Original subtitles

- If you've had some experience with color correction,

you may find that depending

on the system you're coming from,

you actually prefer working with curves

rather than color wheels.

And that's fine because here in DaVinci Resolve,

there's a very powerful curves tool called custom curves.

Both curves and color wheels can be used

to do the same thing, which is primary corrections.

We talked about that earlier in this chapter.

My definition of a primary correction is a correction that

generally affects almost every pixel in the image.

They're not targeted.

We're not just targeting a red shirt

and changing the red shirt.

Rather we're changing the black point,

the white point, the contrast of the image,

the overall color balance of the image.

Those are big primary corrections.

Now curves can be used to make really big corrections

or very targeted corrections.

We're going to take a look at using curves

as a primary correction,

knowing that you can always add more dots in a curve in

order to then turn that curve from a big primary correction

into a targeted secondary correction.

By default, the custom curves are exposed

in this curves pallet.

You'll notice there are a bunch of different curves options.

We have our custom curves,

a bunch of Hue versus curves, a Lum versus,

and two Sat versus curves.

We'll take a look at some of these later in this training.

Right now, we're going to stay focused on the custom curve.

Resolve 17 brought us to what I call

the gigantor curves.

Using that expand button,

you can now have a large curves interface that you can make

as large as you want,

especially if you want to do very detailed work,

or if you want to get into

a very specific part of the image.

One of the nice things about curves is it gives you a

histogram which can be controlled in this options menu.

So we've got this histogram and it can show you

what is the histogram on input.

In other words, before you make any change,

or does a histogram show you

after you make your changes, output,

or you can just go ahead and turn the histogram off.

Let's go ahead and keep it on output.

Cause it'll show us the result of our changes.

Now, the concept on the histogram and in fact,

I'm going to make this a little bit smaller

so we can also see our scopes.

And then we can see a little bit of the image here.

I've got two end points on this curve on the bottom left is

black, so left to right.

We have the darkest part of the image on the left and then

to the right is the brightest parts of the image

or the brightest pixels.

I'm going to click this darkest one

and move it to the right.

And you can see how on the wave form that we're stretching

the image down, which looks a heck of a lot like,

if we take this lift control and stretch the image down.

So by default, just grabbing this end point

is essentially the same move as a lift control.

Same thing's true on the far right-hand side

where we're dealing with the highlights.

If I don't add any more points or make any other changes,

clicking and dragging the highlights to the left

will make the image brighter.

Bringing it down to the bottom makes it darker.

This acts precisely like the lift control

in the three-way color wheels.

So you can see my initial thought as to why custom curves

can act very much like a primary correction,

just like our three-way color wheels.

Now, one of the things I love about custom curves

is we can add splines.

So if I come up to the options menu,

click this into editable splines.

Now, whenever I select a point, I get this handle control.

And so now I've got handles on these,

which allows you to make these very gentle,

non aggressive moves that give you this kind of roll off.

And you can really change the balance of an image

simply by working with these controls.

So if I think maybe his face is a little too dark here.

Let's make this a little bit smaller.

I think maybe his face is a little too dark.

I can just grab the end of this spline, shorten it up.

And I'm changing how far out this effect happens.

And then I can change the balance of the highlights

and say, "You know what?

This increase in brightness,

I want to move it down the brightness chain so that these

mid-tones get brighter and just pull this out and make these

very subtle adjustments."

So this is a great way of working and balancing out your

image in a way that feels a little bit more intuitive often

than maybe the three-way color wheels.

And this is one reason why a lot of colorists,

especially colorists are also editors, love using curves,

very intuitive, the splines work fantastic.

And yes, you can add additional points

simply by clicking and then adjusting.

If you do add a point and you don't want it,

you can right click on that point to make it go away.

Now you don't have to just work overall

on the overall image.

You can also, let's make some quick little adjustments here.

You could also make adjustments

to individual color channels.

So let's say I've made this overall brightness adjustment,

but maybe I want to drop the red channel a little bit.

Well, I can go ahead and use this little interface here

and just select whatever color channel I want.

In this case, the red channel, this curve turns red.

Now the changes I make will only happen on the red channel

and just like in the three-way color wheels.

If you take a look at the scope,

do you notice there is a counteracting move

in green and blue, that comes down

to DaVinci Resolves YRGB image processing

to keep the overall brightness of the image the same.

As all I'm doing is changing

and effecting the colors of the image.

Now having made these changes,

if I were to go ahead and turn off editable splines,

the moment I make any changes that control is going to snap

into a linear control,

and you're going to lose these spline effects

the moment you make a change.

See how that snapped.

Let's go ahead and do a reset.

To quickly link all of these back up together.

You just click on this link control

and now they're all linked back together.

And finally, for some fun,

you can go ahead and invert this control.

And now I've inverted this image using this control here on

the far left hand side that allows you to manipulate this

curve strictly for effect.

When I'm done with this curve,

I can go ahead and close these expanded curves

and anything we did up in the expanded curve.

We can also do down here in the curve palette.

Let's go ahead and reset that.

And that is the fundamentals of working with custom curves

here in DaVinci Resolve.