Rethinking Saturation in DaVinci Resolve

Controlling Saturation in DaVinci Resolve: A Fresh Look

Part 1: ‘HSL Isolation’ or ‘Sat vs. Sat’?

One of the curses of being a long-time user of a piece of software is that habits you establish early in your mastery tend to outlive their usefulness. It’s not very often any of us take a fresh new look at doing our mundane tasks. For me, one such ‘mundane task’ is dealing with excessive saturation.

I have a ‘Desaturation’ PowerGrade that I’ve been using for years

It’s a simple HSL qualifier that selects the most over-saturated pixels and desaturates them – bringing them into ‘legal’ (and usually, more life-like) range.

But there’s a User Interface convention in Resolve’s HSL Qualifier that has been bugging me from Day 1

In this Insight, you’ll learn what that UI annoyance is… and how I’ve recently thrown away my old habit for dealing with desaturation—and why I think this new approach is much better.

In truth, I’m not so sure why it’s taken me so long to fully embrace this new approach, except that the initial implementation may have been a little noisier than I liked. Or maybe… it’s always worked as well as it does in Resolve 12.5 and I’ve never had a reason to question, much less change, my old habit.

Coming Up in Part 2: Controlling RGB Gamut Errors with Software

Along the same lines, I’ve starting thinking about what we can do as digital colorists to try and minimize RGB Gamut errors during the color correction process. I’ll share those thoughts in Part 2.

Enjoy!

-pi