Color grading isn’t just about making sure the reds, greens, and blues are all in balance. It’s also where you can remove blemishes, or highlight specific aspects of your image to get the exact look you want.

Watch the tutorial below and keep reading for an in-depth guide to color grading using DaVinci Resolve.

Color Grading Tutorial

In this video overview, SproutVideo’s Creative Director, Nick LaClair, walks us through exactly how to color grade footage. You’ll learn how to work with nodes to map your changes to different elements in your clips, apply a grade to multiple clips, and hide or emphasize specific aspects of your visuals.

Getting Started

If you’ve followed the steps in our workflow for Adobe Premiere and DaVinci from last episode, you’ll already have your XML file in DaVinci. If you need to, head back to that article for step-by-step instructions on how to get your XML file imported into DaVinci.

Navigating the Workspace Tabs

By default, you’ll land in the Edit tab since we started by opening the XML file imported from Adobe Premiere. However, if you wanted to add footage, create timelines, or edit footage together, you’d want to navigate to the Media tab. Finally, the Fusion tab allows you to add graphics, like titles or text overlays.

Since we already took care of editing in Adobe Premiere, we’re heading straight to the Color workspace.

There, you’ll see your timeline, with each clip represented by a thumbnail. Select a clip to color grade, and it will open automatically in a node to the right of your screen.

Working With Nodes

Nodes allow you to map your color grade to your footage, and make precise changes to different elements of your footage. It’s a visual way to configure the changes you are making to each clip.

By arranging your nodes in different ways, you can change how the effects are applied. For instance, you can make the changes sequential by adding nodes in serial, or layer them as needed. You can create as many nodes as you’d like for your project.

How to Use Nodes

In our example, we used serial nodes, meaning that each successive node would apply new changes to the output from the previous node. Processing your image in this manner allows you to build the effect you want piece by piece.

When working with multiple nodes, it’s crucial to stay organized. Label each node you create with an easily recognizable name to avoid confusion over the purpose of each node.

For starters, we renamed our first node as “Primary Grade”, and the second serial node as “LUT”. Most color grading projects will have these two nodes at a minimum. That’s because most footage shot on a professional camera will be recorded in a Log format. A LUT converts flat Log footage into a colorspace for output. Essentially, it’s a shortcut for making colors more lifelike. Meanwhile, your primary grade allows you to make adjustments to the image before the LUT is applied.

The LUT node belongs at the very end of the color grade because LUTs are destructive. Basically, if your LUT creates blown out highlights, you can’t correct it with any further changes after the LUT is applied. So, any input being fed to the LUT node needs to already be edited as you’d like it.

Select the LUT that is suitable for your footage, and drag and drop the LUT node to the side of the workspace to allow for adding additional nodes.

After setting up those two nodes, we’ll add some more specific to the project we’re working on. Your nodes might be different according to the footage you’re working with and the effects you are going for.

For instance, we added nodes for Skin Tone, Eyes, Blemishes, a Vignette, a Secondary Grade, and a Creative Grade. Each node corresponds to a visual element we want to adjust in our footage. We’ll work through each of those so you can see the difference they make to our final output.

Using the Video Scopes

Now that the nodes are setup, we’re ready to start the color grading process. Navigate to the Workspaces menu to access the video scopes. These colorful graphs will be displayed to the left of your screen.

The video scopes tell us crucial information about light and dark areas of our image, as well as the levels of red, green, and blue in our image. They’ll help guide your color corrections throughout the color grading process. For more on how to interpret the information in the different scopes, check out our previous episode on color grading fundamentals.

Color Grading With Wheels

Professional colorists use tools shaped in the form of a wheel to make minute adjustments to visuals. The wheel tools in DaVinci Resolve mimic those tools very closely.

DaVinci gives us lots of choices for color wheels. Each wheel has two elements – the wheel itself for adjusting color, and another tool just below it for changing the luminance.

Above, you can see the wheels for lift, gamma, gain and offset. These basically correspond to shadows, mid-tones, and highlights, while offset changes the entire image.

