Simple Quick White Balance Method

I am very new to DaVinci Resolve. I have version 12.

I want to do a simple white balance to the picture below. Are there are tutorials or videos that I can look at to do that? Is there a one button simple method in DaVinci to do a simple white balance?

Thanks in advance

are you looking for a mathematical way out just to make it looming right?

Also addressed on Creative Cow Resolve.

There is an AWB with cursor integration when you are operating a Resolve(TM) control surface, but otherwise [Option-A] does an overall R=G=B with respect to the highest and lowest values in the image. This will not work for your sample as it is here represented.

White balance by itself is nearly worthless as a grade objective anyway.

jPo

In some software it's 1 click, but no idea how you do it in Resolve.

i built a macro that's mapped to my XKeys for another colorist who uses my suite for a reality show, he's happy with the resualts;

1- trigger - color / presets / chroma light (mapped to keyboard shortcut)
2 - re-set sat values to default (mouse capture; click on "color wheels", click on "primairy wheels", click on "sat", type in "50", hit "enter")
3 - trigger - auto color (mapped to keyboard shortcut)

one button push and done a the speed of the CPU's, so fast too, but could be three mouse clicks; chroma light/sat re-set/autocolor

You should be aware that mathematical R=G=B with highest and lowest values can look very weird.
That's why Colorists choose to tweak color by eye and not by values only.

I'd try to balance color with lift, gamma, gain settings first and copy these settings to all clips made with the same lighting.

I was never satisfied with auto color.

Auto color can very accurate and in the sae tim very bad (50/50)
I prefer approach from NLEs, where you click on the area which you know should be white/grey/black. This for simple adjustments works wonders and takes seconds.

For my taste DS has the best implementation of this tool, and raises the bar to a point that no one else has yet managed to meet, and raised it to a point that it's actualy usefull

Have not seen anyone else get close, but it's only 2016...

i don't use it, i mainly work in ACES and yea, for giggles sometime try hitting that button in an ACES project.. i see pretty wack resualts there!

But the guy who is gradeing 48 min of reality a day in YRGB really appreacates the one button push auto highlights big time

But the guy who is gradeing 48 min of reality a day in YRGB really appreacates the one button push auto highlights big time

Yes, definitely "get" that.

Auto white bal works almost as well as the Apple auto-speelling correcton.

It worked once, for me. Grading a hockey game and luckily, the ice was "white." How often might that happen, though?

There was an interesting eyedroppper approach posted on the COW, involving clicking points in the image and watching where they landed on the curve corrector, then move the circle targets around -- would be useful if you could constrain the adjustment in H+V, like you can in some composting applicaitons.

This does not address the issue of simultaneous dynamic contrast, though. Both in brightness and complementary hue. You will wind up with a machine version of a greyscale that is only interested in the tentpole going straight up from unsaturated black to white. This is kind of wound up in the idea that if you can achieve a neutral grey-scale that you automatically get a notionally correct overall chromaticity gamut, which is incorrect. The cube can still be quite skewed, not only in a clip grade, but more dangerously in a monitor calibration.

jPo

This will show you how to quickly correct your image using the RGB parade. It should be super simple for that example you provided.

Thanks for posting that Steve hullfish clip. It would be great for resolve to have a feature like his tectronix.... I think he called it Luma qualified vectorscope where he could set the range of values displayed on the vector.

unfortunately that is the job we do, you know, color.

if you have a light on the set that is blue, the autocorrect will it make white, but it is not the intended cinematography. if you shoot in Golden/magic hour, and you remove the warm from the image, the DP will kill you.

it is not the intended cinematography.

And there is only one diagnostic tool that will come to the correct conclusion, and it is a thing called "dialogue." Because that last part about the cinematographer's reaction is true. It used to be a little tricky deciding what to do at 3:42 AM with rushes deadline coming right up -- and you still have to pull the VHS visual time code dubs. Figuring out what action to take, with little reference, is also what we do.

So with that, you're going to "white balance" that lovely candle-lit wedding announcement? It will start looking a bit cold...

As for scopes... some of what Tektronix does is proprietary, so there are some features that will never become available. What is very useful is the ability to display a YRGB parade -- in some ways this is somewhat achievable even with Resolve's internal scope display, but you should keep in mind that a strict RGB tri-waveform is only telling part of the story. There are obviously combinations of the primaries that are important to the overall chromatic construction of the output image that the brain cannot correlate from the traces. While you can imagine that 220-075-046 are RGB values, but by themselves they are obviously just numbers and not a color. Care to guess what hue this might be on a vectorscope (assuming 16-235 8-bit so the Photoshop crowd has access, because 0-255 is another can of worms)?

⎔ might be close... with the almost as impenetrable value of FFBF80. Hex is fun, too.

jPo

And there is only one diagnostic tool that will come to the correct conclusion, and it is a thing called "dialogue." Because that last part about the cinematographer's reaction is true. It used to be a little tricky deciding what to do at 3:42 AM with rushes deadline coming right up -- and you still have to pull the VHS visual time code dubs. Figuring out what action to take, with little reference, is also what we do.

My favorite part of dailies in the old days was seeing a slate at 3AM that warned, "Marc -- this is SUPPOSED to be blue! Don't screw it up!"

One issue with having to balance a badly-skewed image -- for example, a case where a shot used 3200° lighting but the camera was set for 5400° -- is that the blue channel winds up "starved" for information and becomes very noisy, because the blue channel is very underexposed. If you have no Raw files and the settings are baked in, all you can do is push it as far as you can and hope for the best. Even in Raw situations, the underexposed channel will still be somewhat noisy in some conditions, particularly if you're trying to balance out the whites.

Hue vs. Sat curves can help tame situations like this quite a bit, pulling the excessive yellow, then allowing you to pump more blue into the shot with the Primaries.