[flow_default] Transcription: 009_-_Color_Pt2_-_Curves_Log_and_Nodes.json

transcriptions/009_-_Color_Pt2_-_Curves_Log_and_Nodes.json

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+{
+  "audio_file": "009_-_Color_Pt2_-_Curves_Log_and_Nodes.wav",
+  "text": "We've looked at one way to make some major changes to our shot to change the saturation and the contrast and the color balance and check those things on the scopes. But the primary controls are just one palette in all of the tools that you have in resolve. And honestly, it's totally okay to just use that if that's all you need. There's no reason to use other tools if you don't need them. But I do want to walk you through some of the more useful tools for making an image look the way that you want. First thing I'm going to is open up my parade in the lower right hand corner, click on scopes. And again, if you don't have parade, make sure to click on this little menu here and select parade. Also adjust the options that we want. I like to turn on extents and brighten up my parade a little bit. Now let's take a look at using curves. I'm gonna click on this little S curve icon right here that says curves. And that's gonna switch out this panel to my custom curves. If you've ever used Photoshop or any kind of imaging app, this will probably make a lot of sense to you. But curves is a way that you can remap the tones of an image. If we want to adjust the brightest parts of the image, that happens in the upper right-hand corner. This little dot right here is the white point of the image. And if I were to grab this and move it around, you can see on the image what happens. If I bring it down, things get darker. If I bring it up into the left, things get brighter. Think of it like a line graph in the tones of an image on the x-axis and what you want them to be on the y-axis, right? Down in the lower left-hand corner is the black point. Again, if I grab this and push it up, that's going to brighten up the darker parts of the image and push it to the right. That's going to darken everything. And the easiest way to just understand this is to open it up and play with it. See what happens when you move either of these dots. But you can do a lot of what you would normally do in the gain and lift just using these two dots. If I wanted to make the brighter parts of my image brighter, I could look at my parade, grab this white point and move it up into the left and make my adjustments that way. If I want the darker parts to be darker, I can grab the lower left hand point and move it down to the right and accomplish basically the same thing as gain and lift. Where this gets interesting is that you can make points in between these two points on this line and adjust the way that the tones work. So if I want my mid tones to be brighter, I can push this up like this and that's just like rolling up on my gamma wheel. But I can also move this up here and just make the brighter mid tones brighter and the darker mid tones darker and I can get some really creative looks just by messing with this curve. I'll click on this little circle with a plus and reset everything. A common way to make an image just look a little nicer is to just grab darker mid tones and bring them down, grab the upper mid tones and bring them up a little bit. This is called an S curve because it just kind of looks like a big stretched out S. And you could do it really intense like this and you're going to get a more intense look in your image. The cool thing is that you can use this control with your primaries and adjust the way things look until you're happy with it. So you have a lot of control, not only over the gain, gamma and lift, but also everything in between and you can get really, really detailed with your curve. Each one of these palettes has a ton of controls that I'm just not going to go over just because we don't have time to go through every single little thing. But that's the main way that you would adjust curves. One thing I will touch on is that you can break these curves up into channels just like you can with your parade. So if I want to adjust the curve for just my reds, I can click on red and I can boost my red channel in the mid tones or bring it down to have kind of a teal-y look. You can tint your image by just adjusting individual channels and the curves and you have a lot of control. Some people just color grade with curves. Some people never touch them. It depends on what you like, what you understand and how you want to work. Again, if I select Y, so that's just the brightness of our image without changing the color tones. And so that's a nice way to work if you want to make sure that you nail without making colors more or less saturated. Normally, these are all linked and whatever you do will happen to all the channels all at once. Again, play around with that, see what you like. That's how you learn these tools is just playing with them. About these palettes down here, you'll also notice that there's these dots. These dots will switch out different kinds of controls within each palette. And so you'll notice there's a ton of different curves that you can use. We've been talking about custom curves. We're going to get into these other curves in just a little bit when we talk about secondaries. But over here on the color wheels, there are also a couple dots. These controls are called the primary wheels. If I click on the second one, we have the primaries bars. The primary bars and primary wheels do the exact same thing. They're just presented in a different way. So if I were to grab this green and push up this green bar in our gain, it's the