In the Primaries set of wheels pictured above, each wheel affects its allotted area of the image, but it also affects much of the rest of the image as well. Review 1:51 – 2:00 to see how much the image changes as Nick adjusts the different wheels. Keep your eye on the waveform monitors to more easily understand the impact.

DaVinci also offers a set of Log wheels, which provide more minute control over each individual aspect of the image. This set of wheels gives you very finite control over shadows, mid-tones and highlights. Review 2:01 – 2:16 to see how these wheels work differently from the other set.

There’s a right time for each set of wheels, and as you get familiar with how they work, you’ll be really glad you have them both. 

Additional Controls

To the right of the wheels, you have additional tools for controlling how the effects are applied to your clip. There, you’ll find:

• Curves – adjust the hue or saturation of part of an image
• Qualifier – mask certain aspects of the image by selecting colors from the image
• Window – draw shape “windows” to create masks, allowing you to select or exclude parts of the image
• Tracker – track windows or masks across movement
• Blur – blend or soften the image, or selected parts of the image
• Key – change the input and output to determine how much of each node’s corrections will be visible in the image
• Sizing – control the rotation, aspect ratio, pan, tilt and more

Adjusting Each Node

Now that we understand the tools at our disposal, we’re ready to start color grading! First, click to select a node to make changes to that specific node.

Primary Grade

In our example, we start with the primary grade. This node is for setting your color temperature and general tones. If your image is too warm or too cool, this is where you should fix it.

Use the wheels to make any necessary changes. For guidance on using the waveform monitor to know when you’ve hit the right white balance, please refer to our episode on color grading fundamentals.

In terms of highlights, as a general rule, you don’t want to go above 896 on the waveform monitor if you can help it. Any higher than that, and you’ll risk blowing out the highlights, and losing lots of detail in the lighter parts of the image.

Skin Tone

Many videos feature people, so addressing skin tones is a common need when color grading. Here’s how to selectively make changes to a person’s skin tone.

First, click on the Skin Tone node to select it. Then, you need to isolate the element you want to edit. In this case, we’ll use the Qualifier tool to create a mask by using the eyedropper to select the color of our subject’s skin.

Toggle your center image to show what you’ve masked. It’s a little creepy-looking, but the greyed-out areas of the image will not be impacted by any changes you make.

To get rid of any hard edges in the mask, and ensure you have good coverage for your changes, adjust the blur radius. For instance, Nick usually takes the blur radius up to around 35. This helps reduce the chances you’ll omit an area of your image that should’ve been included in this node.

Once you have your mask in place, you can adjust your image as needed. In our example, Nick adds some magenta tones to make our subject’s skin color more vivid and lifelike.

Emphasize the Eyes

Think Frodo in Lord of the Rings. Sometimes, eye color just really needs to stand out on screen. This is how you can achieve a similar effect in your own video.

This is nearly the same process as creating a mask for the skin tone adjustments. After clicking the corresponding node, you’ll use the Qualifier tool and the eyedropper again to select the color of your subject’s eyes.

If you find that you have a lot of color appearing in areas of your image you’d like to exclude from your mask, you can use the Window tool to limit where the mask can be applied. In the image below, the window is the circular overlay on our subject’s face. This extra step ensures the changes we make will only apply to the blues located in the window.

Now that you’ve isolated the subject’s eyes, you can make any needed adjustments to the brightness or saturation of their eye color.

Blemishes

Blemishes are a fact of life. However, that doesn’t mean you have to see them in a finished film.

In most cases, the Qualifier tool won’t work because the color of the blemish would be hard to isolate from the rest of the person’s face. Instead, the Window tool is the way to go.

Be sure to select the blemish node, and then go to the Window tool. You can resize, rotate, and change the feather of your window as needed.

Next, we want to make sure the window we just created won’t stay in one place as our subject moves around on screen. Go to Tracker, and make sure you’re on the first frame of the clip. Then, track it forward so the window will follow your subject’s movement in the frame.

