Rethinking Saturation in DaVinci Resolve

Very nice. I’ve been using the Sat v Sat curve to do this for a while. I’ve always wondered why the saturation scale in the HSL controls is so expansive, especially since the sat v sat UI shows essentially the same information, but in a usable scale… I wonder if there’s a reason the developers did this?

Peder – ‘Expansive’: That’s the word I was looking for to describe it – but couldn’t find. Thank you!

I’ve got to think there’s some Math reason – some hypothetical range of saturation that you can potentially select? But I have no idea. I keep trying to remember to ask the Team this question at NAB… but I always forget 🙂

Patrick, while you’re asking them about the Sat mode, ask them why Hue doesn’t rotate phase in a precisely uniform way. Rotate the hue of a compound clip of bars and see what you get.

I’ll take a look 🙂

I’ve been using the Sat vs. Sat curve in this way for a while, especially when dealing with oversaturated elements such as traffic lights or other forms of heavily colored light sources. I actually programmed this into my Xkeys: one button cycles through a few Sat vs. Sat curves.

I do a lot of industrial videos where crappy factory lighting causes huge color balance problems. Often, balancing for skin and other things causes unpleasant tones to be picked up in the metal of factory equipment. This stumped me for a long time. There seemed to be no way to balance the color balancing requirements to get everything perfect.

Then I tried using sat v sat to just desaturate colors with low saturation. It cleans that metal up with no real hassle. The versus curves in resolve are great tools!

Cool idea.

Agreed. You can use these tools to solve a ton of problems that would be difficult to do otherwise.

Patrick, would you typically use this on the last node, as a “final tweak”?

I do. But I don’t just use it as a last node – I’ll use this anywhere where I want to fine tune the saturation of my image.