Grading Tip

Because there’s so much leeway for placing exposure in post, it’s all too easy to grade HDR footage so that it ends up too bright and over-saturated. 

We used to occasionally use the luma/sat curves in Resolve to reduce saturation in either the shadows, the highlights, or both in order to achieve a more ‘film-like’ look, but recently we discovered that doing so only made RED footage look worse – and that adjusting ISO in the RAW tab to correctly normalize the footage eliminated the need for any desaturation of skin tones. A recent example of grading too brightly was our chromatic adaptation video (since deleted!) on YouTube, where the tee shirt measured around 360 nits, which is awfully high for indoor diffuse white. If we’d been paying attention to the shadow side of the face in the video, we’d have realized that by reducing the ISO even further, saturation would also be reduced and skin tones would look much more natural. So, if you’re unsure about your levels, one of the first things we’d recommend doing is lowering the ISO while keeping an eye on shadow saturation.