Automatic Color Correction With DaVinci Resolve

2.1 What Is Color Correction?

Color correction is a very specific process, and in this lesson you'll find out exactly what it's all about. So imagine you're working on a video, and you have a collection of shots in your sequence. These shots may have been shot in different locations, at different times of the day, under different lighting conditions, with different camera settings. That is a lot of variables, and in order to give your video or your sequence a homogeneous look, you need to do some color correction. Now let's imagine what those clips may look like. You may have some shots that were shot outside in the morning. You may have some shots that were shot outside on an overcast day. You may have some interior shots that were shot under fluorescent lighting. You may have some shots that were shot with some nice video lights, either tungsten, or fluorescent, or really nice LEDs, or metal halide. You may have some shots that were shot in an office building with some practical lighting and the color quality is not that great. And you may have some shots that were shot under some really nasty exterior street lighting, or in a warehouse, or in a gymnasium, these mercury vapor or sodium vapor lights that are really orange, or really yellow, or maybe even really purple. So all of these shots are all over the place in terms of their color quality, in terms of their color temperature. And what you wanna do in the color correction process is to neutralize all of the shots. You wanna neutralize them in terms of their color temperature, their color rendition, and their saturation. Now in addition to that, you also are going to be making adjustments to exposure because each individual shot may have wild variances in exposure. Some shots may be done under really low lighting, and so the exposure needs to come up. Some shots may be done and the exposure was set a little bit too hot, and it needs to be brought down a little bit. So color correction is really about three things, matching your sequence in terms of exposure, color temperature, and saturation. All of these can affect how the shots flow together and whether they look similar or not. And that's really the goal. Now it could be that you have a sequence that you just need to color correct, and everything needs to look the same. But also you wanna think about color correction as a step in the process before you get to color grading. Now, color grading is a different mindset. That's where you're moving away from getting the picture to look as pure and as normal and as neutralized as possible, and where you're starting to move towards the more creative, where you're pushing the colors to give a stylized look, where you're adding vignettes, where you're adding noise, and grain, and diffusion, and things of that nature. That is all color grading, where you're making creative decisions to give your video a particular look. Color correction is not that it all. Color correction is making all of those shots that fall all over the color, and the saturation, and the exposure, and the color quality spectrum the same because that will make the process of color grading in any of those creative decisions a lot easier. So for each shot, you need to think about the exposure, the color temperature, and the saturation, and you need to match them together. Now the cool thing about the process that I'm going to show you is you really don't have to think a whole lot and worry a whole lot about these things because the color target and the process I'm gonna show you in DaVinci Resolve takes care of, I would say, 95% of the work for you. The color target has a gray scale from black to white, so it's going to kind of normalize the exposure to a certain degree from black to white. And that will help to balance out the contrast. It's also going to help with the saturation because it has a whole bunch of different color chips or color swatches. And it's going to adjust the color of each one of those to match this known quantity, right? Because the whole idea is you wanna take something that does not look correct, right? This could be a shot that was shot outside with great lighting, right? The sun has perfect color, but maybe the camera wasn't set quite right. Instead of a daylight white balance, maybe it was set to like 4,000 Kelvin or tungsten, and so everything's gonna look super blue. And you can do a lot of work by eye to try to normalize that, and you can probably get it pretty close. But using one of these color reference targets, you have something that is a known source. These color chips in this device are very tightly controlled, and they know exactly what these colors are supposed to be. When you know what the colors are, it's easy for software to be able to match the video source with this. These you can say, take this and make it look like that. It's not necessarily so easy to do it by eye, especially if you're just starting out. Eventually, once you get used to pushing around the colors, or the shadows, the midtones, and the highlights, and adjusting the color temperature, and the saturation, and curves, you get used to neutralizing shots. And it becomes kind of second nature and you can do it pretty fast. But if you're just starting out, I don't think there's any faster way to do really accurate color correction than the process that I'm going to show you, which is very cool. Although the color target and resolve are going to take care of most of the work for you, you may have to push the colors around a little bit to get it that last, let's say, 5%. And I'm gonna show you how to do that as well. That's part of the color correction process as well because even though we're working with a known source, the light can be such that you may need to tweak it just a little bit to match the other shots. But the whole process of color correction is about getting your shots, your sequence to look homogenized, to start from a neutral point in terms of exposure, color temperature, or white balance, and saturation. Now that you know what color correction is and what color correction is not, it's time to talk about when to do color correction, and that's coming up next.