CHAPTER 12

Tutorials

With Adobe SpeedGrade still in the wings (as of the writing of this book) and Apple Color’s discontinuation, the most universally available color correction application is probably DaVinci Resolve. In order to get through the most material, I’ll be doing all of the tutorials in this chapter using DaVinci Resolve 8.1. But regardless of whatever color correction system you have access to, or prefer to use most frequently, you should be able to follow along and translate the methods from this chapter to your own favorite system.

As I was writing this, Adobe did start to show off the capabilities of their version of SpeedGrade. It seems like it will be a standalone product for the time being instead of being integrated into Premiere. There are numerous analogous tools between Resolve and SpeedGrade. And for those still using Apple Color, the tools will also be very similar.

The goal with these tutorials is to walk you through several corrections from start to finish so that you start to develop a comfort level with the tools and techniques. These tutorials will build on each other.

Start out by loading all of the footage. On page xvii is a thorough explanation of how to load the tutorial material from the DVD onto your system and prepare it for grading in DaVinci Resolve. If you haven’t already, follow those instructions before continuing.

Primary Color Correction

1.  With the DVD footage loaded into Resolve, click on the Color button at the very bottom of the screen (Figure 12.1). This gets you to the Color Screen.

2.  Scroll through the timeline, in the center of the screen, and find the “Ghost_SWAT” shot (Figure 12.2).

Fig. 12.1

Fig. 12.2

3.  With the “Ghost_SWAT” shot in the viewer window, right-click on the viewer and select Waveform options, putting checkmarks in the waveform options you want to see (Figure 12.3). I’ve chosen RGB Parade and Vectorscope. You can choose as many as you like, but choose at least those two.

4.  Notice in the RGB Parade that the strongest channel is the green channel (Figure 12.4 and 12.5). This should confirm what your eyes are telling you: that there’s a distinct green cast to the image. This cast could come from the small patch of green grass to the right side of the picture, but the grass is only on the right side, and the strength of the green channel in the RGB Parade goes all the way across the image. We can also see by looking at the very bottom of the RGB Parade that the blacks are probably pretty well balanced because none of the channels is higher than another. This could be because they’re all crushed, so the best practice is to use the shadow controls—like the thumbwheel under the Shadow color wheel in the 3-Way Color tab—to lift the blacks to see if they all stay the same relative to each other as they are lifted. They do, so that tells us that our blacks are balanced. Return the blacks to 0 or press Command-Z to reset. Or, from the Session pulldown menu, choose any of the Base Memory options to get back to your starting point.

Fig. 12.3

As I have professed several times throughout the book, external scopes are critical to good color correction work, especially for colorists without a lot of experience under their belts. Make a note of the detail difference between the Tektronix scopes (Figure 12.4) and the Resolve internal scopes (Figures 12.5 and 12.6).

The Tektronix scope is showing four different views. The top left is a straight RGB Parade waveform. Directly underneath that is another RGB Parade waveform image zoomed in and repositioned to show great detail in the shadows. The top right shows a composite waveform, for basic levels, and the bottom right is a standard vectorscope. Note the difference in the quality of information between the Tektronix scope and the internal scopes.

As you can see from the shadows at 0 and highlights at 100 percent—or 1023 on the DaVinci RGB Parade—there is a good spread between highlights and shadows, but we should play with the gammas/midtones to determine the feel of the shot and how much detail we’re able to see in the shadows. Use the center thumbwheel in the 3-Way Color tab (Figure 12.7). Taking the gammas below 0 (look at the numbers between the colored rings and the thumbwheels) starts to give a very dark feel, and the detail in the shadows becomes completely lost. Bringing it up to the 0.15 range makes the action seem like part of a sitcom. It’s much easier to see good detail in the shadows though. And if you take the gamma level way up to the 0.40 or 0.50 range, you can see in the RGB Parade that there is actually quite a bit of cyan in the shadows. You’ll see that the weakest (closest to 0) channel is the red channel and that the green and blue channels are higher. Green plus blue is cyan and the opposite of red is cyan. Let’s leave the midtones at 0.06. This leaves some meat to the image, but allows us to see some of the weaponry in the shadow details.

Fig. 12.4 Tektronix waveform monitor of “Ghost_SWAT” image.

Fig. 12.5 DaVinci Resolve internal RGB Parade waveform monitor.

Fig. 12.6 DaVinci Resolve internal vectorscope image.

