A Simple Trick to Make Your Color Grades More Cinematic & Professional1 min read
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe tools for precise colour grading are now widely available, but some of the techniques that professionals use day-in and day-out remain a mystery.
In a quick video from Alex Jordan at Learn Colour Grading, Alex shares an extremely simple tip that could make a huge difference in the aesthetic of your film. That tip can be summed up nicely as: keep the shadows in your image relatively desaturated.
It’s easy to think that saturation is something that you can only adjust in one fell swoop, an adjustment that applies to the entire image and not individual parts or luma ranges. And in many basic colour correction plugins, that’s definitely the case. You adjust the saturation control and the the entire range of shadows, mid-tones, and highlights has its saturation manipulated by exactly the same amount. In DaVinci Resolve, however, there’s a simple adjustment that allows you precisely control which parts of the image are saturated and which parts are not.
What Alex is doing in his example above is simple. In order to keep the darker parts of the image relatively desaturated, he’s creating a new serial node that he leaves at the end of the chain. Any other nodes used to make adjustments to the image will be kept before this one. On that final node, he makes one adjustment. In the Curves editor he selects the Luma vs. Saturation control, and then drops the left side (the shadows) of the curve down while slightly boosting the saturation of the mid-tones.
via: No Film School
Image Credit: Blackmagic Design
