Doing It All In DaVinci – PART 2: Adjusting Color Temperature

Doing It All in DaVinci is a series of Assembling and cutting final shots to the required length in order to achieve the desired results.

Dale Campbell and his team at Still Moving Media are back with the second part of their Doing It All In Davinci series and today they’re looking at Blackmagic Raw and Color Temperature. If any of you out there have been debating using Blackmagic’s Davinci Resolve, Dale’s wizardry will hopefully steer you toward it! Take it away, Dale!

Doing It All in DaVinci Tutorials

Part 2: Adjusting Color Temperature

In this part, we’re going to look at how having shot Blackmagic Raw we can interpret that footage and adjust the white balance and the color balance of everything in post to get the image that we want.

To bring back the detail in the sky, I pull the exposure down in the raw panel. I was able to either adjust the ISO or the exposure so it doesn’t feel too gray. Also, it is to add a little bit of texture and color. These adjustments meant that the car was a little bit darker than we wanted. So all we did is put some power windows on, tracked those onto the car and then we could adjust the car independently.

In this next bit…

Unlike with the model car, we’ve actually got a moving vehicle. The camera’s moving. The shot is a lot more dynamic. It doesn’t always translate to a single power window. So in that situation, put a couple of power windows on four different areas and bring those in. And that, if you need this workflow, also allows us to provide certain details like the Union Jack detailing on the back of the car.

DOING IT ALL IN DAVINCI - PART 2 - Power Window

Something I noticed was that the color temperature for the sky above was vastly different from that nearer the car so I can adjust from shot to shot with the qualify tool. Select the qualifier, select your area, and then if you need to just hone in on the area you can bring in a power window as well.

And just look at the color pop on the red just there. It’s quite subtle, but it’s enough just to make it sing a little bit so that when you’re looking at the shot, you got the sky and you’ve got a car sitting at the right exposure level. The sky is warm in the background. The red is now popping and we’ve corrected the white on the car. So, it’s all sitting a little bit more where we want it to.

Coming Up…

In the next part, I’m gonna take you through how I use the patch replacer to touch everything up, remove specks of dirt, etc. That way, we get a really clean finish for the client. That’s because on that white body, you’re gonna see absolutely everything!