same thing as pushing towards the green control in our gain here on the primary's wheels. And we get the same result. We get a very, very green image. So I'll switch back to that. If you want to just remove something like a color cast from your image, let's say down here on these kind of more blue shots, I can go down to my primary bars and roll down on my the The color wheels, if you were to grab, let's say the color wheels and let's make the gain really pink. You'll see it makes the whole image overall pink, but it's strongest in the highlights. Again, if I were to do the same thing with the lift, make the lift really cyan, it's strongest in the darkest parts of the image, but it affects the whole image. If I were to switch over to the log wheels, I would switch over to the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of the top of darkest parts of the image but it affects the whole image if I were to switch over to the log wheels and we do the same thing I'll grab highlight and bring it really really pink We'll see it's almost doing nothing and look it's starting to tint the brightest parts of the image But it's leaving everything else alone same thing for the shadow if I were to bring that really really blue You'll see it's just affecting the very darkest parts of the image and leaving the rest of it alone There's kind of a separation that's drawn when you use the log wheels image When you deal with a log, it's like you have a couple of control points here. And if I were to adjust this, you see it doesn't mess with the rest of the line because I have that little cutoff there. And depending on where I put this other little dot, I can adjust more or less of that line. So what happens is in log mode, if I were to go over here and boost these highlights like this, it only boosts that top part, the brightest parts of the pixels. Same thing with the shadow, only the darkest parts of the pixels. We can see this on the scopes. the mess with our gain, we'll see the whole image dances up and down. So which one you use depends on your preference. Using the log mode gives you a lot of control over your image, but you have to pay attention. For instance, if I wanted to adjust my white balance and I was in log mode, I could grab my highlight and move that around, but it wouldn't really fix the white balance. It would tint just the brightest pixels in the image, which isn't really what we want. However, if we were doing a look where we wanted just the shadows to be really blue, this might be a great tool to use because we can just make those shadows blue without having to correct it because it just limits it to the shadows. Now, how much does it limit it? We can look down here in our log controls and they've kind of switched out. We have a couple of sliders here, the low range and the high range. This is like those little points on the curve that cuts off where these controls stop affecting. So if I were to boost this low range and look at our screen, the more I boost it up, the more of the image is going to be affected. And the more I clamp it down, the less of the image is going to be affected. So again, it gives you a lot of control and it's really nice, but you have to kind of pay attention to what you're doing. It's a, it's a really exact way to get a specific look that you're going for. Now, if you like working like that, go for it. I don't particularly like working in log mode because there's just too much to pay attention to. I usually stay in the primaries wheels and I like to make big adjustments in the primaries wheels like this and then adjust things that I don't like about the image later with some tools that we're going to go over in a little bit. But just so you know, those are the differences. And if your color wheels aren't acting the way you think they should, make sure to check that you're on primaries or log. Now that we've learned a little bit about color correction and looked at some of the main tools that we use to adjust our image. It's time that we talk about nodes. This is one of those subjects that can be a little bit intimidating, especially when we get into fusion, but the basics aren't really that hard. We'll try and make it easy and we'll walk through it together. So we've already learned that if we want to adjust our image, all we have to do is click on it in our clips here and we can adjust things down here in our controls. We can look at our scopes to help us balance things and make sure that they're the levels that we want. But one thing I haven't mentioned yet is that everything down here that we do, everything that we do to this image actually kind of lives in a group of adjustments called a node. In the upper right hand corner, you can see our node graph. And right now we have one node. Think about a node as just like a step, like one thing that you're doing. Everything that we've done here lives in a group of corrections. The first thing that we're doing called the first node. If you just want to do something basic to the image, like do just a basic color correction like we've been doing, you don't really even need to pay attention to nodes because who cares if it lives there if you're not going to do anything else with it. But the thing about nodes is they can be really useful when you want to get a little bit more advanced with your color correction. For example, let's say we want to do a balance kind of like we just did, and then we want to do something creative over it. We don't want it to look normal. We want it to look warm. We could just go down to our controls that we've already adjusted and push them warmth into our gain. And that