Production Blog: A Deeper Dive to How I Color Grade My Videos

In my Production Blog: Colors, I didn't talk about my whole process into how I color graded my clips since I was relatively new to working out the program. On this editing day, I got to understand the DaVinci Resolve program and become more familiar with the color grading part. Ever since I've experimented and gotten a good deft of what I wanted to achieve, I can now explain my process in a more standardized way. This blog will explain my process more better. 

To start off, before even editing, I transfer my video clips from my SD card to my USB Drive. Then, I import the clips I want to edit onto DaVinci Resolve. I go straight into the color grading section (it's the one highlighted in color at the bottom section). I go to Curves to manipulate the lighting (it's the one that has the RBG settings). I only manipulate the white curves, which just alters the shadows and highlights of the video. I form the curve into a slight S shape to emphasize the shadows and highlights of the video accordingly.  What this achieves is that the shadows and highlights becomes more prominent, and the mid tones will be slightly subdued. I wanted to achieve the low-lighting look that are common horror films, hence why I first start off manipulating the lighting through adjusting the curves. The reason I know how to manipulate the Curves setting is that I've done photography before. I used to look at YouTube videos in the past on how to edit my photos, and the Curves feature was something that I learned how to utilize way before I had this class. I'm not the best at it, but I hope I can improve my skills as I go through this project. 

Next, I add color to the clip: I first go to the High Dynamic Range section. The look I'm achieving is to create teal shadows and orange-y & peach-y highlights for my short film. For the 'Shadow' section, I'm assigning the color around the teal and green area on the color wheel to implement the green teal color onto the dark colors in the video. I adjust the saturation of the color accordingly with the red bar to the right of the 'Shadow' section. Then, I manipulate the highlights of the video on the 'Light' section, and I assign it to the orange color on the color wheel to implement warm highlights for the video. I also adjust the saturation for this part. Additionally, I manipulate the 'Dark' sections as well. This section manipulate the blacks of the video; not necessarily shadows but what is considered black for the program, it will adjust the hues in the video. I assign the hue to a teal color as well like in the Shadow section. For the finishing touch, I also adjust the contrast of the video slightly. 

This is the final result: