This is the BEST walkthrough of the Color Slice tool I've seen, yet. Ive watched a few videos going over it, but, none of which made me feel comfortable even touching it. Basically, I see the Color Slice tool as something to use on a shot by shot basis. If that makes any sense. Thanks for another great explanation of one of Resolve's newest tools.
Thank you for providing such thoughtful and well presented information about color grading and resolve. Your content is so helpful and is truly unique on RU-vid.
This is perhaps the best colorslice video on youtube so far. I'm not a colorist, but follow your content to try and be a well-rounded editor and you explained all of these concepts very well.
I only use the skin vector to increase density, and phone of the other colors. I will take another look and see if I’m getting chatter. Thanks for this great deep dive!
Thanks for another great tutorial Cullen. Great to know that global saturation and density become much more controllable there. I found color slice incredibly useful on a recent difficult a dance film shot in the redwoods with different cameras, shifting lighting conditions and radically shifting exposures on drone cameras. I had to isolate and adjust some very similar colors (skin vs orange costumes vs tree bark and green leaves that varied from camera to camera.) In 18.6 I found myself using a variety of Tetrahedral DCTLs that more or less saved my life but some colors were still difficult to isolate. When 19 came out, based on web reviews I didn't expect Color Slice to be as useful as the Tetra DCTLs, but it was fantastic and I was able to isolate and adjust some very similar colors especially the skin, costumes & tree bark to make matches much better and WAY FASTER plus I found the individual hue adjustments helpful also. Actually the skin vector was incredibly useful for my purposes. I didn't notice any problems but honestly I wasn't especially looking for them. My corrections were much more subtle than what you showed here , but I'll double check now. Do you have any thoughts about the overall hue knob compared to the one in the primaries?
Extremely helpful, you're the best! Should the Color Slice saturation slider completely replace your previous subtractive sat technique (Node with ColorSpace=HSV, Channel=2, adjust gain wheel on color primaries)?
This was super informative, thanks Cullen! I’ve got two questions though: 1. Would the global adjustments you can make in the colour slice tool be suitable for look dev, as a way to set a overall level of (de)saturation and depth? 2. Does this replace the HSV & Gain method of manipulating overall saturation in most of your work?
Hey Cullen great tutorial! Really love that you take on new tools and keep us well educated and up to date. Now that we have Color Slice are there any use cases for HSV saturation like you taught us a long time ago?
I noticed this issue with the skin tone vector as well and some times it happens with other colors as well, mainly magenta in darker images. I wish they made it so you could turn off and on the separate vectors if needed but the center slider does the job on most occasions.
Totally agree. Great sat and density controls on the overall image. But way too picky when it comes to "slices" of colors... In a job, I don't have time to make sure that the tool creates artefacts or not on every shot... so for me the slices are useless in a pro world. Some DCTL do that way better, especially for a look. If BM would insert a customizable softness on their slices, I believe it would be more usable. Sat and overall density rule, though.
Very interesting, and especially more so today, as I have just started a firework project where I want to make the colours pop without looking like a unicorn vomited over my attempt to colour Grade. I only started using Resolve 19 when it went out of Beta. I learned my lesson when I upgraded to Resolve 15 Beta and hit a world of pain when it conflicted with, at the time, my brand new GPU. The GPU was so new that Nvidia's drivers were just released. Even with my first attempt today, I'm liking the colour slice.
When I saw the red getting denser, I was convinced. Thank you, Cullen Kelly. I see why they added the skin vector, but I also wish there was a way to disable it. I wonder if it would be helpful to feather the adjustments to nearby colors. I also wonder how it compares to the color warper.
I love this breakdown of the colorslice tool. My question is would you change your saturation node in your template node graph from what it is now to just using the colorslice saturation?
Thank you! I needed this one. I changed to using Color Slice instead of using a HSV Saturation node (and sometimes a Satshaper+ or Saturator dctl node) for tweaking clip-level saturation and skin just a couple of days ago, so far quite happy about the results. I was wondering if I was just being flashed by the new shiny thing, or if this was a real keeper in my node tree. Also, had some footage I was practicing on where I was scratching my head for a very long time (almost made me rage-quit Resolve) because the skin suddenly had a lot of unexplainable noise that wasn't in the clip before - now I know why (and how to fix it).
Just starting to watch this, so I don't know if this is addressed, but the slicer is sometimes quite useful when dealing with mixed lighting scenarios and pesky color casts.
Amazing tutorial, Cullen. ColorSlice feels a lot more approachable now. But I'm still confused as to the difference between Sat Balance and Sat Depth. They seem to have a similar effect in your histogram.
What if you used a second colorslice tool in a second node just for skin? Couldn't you then move the red and yellow vectors so the skin doesn't leave all the artifacts? We tend to want to do everything with one node and one tool. Thought maybe your problem with the skin there might be okay if you just were working on the skin. I haven't tested this though. Might be the same problem. Just speculating.
Hey Cullen, great video as usual. I'm not a colorist by any means, but wondering about two things. When activating the highlight mode, the color falloff for each individual slice seems very harsh, unlike when I'm qualifying the "usual way". Does that make my image more prone to unwanted artifacts? The other thing is that no matter what footage I'm grading, the center value for each slice seems to always be way off from optimal and I have to adjust it pretty much for every slice, pushing them to hard left or right. Am I tackling this the wrong way? Thanks ! 🙏
when you transition your camera into a facecam down in the bottom, id recommend cutting out all the monitors and your tools down in the shadows, its hard to see what youre doing there and its already shown on the screen. it would help emphasize ur face and you talking, and whats going on on the screen :D
Hey Cullen, just to clarify, you would use the saturation dial within color slice tool for a global correction and then only get into the individual hue adjustments on a shot by shot basis? Also, does this replace your workflow of using a saturation in HSV with only channel 2 selected? Thanks for a great video! I'm looking at these too workflows side by side and it looks like 1.62 on the Gain knob with the HSV/ channel 2 method is pretty much exact to 1.5 on the saturation slider within the color slice. not sure if the math translates 1 to 1? Asking the first question bc I have a saturation node built into my look development.
I think that you are a great educator, and you are very good at your craft. Watching some of your videos, I get the impression that you do not recommend many of DaVinci's tools for look development. What would you recommend for look development? Does DaVinci have any tools that are useful to that end? Are we looking at third-party tools or super expensive high-end tools only available to Hollywood colorists?
Hi Cullen, Thank you as always for another great tutorial. Quick question, would you say that the sat and density inside the color slice tool are comparable to the HSV - HSL method you showed in a tutorial about a year ago or so? I find that the HSV method gives me, if anything, I bit more room to play with. I'm curious if they are in essence the same adjustment or if they operate completely differently. thank you!!!
it would be nice to have a on/off switch for skin tone so we can activate it only when needed. Also, even if you think color slicer is not a tool for look dev because of the individual slice. could i use it if i just use the global tools for shapping global density, sat, and their balance and depth ?
Did you try to copy the slider adjustments from red (yellow) to the skin tone sliders instead of moving them away to the side? Shouldn't that reduce the chatter since there now would be a broader hue angle affected with the same settings? Cant test it right now but that would be interesting. Anyway I would not use the individual sliders for look dev either but they are amazing for targeting specific things in a shot. How do you feel about this compared to the tetra, saturation and density dctls by iridescent color or Edou Hoekstra? Does the color slicer also use tetrahedral interpolation? (I have no idea what that means but it sounds and looks really cool..😅 I would be really interested if you make an in depth video about that) Your videos are awesome, I learned so much from them!
Not sure what you mean by “ripoff”, but Cullen makes a huge point with the ColorSlice tool in that it’s a color grading tool, NOT a look development tool. So with tools like Contour, Stefan’s Mononodes, or Iridescent Color’s tools, those are mathematically designed to make it either impossible or very difficult to break an image, so those would be considered more look dev tools because you can ensure their fidelity across a wide variety of images. That’s not possible with ColorSlice.
