clicking and dragging, but also by using the scroll wheel

so I can scroll out of the image and keep dragging that softness.

And the final important thing to do for vignettes

is to invert my selection,

because right now, if I tried to darken my edges, you know,

if I went into, say, my gamma master wheel and I tried to drag it to the left,

I will find that it's the center of the image

that becomes darker and that's not what I want.

So going to reset and then invert my window in the window palette.

So there's my invert button.

Now, if I check the highlight mode, you will see that

what we're selecting is only the corners of the frame

and I can return to my damage control.

So dragging it to the left and you will see that that is the edges

now that are darkening once again, I will want to leave my window palettes

so that I'm not distracted by the circular outline.

And I can also

zoom back into the viewer.

A shortcut for that is to use Shift Z on your keyboard,

not only will it zoom into your frame,

but it will also set it to fill the frame,

which means that it will react dynamically to any resizing that you do.

So it's a pretty good state to be in.

All right.

So with that selection made, I can now start to darken

the edges of my frame,

make them a bit more dramatic.

If I'm not happy with the shadows are falling,

I can return to my window controls and make further changes to the shape.

I use vignettes relatively frequently.

It's a pretty standard shape and placement, so something I could do

is save the placement and the blending

or in the softness of the circle as a preset.

I'm going to go into the options menu of the window palette,

and at the very top you can see Save as new presets is an option.

I will select that and give it a preset name

vignette.

Press. Okay.

And from now on, if I want to go into another clip,

I will continue to see Vignette as a shape

option in the options menu of the window palette.

All right.

And finally, we are going to go to clip number eight and discover

the other half of secondary grading, which is using the qualifier

to make selections based on a key of either color values, luminance or saturation.

In this case,

we have a clip that we can play through a couple of times

of an airplane traveling over some water

or just running on loop.

And our intention here will be to,

for example, turn the water blue.

This is very difficult to do using windows, obviously,

because it will require you to, you know, outline the airplane

to get that exact shape and then also track it.

But it's much, much easier to do based on color values

because the green water is so distinct and there is nothing else

green in the footage.

So it will be pretty easy to extract.

We already have a balance mode present on this clip.

Feel free to explore this.

If you're following along,

you can deactivate this note to see what it looked like before.

And this image was also a little bit flatter.

There was not as much distinction in the details

in the water and also like amongst the highlights in the shadows.

Whereas with the balance in place, you can actually see where the clouds

were in the sky

and where you have like the shadow of the airplane.

So these details are a little bit more pronounced.

They're going to make the final image look quite good.

But in our case, we want to generate a brand new mode

with which to perform essentially a green key.

So I'm going to right click the bounce node,

add note at Serial,

and I will call this a blue water

and then I will navigate to the qualifier palette right next to the power windows.

There we go.

And here you can see that we have three

standards upon which we are making selections.

So that's hue saturation and luminance.

You can start interacting with these parameters away

or you can click in the viewer

to take a sample of the color that you want to select.

So the quickest way to do this is simply to click once the viewer,

and you will immediately see

a series of selections in these bars in the qualifier palette,

you can also click on the one.

So the highlight mode in the viewer to see what your selection looks like.

So yes, it has grabbed that distinct shade of green,

but it hasn't really grabbed all of the water.

So I'm going to try this again.

But instead of clicking one time, I'm going to click and drag

and that will allow me grab a much wider sample of color.

I'm going to press the global reset for the qualifier in the top right corner.

So that resets all of the parameters down here and then go back into the viewer

and I'm going to click and drag across the water.

Make sure to get a full range of the the luminance values, you know,

so we have the lighter green at the top, we have the richer green at the bottom,

and even a slightly warmer green in the bottom right corner.

And as I clicked and dragged

my selections in, the qualifier parameters grew.

All right.

They expanded to include a wider range of prominence hues,

saturation and luminance.

When I click on the highlight mode in the viewer,

I will see that that selection now looks much more solid.

So you should see mostly green water, maybe still a few areas

that have not been picked up, but that's fine.

We can now refine this.

So if we go back to the qualifier controls,

you can continue to interact with all of these,

I can click and drag the edges of my qualifier selection

and as I do so, you will notice that the selection, the viewer is affected.

So I'm getting few and few of those gray spots.

And gray, when you're in highlight mode means that an area has not been selected.

So it's good that the airplane is gray and the birds,

but everything else, all the water should be green.

And that's not looking too bad.

If I still found that there were areas that were not being selected

despite the color range seemingly being represented,

I could then to make changes to saturation and luminance,

but once I'm done with these three, I can also now

go into the top right corner of the viewer where I have some highlight

specific controls so I can change the way that my selection

is being represented from highlight mode, which gives me that kind of color

and grayscale representation which we've been using so far.

Or I could switch it to highlight black white,

which will give me a matte representation of my selection.

So here I can see that whatever is represented

as white or opaque, white is fully selected.

Anything that's black is not selected.

So we want to make sure that we don't have any spots, any dots visible,

and also that, you know, there's no selections on the airplane itself

to clean up your selection.

When you were in this mode, black and white, you want to use the matte

finish controls on the right hand side of the qualifier palette.

So the noise is a very popular choice because that will get rid

of a lot of the smaller issues that you might have with the edges

of your selections, the object that you have.

So, for example, that's sort of cleaned up a lot of the issues I had inside

the airplane

and then clean, black and clean white.

You can almost think as master wheels.

So if something was already pretty dark, but there was a few white flecks in it,

then Clean black is just going to get rid of those last remaining bit of noise.

And then I can also use clean white

to get rid of some of the noise around the birds.

