Production still

[jafa]

This is a production still from a wedding I shot some time ago, its not from RAW but good old 264 converted to DNXHD and graded in resolve , ive been grading more recently with RAW and I have to say its a damn site easier working with 14bit than 8.
The grade is of coarse my own home made variant on the orange/teal look , i did originally buy a couple of luts that I thought would give me the same results , but to be honest , they are crap and your footage just looks like orange/teal MUD , so I decided to make my own , as im not a professional colorist or davinci expert , to get this far has taken a long time.
I know this not RAW or a video but I wouldnt mind some feedback on the grading.

Cheers
Jafa.   

[Andy600]

Nice balance! Not bad at all @jafa but keep an eye on your skin tones, especially highlights - look at the fingers and a patch of his forehead, the grade shows some clipping.  Did you use a qualifier? If so, try to refine it a little and you'll have a great grade!

The Teal/Orange look is not something that can be done well with a lut. You've got the right idea here!

Sharpening looks a little intense and it's producing artifacts on blurred/out of focus areas. Try sharpening the luma channel only - add a node, set it to YUV and deselect channels 2 & 3 to isolate the Y channel, then add negative blur. If you want a bit of texture add a little mist after the sharpening node.

[jafa]

Wow , thanks Andy , this is just what I was after , I did qualify just the skin into 3 parallel nodes for shadows , mids and highlights , I sharpened the mid and high nodes two stops and then another 3 stops for the overall image in the final node , way to much sharpening I can hear you saying .
With the highlights I was trying to add a bit more shininess to his face as it was looking a bit plastic and flat and at the same time trying to ignore the blown highlights on his hand i did in the end put an oval tracking window over the forehead and ears to isolate them from the hand , but obviously I need to work on this.
The biggest problem for me has been just isolating the skin tones from the background , when qualifying allot of background is picked up so I try to refine and narrow the area and then I start to loose parts of the area Im trying to qualify and I seem to go back and forth over and over again untill I just have to settle on a happy medium , is there a secret to getting just the skin tones or even better a tutorial that you know of ?
Ill get on later with reworking those areas you picked up on and repost a vid or still of the results.

Thanks again.   

[Andy600]

For a basic approach you can just use Power Windows to roughly isolate only the areas of the image where skin is showing and then use a qualifier to pick out the skin (as you have already done). You'll need to activate tracking so that the power window(s) follow the action. You will probably have to do some work to grow/shrink/reshape the power window(s) to stay with the action.

TBH, there are many ways to achieve the same thing but Juan Melara did a pretty good tut using parallel nodes: http://juanmelara.com.au/basic-resolve-node-structure-and-order-of-operations/

You're on the right path anyway

[jrcreative]

Hi Andy, I'm wondering if you can be a bit more specific when you talk about negative blur. I'm trying to play around with some footage and I'd like to try and do what you're talking about, however i've never used blur or mist before. I was able to switch the layer to YUV and turn off the two layers as you described, but how do i effect only Y layer with negative blur.

Thanks,
J

[jafa]

Reworked image from Andys comments , soloed the hand and reduced the highlights to match the rest of the image , then went back and passed the skin tones through a new YUV node emitting channels 2&3 adding 2 clicks of negative blur as instructed , undid all other sharpening bar one click on the final node.
Initially I found it hard to notice the difference , then after a short while I thought the image looked nicer-softer in the right places with a better less harsh detailing in the subjects face.
Thanks Andy I think ive just got a little better at this grading malarkey. 

[andresharambour]

Awesome stuff! It was a very nice grading and now it's much better. Thanks all of you for all the tips!

[baldavenger]

Excellent work all round, especially considering the source footage is h264.  The final look has a print emulation feel to it.  Good application of advice, and more importantly, very good instinctive approach.  Some things can't be taught and it would appear that you have a natural aptitude for colour grading.

[jafa]

Thanks baldavenger , ive had Resolve for over a year , but never used it for much more than adding color to my flat footage , I then came across a web page where ther was a love/hate discussion going on about the orange/teal use in digital film, this is when I first became aware of grading in general and realised I no longer wanted my own footage to look like video i wanted it to look like film.
Anywho-many hundreds of frustrating hours later I finally feel like im "JUST"
 starting to get to grips with grading and im even enjoying applying it to footage , the only real downside is that I can no longer watch anything , films , adverts , mini series without analysing the grading .
   

[jafa]

I made this small test for a friend    ( the girl in the vid who asked me   to film the event  didn't understand what I meant by Grading the footage)    , I think I overdid it on the eyes but apart from that I think im getting there if not slowly .
H.264 , converted to Dnxhd , skin is still a bitch to qualify , but im getting better...also slowly.

Cheers
jafa.

[jafa]

More work on grading done this time using a raw shot , converted to PR444 , graded in resolve , stabilised in AE and cut and sharpened in PP , I took several shots around Nottingham with the aim of making it as difficult for myself to qualify the skin tones without having to resort to power windows, what became clear in post is "A" raw & pro res is a much better format to work with than 264 and "B"  trying to stabilise very shaky footage ruins the quality.