An extremely compromising but interesting Color Slice tool that needs to be used carefully. This is a really useful tool when adding subtractive saturation to an image
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.
I watch a few colorists for Resolve tips. I really like how you take the time to explain everything, including the underlying reason and science, rather than just trying to jam in as much info as possible in the least amount of time. If you saw your subscriber count go up, that was me. LOL
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?
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!
Yet another excellent tutorial, thanks as always! The more I learn from you the more I want to dig deeper into color science. There should definitely be a way of disengaging the skin vector so red and yellow blend smoothly. Adjust skin tone as usual working both red and yellow.
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 RUclips.
Without a doubt the most detailed and informative colour grading channel on youtube. I've learnt a lot in a short space of time by watching your tutorials. Many thanks.
Very informative video thank you! Hopefully they will address the skin vector flaw by perhaps simply allowing to disable it or make it so adjustments are parallel to red and yellow and not treated as a separate slice.
Hey Cullen, great video as usual. I really love you man! One quick question. Do you think I could use this tool to build a look just by using the global controls and by not going into the single hues?
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?
I have started to run into the skin slice issue a bit on a project where I started noticing an increase in noise at the skin level and I chalked it up to the increase in density, but I was mistaken. The solution is excellent, I will have to try that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
Wow had no idea that the skin tone slice affected it like so ; it was nice to use for slight adjustments for skin but can see how big of an issue it can be
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.
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.
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?
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 ?
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 ! 🙏
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!!!
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.
Great explanation on the Color Slice Tool, It does not show up in DaVinci and this is my setup macOS Sonoma 14.7 DaVinci Resolve Studio 19.0.2 Build 7. Do you need to update to macOS Sequoia 15.01? I have restarted and not my first rodeo, but bummed it does not show up on my color page in DVR. Thanks for any insight. Cheers.
How does Color Slice compare to increasing saturation via an HSV note that you turn off channels 1 & 3, then boost the gain for channel 2 (sat)? That's already a significantly better image than the basic saturation dial.
if this is the case for ColorSlice being a color grading tool NOT a look dev tool then would HSV still be the best option as far as a saturation look dev tool?
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).
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.
An extremely compromising but interesting Color Slice tool that needs to be used carefully. This is a really useful tool when adding subtractive saturation to an image
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.
I watch a few colorists for Resolve tips. I really like how you take the time to explain everything, including the underlying reason and science, rather than just trying to jam in as much info as possible in the least amount of time. If you saw your subscriber count go up, that was me. LOL
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)?
I had the exact same question; Cullen please let us know your thoughts!
Replying so I get notified with his preference
It does for me
Good question.
We all want to know this Cullen!
Davinci should remove the skin tone section and provide a width and falloff sliders for all vectors.
8:55 “Let’s zoom in here and look at my dudes face here” 😂
Haven’t tried the color slicer yet but I definitely will now. Great content as always
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?
yeah I was wondering the same thing
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!
You are always using footage I shot for Artgrid! 😂 Love it!
well good job man
Yet another excellent tutorial, thanks as always! The more I learn from you the more I want to dig deeper into color science. There should definitely be a way of disengaging the skin vector so red and yellow blend smoothly. Adjust skin tone as usual working both red and yellow.
Excellent. Cleared up some things for me, especially with the skin slice getting wonky results.
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 RUclips.
Without a doubt the most detailed and informative colour grading channel on youtube. I've learnt a lot in a short space of time by watching your tutorials. Many thanks.
Very informative video thank you! Hopefully they will address the skin vector flaw by perhaps simply allowing to disable it or make it so adjustments are parallel to red and yellow and not treated as a separate slice.
Hey Cullen, great video as usual. I really love you man!
One quick question. Do you think I could use this tool to build a look just by using the global controls and by not going into the single hues?
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?
I have started to run into the skin slice issue a bit on a project where I started noticing an increase in noise at the skin level and I chalked it up to the increase in density, but I was mistaken. The solution is excellent, I will have to try that.
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.
What dctl, out there you think the best or density? Mononodes or pixeltool? Any other recomendation
@@amirulbimo289 I'm testing mononodes on a few projects and really liking them for looks
Thank you for addressing how NOT to use this tool. Really informative.
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.
You have some weight, ask BMD to give us customizable crossovers for all the slices :D Red and Skin could just be combined into one slice, really.
Superb explanation. thanks.
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.
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?
Hey Cullen, Always YA're The BEST TUTOR of Color Grading on RUclips ❗️
Please Upload The Video of Apple Log Color Grading ❗️❗️❗️❗️❗️❗️❗️❗️
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.
Really useful video. Thank you.
I was looking forward for this one. Thanks for the in depth insights
Love your tuts my dude. Always a wealth of tidbits..
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!
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?
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.
Wow had no idea that the skin tone slice affected it like so ; it was nice to use for slight adjustments for skin but can see how big of an issue it can be
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.
Great video! Thanks for demystifying the Color Slice tool.
Thank you, Cullen, very enlightening!
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.
Cullen, how do you compare ColorSlice saturation versus changing Gamma to HSV for Saturation control, as you have shown us in a past video?
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.
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?
On this all RUclips thing You're number 1.
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 ?
What a great video as always
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 ! 🙏
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!!!
fav youtuber rn
You sir are the GOAT
Have enrolments for the next ‘Colorist Career Accelerator’ started?
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.
Awesome as always. And I never thought I'd say that about a video that had the words, "this little skin pizza slice..." 🤣
Great explanation on the Color Slice Tool, It does not show up in DaVinci and this is my setup macOS Sonoma 14.7 DaVinci Resolve Studio 19.0.2 Build 7.
Do you need to update to macOS Sequoia 15.01? I have restarted and not my first rodeo, but bummed it does not show up on my color page in DVR.
Thanks for any insight. Cheers.
Cheers, been waiting for this !
Good stuff again!
How much difference is there between the saturation and density in the color slice tool versus the Film Look Creator plugin?
Question…if you use the saturation knob on your panel the color slice tool, will it adjust the basic saturation or the color slice saturation?
when is the next course !
Do you, by any chance, give out your Node Tree?
awesome info, thank you!
How do you compare color nodes like this at 3:00 or did you just disable/enable the nodes?
would you use color slice for saturation over dynamic range sat or the hsv sat control ?
Previously we could do it in hsv color space
Very good
Hm. I wonder if Bam could simply add a checkbox to each slice so we can get the tool to ignore slices that mess up the result.
as there are reference levels for exposer in Parade and Waveform , is there something like the same in Vectorscope for Saturation ?
Is this tool mapped to a certain color space (color space aware) or would that not matter with this one?
Couldn't they add a smoothing slider on the skin tone slice to blend the red and yellow values?
How does Color Slice compare to increasing saturation via an HSV note that you turn off channels 1 & 3, then boost the gain for channel 2 (sat)? That's already a significantly better image than the basic saturation dial.
Does this mean your existing node structure is obsolete?
Thank you.
if this is the case for ColorSlice being a color grading tool NOT a look dev tool then would HSV still be the best option as far as a saturation look dev tool?
I noticed that Luma mix was at 100 for rhe primaries saturation adjustment node. Would it be somilar to the color slice's if it was at 0?
No, Lum Mix doesn't have any effect on the Saturation knob in Primaries.
Time to compare some HSV sat with Slice Sat
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).
How can I contact you for a potential cooperation?
ewewew i will have nightmares with the skin slice of the pizza
So should we use this or buy hundreds of dollars of ripoff DCTLs?!?!
Tetra is free 👍🏼
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.