Look Development Part 3: Sweetening The Color Palette

Loved this series, thank you! Just a clarification: when in this workflow would you go through the “correction” or shot-to-shot matching and balance phase?

Thanks Doug! I’d tackle the shot-by-shot adjustments after going through the full process of setting up the image pipeline and building out the look. You’ll probably continue to refine your look in your first pass of individualized grading, but you still want to get it as dialed as possible beforehand.

I’m curious if you adapt this workflow any differently when working on documentaries where the source footage can be totally unidentifiable (mirrorless SLR, archival, DV, etc). How would you best adapt this workflow to work with those sources? I can see how the preferential mapping would apply once you wrangle them into the workflow, but typically if I don’t know the proper IDT I’ll just it to Rec709 and grade from there. But, as we expand into HDR and needing to do several different luminance trims/passes, I feel like that may be a big roadblock down the road.

Great question Daniel! Input mapping Rec709/601 material into ACES can definitely be tricky. If the Rec709 IDT doesn’t work, you can also try Color Space Transforms, and if all else fails, you can completely side-step color management on specific shots — IF you’re using a node-based “Custom ACES” approach like we did in this series. In the latter case, you may have to tweak your look nodes, but they’ll still work for you.

I have been digging into the color warper tool lately.. I am loving it for looks. The idea that you can pin stuff that you want to remain “as is ” and manipulate the rest is really quite fun.
But, ( may be a bug, I have posted this in the FB Resolve forums, and better minds than mine can’t seem to figure it out either )
Color warper doesn’t seem to reflect the same trace as the vectorscope at any setting. Seems to be skewed by 4 degrees and Saturation is not mapped linearly in the UV plane. There is noticeably less saturation in magenta when you place color swatches and compare the trace to the vectorscope.

But I am still using it, but watching the vector scope for direction and changes. Between the HDR tool and the warper, I feel like I can almost grade everything with those two tools that used to take a lot more nodes to even come close.
But not sure if the warper has a bug or not. I would not be confident in just saying , I’ll grab this hue and move it here etc. without the vectorscope verifying what exactly is being affected.

It’s because the standard vectorscope is set up to view Y’CbCr/YUV model where as the warper wheel is showing HSL/HSP. If you try to make the correlation when viewing a HSV modeled scope those moves you make will match – scopebox, Omni scope can do this.

But I agree if your trying to correlate one move to the other it can be little weird to see the offset. Right when the warper came out I made a feature request about this but not an option as of yet.

Also this behavior gets much weirder in color managed projects for me so there is some additional math going on that I haven’t sorted out.

Regardless of the model – Resolve should be able to map it so they match. When they put something up there with a skin line indicator that is almost in the same spot, people tend to push toward hues like they do on the wheels but no matter which one I try HSL/HSP etc. The magenta is way out and the trace doesn’t match. Yes, I was using the color management. So I agree that might be making stuff even worse. Tom Huczek, after I posted it compared the results to his Nobe color remap and said there is something definitely off.

yea i’m agreeing with you on the end result it’s why i filed a feature request when it came out (like day of). i tend to use the warper for more subjective corrections then exact ones (product hues etc) so it’s not really bothered me but i think you are 100% right it should be addressed and translate the the mapping between the warper and the default vector

This was an amazing series. Thanks Cullen. I love watching your videos. You were very thorough.
I have few concerns. Right now I can on your timeline shots varies in terms of their locations and lightings which is a case when you are color grading film trailer. However, in majority of situations we get same location shots throughout the couple of minutes. Don’t you think in that case applying the look on Post-group level would be great? So first initial color correction on clip level and then scene based look on Post-group level?