The Importance of Understanding LUTs in DaVinci Resolve

When working with DaVinci Resolve, it's essential to understand the concept of LUTs (Look Up Tables) and how they can enhance your editing workflow. A LUT is a pre-defined color grading curve that can be applied to footage to achieve a specific look or style.

To get started with LUTs in DaVinci Resolve, we'll begin by navigating through the node graph. We'll bring up the RGB parade and examine how the LUT affects the color information. As we move the LUT node, we'll see that it has a hard floor at around 250, which means that the blacks will be locked in at zero. This is a key aspect of understanding how LUTs work.

To achieve our desired look, we need to adjust the nodes before and after the LUT. The node on the left of the LUT can be adjusted to fine-tune the contrast and brightness of the image. By applying adjustments to this node, we can create a more subtle grade that enhances the overall appearance of the footage.

One common scenario is when working with a heavily graded LUT that doesn't suit our style. In such cases, we need to understand how to work within the parameters of the LUT by adjusting the nodes before and after it. For example, if we want to adjust the brightness or contrast of an image, we can do so by applying adjustments to the node on the right of the LUT.

It's also essential to note that when working with LUTs, it's crucial to understand which side of the LUT you're applying your grades to. In some cases, a LUT may be designed for log footage and requires specific grading adjustments before application. By experimenting with different nodes and adjusting the LUT accordingly, we can achieve our desired look and style.

To illustrate this concept further, let's take a closer look at an example where we have two versions of the same node. In one version, we're applying a 3D LUT to footage, while in another, we're using a different LUT that's more heavy-handed. By comparing the two before and after shots, it becomes clear how crucial it is to adjust the nodes before and after the LUT to achieve our desired look.

In the second example, we're applying a 3D LUT to footage that has been graded with curves adjustments. To get the most out of this LUT, we need to understand how to work within its parameters by adjusting the node on the left of the LUT to fine-tune the contrast and brightness of the image.

In DaVinci Resolve, it's also possible to create our own custom LUTs using the node graph. This can be a powerful tool for achieving unique looks or styles that aren't available through pre-defined LUTs. By experimenting with different nodes and adjusting the LUT accordingly, we can create our own custom grades that enhance our footage.

To get started with creating your own custom LUTs in DaVinci Resolve, we'll need to familiarize ourselves with the node graph and how it works. This may involve some trial and error as we experiment with different nodes and adjustments.

Fortunately, there are many resources available online that can help us learn more about LUTs and how to use them in DaVinci Resolve. The official Blackmagic Design website offers a range of tutorials and resources on working with LUTs in the software.

For those who want to dive deeper into the world of LUTs, we recommend checking out the DaVinci Resolve forums or online communities where enthusiasts share their knowledge and expertise. By joining these communities and experimenting with different techniques, we can expand our skills and knowledge as editors and colorists.

In conclusion, understanding LUTs in DaVinci Resolve is essential for achieving professional-looking results in your editing workflow. By grasping the basics of how LUTs work and experimenting with different nodes and adjustments, you can unlock a range of creative possibilities that enhance your footage and elevate your overall style.

How to Get Started with LUTs in DaVinci Resolve

To get started with LUTs in DaVinci Resolve, follow these steps:

1. Familiarize yourself with the node graph by watching tutorials or online videos.

2. Experiment with different nodes and adjustments to understand how they work.

3. Learn about 3D LUTs and their applications in DaVinci Resolve.

4. Understand which side of the LUT you're applying your grades to, and learn how to adjust nodes before and after it.

5. Create custom LUTs using the node graph by experimenting with different nodes and adjustments.

Some recommended resources for learning more about LUTs in DaVinci Resolve include:

* The official Blackmagic Design website

* DaVinci Resolve forums or online communities

* Online tutorials or videos on YouTube

Remember, mastering LUTs takes practice and experimentation. Don't be afraid to try new techniques and adjust your workflow accordingly.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat is up everybody welcome back I wantto talk in this video about DaVinciResolve which I have talked about a lotlately and this is a softwareapplication that I use for color gradingvideo footage did a video on that abouta week or so ago and I've had severalpeople ask me since can you use it tograde still images and the quick answeris yes in fact DaVinci does severalthings really well it's not going toreplace something like Lightroom orPhotoshop necessarily but if you want touse a nodal editor and use DaVinciResolve to apply LUTs and color gradesthat way it does support it quite wellyou can do several things with it youcan bring in still images it supportsseveral file formats you can do JPEGsTiff's Camera Raw probably won't supportwhatever your camera shoots but if youconvert it to a DNG file it does supportDNG raw which is very cool the otherthing is very cool is you can export aframe from a video to use as a stillwith all your color grading applied andthat works really well too I shootmostly in 4k so that's 8 megapixels soit's big enough to do a lot of thingswith so let's look at DaVinci Resolveand I'll show you how you can do some ofthese things with still images so firstof all I'm going to show you how you can exporta still from a video clip so right nowthis is a video clip that is in here andI have you can see the nodes over hereon the right pane and I've applied somelevels adjustments a LUT some colorgrading and then also a vignette with somestuff in it so here's quick before andafter and there's before that's straightoff the camera and then once I colorgrade it and that's what we have in theend and I want to export this as a stillimage so the way you're going to do thisis you're going to right click on theviewer here and you going to say grabstill and then what it's going to do isover here on the Left pane it's going toput that still there and it puts itthere temporarily because what this actsis kind of a screenshot of your videoclip and it took that specific frame so itsaves two things it saves a full versionof the image but it also saves the colorinformation so what's cool is I can justuse this to apply to other footage if Iwant so if you want to apply the samelook or color grade to another clip youcan just click and drag to do that oryou can export this as a still and to dothat you're going to right click on thatlittle thumbnail then and you're goingto say export and you do have the optionof exporting it withthe display LUT or with that colorinformation or just straight up and sohere's your file formats here and Iusually export it as a tiff file whereyou can also just straight export as aJPEG also if you're not going to do anyfurther editing and boom you're done sothat's how you take a still clip from avideo file now let's talk about how youwould bring still images in to work withthem here and what I'm going to do isI'm going to go into the media pane downhere at the bottom and I have a folderhere with a couple images in it I've gotTIFF image and two DNG's so let's bring inone of the DNGs I'm going to clickand drag this down to the media poolonce it's in there you can go to theEdit window and I'm going to select itover here and what I'm going to do isright click and I'm going to say newtimelines using selected clips and it'sgoing to create a timeline now this iswhere this differs from something likePhotoshop or Lightroom because what it'sgoing to do is it's going to treat itlike video and so you're kind of stilllimited into that 8 megapixel 4kresolution and it'll be interesting tosee I haven't checked out the betaversion of DaVinci Resolve 14 yet but ifit has some more still support thatwould really be cool so once I'vecreated that timeline then I can go overto my color pane here and you can see wehave the clip selected and I can addnodes and I could you know mess with mylevels my curves adjustments and colorsand all that stuff and create a gradearound this or better yet I'm going toreset all nodes and grades there we havethis still that we grabbed from theprevious example and it's still thereand this has all the color gradinginformation in it so let's say that Iwant to apply this look to this newimage here so I can simply bring thatover and click and drag and drop it andthere we go now I have all the colorinformation set up from my previousgrade and I'll probably want to edit itfurther from that which is going tobring me to my next point and I want toclarify a few things about working in anodal editor because a lot of people getreally excited about the idea of a LUTand a LUT stands for color lookup tableit's a file that you can bring into thesoftware that gives it a set ofinstructions on what to do color gradingthat image and so a lot of people willfind LUTs that you can either downloadfor free or you can buy on the Internetand the whole idea of just being able toapply the LUT and render the footage outit's really cool but LUT's really don'tquite work that way there's a few thingsyou need to understand about workingwith LUTs - LUTs are completely dependenton the source footage at what camera wasit shot on what color profile was usedwhat gamma profile was used what are allthose settings was is it exposedproperly and so just bringing footage inand applying the LUT usually you'regoing to have to work with it a littlefurther and I want to talk about thatbecause it's really important it's thesame thing you wouldn't work just withLightroom presets and never tweakanything beyond that so I want to talkabout that but first I want to give ashout-out to our sponsor today who arethe awesome folks over atsquarespace.com if you need a domain youneed tedforbes.com well you're notgoing to get that because I already haveit you need your name com you needsomething like that and you need awebsite you can do all that throughSquarespace you can get your domainthere you can set up an SSL certificateand you can hook all that up andseamlessly integrate it with yourSquarespace website or online storeSquarespace is really amazing and theydo make it really easy to build awebsite quickly and so what I would dois head over to Squarespace.com andsign up for the free trial they don'task for a credit card or anything andsee how it works check out the systemsee how easy it is to build a websiteand if you decide that Squarespace isright for you I can save you anadditional 10% off your order if you useoffer code AOP on checkout so once againSquarespace.com/AOP use offer codeAOP for an additional 10% off on checkout make your next move with Squarespacegive a special shout-out to those folksfor sponsoring another episode of theart of photography so let's talk aboutgrading with LUTsand DaVinci Resolve now I have a samplesetup here it's just a clip and I havecreated three nodes and there is nocolor grading done and all on herethey're all blank but I want to use thisas an example so this is a nodal editor - iswhat we call DaVinci Resolve it workswith nodes and if you consider Photoshopbeing a layer based editor the idea in alayer based editor is that anything youadd to a layer above effects the layersbelow for the most part you can set thatup to where it doesn't but that's theidea behind a layer based editingsituation so this is nodal based and sowhat this means is the nodes work sideby side they don't necessarily impactthe same way if they did if they werestacked in two layers let me show youwhat I'm talking about if I select themiddle node here right and I'm going todo a quick anddirty curves adjustment and we are going toclick-and-drag the darks and destroythis image it looks terrible right if Iclick on the node on the right hereand can go the opposite direction andyou can see I can bring all of that backand it didn't necessarily destroyanything you would never be able to dothat kind of thing in a layer-basededitor consequently I can also let'sreset that node grade I can go to thenode before it and I can also bring theblacks up in that and I can bring itback to pretty much where it was withthe source footage so that's thedifference here is that the idea is thatyou can make adjustments on one nodethat don't necessarily haverepercussions down the line with othernodes you can cancel things out ifsomething is too dark can make itlighter in another node not that's greatpractice but that is the idea now thischanges when you introduce LUTs into theequation you bring that file in withthat color information it changes whatcan be done and where and let me giveyou an example with this so if I load upa different version of this and this isone where you can see here I have threenodes that are set up and only one ofthem has something applied you can seethe little icon down here that means I'veapplied a LUT and so this is a LUT thisis one I found on the Internet this iskind of one of the trendy looks thatyou see now with the faded out blacksand let's say that that's what we'regoing for it's cool but I just don'twant them faded so much so if I go tothe node before it and I try to darkenthe blacks and bring them down you'regoing to see that whoa it just startsbanding and nothing ever goes black itjust goes a really dark gray and solet's bring up the waveforms here withthe Scopes shift command W we'll bringthat up and you can see we'll look atthe RGB parade here and you can see thatthere is kind of this hard line downhere right around 250 or so well blackoccurs at zero so when I move this downyou can see that that LUT has actuallyput a hard floor in there it's how lowthe blacks will go it's part of thecolor information that'sbaked into that LUT so what I wouldwant to do in this case is actually goto the node after the LUT let's resetthat node grade and if I go to the oneafter that LUT then indeed I can bringthem all the way back down to zero if Iwant or I can split the difference and maybeif that look is just a little too trendyin there and I don't want to have itthat faded out I can make adjustments soit does matter when you use a LUTwhether you grade on the right or theleft depending on what you want to do to itgenerally speaking things that happenbefore the LUT - the LUT is locked in sothat's kind of working within theparameters of the LUT and then if you goto the right side then you're able to doa little more with it now let me showyou an example where you have kind ofthe opposite thing go down and I'm goingto right click here let's go to versiontwo load that up and I have three nodesset up I'm going to grab the middle nodeand let's go down apply a 3D LUT if youlook in this film looks folder everyoneshould have this because it comes withDaVinci it's free and these full of LUTsand so if I go the rec.709 Kodak 2383let's grab that oneI like this LUT but it is reallyheavy-handed and I mentioned that in thelast video and so how would you gradefor this you know what can you do so inthat last example we found that we wereable to fix that by going to the node onthe right so let's go to the one afterthe LUT and what I'm going to do here isit's really contrasty andthere's a lot of darks and the blacksare really crushed in here so if I go tothis one I try to bring the blacks upyou can see that Wow look it here's thatline once again remember and so this isan example where I'm just raisingeverything but I don't want it to allhard raise I want and I want to kind ofsplit the difference somewhere so let'sreset that node now in this case I'mgoing to go to the node on the left andnow when I lower the blacks you can seethat it still kind of locks them in downtowards zero and so I can make this alot less contrasty in this case because Iam applying my curves adjustments herebefore the LUT and that's reallyimportant so I'll give you a quickbefore-and-after this is kind of downand dirty but you get the idea so here'sbefore with no grades applied thatsstraight off the camera here is afterwith my grades applied - it's still alittle bit heavy and I would probably gowork on that some more but my wholepoint here is if you're going to getinto working with LUTs it's going tomake a big difference of which side ofthe LUT you apply your grades to and forinstance in this case if you just bypassthe LUT node here you can see thateverything's really washed out so itkind of looks to me like this LUT isexpecting log footageto come in so I've had to kind ofreplicate that in the node before andthat's not uncommon I mean a LUT isdesigned to do a certain thing with acertain way something was shot and ifit's not getting that it's not going tolook right and so you're going to haveto understand how to adjust that and soyou're going to experiment a little bitand so that's typically why I will putthe LUT in the middle of two other nodes andso I've got room to try different thingsdepending on what I'm trying to do tothat look to modify that so I hope thatmakes sense to you guys I will put alink to DaVinci Resolve you can get itit's free from Blackmagic software youdo have to have a fast computer tohandle it if you have any questions feelfree to leave me a comment I'd beinterested to hear from you and asalways we've enjoyed this videoplease remember to like it share itsubscribe to the Art of Photography formore videos and I will see you guys inthe next one until then later\n"