DaVinci highlights

[Adéyẹmi]

Hi guys, Both BL and DR users, any thoughts on dealing with DR's harsh highlights technically? I am trying to imitate the baselights carefully compressed very soft and soothing highlight roll off. Either by DCTL, or anything. Any tricks, at all? Thanks in advance.

[Dylan R. Hopkin]

In DR I tend to use the Highlight (HL) tool to achieve pleasant highlight Rolloff. It can be used either globally (don’t push it too hard globally though), or qualify a specific highlight range, and apply the Highlight (HL) tool to the qualified area.

All the above is usually done in Log-space, pre-LUT / pre-contrast expansion (valid for DR YRGB projects). You can blend the two methods too, when applied to separate pre-LUT nodes.

From what I have read, Paul Dore has a good DCTL / OpenFX for highlight Rolloff too. But I have not tried it myself.

https://github.com/baldavenger

Hope this helps B.)

 

Edited July 7, 2019 by Dylan R. Hopkin

[Anton Meleshkevich]

On 7/7/2019 at 8:47 PM, Dylan R. Hopkin said:

qualify a specific highlight range, and apply the Highlight (HL) tool to the qualified area

As far as I know Highlights (HL) tool does highlights qualifying by itself.

Edited July 9, 2019 by Anton Meleshkevich

[Dylan R. Hopkin]

All tools that effect certain tonal ranges "qualify" in a certain fashion. However, not all of these tools let you adjust which tonal range that acts on. The range is a set to a specific area. Therefore my two different suggestions for the Highlight (HL) tool. When you create the qualifier yourself you have more control of the effected tonal range. 

Cheers

Dylan

[Anton Meleshkevich]

I mean, it's not just a soft roll-off curve like highlight wheel or soft clip slider.
It actually uses qualifying with some percent of blur or something like that.

I'm not trying to say anything bad about your technique. Just want to add some useful info about this tool.

Edited July 9, 2019 by Anton Meleshkevich

[Dylan R. Hopkin]

What I also like about the highlight (HL) tool is that keeps some of the saturation in the effected areas when you reduce the highlights. But as with other tools, if pushed too far, things can look un-natural. It’s all a matter of taste I suppose.

[Marc Wielage]

I have had cases where I pull a soft highlight key, qualify it carefully, and then will boost the levels a bit just to "pop" the scene more. I just had this happen a few weeks ago on a day-for-night scene where I had to drastically darken the shot, but wanted the headlights alone to pop out at a normal (for night) level. This had to be tracked carefully, but there's several ways to do it. Highlights are helpful sometimes, as are the Log controls -- it kind of depends if you're coming up or coming down.

[James Conkle]

Have you tried changing what Timeline Color Space you're using in Project Settings? From my understanding that changes how the tools feel and might get you close.

 

If anyone has experience with changing this I'd love to know what space you chose and why. 

[Anton Meleshkevich]

22 hours ago, James Conkle said:

Have you tried changing what Timeline Color Space you're using in Project Settings? From my understanding that changes how the tools feel and might get you close.

 

If anyone has experience with changing this I'd love to know what space you chose and why. 

Changing timeline color space has no influence on how tools work until you change node color space (or gamma). So node color space and gamma will be converted from timeline color space to selected, then all the tools of the selected node, then back from selected node color space to timeline color space.

I use this all the time. Go from log(C) to node linear for exposure, go to  node rec709 gamma for saturation, go to  node color space HSV for different saturation and so on.

When you add saturation in linear gamma, you get colors darker.
When you add saturation in log gamma, you get colors brighter.

When you change RGB gain in linear gamma, you can change exposure in a natural way. As well as color balance (not as natural as in some kind of LMS color space though). Don't forget to set lum mix to 0.

Edited August 28, 2019 by Anton Meleshkevich