Finally, go to Blur, increase the radius, and it will blur that blemish into oblivion. If only it were that easy in real life… To see a before and after, go to 4:30 – 4:35 in our video.

Vignette

A vignette is a subtle artistic choice that calls attention to the subject in the middle of our frame. It essentially darkens the corners of our image ever so slightly, helping to emphasize the center of the image.

To create a vignette, you’ll also want to use the Window tool, sized to frame your subject.

Using the offset color wheel in the Primaries set, you can bring down the overall tone of the image. You’ll notice the area under the window darkening as you change the offset.

Adjust the offset according to the level of drama you’re going for. Finally, invert the window to highlight the center and darken the edges. Et voilà, a vignette.

Creative Grade

A creative grade allows you to apply a specific look to your footage by using a preset. For instance, if you want to make it seem as though your footage was captured on a specific type of film, you can do that with your creative grade.

In general, this is a fairly advanced option. It’s fun to play with, and you can always try different looks to see what works for your project.

In our example, we applied a Film Look located under the 3D LUT options in the LUT menu. We picked the Rec709 FujiFilm 3513DI D60 option, and then dialed back the intensity by using the Key tool to lower the gain of the output.

Secondary Grade

The secondary grade node is where you should make any fine-tune adjustments after all the other nodes are applied. This is where you want to perfect your image before the LUT is applied.

Typically, this is a necessary step even though you already have a primary grade in place. The reason is that any changes made to your primary grade will impact all of your qualifiers and masks in the other nodes.

For instance, if you set the qualifier for skin tones to a certain type of magenta, and then you change the hue of the image in your primary grade, the skin tone qualifier will be impacted because you edited the input to that node. You’re better off making tweaks in a secondary grade than trying to adjust your primary grade and redoing all your subsequent masks and qualifiers.

Applying the Grade to All Clips

Of course, that process would be unbelievably tedious for anything but the shortest of videos if you had to follow it for every single clip. Luckily, it’s easy to quickly copy a color grade over from one clip to other clips.

First, make a “still” of this clip by right clicking, and selecting “Grab Still” from the menu.

A gallery of all the stills you create will appear behind your scopes to the left of your screen. 

Next, select another thumbnail that needs a grade. Then, go back to the still, right click, and select Apply Grade. This will copy the grade from the still to the selected clip.

A handy shortcut for applying a grade requires the ability to middle click on a mouse. In this workflow, you simply select the thumbnails that need a grade, then middle click on a thumbnail to which you’ve already applied the grade you want. This is a little more streamlined than creating stills and navigating menus to apply a grade.

Of course, your mouse might not have a middle button to click. Don’t despair – you still have options. You can map a gesture to any customizable mouse, such as a Magic Mouse, or map the gesture to a button on a tablet with a stylus (Nick uses a Wacom tablet) instead.

Color Corrections

Sometimes, you might have a great-looking color grade for a clip, but find it contains elements other clips do not. In our example, we created a color grade for a shot of our subject’s face, but many of our other clips do not feature people’s faces at all.

In order to prevent any errors as you’re making bulk changes, and to simplify the grade, you can easily remove the nodes you don’t need. For instance, we removed the nodes for the eyes and the skin tone, as well as the vignette and the blemish removal. Then, you can easily apply your cleaned up color grade in bulk to any clips that need it by creating new stills or middle clicking as detailed above.

Compare and Contrast

As you’re finalizing your color grade, you might come across certain clips where your bulk changes don’t quite work out the way you’d like. In many instances, it’s useful to be able to compare and contrast those clips with a clip you want to emulate. This enables you to obtain a more consistent look across your entire video.

To do so, first, create or select a still to use as a reference following the process detailed above. Click on the thumbnail you want to compare to the still, and then click the Split Screen button near the center of your screen. This will place the still (on the left) and the selected clip side-by-side:

Select the primary node, and use the wheels to adjust the clip until it matches the still you’re using as a reference. This is essentially a trial and error process, so play around with the wheels until it looks right.

