Visual Math – Building A Subtractive Saturation Node Tree In DaVinci Resolve

Learn how Subtractive Saturation works by building it yourself

Series Note: Cullen Kelly recently finished a series on coding your own DCTL ResolveFX plug-in to create a split-tone look. Today, Cullen starts a new multi-part series teaching you how to use the Layer Mixer node to build really useful tools without going the DCTL or plug-in route.

Math.

In the end, all of our color grading tools are essentially mathematical operations on the red, green, and blue values of each pixel captured by our cameras (or rendered out of software). But some operations are more complicated than others.

The value of many of our favorite plug-ins lies in their ability to make the complex, simple. The cost of this simplicity is that we never learn how to do these things ourselves. We lose insight into what’s going on ‘under the hood’. But if we know the underlying math, we can (potentially) manually recreate the math even if we don’t have access to those plugins.

One of the most powerful ‘math-based’ instruments in the DaVinci Resolve toolbox on the Color Page is the Layer Mixer node (if you need it, at the bottom of this Insight are a few Mixing Light links to get you up to speed on the Layer Mixer node). This node lets you perform math operations in the form of blending modes (as you’d find in Photoshop or After Effects).