This Advance White Balance Technique is Ruining YOUR Grades | DaVinci Resolve 19 Tutorial

0:00 as a professional you feel like you just know it all and I love when I get humbled and that's exactly what happened here I was experimenting and coming up with some ideas for tutorials for you guys and I stumbled upon something that like just shook my freaking belief system and I'm like is this for real and I even ran it by couple of my colorist friends to kind of figure out what's really going on and I didn't really get a definitive answer so what we're going to be discovering here is something that like I said we're going to be kind of doing that together and figuring out something that I thought was so amazing is actually pretty detrimental and then what can you do instead for those that don't know me my name is kazy I've worked with Brands like Adidas Amazon Prime Universal Studios and I make no

0:47 straightforward color grading tutorial so you can work with your dream clients if you like content that I put out then please do me a favor so go ahead smash the like subscribe to the channel if you haven't already hit the Bell so you could be notified about my future videos let's Jump Right In this footage is shot on red dragon so we're converting it from red color science to D Vinci white gamut and D Vinci white gamut to re 79 okay pretty standard stuff obviously if I go through and show you the shot it's just too warm it's not balanced at all so the first way to do it let's just do it the beginner way would be to find something white in the frame so it's this shirt right here and then I can just go in my

1:33 primaries click on this little eye dropper and go right here and just click on it and boom magic so to know if your image is balanced or not look at the vector scope and if it's in the middle it's pretty good this is a beginner level white balancing not good at all and you will know why so let's uh do a few things so let's go ahead and grab this still and also let's save this version now I'm going to said that and then a better way to do it is knowing how to actually balance this through your own eyes and using your Scopes so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go in my HDR palet I'm going to use the global offset so this works very much like if this change was done in camera

2:19 so I'm going to go right here use my Global offset and I'm going to start moving it around now one thing I want to do is I still want to respect the environment so the entire place is lit with candle lights so I'm going to respect that so I want to keep just a hint of like warmth okay I don't want to take that out and this is a very good tip for you guys to know that you know a lot of people when they learn wide balance and color correcting they just want to like overdo it don't overdo it like respect the environment so now that we have an image like this you see like how our Blues are still staying put and our black points are proper okay so that's why this is way more Superior than the old traditional way of using your primaries offset so I'm going to grab my still and

3:07 I'm going to add a new version and now let's reset that and use the most advanced technique that everybody talks about and of course I'm talking about chromatic adaptation basically if you look at the definition this is a scientific way of manipulating color temperature inside resolve and it's supposed to be the most accurate representation of that so what's happening here is we got our source and we got our Target so we know that our source is completely off this is just shot at a wrong color temperature so if the lights are warm and if it was lit with warm lights to get it perfectly balanced we have to first click right here and change it to color temperature

3:53 and then we have to manually put in 3200 Kelvin cuz 3200 Kelvin is what you would set your camera to when you're shooting with warm lights so if I were to click right here and just type in 3200 get ready to have your mind blown and before I even hit enter I just want to show you why I'm leaving my target set to d65 because this is our white point when you're working in Rec 709 and we're going to be exporting this in 709 so we want to keep our white point to d65 we don't want to mess with that and now if I hit enter look what happens voila I mean this is unreal and this is what everybody says this is scientifically proven math is math you

4:38 can't challenge that plug in the numbers hit enter and you're done it's so crisp it's so clean it is amazing and the colors that are coming out are just out of this world right wrong and you're going to find out why that is so let's just go right here first of all and let me show you what is happening right here how this is like so ugly so one way to fix that is going in your color space transform right here and what we can do is under gamut mapping method I can just say saturation compression and voila fixed that's great but is it though if I go and look at this and we come to

5:24 something like that you see that little that little breakage that's happening that wasn't happening before so if I do if I get rid of this chromatic adaptation you can see that this was perfect but then after we got that little thing going on so just keep that in mind obviously another way to get rid of it would be to double dip the gamut mapping method and then even on the output we can do saturation compression and then it gets rid of it but now look at how muted this looks compared to to the HDR method which is so crisp and clean look at this and plus like all this green Gunk that we're getting that

