Welcome back! In this article, we will take a look at the color warper. Now, the color warper is a powerful tool that works a bit like if we took the secondary curves, the attribute curves like “hue vs hue” or “hue vs sat,” and we overlaid them onto the vectorscope.
Where Can you find the Color Warper In Davinci Resolve?
To access the color warper, we go next to the curves. There’s a new spider’s web kind of icon, and we click that, and we get a sort of spider’s web-looking diagram. Now, the color warper is extremely powerful, and it’s an excellent way of thinking about how to work with color in Davinci Resolve.
What is the Color Warper in Davinci Resolve?
You can take the wireframe, and if you click and drag the dot around, you can change the hue and saturation of the value underneath the dot.
If you drag a red dot towards yellow, everything red becomes yellow, and if you pull it outwards, it will increase the saturation as well or towards inside to decrease saturation. You can make hue and saturation adjustments by quickly drawing around on the diagram.
The first thing that we should know is that it’s overlaid directly onto the vectorscope. You can also have the vectorscope up and visible because it will allow us to see what we’re doing.
Exploring Color Warper
By default, we have a six-by-six web. It’s not very useful because it means we can only really manipulate things directly on the six red, cyan, magenta, yellow, and green vectors. What you can do is down in the lower left of the mini color warper window, you can choose how many points you have visible, and we can go from six to 24.
Now, 24 is a little bit busy. We can hit the expanding icon upwards the color warper to expand, and you get a bigger window, which you can stretch around and make bigger or smaller.
You can often take this onto a separate monitor and work with it because you want to see what you’re doing in quite a bit of detail.
Basic Use Of Color Warper In Davinci Resolve
Let’s start going over the tools that we have. You will change the web to 12 by 12 for now because that should be enough for what you want to do.
First, if you want to make a saturation adjustment using the color warper, you want to identify the color you want to work with. A nice feature is that if you have the color warper active and in the lower left of your viewer, the qualifier active, you can actually make selections on the color warper diagram based on just clicking and dragging in the viewer.
Supposedly, you have a man wearing a blue shirt that you want to change to purple. You can directly go into the viewer select the blue shirt.
The hue will automatically be marked in your color warper tool. After that, you can simply click and hold the dot that Davinci Resolve made for you and drag it towards the blue hue. This will result in the shirt changing from purple to blue color.
Also, to finesse the selection, if you still have a few blue patches left on the shirt, you can again repeat the same thing by clicking on the remaining blue patches in the viewer.
Also, to control the saturation. You click and drag the same dot outwards and inwards. If you drag it out from the center, it will increase saturation. If you pull it towards the center, it will decrease. It is an excellent graphical way of interacting with the colors.
It’s a really friendly, quick, and immediate tool, and it can be just as suitable for skin tones as well. These are the most basic forms of interfacing with it. And always remember, at the bottom, you can change the number of targets you have. The more subdivisions you make, the more subdivisions we have on the diagram.
Also, more subdivisions equal more accurate adjustments, although changing around when we’ve already made some adjustments can make things go a little bit wrong.
My advice will be never to do 24 subdivisions. The qualifications will be finer, resulting in fewer areas being covered. You will be left with a lot of inconsistency.
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Tools In Color Warper
There are other things that you can do. There’s a little gang chain at the bottom as well. If that’s linked, then when you change one of these subdivision settings, the other also changes.
But what you can also do is you can click it to unlink it. And you can say you only want, let’s say, 6 saturation steps, but you want 16 new steps or even 24 new steps. And that can make things a lot easier to work with. You can work with 24 by six quite a lot with the tool, but there are other things that we can do. There are some excellent features.
We’ll take a quick look at all of them. There are a lot of tools in the color warper which can be chosen from the top right corner.
Select/Deselect
The first one is the Select/Deselect tool. With this tool, you can simply select the desired hue in the warper. This is the default tool in which it warper opens. It is also the main option by which you can drag the shades around. This tool also lets you draw a selection box.
Draw Selection
Then you’ve got a tool that looks like a bit of stick of chalk known as Draw Selection. This will let you draw, click and drag over individual points. And they will then be included in the selection, and when you go back to the primary tool, “Select/Deselect,” they all move together.
Pin/De-pin
It is quite important to be aware of this tool if we’re going to make accurate adjustments. If we look closely at some of these white dots, the outer white dots have a black border. And if you click the Pin/De-pin tool and you click and drag over white dots, they get a black border.
The way this works is if you click and drag a white dot, every dot between it and the center on that straight line will be pulled along. More or less, every dot on that kind of vertices going out or vertex going out will be dragged along. But the pins stop that.
Only the white dots get dragged around; if we make a black pin, then they stay rigid. That means that we can avoid accidentally changing certain colors.
That’s really important because if you say, OK, you want to bring up the skin tone and make that stronger, you could boost red or orange noise elsewhere. You can Establish these pens and draw them to make what is basically a safe area on the spectrum that you don’t want to change when fixing the skin tone.
If we want to un-pin something, we click it the second time. These tools might look intimidating for the first time but trust me; it’s such an advanced tool that you can make very sophisticated LUTs using it.
Pull Points and Push Points
There’s a really useful tool that lets me squeeze everything (Pull Points) in towards a single point or expand things out away from a single point(Push Points). By Pull Points, you can actually squeeze the gamut and can create complementary colors, and introduce split toning to increase the color contrast in the shot.
You can use Push Points to push out the colors if you have used the Pull Points a lot. You can also use Push Points to introduce more shades of color in the image. That’s a really useful tool.
The idea is not to use these tools very aggressively. Typically, you want to kind of get things to be solid colors. You don’t want to heighten color noise.
Increase Fall Off and Decrease Fall Off
What this tool does is when you click the plus button, i.e., “Increase Fall Off,” it adds additional points nearby, or when you click the minus button that is “Decrease Fall Of,” it subtracts the additional points.
Invert Selection
This tool inverts and selects the points you have already selected in the warper, supposedly if you have all the blue shades selected in the warper. When you click the invert selection tool, it will invert the selection; all the hues except blue will get chosen.
Convert Selected to Pin
The “Convert Selected to Pin” tool changes your selected dot; it doesn’t matter if you have selected multiple dots and converts them into pins, as I have mentioned earlier. A selected dot is white, and a pin is a white dot with a black border. Converting a selection to a pin will make it rigid and stop moving.
Select/Pin Column
This tool selects the whole column of the particular hue that you have already selected in the Color Warper. You can also pin the whole column using this.
Select/Pin Ring
This tool selects or pins the whole ring you are currently on. It’s a very useful tool if you want to see a shift in all the hues. Again, when you are using this tool, use it very wisely. Especially when working with 8-bit footage, you might introduce a lot of Luma and Chroma Noise.
Changing the color space in the color warper
You can also change the color space of the warper for different results. To access the color space menu of the warper, all you have to do is, select the menu beside the colorful cube at the bottom of the warper.
By default, it uses “HSP” as the color space. But I have noticed that when using it with LOG footage shifting to the “HSP LOG” color space gives more accurate shifts.
Also, for better saturation control, using the HSL color space can enhance your shots.
Auto Locking In Warper
There is also a feature called “Auto-Lock” in the warper. After you turn this on, you will get the option to choose how many points to select. If you select 2 points, the warper will automatically pin after the two pins you have selected to lock that particular hue.
That’s the color warper tool in Davinci Resolve. I hope this article helped!
Happy Color Grading!