Fig. 12.7

5.  The blacks of the uniforms seems pretty well balanced, and we can’t be sure of a true white. The top of the truck might be white, but it could be painted some slightly different color or could be reflecting the sky. So to try to balance out the green/cyan, we need a neutral color. The best choice could be the door to the SWAT vehicle. To confirm exactly where that is in the waveform image, let’s zoom into it. At the bottom of the Resolve screen, click on Format (Figure 12.8).

Fig. 12.8

6.  Move the Zoom slider to 4.0 (4x) and use the Pan slider (Figure 12.9) to move the image in the right viewing window (the output) so that the door is on the right edge of the screen (Figure 12.10). I did this in the Input tab. But if you use both the Input and the Output tabs, you can zoom in even further so that the door completely fills the frame.

7.  In the RGB Parade Waveform, it’s easy to “see” the door as the thinnish line on the right side of each color channel just under the dotted line in the middle of the waveform monitor. And it’s evident that the strongest channel is green, followed by blue, with the weakest channel being red (Figure 12.11). Switch back to the Color screen. Try balancing this in a number of ways. You could use a point in the middle of the green and blue Custom Curves. You could use the midtone sliders in the Primary tab, or you could use the wheels in the 3-Way Color tab. To do the midtone correction in Custom Curves, first right-click under the curves and uncheck the Gang Custom Curves checkbox in the contextual menu. The goal is obviously to get the part of the RGB waveform that represents the door to be even across all three channels (Figure 12.12). Remember that by raising the red and blue channels to match the green channel, you are also raising the overall gamma. I took green down a bit and red and blue up a bit to make my match (Figure 12.13). Experienced colorists will be able to do this match by eye, but we need to use the basic tools to get start to create a solid level of experience and a confidence in our eyes.

Fig. 12.9

Fig. 12.10

Fig. 12.11 Internal RGB Parade shows that the red channel is weak and the blue and green channels are stronger, indicating a cyan cast in the midtones.

Fig. 12.12 The internal RGB Parade after the Custom Curve correction.

Fig. 12.13 The data for the Custom Curve correction.

To do this same correction in the Primary tab, first reset your grade (Session > Base Mem), then adjust the red green and blue gamma sliders (Figure 12.14).

To do this in the 3-Way Color tab, reset to Base Mem and use your mouse to move the center Gamma-Midtones wheel. Pushing it up toward red (11 o’clock) will add red and slightly drop the green, but do little to balance the blues. To get the blue channel to balance, slide the mouse straight to the right. The other two channels should not move and the blue channel should rise (Figure 12.15).

Fig. 12.14 Note the numbers under the red, green, and blue gamma sliders.

Fig. 12.15

Fig. 12.16 The split is at the middle of the door. The green cast to the right is the “before.” The warmer tones to the left is the “after.”

The image may seem a little warm. You can dial back some of the warmth with the entire image visible. On the gamma color wheel, just pull straight down toward the center position until you feel balanced (Figure 12.16).

Secondary Correction

Let’s add three secondaries or nodes to this image. The first one will be a vignette to just darken and blur the edges. The second will be a window that will help highlight the one SWAT face that we can see. We’ll pretend he’s the hero of this shot, so we’ll help call a little more attention to his face. The final one will be an HSL qualification to punch up the grass. I don’t think this shot really needs that treatment, but we’ll do it as an exercise.

First, the vignette:

1.  In the Color Screen’s Window tab (Figure 12.17), check the “on” button next to the Circular choice (top choice) and click the second box next to it to grade outside the window instead of inside. This selection will put three colored circles in the viewer window. The middle green circle is the center of the softness. The outer yellow circle is the outside softness. The inner yellow circle is the inner softness. You can either use the sliders in the Window tab or click and drag on various handles of the circles to change the size, shape and softness of the circle (Figure 12.18).

Fig. 12.17

Fig. 12.18

2.  Use the standard color correction controls to lower the highlights, gammas, and shadows outside of the selected window. You could also lower the saturation or even open the Blur tab and blur the image outside of the window. To see the image without the colored circles, deselect the small box icon button to the left of the eyedropper button under the viewer (Figure 12.19).

Fig. 12.19

Fig. 12.20 First node selected, ready to add serial node for the tracking window.

Fig. 12.21 Third node added between first and second nodes.

