How to color grade log footage in Davinci Resolve

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Hey Guys, today I'm going to be teaching you how to use black and white exposure mapping to color grade any log footage in just seconds. Alright guys here we are in DaVinci Resolve and today I'm going to show you how to use the RGB mixers monochrome feature to quickly grade log footage. 

So here I have a log footage. so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to start out in our nodes and we're just gonna set up our node free.

So we add a serial node from node 1, then from node 2 we add a layer, now the only reason why I like to start at node 2 is because, I want to keep all that information in case I want to do any adjustments after my initial grade, I want to be able to have all that information, here in node 1 without it being clipped because if we start it with node 1 then we would no longer have access to all of that raw information captured by the camera, so always remember, it’s good to start our color grading from node 2. 

So from here, we're gonna go into node 3 and we're gonna click monochrome, then we're gonna go into our layer and we're gonna go into composite mode, we're gonna click overlay

So let's see this is what it did before and after, what we're doing is we're adding that black and white image on top of our regular color image so we have more contrast in our footage.

It's just not really appealing to the eye so what we're going to do is we're going to use the red green and blue outputs to map our exposure, so I like to take each Channel and see what it does and I see that this is affecting skin tones and I want to brighten those up, so I'm gonna bring this up until it's looking nice to my personal taste. 

So once you’re satisfied with your exposure, what we're going to do is we're going to go into node 2 and go over into our regular color wheels, we're just gonna bump up the saturation, You can adjust saturation to any number it appeals to you but I'm going to bump it all the way up to 100%, now we can see before and after that was a really quick color grade of log footage that's looking really pleasing to the eye, from here when you're gonna start going into your actual look you're gonna add a serial node, then you can color grade a film look or any other style you want.

Check Video Tutorial Below