LAB Color Foundations Part 2: DaVinci Resolve

This seems useful for adding punch to already colorful images w/o saturation going crazy, does it not? Gonna mess around w this on a music video I have coming up. Thanks Pat!! Looking forward to part 3

Jason – Honestly, it’ll months before I’ll start making generalizations about when and when not to use LAB. But for the time being, it’s now part of my routine during the ‘experiment time’ at the start of a grading session.

guess we’ll have to see. Looking forward to part 3 and I’ll certainly jumping into LAB with my primaries when playing around before choosing a method. Thanks for sharing yet another unique tool!

I’m wonder how increasing saturation via the channel mixer compares to using lab?

Well – much the same results as if you just boosted Saturation while working in RGB. I’ve done this test, RGB saturation vs. RGB Channel Mixer saturation. It’s the same exact move if all three channels are increased equally. You could try removing red out of the green or blue channel but that’ll weaken those color channels. If you add red to the green or blue channels you end up making the image more monochromatic (as those values in the two channels become more similar).

Working in LAB, to my mind – beside the big moves for heavy handed color washes as Dan demo’ed in an earlier Insight – is about getting results that are different than you’d get in RGB… and if you tried to make it happen in RGB, would take a ton more work. BUT – the results in LAB are not always more desirable to the point where you’d decide to just work in LAB full-time across every project that you touch.

Am I making sense?

could you just alway apply your 3 grid powergrade then use gain to tweak the saturation?

I’m not sure I understand your question… which colorspace are you talking about? And you mean the 3-node structure? And which gain control are you referring to? 🙂 (this gets confusing real fast)

Sorry I mean’t could you just apply the most saturated version of you LAB contrast power grades above, then tune the saturation to your liking via the mask gain value instead having 4 LAB contract power grades? Better yet apply the strongest lab contrast preset then adjust the ganged intensity sliders to fine tune the saturation.

That might work. Certainly you could try that. I’d be on the lookout for loss of detail back in the RGB colorpsace when desaturating.

New member to the site, already glad that I am from these three LAB colour space insights. Really looking forward to the next part. Thank you Patrick.

Great insight Patrick! 😀 I’m experimenting with LAB now on a commercial job that has a lot of nice winter landscapes in it. And all the different colors just pops the right way for me using this process. I arrived to the look I wanted a lot faster than I did the “normal” way. Looking forward to the next video and experimenting some more!

Robert – Welcome to Mixing Light! You won’t have to wait long. The next part will be released very, very shortly! I’m loving this experimentation.

Raymond – Terrific. I’m psyched to hear you’ve got it working in a real-life situation. And as you’ll see in my next video… we know pretty quick if LAB gets us where want in same amount of time as our normal RGB grading tools. You just have to be willing to muck with curves (although, I have some ideas on minimizing the curves tweaking, which will come in a later Insight).

Very interesting thank you! I come from a photoshop background but we don’t use LAB that often anymore. At least not the people that trained me. But this seems like another good way of getting the most out of your footage! I wonder how the hue vs hue and hue vs sat curves will work in LAB.

Heh. I have not tried those tools in LAB. I suspect, they’ll act very strangely but it could be fun to try and figure out.