3.  Let’s add the window that will highlight our hero. We will track this window because the man moves through the shot. I want to do this secondary before the vignette that we just created is applied, so in the node graph, select the primary node and choose “Add serial” (Shift-S) to add a new node between the primary (first) node and the vignette (second node). Note that the first node is selected by the blue outline (Figure 12.20). After adding the third node the node graph should look like Figure 12.21.

4.  With node 3 highlighted as in Figure 12.21, create another circle window in the Window tab by checking the box to the right of the Circular style. This time, we’ll grade the inside differently, instead of the outside. Grading the inside of windows is the default, so you don’t have to do anything but reposition and resize the window so that it surrounds the hero’s head (Figure 12.22).

5.  Use the thumbwheels in the 3-Way Color tab to slightly increase the highlights and gammas, maybe increase saturation, and you could even push some warmth into the gammas with the color wheel (slightly pushing the color wheel cursor up toward about 11 o’ clock).

6.  Switch over to the Viewer Screen with the Viewer button at the bottom of the screen and click on the Show Object Tracking Controls arrow near the bottom right corner of the screen (Figure 12.23).

7.  This brings the tracking controls up on the right side of the screen (Figure 12.24). The default track is Window, which is what you want. Click the Fwd button to start the track. The track should work until about the time the guy’s head crosses the gray door. Because the shape of his head has changed as he turns the corner, the track gets lost.

Fig. 12.22

Fig. 12.23

8.  Turn on the Show Track checkbox in the tracking controls and step through the track using the single-frame advance button under the viewer, two to the left of the pause button in the middle of the screen. There are a number of ways to fix the track from where it gets lost. Because there are only a few frames left in the track, we’ll fix them one keyframe at a time. To do this, under Adjust, the Global choice is the default, but we want the Key Frame option, so select that. Now you can simply step through the shot one frame at a time, manually adjusting the position of the window to keep it centered on our hero.

9.  Let’s punch up the grass. To do this kind of secondary, the first job is to qualify—or select—the grass. In the node graph, select the first node and press Shift-S to add a serial node that will go before the other two secondary corrections. We don’t want either of the other secondaries to affect the grass qualification, so we want it to be first. We could even have it before the primary if we wanted to.

10.  With this new node selected (outlined in blue in the node graph), click on the Qualifier tab in the same area of the screen as the Curves, Windows, and Blur. With the “deck controls” under the viewer, shuttle forward to about two-thirds of the way through the show, where you can best see the grassy area. Then use the color picker (eyedropper tool in the Qualifier tab) and drag the cursor around in the area of the grass to select it. You’ll notice in the Qualification tab that the HSL bars show the selected color vector of the grass, defined by white lines in the bars (Figure 12.25). The white lines in the HSL bars show that the qualification is in a tightly defined area of Hue, fairly low saturation (to the left of the Sat bar), and in the midrange of the Luma bar.

Fig. 12.24

Fig. 12.25

11.  To see the specific portions of the picture you’ve selected, check the Highlight checkbox in the Qualifier tab. The default is to show the selected area in the viewer as a color (green for grass) and all nonqualified or nonselected colors are shown as gray. My selection picked up on some of the green cast of the pillars in the building, which I don’t want. So use the Low sat and High Luma controls to try to dial in a better selection, or use the “–” button to the right of the eyedropper control and click in the areas you want to subtract from the selection. If you like a nice high-contrast key to see your selection, go to the Config screen in the Settings tab and check the box for “Mattes display high contrast black and white” (Figure 12.26). Without the hi-con matte option, the qualification looks like Figure 12.27 in the viewer. With the hi-con matte option, the qualification looks like Figure 12.28 in the viewer. Use whichever one helps you make the best qualification.
To make the best adjustment of this qualification, turn off the checkbox for Highlight in the Qualifier tab so that you are viewing the image in full color.

12.  In the 3-Way Color tab, drag the gamma color wheel down toward green (7 o’clock) and adjust the gamma and highlight thumbwheels to richen the colors. Again, for this shot, it’s probably not appropriate to pump up the greens, because this is supposed to be a dangerous assault, not a golf documentary, but this is an exercise to show that it can be done and how to do it.

Fig. 12.26

Fig. 12.27 Default view of qualified portions of an image.

Fig. 12.28 Hi-con view of qualified portions of an image.