would work. But what if later down the line we decide we don't want it warm? Well, we'd have to go back to our gain and kind of rebalance it, which wouldn't be that big of a deal if it were one shot. But it's likely that it's not going to be one shot. It's going to be a bunch of shots. So what we can do is start a new group of corrections by making a new node. Up here in our node graph, if I right click on this first node, I can go down to add node and I'm going to select add serial. What that does is add another group of corrections right after the first one that we just did in something called a serial node. A serial node is called a serial node because it goes together in a series. First you do this, then you do this. So whichever node we have selected is going to be the one that we're working on. So if I go to my first node, we can see I've boosted up this gain a little bit, boosted up the gamma a little bit, taking down the lift a little bit, boosted up our saturation. But if I switch to our second node down here, everything is reset. That's because it's a brand new group of corrections. So let's say now we want to make this warm. Maybe I'll push a little bit of warmth into the game, a little bit into the gamma, and make this really nice and warm, maybe I'll saturate it. And now we have this warm look that we've built into this shot, but we've built it in pieces. This second node is just the warm correction, and this first node is our primary correction, our making everything look normal. And I can turn each node off just by clicking on the number. If I click that off, that's gonna bring us back to our original correction. So I can quickly see what each node is doing just by turning it off or on. to else. And that's really the basics of nodes. All of the color correction stuff that we're doing lives in a node. Each node is a step in the process of color correction. You can even rename these by right clicking and going to node label. And I'll say PR for primary. And then in our second node, we'll call this warm, I'll just say W M. So now we know what each of these nodes is doing. I can turn it off and on and make things nice and organized. There are different kinds of nodes. Right here, we've been using serial nodes, but if you right click and go to add node, you'll see that there's a few more. There's add serial, add serial before, which just puts a serial node before the node you're working on. There's also a parallel node. And what that will do is make a correction at the same time as the other one instead of after it. So if I want to make this really warm on the warm and a really cool look in this other node, it'll apply both of these corrections and it will basically cancel things out. If I turn either of these off, it'll just be one of them. You could probably ask different people what's better to use for what situation and they'd probably tell you something different. I like to use parallel nodes when I'm doing a bunch of different things to an image because they just tend to mix together a little bit nicer than putting a whole bunch of serial nodes together. A serial node is going to affect every single thing that comes into it. So I'll delete our parallel node here and add a serial node I'm just hitting alt s on the keyboard and in this serial node Maybe I'll take our saturation all the way down to turn it black and white No matter what I do in the nodes before this black and white node if I make it just crazy pink or whatever It doesn't matter because it's always being desaturated at the end if this were a parallel node I'll hit alt P for a parallel node and do the same thing and completely desaturate it. It's just making all of these corrections at the same time. So it's taking out some of the saturation, but also adding a crap ton in with this warm node that happens to be colored pink right now. And so it doesn't really affect a whole lot if this desaturation node is on or not because it's kind of mixing those together. So depending on what you're doing, you might want to use different nodes. There's also a layer node, which I'll make a new node here, a new serial node, right click and go down to add node, add layer. This looks a lot like a parallel node, but it acts completely differently. What this is doing is taking this original image that we got from this node and putting it over itself. It's like it's making a copy and putting it over it. And so whatever we do to this node right here, that's going to show up in full force. And whatever happens in this layer below it, you won't be able to see it because this layer is on top of it. But if we were to add a mask, which again, we'll go over this in a second. But if I were to select this second layer and add a mask, you can see we can do quite a bit of cool stuff by layering this image that's tinted blue over the same image that's tinted yellow. A lot of potential here. Again, stuff we'll get into in a little bit. But for now, think of it like this. Each node is a new step or a new job that you're doing on this image. So we have our primary and then maybe I want to make this look a little bit more clear. I can add a serial node, go to our curves and add a little S curve. And that'll make things just look a little bit clearer. If I turn this off and on, you can see it just kind of increases that contrast a little bit, makes it look a little bit more poppy. And we can build this in pieces. So maybe we'll do our warm look here in our third node, and at any point we can turn off any of these nodes to go back to see what it looks like without it.",
+  "language": "en",
+  "confidence": null,
+  "duration": 923.82
+}