Another way to color grade is to use the built in scopes to help you balance shots. You can
open a single video scope by clicking the ‘scope’ button, which is the second from the right on
the palette toolbar. You can choose to display a waveform, parade, vectorscope and histogram.
Using these scopes you can monitor your tonal balance, check the levels of your video to avoid
crushing your blacks and clipping the highlights, plus monitor any color cast in your clips.
The ‘color wheels’ palette contains the ‘lift’, ‘gamma’ and ‘gain’ controls which will generally
constitute your first adjustment. If you’ve previously had experience with color correction, these
should resemble controls you’ve seen in other applications for doing color and contrast
adjustments. For more accurate control of each color using a mouse, you can change the color
wheels to ‘primaries bars’ which let you adjust each color and luminance channel for the lift,
gamma and gain controls separately. Simply select ‘primaries bars’ from the dropdown menu
near the top right of the color wheels.
1 Adjusting the ‘lift’
With your clip selected on the color timeline, click on the ‘lift’ dial underneath the first
color wheel. Slide it back and forth and watch how it affects your image. You’ll see the
brightness of the dark regions of your picture increase and decrease.
Set it to where you want the dark areas to look their best. If you decrease the lift too
much, you’ll lose details in the blacks and you can use the parade scope to help avoid
this. The optimal position for blacks on the waveform is just above the bottom line of
the parade scope.
2 Adjusting the ‘gain’
Click on the ‘gain’ dial and slide it back and forth. This adjusts the highlights which are
the brightest areas of your clip. The highlights are shown on the top section of the
waveform on the parade scope. For a brightly lit shot, these are best positioned just
below the top line of the waveform scope. If the highlights rise above the top line of the
waveform scope, they will clip and you will lose details in the brightest regions of
your image.
3 Adjusting the ‘gamma’
Click on the ‘gamma’ dial underneath the color wheel and slide it back and forth.
Asyou increase the gamma you’ll see the brightness of the image increase. Notice the
middle section of the waveform will also move as you adjust the gamma. This
represents the mid tones of your clip. The optimal position for mid tones generally falls
between 50 to 70% on the waveform scope. However, this can be subjective based on
the look you are creating and the lighting conditions in the clip.
You can also use the curves palette to make primary color corrections. Simply click to create
control points on the diagonal line inside the curve graph, and drag them up or down to adjust
the master RGB contrast at different areas of image tonality. The optimum points to adjust are
the bottom third, mid, and top third of the curve line.
There are many more ways of doing primary color correction in DaVinci Resolve. Check the
DaVinci Resolve manual to learn how to use them all.
222Using DaVinci Resolve
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