To sum up, we balanced the shot in our first node, vignetted the edges in the second node, highlighted and tracked an actor in the third node, and qualified a specific vector (the green of the grass) and punched it up in the fourth node (Figure 12.29). We could have actually created them in the order they ended up: grass, then actor, then vignette, but this order gave you a chance to learn a little about the node graph.

The first node is the primary, the second node (4) is the grass qualification and adjustment, the third node (2) is the vignette, and the fourth node (3) is the tracked “hero” window.

Fig. 12.29

Fig. 12.30 (a) Original film scan. (b) Finished look.

Fig. 12.31 These are the Custom Curves applied to node 1.

Creating Looks

On top of the work we just did, we also want to create some looks. I am fond of the Brazilian Silver look that Bob Festa did in Chapter 11, so we’ll try to replicate that. He described it as a bleach bypass mixed with a black and white hi-con look. So let’s try to recreate that.

1.  Save our secondaries grade before we add any looks on top of them. Right-click on the viewer and, from the contextual menu, choose Grab Still. Or memorize the very useful Option-Command-G keyboard shortcut to Grab Still. This places it in the Stills tab to the right of the viewer window in the Color Screen.

2.  Using the buttons at the very bottom of the screen, switch to the Gallery screen. Drag the thumbnail of your saved SWAT still to the Memories tab to the left, dropping it onto the A position. Then click on the PowerGrade tab and drag the thumbnail from the Memories tab to the PowerGrade tab. There is a more direct way of doing this, but I wanted to show you how these various tabs interact and save grades. You want to save grades as PowerGrades so that they can be used in future sessions. Stills are available only to the current session. You can also save grades to the Memories (the lettered thumbnails) with Option-# (where the # is the number 1–9, for A–I) and recall the Memories with Command-# (where the # is the number 1–9).
In the Gallery Screen, you can save and transfer Stills, Memories, and PowerGrades.

3.  With your grade saved as a PowerGrade, go to the Session menu and choose Base Memory Reset. You’ll notice in the node graph that your secondary nodes are gone and that your primary node has been reset.

4.  To create the basic bleach bypass, we’ll create two nodes blended together as layers. The first node will have some funky color alteration that cross-processed chemical looks tend to have. I borrowed this color curve look from a tutorial I saw in Layers Magazine. Go into the Custom Curves tab and right-click under the Curves (near the reset buttons) to get a contextual menu; uncheck “Gang Custom Curves,” which is on by default. Then click and drag on points on the graphs to make them look like Figure 12.31. Note that the luma, red, and green curves all have the bottom point pulled down and the top point pulled up and that the blue graph is the reverse. Also, because this image has so much green in it anyway, I didn’t pull up the top green point as much and I pulled the bottom point down more. But that’s just for this image with more green to it. If you want, you can really do this part much more subtly than I did it.

5.  A real bleach bypass or skip bleach effect is done by processing film and skipping the bleach bath that is typically used in the normal processing of the film. Sometimes, instead of completely skipping it, the film is just left in the bath for less than the recommended time. The lack of bleach means that the silver in the film is retained. The effect of this is basically a contrastier, grainier image, because the layers of colored emulsion also have a layer of silver. To create this effect, we’re going to create a contrasty black and white and layer it on our weird color node. Press Shift-P to create a parallel node. The bottom node should already be selected, so just pull saturation all the way down.

Fig. 12.32

6.  Click on the Parallel node. Right-click on it and choose “Morph into Layer Mixer Node” in the contextual pulldown menu. (Or you can shift-L to create a Layer Mixer node directly.) In the contextual menu, under Composite Modes. You can choose several options, but I like Add and Screen the best. Screen is a little more subtle. Add gives it some attitude. Remember that if you don’t quite like what you’re seeing, you can go in to the individual nodes and do some tweaking. For example, the highlights are too blown out for me, so I’ll go back into the first node (the Curved one) and lower the highlights.

7.  Festa says he takes a bleach bypass look—which is already contrasty and layered with black and white—and combines it with another layer of black and white. We’ll add a bit more coolness to the additional layer.

8.  Right-click on the “grid space” in the Node Graph (Figure 12.34) and choose Add Node > Corrector from the contextual menu.

9.  Right-click on the Layer Mixer Node and choose Add One Input from the contextual menu. You’ll notice that there are now three little dots (inputs) on the left side of the Layer Mixer Node.

10.  Click on the top left dot on the newly created Corrector node (which looks like a rainbow colored globe) and drag back to the input bar on the far left side of the node graph. Release it when the line turns solid white.