6:09 just doesn't look right because if I go here and turn it before and after it was never this green yellow so then one way to fix it is in our tint and then add some magenta but see it's not as simple as that because if I go back and do this yes sure the ground looks a little bit better so our floors are looking better but at the same time this inherent like greenish yellow is just in there it's embedded and then another thing that I want you to pay attention to is when we come around and we park it here look at what's happening in the vector scope to my purples like look at this how this is absolutely not what it's supposed to be because if I turn this off it should be

6:55 going all the way right it shouldn't be restricted like this completely change and this has nothing to do with color temperature because if I go right here and show you what we got with the HDR method like look at how nice my magenta is and I mean just look at it in the colorized waveform so keep your eye right here this is after this is before I mean what just happened and this is what I'm trying to tell you guys this is dismal so now one thing that we can do right now I want to be fair to our experiment is let's go here and if I go right here and show you what we got going on so right now with our HDR look at how beautiful this is that I

7:44 didn't even have to turn on gamut mapping on either of these and we're still getting such a clean result compared to what we had to do here so now just remember if you're not an advanced user and if you're not comfortable with all of these things and if you just saw a video of somebody talking about like how chromatic adaptation is the new big thing that's why I always tell people that don't just jump on the first complicated video that you see and think that this is the way because if you don't really know your way around resolve and if you don't do all the things that I did to suppress this problem your images are going to look like and not to mention this is just one shot now imagine if you have a

8:29 15 00 shot movie that you're working on this is a game of whack-a-mole you are setting yourself up for failure you do not ever want to do that and before we keep going I want you to start your year strong 50% off for a limited time only on freelance colorist and Kazi stool kid bundle QT without a question is a resolves best look development tool to get high-end looks in minutes and in my experience speed will bring you more clients and quality will keep them loyal and if you want to go from from zero to grading like a pro then look no further join freelance colorist we have over 9,000 members using these products and getting killer results so now it's your turn click the link in the description to claim this offer let's get back to the video and now if we go back to

9:18 this and we look at what's Happening Here chromatic adaptation and then this is our HDR method guys it is a alarming how bad this is so I'm going to save this and we're going to create a new version so now what I want to do is the method that I've been sharing with you guys which is linear gamma so I'm going to right click here go under gamma and change it to linear and then Luma mix I'm going to turn it to zero and uh the reason why I'm using linear to compare it with HDR palette is because a lot of people think it's the same exact thing so let's just put it to test and find out this is not necessarily a 100% scientific test we're going to just eyeball it and get it really really

10:05 close and then that's where you will be able to see the difference between the two and I think that's a more realistic test anyways I'm going to go here and choose my HDR pallette and then pop that open and then let's just get close something like this but the one thing that I want to do first before I forget is I want to go back to none and none so we want to do that right and now let's go to linear and I want to just get it a a closer match let's just see so I feel like this is pretty close so now if I just come out of it and we look at this so the beautiful thing about

10:51 linear as you can see like look at it right here it's like how well balanced it is it just brought the red down lifted the blues perfectly and kept all the colors as they're supposed to be so now I'm just going to match it with HDR palette so this is HDR palette and then this is our linear honestly I love the skin tones with linear so if I come close and if I do before so this is HDR palette they just seem a little thin and then this is your linear and it just belongs same thing with the flooring it looks a lot better um with it looks film like deeper okay with linear linear is just more grounded with all of it and I like it like you know if

11:37 I actually punch in and show you right here this is HDR palette this is linear this just has more juice it has more color it has more punch let's go here this is HDR palette this is linear okay and you can see like right here if I just really get in there this is HDR palette this is linear it's handling it even better like look at this it's giving us more information I mean you're looking at it on YouTube with compression I don't know what you're really seeing but I am seeing a lot more detail right here and if you see the same thing then drop a comment below let me know that I'm not crazy so linear in my estimation then is a lot better but

12:23 now the one thing that I see with linear right here this is not good so we're getting that so then I'm going to go under my gamut I'm going to turn on saturation and now if I match it so this right here is our chromatic ad adaptation this right here is our HDR and then this is our linear so what if I go and turn on this right here so we basically have all of our versions let's just go here and look at all of our versions I don't know how helpful it's going to be because honestly I think it's just going to be more confusing than helpful but let's just make it full screen let's get rid of that and then go and kind of see what's happening and I'll just

