Colour balancing is an essential aspect of every colour correction workflow and a mandatory step before plunging deeper into more advanced colour processing and further tweaking. Every colour grading piece of software or even a typical NLE provides the tools required to perform the task, as the processing principles and adjustments are similar and can be applied in almost every situation.
In the following video tutorial by Tunnel Vizion, we’ll see how we can easily colour balance a shot by using DaVinci Resolve 12 and its powerful tools and assets. It’s worth noting that this technique should be applied upfront, before commencing colour grading. It’s important to do this first in order to fix predominant colour balance issues and mismatches.
First, change your Scope and set it to Parade. In this particular case, we can immediately see that the white balance of the shot is incorrectly set as the image is too warm. In order to balance the primary red, green and blue colours navigate to Primary Wheels menu and choose Primaries Bars.
Push down the highest colour in the RGB Parade, in this particular case, it’s the red. Altering the Primaries Bars should have an immediate effect on your image. On this step try to balance the three primary colours by looking into the middle section in the Parade Scope. When the three colours are correctly balanced, the scope should look like this:
The next step would be to toggle Primary Wheels and use the Lift, Gamma and Gain wheels. By utilising these controls, you can adjust the bottom, middle and top section of the RGB Parade separately. Generally, you will need to push your footage towards bottom and top of the parade to get the optimal exposure and proper balance.
You can do this by using the horizontal wheel located under Colour Wheels. If you need to compensate one of the colours during this stage of the process you can easily push the given colour by using the picker and moving it towards the colour you want to add.
Finally, you can adjust the Contrast, Hue and Saturation settings located in the bottom section of the Colours Wheels panel. As mentioned earlier, you can apply this technique with every other piece of software that provides similar tools as the result that you are going to achieve would be essentially the same. When you have a well-balanced and colour corrected footage you can continue with further tweaking by adding additional nodes and utilizing the other available tools for additional primary and secondary colour modifications.
[source: TunnelvizionTV]
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