11.  Click on the top right dot on the Corrector node and drag it to the newly created input dot on the Layer Mixer node. Your node graph should look like Figure 12.34.

Fig. 12.33 The node graph for the bleach bypass look. The Curves from Figure 12.31 are applied to node 1. Node 2 is black and white. Node 3 has a Composite Mode of Add.

Fig. 12.34

12.  This step really amps up the brightness. Click on node 4 (which has changed from a rainbow colored globe to a thumbnail of the SWAT team) and pull saturation down to almost nothing. Don’t go all the way, because we want to add just a touch of coolness in the midtones and the highlights using the color wheels. Dial the thumbwheels for midtones and highlights down to a comfortable level. Or you can leave the levels where they are and experiment with the Key tab in the secondaries area, adjusting the Gain and Offset controls to regulate how much of the image is being keyed through in the Layer Mixer.

So that’s my version of Brazilian Silver (Figure 12.35). It’s possible to do a similar look in fewer steps, but the tutorial shows some good concepts for combining corrections. Definitely experiment with the Modes in the Layer Mixer. Screen and Add work best with this particular correction, but each image and each combination of corrections will be different.

Save this correction to your PowerGrades and use it on other images. Save the still to one of the Memories (Figure 12.36) by pressing Option-3 (for example, to save to Memory C, or Option-4 to save to Memory D).

Then move to another shot in the timeline and press Command-3 to put Memory C onto that shot.

If you want to apply this look to several shots in the sequence, select the shots, right-click, and choose “Add into a new group.” A Group Name dialog will pop up. Type a name for the group, such as “Bleached,” and click OK. Press Command-3 to assign the Brazilian Silver look to the group.

If you find other shots that you want to be in the group, just right-click them and choose “Add to Current Group.”

Fig. 12.35

Fig. 12.36

Compositing Modes for a Better Look

For the final tutorial on looks, I direct you to the DVD. The number of options and possibilities and the need to see things in real time instead of as “snapshots” made writing out this final tutorial almost impossible. Please see the Compositing Mode tutorial for an explanation of how to create some truly amazing looks by the creative combination of nodes, node types, compositing modes, and selective qualifications.

The basis for this tutorial was another Bob Festa look: Pearlized Whites. I don’t really do his look justice, but the basic concept is there, and you may be able to perfect the recipe for yourself once you see all of the ingredients laid out.

The basic concept for the look is to use the Artbeats image of the boxer—or the same “Kiss_nightgown” shot that Bob used—to make the highlight areas of the image glow. The quick explanation for this effect is:

1. Select the first node. Press Shift-P to create a parallel node.

2. In node 2 (the one underneath your first node), use the Blur tab to blur it pretty heavily by cranking up the Radius sliders (leave them ganged).
You can also choose to add some color—blue or yellow—to the highlights using the highlight color wheel in the 3-Way Color tab.

3. Select the Parallel node. Right-click it and choose “Morph into Layer Mixer Node.” Or use the shift-L shortcut to launch straight into Layer Mixer node.

4. Right-click on the newly renamed Layer Mixer node and select Composite Mode > Add. Another mode that works for this image is Screen. Experiment and see which you like better. You may also have to come back and try different modes after you’ve completed the next two steps, as the next two steps will drastically alter the results of these modes.
Please also experiment with other mode choices. Each one does something different depending on the brightness or color of certain parts of the two nodes feeding into the Layer Mixer.

5. Select the second node (the blurry, bottom node) and experiment with various highlight and midtone levels using the thumbwheels under the color wheels in the 3-Way Color tab.

6. Experiment in the Qualifier tab with various Luma (bottom bar) qualifications, changing the sliders for Low, Low Soft, High, and High Soft. If you don’t add some High and Low Softness, this effect will look really ugly. As a starting point, put Low, Low Soft, and High Soft to about 50 and High to about 80 or 90.

Final Thoughts

I hope that this book has inspired you and that you realize that the techniques shown here are simply the starting recipes for you to create your own amazing grades.

I created this book because I felt that there were so many better people to learn color correction from than me—a mere converted editor. I hope that being exposed to the dozen or so top-tier colorists on these pages has shown you that there is no one way. There is simply experience and trial and experimentation and the thrill of discovery that can come only from sitting in a dark room and trying things—pushing the limits and remembering my favorite line from this book: