Create Textural Depth!

During an appearance on Cullen Kelly’s Grade School, the brilliant colorist Jill Bogdanowicz revealed a secret to accenting texture without it looking over-processed. While working on Joker, the colorist used Live Grain – which separates out the red, green and blue channels, creating grain that resembles scanned film – to accentuate texture in the cooler, darker backgrounds while de-emphasizing grain in the warmer, red tones of the talent’s skin. One way to accomplish this in DaVinci Resolve is to create a layer mixer beneath the grain node, open up the HSL Qualifier, switch off luma and saturation, and, using the highlighter tool to see the effect in the viewer, adjust hue to isolate the skin tones. Afterward, apply clean white, clean black and blur radius to tidy things up. Since we don’t want the skin to be completely free of grain, we add a keyer to the layer node to restore some texture to the talent’s skin. Click here to download an example (HDR) of this powerful technique.