Here we look at a grade from Storyhive documentary series Red Chef Revival, created by Black Rhino Creative.
It’s a DJI drone shot captured with the “D-Cinelike” picture profile, a low contrast setting designed to preserve maximum information in the shadows and highlights.
EXPOSURE VALUES: BALANCING
I always approach by balancing an image before grading. Balancing involves correcting our image to look true to life, before the creative process of grading alters our palette to acheive the desired look.
Firstly I’ll correct the exposure points of our shadows and highlights using the Lift (shadow), and Gain (highlights) wheels labelled 1 and 3 below. Next the Gamma (midtones) wheel 2 is used to brighten up the mids.
These are the results with some correction to the white balance, and some contrast added to the sky and ground individually.
The Parade Scope below is an essential guide that visualises our brightness values. Even as a beginner if you don’t fully understand how to read these values, you can clearly see if you’ve overshot the top and bottom of the graph which would cause ‘clipping’, or lost details in highlights and shadows.
In this example, our lowest black values should be bit above zero, dark without being true black, and our highlight peaks just short of the top.
Sliding shows our straight out of camera levels vs our correction adjustments.
ADDING HAZE
I love adding low-contrast haze by desaturating and brightening the horizon in wide landscape shots, increasing the feeling of scale and depth. So as not to include the water tower in the foreground with this adjustment, a tracking mask was drawn around it.
FINAL GRADE
My favourite part, where it all comes together. A vignette is added, shadows are made cooler with blue hues, highlights are warmed up and a little more contrast is added. It’s a bit of a dance to experiment until the look is just right.
The direction from the DP was for the final result to look natural. It’s important to work with what you have rather than artificially overcook your image, a mistake I made a lot as a beginner. It’s possible to take the look in any number of directions whilst still maintaining a natural feel.
My last step is to compare the balanced image to the graded one, allowing us to review how far we pushed our look with each step. Did we over egg the pudding? Should we dial it back a little?
Often, the answer is yes! It’s easy to go too far, and good to take a break and return or work on other shots before reviewing again, since our eyes can deceive us.
Resolve’s Palette Effect tool allows us to see colour swatches grouped into shadows mids and highs, with an overall global snapshot of the dominant colours. I love this feature!
I’ll return with more breakdowns of a variety of shots including skin-tones, camera matching and more wildly out there looks. Thanks for reading!