Cinematographers who grade like this get better color

This is the secret. This is the way that you move really quickly through a color grade and get really good results really fast. One of the biggest places where I see color grades go wrong is with saturation. We get exposure and contrast and balance to a good spot and then we hit a wall. Do I need more saturation? Do I need less saturation? Is the image good as is? And if I do need to make an adjustment, which of the 10 plus tools in resolve that are all labeled saturation should I actually be using? In part three of this series on color grading for DPs, we're going to break down why saturation is often one of the most difficult parts of a grade and how we can make it easy by using the right tools and taking the right approach. We're also going to level up a tool that we've been using throughout this series for adjusting exposure and balance and we're going to tie everything together into a repeatable node graph that you can take with you into every project. Okay, we're going to dive into saturation and we're going to start with some concepts because the concepts are just important as what we're actually going to do when we get hands-on in resolve here in just a moment. The first concept I want to throw at you is that the order of things matters. That's really a concept we've been talking about throughout this series and it's really true here specifically with balance and then saturation. So we want to make sure before we even begin trying to adjust saturation in our image that our balance is feeling pretty good because if it doesn't feel good, it's only going to get worse as we pump saturation into the image. We really want to observe those principles that I talked about in the earlier installments of this series which by the way, if you haven't checked out, I highly encourage checking those out before you go on with this video because this video is going to be a lot easier and make a lot more sense, but we really want to have that balance dialed and observe those principles of maxing out color separation and flattering our subject as much as possible. Otherwise, any saturation that we add on top of that is just going to make that lack of balance come through that much worse. So that's number one. Number two is something that we talked about in the last installment of this series as related to contrast. Today it relates to saturation and that's that saturation like contrast should be defined at the system level.