Look Development Part 2: Dialing In The Contrast Curve

Day 18: 24 Insights in 24 Days New Year Marathon

Now that we’ve built a solid foundation of color management — which represents our global technical manipulations — we’re ready to dive into building our look, which encompasses our global creative manipulations.

Having our pipeline properly established allows you to evaluate our image in a purely creative mode, starting today with our creative contrast curve. In this Insight I’ll show you:

• The best place in your image pipeline to place look nodes
• Resolve 17’s new HDR palette — and why it ISN’T just for HDR mastering
• How to think about creative contrast in more detail than a simple “crunchy versus soft” dichotomy
• How to use the HDR palette to create a nuanced and tunable global creative contrast curve

A well-implemented creative contrast curve plays a HUGE role in shaping our overall look, and sets us up perfectly for the next stage of look development: preferential color mapping, which we’ll be tackling in Part 3.

On another note, we only scratched the surface today on the HDR palette — if you’re looking to go deeper with this powerful new tool, I highly recommend Patrick Inhofer’s HDR Zones 101 in DaVinci Resolve series.

As always, if you have questions or thoughts on this Insight, I’d love to hear them in the comments!

-Cullen