Putting It All Together

Once you’re finished grading your footage, you’re ready to export it back to Adobe Premiere. There, you can render a final output for your video, and share it with the world!

For details on how to do that, please refer to our second episode on color grading, which covers how to export and import footage between Adobe Premiere and DaVinci.

If you made it this far, we hope you saved some questions for the comments! Please share them below for expert advice on color grading.

Don’t miss the rest of our How To Video series! Subscribe to our newsletter today and get each new episode in your inbox, plus other video-focused tips and trends.

The post Making the Grade: How to Color Grade Like a Pro appeared first on SproutVideo.

Here’s how to make the round trip from Adobe to DaVinci and back more seamless and less error-prone. These tips take the guesswork out of the color grading process.

Video Tutorial

Join Nick LaClair, head of video production at SproutVideo, as he shows the entire end-to-end process for color grading with Adobe Premiere and DaVinci:

If you liked that episode, be sure to catch the rest of our How To Video: Post Production series! Subscribe to our newsletter to get each episode, plus other video-focused tips and trends.

When to Use DaVinci

DaVinci is most appropriate for advanced color grading needs. As a professional color grading tool, it allows you to make changes to your video’s visuals with a high level of accuracy and control. Since it’s a color managed application, you can be sure your final rendered output will look the same to your viewers on the web as it does on your computer.

When your video is edited down to a final cut, it’s time to color grade! This should be close to the very last step in your process, if not the last step. Color grading can be a lengthy, involved process, and it’s best to do it all in one go.

Here is an overview of the process to send your footage from Premiere to DaVinci, and reimport it to Premiere to finalize your video. Follow these exact steps to avoid common pitfalls along the way.

1. Preparing to Send Your Project to DaVinci

The process starts in Adobe Premiere. First, you’ll want to duplicate your video project to create a version you can import into DaVinci. This allows you to make changes without potentially losing any prior work from the editing process.

Then, remove the audio track, flatten your sequence, and remove any attributes, like effects. This will leave you with a clean sequence ready for editing in DaVinci.

Prior to importing the XML from Adobe to DaVinci, make sure your video clips will be formatted correctly in DaVinci. Under File > Project Settings, select Image Scaling and make sure it’s set to “Center Crop with No Resizing”.

Finally, check your timeline’s color space to ensure your video will appear the exact same in DaVinci as it will to your viewers on the web. Under Color Management, change your color settings to sRGB.

Additionally, if you really want to see the real world version of your video colors, you’ll need a calibrated monitor that allows you to use RGB color space. If one isn’t available to you, you can still make accurate color changes in DaVinci as long as your color space settings are set to sRGB.

2. Editing in DaVinci

Now, you’re ready to import your timeline to DaVinci for color grading.

Navigate to File > Import Timeline > Import XML. Select the duplicated XML file we created earlier.

Leave the import options set to the defaults, and DaVinci will import your timeline just as it appears in Premiere.

You’re now ready to color grade in DaVinci! Navigate to the Color tab at the bottom, and make any needed adjustments to your video. We’ll cover exactly how to do that in our upcoming episode next week.

3. Exporting Back to Premiere

After completing your color adjustments in DaVinci, you’re ready to send your footage back to Premiere. Here’s how to optimize your settings during that process.

Go to the Delivery tab, and at the top, choose Premiere XML. Select an empty folder for your final output, and under Render Settings, uncheck audio since this file contains no audio.

The result will be all of your individual clips rendered as an XML file with the new color grade. Once rendered, you’ll be ready to rebuild your timeline in Premiere.

However, one extra step can save you a lot of headaches down the road. If you find you need to make some small edits in the future, such as adding a half second here or there, you’d need to redo the entire process. Or, you can simply tell DaVinci to include a little extra footage when it renders your clips.

To do that, go to Advanced Settings, and select the option to Add Frame Handles. Typically, Nick adds 24 frame handles, which adds an extra second of footage to both sides of your clip.

You’re now ready to render your footage. Click, “Add to Render Queue.”

