Mixing Light Color Correction Podcast Series

How to Emulate the Clarity Slider + Color Correcting in VFX Workflows

November 21, 2013

Three professional colorists discuss how to emulate LightRoom's Clarity Slider in DaVinci Resolve. Plus, where color correction fits in VFX workflows.


Series

Episode 5: From the Mailbag

How to emulate the Clarity Slider? Color Correcting in VFX Workflows?

Team Mixing Light recently sat down and recorded another installment of From The Mail Bag. Remember, if you have questions that you’d like to get an opinion on please use the contact form.

Your questions can be aesthetic, technical, client-related – or just surprise us! We’d love to hear from you, and your question might make a future episode of From the Mailbag.

Episode 5 has Team Mixing Light wrestling with two different questions:

The Clarity Slider
First up, we’ll discuss a question we got from a Mixing Light member about how to emulate the ever-popular Clarity Slider from Adobe Lightroom to give footage, well…some clarity!  We discuss multiple techniques to emulate this in grading applications, including in Resolve.

Visual Effects Workflows
Next, we got a question for Mixing Light member Tom about color grading workflows involving Visual Effects shots. Between us, we have a few different approaches and discuss how to best integrate VFX shots into your grading workflow.

Enjoy!

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Comments

Homepage Forums How to Emulate the Clarity Slider + Color Correcting in VFX Workflows


  • Tom Parish
    Member

    Thank you guys for taking the time to elaborate on some best practices around the collaboration process between a colorist and the VFX folks. Lots of good tips here. Patrick – I had one followup question from your suggestion of sending the VFX guys a LUT from your first pass grade.

    Let’s say you’re working with RED files. Once the VFX guys and lighting bolts or new a sky or whatever based on the image LUT you give them as a guideline for the effects, do they typically give you back a ProRess 422HQ version back to add in the final grade? The problem here is now you no longer have access to the RED raw file adjustments. It’s baked in and that may be fine (or not) as you add in your correction and grade. Would it better to have the VFX send you a file that you composite with the RED clip in Resolve? Not sure this is making sense but I want to ask.


  • Patrick Inhofer
    Guest

    In that particular RED workflow – VFX would render out to ProRes444 (coming from RAW formats I always want to render out at 444 or Uncompressed) using the same RED settings I used when creating the LUT. VFX would use the RED raw controls to make sure the image looks good based on the LUT I gave them… so in theory they should be close enough that I don’t need those RAW controls.

    If they messed up so bad I do need those controls – I’d communicate what I need and have them re-execute.

    Make sense?


  • Tom Parish
    Member

    Makes perfect sense.
    And … once again, thank you so much for your help. That’s exactly what I wanted to know.

  • Regarding the “Clarity Slider” style results in Resolve, I remember that Dan had a tutorial awhile back about using the trim LUT to move grades from Lightroom into Resolve. Would that be another (slower, but perhaps more accurate) way to match the results from Lightroom’s clarity slider in Resolve?


  • RobbieCarman
    Guest

    Jamie –
    Thats a really good question! I’m going to give that a go and let you know what I find!

  • It’s great that Blackmagic has saved us both the trouble by finally adding a slider for it in version 11 : )

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