13:09 commentate through it so this is our amateur white balance this is our HDR palette this is our linear and then this is our chromatic adaptation okay and honestly again another thing that I love about linear not only the skin looks the best also like this warmth that we're getting remember how close we matched it that we couldn't even tell the difference but then it has its own colors that are coming through that are just different than what you would get through HDR so if I park right here and look at it we can clearly see that this just has more depth like look at how like this looks clean right like I mean the white looks like really white with like 3200 Kelvin but like the inherent

13:57 green that came in is just not pretty like look at the floors right here look at the floors the one thing that's singular in all of these three shots the floors and then honestly like the floors look pretty good in the amateur version but the amateur version just looks like crap the rest of it because it's just like really nasty like it will bring in a lot of uh greens and a lot of like teals in the shadows that just makes it contaminated and you can even tell the difference like look at the boot right here look at the boot right here the boot right here and the boot right here so this has more blue so this is okay this is much better this is a lot cleaner this is really good but then the blacks are more grounded in linear compared to HDR and then look at the boot right here so this is the kind of crummy nature that you would get from

14:45 just doing it one click wi balance the beginner way okay so I really really like this like we can tell a lot here so a lot of the personality in your image will come from different color temperature in your shot right so like how this amateur version just made the white like too white whereas this looks kind of cool chromatic adaptation and we can control if we want it less or more like right now we set it to 3200 we can go to 38 and make it a little bit warmer but if you actually look at the linear version and HDR pette version there's something really interesting happening so like you see like how it's keeping the lamp warmth in there cuz usually the bulb is never going to be like 5600 Kelvin in a

15:32 lamp usually it's going to be uh what What's called like a standard bright white you can Google that and I think it's around 4200 4,400 Kelvin and it would look similar to this okay so now I'm not going to just like make some up like I mean these two are pretty close but I'll tell you right now this blue right here looks way better than this right here this just looks sort of like washed out and same thing is happening here there's more color depth than I'm seeing here than it is over here okay let's just keep going and then the biggest difference that you will notice is right here like what is happening with chromatic adaptation it just like choked our color so much and just completely made it something different than what it is and then we

16:17 had the most information as I showed you when we punched in in this version our skin looks the best here and then overall this just has the most separation and it looks the most mature let's keep going another thing that you will notice is like see like how in HDR palette it just kind of starts blowing out a little bit whereas with the linear it's just holding so much saturation and meat in the image look at what's happening with chromatic adaptation I mean come on this is absolutely bananas and then like look at what's happening right here with our beginner version which is not horrible but this is so impressive and then let's read this

17:03 really quick so I mean what are these colors right like it's just coming out of nowhere so like this also looks so horrible this looks okay but crummy HDR palette doesn't look bad but sort of washed out whereas when you look at linear it's just holding on to that color like it just makes it look and feel so HDR I mean I'm saying HDR I mean this is like but but like truly like an HDR image if you will and then if we go and park it somewhere around here and we focus on this area right here I love the actual warmth this is what I would see with my own eyes 1,000% I'm confident this is a little bit more toward magenta this just again looks very amateurish like you know conversion and then this

17:48 is washed out again this just looks bad because remember we had to do so much in our CST just to make this proper whereas like here we just had to barely do anything and we just got such an amazing image now the mature part about balancing your image this way is that once you set up your pipeline like this rest assure 1500 shots 2500 shots your stuff is going to look epic and if you do it the wrong way just because you watched a video and somebody talked about something you never heard of before and you think that is the right way to do it you just saw what we witnessed before your eyes so when you're using linear one thing I would change is I would change this to saturation compression and then that's it set it and forget it then just use

18:35 your linear process if you don't know what this linear process is watch this video right here so this was pretty crazy right that's why nothing beats practice because we can read theories all day long and that's why I'm not a huge believer in all the technical mumbo jumbo I mean you got to know it if you're a professional colorist so I understand everything that I need to understand but I'm just more of a Hands-On person for this exact reason what we discovered here because if you read resolves definition nothing beats chromatic adaptation and it should be working perfectly fine but in this instance and what we're dealing with it was absolutely the worst Choice guys if you enjoyed this video do me a favor smash the like button subscribe to the

19:20 channel if you haven't hit the bell and I will see you guys in the next one peace fam a [Music]