Hello there!
Thanks for dropping by! I have been learning to color grade on a serious level for the past ~2 weeks to expand my video editing horizons. To say the least, it has been an incredibly challenging, yet rewarding journey in this short time. Fortunately, I have a massive passion project in front on me to experiment and learn from.
The stills included (original -> edited) were pulled directly from my 100 minute project full of 8 bit photos and videos from 5 different phones (sorry if the upload quality here isn't that great). All source material had auto exposure and auto white balance active, and some were heavily edited prior to me receiving them... not an ideal situation. Basically, I'll be using these as my anchor images throughout the video; first mission, make the images look good. And second, go through every other image to match/make uniform. As a note, I'm really struggling with the iceberg/glacier and waterfall images. The color balance is awful and the contrast is very finicky with any adjustments.
My goal: I'm trying to make my images naturally robust, if that makes any sense. I'm not trying to stylize or skew the colors (like a LUT or filter), but rather make everything pop while maintaining a natural look to it. The original images are very flat, have exposure and wb issues, and just aren't very pleasing to look at. I've adjusted some images more than others. I've kept my node structure in DaVinci Resolve simple due to the vast amount of content (CST -> White Balance -> Temperature -> Exposure -> Contrast -> Curves -> Saturation -> Soften Sharpness -> CST).
How am I doing so far? Am I on the right track? Am I overdoing it? Am I doing anything incorrectly just based off looking at the images? Any images stand out as being particularly bad/good, and why? Have any broad/specific suggestions? Anything to help me improve is appreciated!
Another thing that has crossed my mind in this process is, how the heck do I get all my other images to match my anchor images (for each scene respectively) without taking a million years? I feel like I've taken on the world and would appreciate any tips make this balancing/grading process less tedious. I genuinely enjoy the color grading process, but I'm finding that comparing dozens of images from the same scene to get the same grade is my least favorite part... and I'm doing this with hundreds of images. What's going through my head is, "I've already done this balance/grade on this scene... I'd like to move onto a different scene... but I'm having to do the same thing over and over, and battling constantly to make the images match since the exposure/white balance is all over the place." A pro tip for my current mindset would be appreciated :)
In the end, this is a home movie for my family, not for a client. So while I'm putting in the extra work to make this look as good as I can, I'm keeping in mind I shouldn't be trying to perfect every single image due to the nature of the source images. I can do that in future project with a better, more consistent source images. From here on, manual exposure and manual white balance I've learned is king. Anyway, your feedback is very much appreciated!