Then, on the right hand side of the screen, click, “Start Render.”

Putting it all Together

Back in Premiere, create a new folder called “Color Grade”.

Select that folder, then go to File > Import, and locate the rendered files from DaVinci. You’ll see all the individual clips, as well as an XML file. Select the XML file, and click Import.

Once the XML is imported into Adobe Premiere, open the new color graded timeline, and copy the new sequence over to your original edited version.

Now that your color graded footage is back in Adobe, your project is ready to be exported and shared with the world! We hope these tips helped take the guesswork out of color grading with professional tools like DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere.

The post Optimize Your DaVinci and Adobe Premiere Workflow appeared first on SproutVideo.

In this three-part tutorial on color grading, we’ll cover everything, from basic fundamentals to advanced techniques. Although this tutorial is based on Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, the process is essentially the same no matter what software you’re using.

Let’s dive into the first episode – color grading fundamentals in Adobe Premiere Pro!

Overview of Color Grading Fundamentals

In this episode of our How To Video: Post Production series, Nick LaClair, head of video production at SproutVideo, walks us through the basics of color grading in Adobe Premiere. Even if you use a different editing suite for your videos, his thorough guide will still help you optimize your workflow since the basic concepts will carry over.

When Is Color Grading Necessary?

If your video looks a little flat, if you filmed on different cameras, or if you’re recording LOG footage, you’ll probably need to color grade your footage.

Note: LOG footage is desaturated, low-contrast footage that many professional cameras shoot. It is designed to retain the most information in the footage (without losing highlights that are blown out or shadows that are too dark). It is the best way to shoot footage, but it is an intermediary, and needs to be color graded into a final image before it’s ready for viewing.

Usually, color grading is the last step after editing your video down to a final cut. All your other edits should be locked before you get to this stage. Otherwise, you’ll waste a lot of time redoing your tweaks to colors. Depending on the process you use, that could be a lot of time!

How to Color Grade in Adobe Premiere

Adobe Premiere is best if your color grading needs are minimal. For instance, it can handle tweaks to exposure and color temperature very well.

Applying Lumetri as an Effect

Lumetri is a tool built into Adobe, and can be applied as an effect to the clips you’re editing in the timeline from the Effects list. If you access it in that manner, you’ll use the Effect Controls menu to make changes.

Accessing the Color Grading Workspace in Premiere

Alternatively, you can navigate to Lumetri within Premiere by selecting the Color tab at the top of the screen to bring up the color grading workspace.

Premiere will automatically select the clip under the playhead, and the Lumetri corrections will open on the right hand side of the screen. Then, you’ll want to make sure the Lumetri scopes are also visible on the left.

The waveform scope appears automatically (more on exactly what that is below), but if you right click it, you can open other options as well.

Overview of Lumetri Scopes

There are different scopes available to help you adjust the colors in your video. We’ve covered the three main types available (shown on the left in the image above), with tips for using each one.

Waveform Monitor

The colorful, nebulous graph shown in the top left of the image above is called a waveform. Waveforms are the most reliable tool for adjusting the color of your image because while monitors and settings can vary tremendously, the scope will always be consistent.

The Y axis goes from zero, or pure black, to one hundred, pure white. It shows you how dark or bright different areas of your image are.

The waveform, from left to right, corresponds to your image. In the example below, the bright areas to the left represent a bright area behind the female subject, while the dark areas to the right correspond to the person in the foreground, partially blocking our view.

Seeing the relative brightness of every element in your frame is a powerful tool because gives you precise data on where your picture exists in the space between too-dark and too-bright, and allows you to adjust it within that space.

Parade

The parade scope is shown to the right of the waveform in the image above. This option breaks out the red, green, and blue waveforms of your image so you can evaluate them side-by-side. This is handy when you need to achieve a specific white balance in your image.

Vectorscope

The circular scope below the waveform and the parade scope is called a vectorscope. This scope shows you where your image falls on the color wheel. It’s particularly useful for finding a neutral white point.