And then if you feel like you want to add a bit of softness to your,

you can also use something like Blur radius.

I tend to leave there until after I start calibrating to make sure that

I can justify the level of softness as opposed to just guessing.

But in that case, I'm really, really happy with this selection.

So I think we've got a really clean extraction of the water.

I'm going to turn off highlight mode

and I

can now start to perform the color great.

There's a lot of different ways that I can achieve this.

In fact, that's something you'll find about the color page

and also a lot of like other, I suppose, creative processes

is that there's never just one way to accomplish something.

There's a lot of different tools that will do something similar.

And the only real difference is in the speed with which you can get

the result that you need and also the the clarity or the quality.

So in our case, we are going to go with speed.

We're going to apply a really quick change to the colors

by isolating the blue channel in the curves palette

and dragging the black point up

in order to make blue

the dominant color in this selection.

So I can drag it up pretty high

and I can play through this clip

to see that those elements

that were not included in our selection are not being affected by the grade.

So if I go back to my black point and I race up and down,

you can see the airplane and the birds are untouched.

But even with the water turned blue,

I can continue to refine it using some other tools.

So for example, I might decide

this is very saturate so I might want to tone it down

by going into the adjustment controls at the bottom of the primaries

and making this a more natural blue

as opposed to like that really intense, like almost plastic looking blue.

Something else I can do is use my hue a parameter

to rotate the hue of the water.

So we've already done most of the work by turning it blue.

But now I can refine what shade of blue I want it to be.

So if I drag it to the left, I start to go

closer to magenta and pink and red, which we don't really want.

Or if I drag it to the right, I might turn it into a more inviting,

like a warmer blue.

And then if I keep dragging it to the right, then eventually

alternate green.

So I want to kind of keep it close to the original range,

but maybe a little bit further to the right.

All right.

And that takes care of the water.

We've turned it blue,

but you might be looking at this image and thinking like, well,

what about all these birds?

At the end, it feels like they're still quite desaturated and colorless.

I think in the footage, if we press shift the

and we turn off the entire pipeline, you can see that they had a hint of pink.

So these were clearly flamingos and we've now lost a little bit of that color.

So be really nice to bring it back.

The great thing about working with modes is that you never have to repeat

a workflow and you never have to like really copy and paste so much.

When you're working within one image, you can just reuse a signal as many times

as you need to.

In this case, I would like to continue working on this selection

that we've made with the water, but just redirect my attention to the birds.

So I'm going to right click

on my latest node

and I will add a new node.

But this time I will choose to add an outside node and what that is going to

do is once again make a standard corrector like we've been using this whole time.

But it will invert any kind of key data that you're current Node has.

So I'm going to click Add outside.

And for the first time we're seeing a brand new connection.

It's this blue one and it is actively invert

what we've just created in the blue water node.

But now when I click on Highlight,

I will see that the white is focusing on the airplane

and the birds, and if I switch back to highlight mode,

you could see that those are the elements that we will be affecting when we color.

Great.

So with this, we can color

grayed the birds when I right click node label

flamingos and

if we were to start making changes

in any of our primary tools right now, we would also be affecting the airplane.

And that's not something I want to do.

So I will need to first, isolated from our selection,

we can go into the window palette for this

and simply create a subtractive window that will extract what we don't need.

So this is a really fun thing about secondary tools,

is that you can mix and match them.

You can combine them.

Oftentimes the qualifier will do a lot of the heavy

lifting for you by making a selection based on color, but you might still need

to use the Windows palette to isolate things.

You know, that you want to keep or maybe subtract things that you don't.

So I will click on this circle preset,

pick it up and drag it right

over the airplane and the viewer,

and then

resize the circle to make sure it's

not overlapping any of our birds.

I'm also going to make sure that you'll see that

the airplane never leaves the confines of that circle.

So as I drag my plane head to the left, I see that it very slowly exits

the frame and disappears like so I will switch back into highlight mode

and I will find that the only thing I can see right now is the airplane.

And that makes sense because by default all windows are additive.

So it is keeping you know what I've selected?

I want to do the opposite.

I want to invert that shape.

So now I'm keeping everything that's outside of it.

I've made it into a subtractive window

and this all

looks good so I can turn off my highlight mode,

go back to my primary tools and turn those birds pink.

This time we can use the wheels.

So because they're all very bright, I will use the gain wheel for that.

Remember, that goes after the highlights of the image and I can drag

my control point towards pink or magenta

to give them a little bit of color.

Now they might look really quite saturated, quite extreme,

but something you have to keep in

mind is how shortly they are present in the sequence.

Really.

So it's only just a few frames, maybe 12 or so frames at the end of the clip

that they come into view.

In that case, it's okay to leave the colors a little extreme.

It's okay to leave the selection as is

because we will have just enough time as an audience to process

that they're there before the clip cuts to something else in the timeline.

So I've pressed shift Z to reposition

my viewer and I'm going to play through this video.

I've got nice blue water under the very yellow airplane

and then all these pink flamingos coming in at the very end.

And that wasn't too difficult to accomplish.

Thank

you so much for joining me for this overview of the color page.

In the next video, we're going to be looking at some more advanced

concepts, like an introduction to color management,

looking at the note editor, achieving nondestructive grading workflows,

and also the HDR palette, and a few other new tools.

If you have any questions or if you need any advice

on using the color page,

I highly recommend that you check out the Blackmagic Design Forum

and to gain access to all our other training materials,

Check out the training page on Blackmagic design dot com where you can learn

all the other pages as well as gain certification for all of them.