Using the Scopes

Each of these scopes will adjust dynamically as you make changes to the brightness, contrast, and white balance in your image. They give you quantitative data to complement how the image looks to you subjectively.

If you have any white elements in your image, you’ll know your color settings are just about right when the red, green and blue waveforms all look equal.

Additional Adjustments

Basic Correction

The Basic Correction section might be more aptly named Major Correction. It contains settings for dramatically changing your visuals.

For starters, you can add a LUT, which stands for Look Up Table. A LUT is essentially a shortcut for adding preconfigured color settings based on the color space in which your footage is shot. For instance, if you shoot LOG footage, a LUT will convert it to full-color, full-contrast footage automatically so you don’t have to do it by hand.

Beyond LUTs, you can tweak the color temperature, hue, exposure, and contrast. You can even use sliders to adjust different areas of luminance in your image. The latter is handy if you have an area that is too bright or too dark in your image.

Creative and Curves

You can also add what are known as Creative looks in the next section. Pick from preconfigured settings, or, create something unique by going with the Custom option. And you can edit curves, which are a more finely controllable way of changing the contrast of your footage.

Color Wheels and Match

Professional colorists use tools built around the concept of these different wheels. They enable minute adjustments to different aspects of the image, and are beyond the purview of this primer in color grading fundamentals in Adobe.

Color Grading Workflows in Premiere

One big advantage of using Adobe Premiere is that you can keep editing your video after you’ve graded your footage. However, there are some drawbacks.

Each of these grades is applied to your clip as an effect. It’s relatively easy to copy the settings from one clip and apply them to other clips. You simply right click the clip you’ve already graded and select copy. Then, select your other clips, right click, and use Paste Attributes to apply those settings to the selected clips.

Color Matching

However, you might find that the exact same color settings don’t work across all the scenes in your video. Lumetri provides convenient tools for correcting that issue. Simply compare the two clips side by side, and use the Color Match tool to achieve a more consistent look.

Applying the new settings to other clips is a little tricky. If you just copy and paste the attributes, as described above, you will be adding one color effect on top of another. This is unlikely to deliver the desired result.

Instead, you have to first remove any existing Lumetri effects from the clips you want to adjust. After doing so, you can then paste the attributes from your color matched clip. Select the clips that have existing Lumetri effects, right click, and select “Remove Attributes”. Be sure the “Effects” option is checked.

Adjustment Layer

The above workflow can admittedly be pretty clunky. Whether or not it’ll work for you largely depends on the complexity of the film you are editing.

Another option is to use adjustment layers instead of applying the Lumetri effects directly to your clips. This enables you to cut your adjustment layer to fit only certain clips, and avoid having to copy, paste, adjust, remove, paste… repeatedly. The adjustment layer is the purple layer in the timeline shown in the image below.

Drawbacks to Using Premiere

While you can certainly achieve good results when using Premiere for color grading, it isn’t considered a professional color workflow. The main reason is because Premiere isn’t a “color managed” application. So, what does that mean exactly?

Basically, your footage won’t look the same in Premiere as it does on the web or wherever it’s being shared. This makes achieving a specific end result challenging, since it’s really difficult to compensate for these changes. If you want to know more than that, and really want your head to spin, here is a fun entry point to the rabbit hole on color management in video applications.

Solutions for Color Management

In some cases, getting the color just right really, really matters and the differences between what you see in Premiere and your final output might be too different to make it a viable option for you. Luckily, there are solutions for situations like that.

One potential option is to use a color managed video editing application from the start, such as Final Cut Pro. However, you’re likely to be better off using a purpose-built color grading application, like DaVinci Resolve.

DaVinci Resolve has more advanced features than Lumetri. More importantly, it enables you to achieve a consistent look no matter how you share your video once it’s finalized. In the upcoming second episode of this three-part series on color grading, we’ll walk you through the round trip workflow of editing in Premiere, color grading in DaVinci, and finalizing your film in Premiere.

The post Color Grading Fundamentals in Adobe Premiere Pro appeared first on SproutVideo.